The Silver Screen That Divides Us

What if you woke up one day and every movie portrayed Americans as dumb, dirty and ignorant? What if every TV show you tuned into showed Americans as fat, lazy and inbred? What if every actor was cast as The Ugly American--greedy, materialistic and arrogant? Welcome to how the rest of the world feels when it watches Hollywood portray its countries and cultures.

No one is as good--or as persuasive--at making other cultures look as simplistic and backward as Hollywood. Whether it’s Arabs, Asians or Mexicans, foreigners have always served as a convenient source of amusement, exoticism and danger for Hollywood.

Mexico in particular has suffered the brunt of this myopic depiction. Whether it’s the silent-era films or the gun-toting westerns, Mexicans have rarely, if ever, been seen in a complex or flattering light. Lately, Mexico has served as the backdrop for several major studio movies--”Traffic,” “The Mexican,” “Blow” and “All the Pretty Horses,”--and unfortunately many of the stereotypes and simplistic portrayals remain.

“It’s not that [these latest films] are any worse than other films, but the problem is that Hollywood seems to only focus on the negativity of Mexico,” said David Maciel, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Dominguez Hills who has written several books about Hollywood’s depiction of Mexico. “Very seldom do we find an uplifting film about Mexico or Mexican culture and society.”

Last month, producer Mike Medavoy held a dinner in Los Angeles in honor of Mexican President Vicente Fox that was attended by such stars as Marlon Brando, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, as well as studio executives. The theme of the evening was improving relations between Mexico and the United States.

Actor Ricardo Montalban decided to say something at the event about the way Hollywood has consistently portrayed Mexico in a negative light.

“I wanted to get it off my chest,” said Montalban, recalling his speech that night. “I said, ‘Mr. President, if we are talking about a better understanding between our two countries, I think Hollywood could do so much to help that understanding. When I was at MGM and they wanted to make me a romantic lead--I was Cuban. With Esther Williams in ‘Latin Lovers’ I was Argentinian. With Lana Turner I was Brazilian. Those are nice-sounding nationalities. Mexican is not a nice-sounding word and Hollywood is at fault for this because we have been portrayed in this ungodly manner. We are the indolent peon leaning on the cactus. We are the bandits. Hollywood could do a great deal to undo the harm that it has done over the years.’ ”

But those one-sided images continue in some recent films.

In USA Films’ “Traffic,” Mexico comes off as a cesspool--seen literally through a brown haze of poverty, corruption, greed and narco-violence. The only exception is Benicio Del Toro’s portrayal of a conflicted but ultimately moral cop. Perhaps we owe that to the actor himself. Del Toro said in a recent Los Angeles Times interview that he molded the character to be more complex.

In the original “Traffic” script, Del Toro’s character, Javier, was calculating and corrupt. Del Toro, who is Puerto Rican, urged director Steven Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan to add nuance to the part. He helped them understand that the drug war is directly related to Americans’ seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs.

For Mexico (as well as Colombia), the human toll is extraordinary, and winning the war is complicated by issues of poverty and hunger.

“So many times we’ve done movies and used an ethnic group to just make a statement about this and that,” Del Toro said in The Times’ interview. “I think, ‘Hey, it’s time to show the other side too.’ I’m talking about bucking stereotypes. Mexico has this intense history. It’s important to say there’s a lot of people, the majority, who are honest, hard-working people.”

*

In New Line’s “Blow,” the only sense of Mexico we get is that it’s a place where gringos can go buy some “pot-o.” Meanwhile, the depiction of Colombia’s drug trafficking in the film was so simplistic that it moved Colombian President Andres Pastrana to write an op-ed piece about it in The Times earlier this month.

“In ‘Blow’ we see [drug kingpin Pablo Escobar] on his ranch, talking business,” Pastrana wrote. “What we don’t see are the bombs he set off in Colombia, in shopping malls and on airplanes; or the judges, politicians, journalists and police officers he murdered in cold blood; or the thousands of widows and orphans he and his cohorts created.”

In DreamWorks’ romantic comedy, “The Mexican,” the gringos at least are just as corrupt as the Mexicans. Still, the Mexicans are portrayed for the most part as ignorant and poor. While the director, Gore Verbinsky, tries to poke fun at some stereotypes, he also enhances them. For example, star Brad Pitt frowns on a Ford Taurus as a rental car and asks the clerk for something more . . . “Mexican?” the clerk asks with a knowing look on his face. Pitt nods enthusiastically and is given a “macho-man,” 1970s, broken-down, blue El Camino. Apparently that’s a more “Mexican” car.

Even the look of the film changes depending on where it’s set. This movie juxtaposes Las Vegas with Mexico, making the former look sparkling clean in comparison to the little Mexican town.

“There’s the brownish haze that hangs over most of the Mexican scenes [the Vegas scenes are a lot brighter]. What is this recent fascination with browning up Mexico in the movies?” asked New York magazine film critic Peter Rainer in his review of “The Mexican.” “It encouraged us to think of Mexico as a brackish netherworld, a gringo conception if ever there was one.”

“All the Pretty Horses,” released late last year, perhaps did the best job of capturing the beauty and harshness of Mexico, though its period rural setting is naturally more appealing than the contemporary urban setting of more recent films. Set in the 1940s on the Texas-Mexico border, the film could very easily have turned into a western-style film full of outlaws or mute, humble peasants. But it tried its best to present a more balanced picture. Matt Damon’s character ventures to the Mexican desert in hopes of finding adventure--in the process he lands in prison, but also falls in love with a Mexican heiress, played by Spanish actress Penelope Cruz.

While still viewing Mexico as a dangerous, corrupt place, the film also shows the sophisticated lifestyle of a wealthy Mexican rancher, the beauty of the countryside and the charms of village life.

Hollywood’s fascination with Mexico seems to run in cycles. In the 1930s, actors often visited the country--then a bohemian hangout. In the 1950s it was Ava Gardner and John Huston who swooned for Mexico’s sensuality and romance. But whatever these folks might have learned in their travels never seem to translate onto the screen. Even lovers of Mexico such as Huston helped create stereotypical images of the country--the noble, silent Indians in “Night of the Iguana” (1964) and the dirty bandidos with rotting teeth proclaiming they were the law and didn’t have to show “no stinkin’ badges” in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1949).

A few, like director Elia Kazan, took considerable efforts to bring Mexico’s true contradictions to the big screen. “Viva Zapata” (1952), written by John Steinbeck (who was very familiar with Mexico and had wrote several novels set there) and starring Marlon Brando and Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, did a splendid job of capturing the revolutionary hero.

In 1934, “Juarez” starring Bette Davis and Paul Muni, was so well thought of among Mexicans that it was premiered in Mexico by President Lazaro Cardenas at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

But lately, few, if any, American movies depicting Mexico have earned kudos among Mexicans--the expectation in fact is that Hollywood films will have a narrow-minded view of their country. So Mexican filmmakers are doing what they can to deal with this image problem. Mexico’s film industry is burgeoning, led by young ambitious directors. They have turned away from showing their country as either a crime-infested Third World nightmare or a paradise of magical realism.

Young Mexican directors such as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who exploded onto the international scene with his Oscar-nominated film “Amores Perros,” are determined to do what they can to give the world a more realistic view of their country.

“I am not a Mexican with a moustache and a sombrero and my bottle of tequila,” he said during lunch recently. “Nor am I a corrupt cop or a drug trafficker. And like me there are millions. We have culture, education, vision. And that is the world I live in and the one I wanted to show.”