LIBERATION, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

I'll admit it: last night my brain was fried so I went to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico, mostly because I like Johnny Depp and Antonio Banderas (Selma Hayek's not bad, either).

Suffice it to say that my brain was not less fried after watching the movie, which is sickening in its casual approach to violence. Should have thought about that before going in, of course.

But two important points are worth mentioning about the movie. First, the parallels between the movie's portrayal of democratization and the current administration's simplistic expectations regarding a postwar Iraq are striking. In the movie, there is a complicated, drug lord backed attempted coup against a popular and sympathetic ruler. The coup is put down by a combination of the superhuman efforts of Antonio Banderas's band of merry gunslingers and spontaneous, popular defense of the regime using the captured weaponry of the coup plotters. As far as the plot goes, the popular regime-defenders clearly would have failed without the help of the gunslingers, so on the one hand the message seems to be an affirmation of the hopelessness of "the people" in the face of elite machinations. On the other hand -- and this is where the parallel to Iraq comes in -- the conclusion of the movie depicts the ordinary folks who defended the regime as people who then lay down their arms and go back to their villages, where they are rewarded with a shower of bank notes (stolen by the gunslingers from the coup plotters). All of the hard work of building civil society and engaging in sustained efforts at monitoring the new elites is simply omitted. The people are not evidently scarred by their experiences being subject to the intermittent, arbitrary rule of the drug lords; they exist in an uncomplicated realm of private behavior punctuated by a momentous, spontaneous defense of the regime. Yes, it's "only" a movie. But to the extent that the Bush administration thought that democracy would somehow sprout, spontaneously, from the ruins of a country savaged by years of totalitarian rule, they employ the same, simplistic approach to the preconditions for democratic rule.

Second, Johnny Depp plays a sadistic CIA operative whose self-proclaimed role is that of "restoring balance to the world," (1) by repeatedly shooting chefs who are too good at preparing his favorite dish and (2) by sabotaging a bull fight (which results in the graphic goring of the matador). The movie portrays these killings as a humorous event, which is pretty sickening in and of itself. Nonetheless, in the anti-moral, anti-hero Hollywood script that is so familiar, Depp's attempts to "restore the balance" in this base fashion has a parallel in his ambiguous role in preventing the coup and in punishing the coup plotters. Depp's character is thus redeemed in the end. In addition, the gunslinger character played by Banderas is also portrayed as "restoring the balance" in a variety of ways, including in a revenge killing, and he even utters lines to that effect toward the end of the movie. The lesson seems to be that brutal violence is at the root of human order and is required in an ongoing fashion. The moral of anti-moral. In this context, Adorno might speak about the repetition of the given, and he'd be right.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Johnny Depp's character uses the phrase "can you hear me now?" in an obvious ironic reference to Verizon's ad campaign. So far I haven't heard of Verizon raising a stink about "brand erosion," and I wonder if Verizon might have even paid to have the phrase put in there as product placement. The lesson: movie stars can make fun of brand identity (and might even be paid to do so by the corporations themselves), but unions can't.