Hollywood has its ‘Boys’ on the bus

The Indian peasant woman sitting across from me is fast asleep. I envy her. On the one hand, she is missing out on the rugged grandeur of the Sierra Madre mountain range as it rolls past our bus window in the coppery morning light. On the other hand, she’s also missing out on Will Smith and Martin Lawrence hurling loud, repetitious expletives at each other as they take on the evil, slick-haired Latino villains in “Bad Boys II.”

Their antics are coming in, very loud and clear, from a TV set mounted above the bus driver’s head, and another set that’s actually a few feet behind me but might as well be hard-wired to my eardrums. With the noise level approaching that of downtown Tokyo, every scream, multiple-car crash and burst of machine-gun fire echoes within the bus’ metal confines. Most of the other passengers are dozing, either too exhausted or disinterested to bother keeping up with the Spanish-language subtitles, but I’m wide awake as we rumble along past tin-roofed shanties and grazing goats.

Though I normally fly when traveling around Mexico, I’d opted to take the bus on this trip because my destination was a small town of 25,000 people halfway between the nearest major airports in Mexico City and Acapulco. I’d planned to spend the return trip with my head buried in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s lushly written memoir, “Living to Tell the Tale,” pausing from time to time to gawk at the Mexican countryside.

Instead, I’m trapped with Martin and Will on a five-hour ride through winding mountain roads, on a bus with no bathroom and no air conditioning. Don’t get me wrong -- “Bad Boys” does have its moments. No movie with Will Smith can be all bad. But the background buzz of special-effects carnage makes it impossible to read, and watching the screen for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch makes me woozy. I’m sure there are worse fates in store for serial killers in the Ninth Circle of Hell, but offhand I can’t think of any.

Oscar season brings mixed feelings in Hollywood: joy and pride for some, jealousy and quiet despair for others. The winners, toting their gold statuettes, savor their brush with cinematic immortality. Meanwhile, some of the also-rans and lookers-on wonder if they’ll ever make a movie with real staying power, with an artistic shelf life longer than, say, the span between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

Well, wonder no more, Hollywood. In the motion picture afterlife, a veritable Valhalla awaits even the lamest comedies, dullest dramas and most overwrought action pix. It’s called the Mexican bus industry.

Inescapable soundtrack

Now, first let’s be clear that Mexican buses have a much higher social stature than their U.S. counterparts. Domestic air travel, much of it state-owned, is ridiculously expensive here, but buses are cheap, convenient and generally safe. They also come in many varieties, including no-frill, low-frill and “luxury.” Luxury buses are more like passenger trains, with wide, comfortable seats, free beverages and free piped-in movies. Even some non-luxury buses, like the one I just rode on, show movies too, usually old black-and-white Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete flicks.

The only problem is that there are no individual headphone sets, so you are condemned to listen and watch along with your fellow passengers, whether you want to or not. Even earplugs won’t save you when the volume is set at sonic-boom levels and the driver refuses to turn it down.

Frequently these bus-trip flicks are the kind of stuff you find knocking around in Blockbuster bargain bins, though now and then you may get a decent film, or a mildly provocative pairing. Once en route from Veracruz I sat through a double bill of “Mystery, Alaska” with Russell Crowe, charismatically butch as a hockey-playing sheriff, and “The Shipping News,” with Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore, which is a pretty good movie if you don’t mind characters named Wavey Prowse, Tert Card and Bunny Quoyle.

On another trip to Guanajuato, the bizarre double-header led off with “Tombstone” (Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer shootin’ up the OK Corral). The nightcap was “Mona Lisa Smile” (Julia Roberts teaching the meaning of life to the ladies of Wellesley). The movies passed the time, though as Beckett’s tramps observe in “Waiting for Godot,” the time would have passed anyway.

On this last trip I was happy to discover there was no luxury bus service on my route, which presumably meant no gratuitous entertainments. But while bathrooms may be expendable on Mexican buses, Hollywood movies are not. Oh well, I figured, at least this is a short trip, so there’ll be only one film.

But the “Bad Boys II” end-credits had barely finished rolling when on came “Tommy Boy,” a shrill comedy starring David Spade and the late Chris Farley. It ran through the rest of the trip, expiring with scary precision as we pulled into Mexico City’s westside bus terminal.

Whether you like it or not

Why all this kvetching over having to sit through a couple of Hollywood clunkers? After all, it’s hardly breaking news that practically no corner of the world, from Patagonia to Katmandu, is now beyond the reach of American pop culture and its imitators. Every year we grow more accustomed to having pop tunes bombard us as we reach for a box of toothpaste at the supermarket, or wait in line at the drive-through window or the airport terminal. Every year we ingest, or are force-fed, more inane ad jingles and meaningless awards shows.

These cultural forces are so prevalent in the United States that most of us don’t even think to question their presence anymore. But they still stand out in a place like rural west-central Mexico, where many people don’t have indoor plumbing and have never owned a telephone.

Globalization is in some ways a beneficial phenomenon, for the have-nots as well as the haves. It has been gathering speed since the days of the Silk Road merchants, and it’s here to stay.

But it raises the issue that American cultural influence -- like American economic and political influence -- is increasingly becoming non-optional. Our culture is one of continual distraction. It fears and loathes silences and empty spaces, which it regards the way that a Texas oilman might view an untapped well, as an opportunity wasted.

Pop culture seeks to fill this perceived void by cramming itself into every available inch of room -- in the shopping mall, in your dentist’s waiting room, on the Internet. Sometimes it seems that our country’s two biggest exports are imagery and electronic noise. Heaven forbid that anyone should have to spend five hours looking at scenery, reading a book, chatting with a companion or engaging with his or her thoughts while riding a bus in Mexico.

Funny, but once upon a time Americans believed you could spend several hours on the road without need of a personal home entertainment system. In “It Happened One Night” (1934), Frank Capra’s homage to Depression-era ingenuity and social harmony, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert ride a bus packed with passengers who pass the time in a chirpy group sing-along. By the time they reach their destiny, Gable and Colbert are falling in love. Today, Gable would be screaming at his Nintendo Game Boy and Colbert would be keeping her fellow passengers awake all night while burbling into her cellphone.

The incessant patter of American pop culture around the world, by itself, isn’t exactly the problem. The problem is that it’s getting harder and harder to find the on-off switch. At least there are signs that the exchange between Hollywood and the Latin world is becoming less of a shouting match and more of a two-way dialogue: Among this year’s Oscar nominees are Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno (in “Maria Full of Grace”), Jose Rivera’s adapted screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries” and Jorge Drexler’s song “Al Otro Lado Del Rio” from the same film.

For now, I’m vowing to fly everywhere, but sooner or later I’ll probably board another Mexican bus, luxurious or otherwise, and take off for the hinterlands. Maybe they’ll show “The Shipping News” again. I kind of liked that one.