Matthew Perry, the beloved actor who laid the modern groundwork for sarcastic line delivery via his character Chandler Bing in “Friends,” died unexpectedly on Saturday.
For many fans in particular, Perry’s death hit them hard. As Chandler Bing, he presented a charm, wit, kindness and affection for his friends that made him extra endearing and a favorite of many. And based on the stories that have emerged from friends and colleagues, that seems to have been true of Perry himself.
‘One day, without realizing it, you wake up in the soles of another you, one who inhabits an interstitial divide between two distinct worldviews.’
While his role on “Friends” is certainly his biggest and most culturally significant, there’s another that spoke to many of us. That’s his role as Alex Whitman in the 1997 romantic comedy “Fools Rush In.”
Alongside Salma Hayek as the feisty, superstitious Mexican photographer Isabel Fuentes, Perry plays a career-driven, uber-WASPy nightclub contractor hired to build a nightclub that looks like a spaceship that sells leather sectionals.
One night, he meets Isabel in line for the bathroom at a Mexican restaurant, and through flirty repartee — they talk about how fast she can pee. A meet-cute that heavily relies on mentions of speed peeing is surprisingly charming in Perry and Hayek’s hands.
Anyway, all the pee talk leads to her getting pregnant, and it leads to the shotgunniest of shotgun weddings, ordained by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas. Now married and with a baby on the way, Alex and Isabel must navigate the difficult realities of being in an intercultural relationship.
And it’s not easy when you’re essentially pairing the human equivalent of an Allbirds sneaker with a font called “escádalo” that’s only deployed during Hispanic Heritage Month. But thanks to the power of love, a metaphor about squirrels that come from different sides of a mountain, and some Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, Alex and Isabel figure it out and have a baby on the side of the road.
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So yes, as you can imagine, there are plenty of tropes and stereotypes in the movie. For one, her very large, loud family painted their house in multiple colors and filled it with crucifixes so it looked like the den of a vampiric Sábado Gigante dancer. Two, Isabel’s prized dog is a Chihuahua. If they wanted to be accurate, she’d have a scruffy white dog that’s always got nasty gunk in its eyes. Three, Alex’s parents turn lava red under the hot Nevada sun, drink their weight in margaritas and assume Isabel is his housekeeper upon meeting her.
Everyone is the whitest or most Mexican you can be, and while for the most part, both sides catch some heat, the story is heavily focused on the white gaze. Isabel’s family is generally painted as crazy, tacky and weird, a punchline in their very way of existing, while Alex serves as the white tour guide into their world.
That gets into what I call the life-changing Latina bombshell trope.
Alex is a classic fish-out-of-water. Cultureless, barely talks to his parents, skeptical of Isabel’s beliefs of fate and universal signs and overall marked by a sense of dullness in his life and person. But now married to someone who is vibrant, passionate, from a rich culture and who lives her life directed by a sense of greater purpose and Catholic-based beliefs — he’s stunned.
There’s a scene where he walks into their house and finds Isabel dancing to “Mi Tierra” by Gloria Estefan while cooking dinner. Alex leans his head onto a ledge that has a rosary sitting on it — for no reason other than Mexican — and he mouths, “Wow.”
This is his life now. An espicy Latina wiggles to salsa in their multicolor corporate track house, filling it with life and music and caliente-ness.
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At that moment, he becomes the “big booty Latina” guy” saying “No naci ayer.” And while their cultural differences cause their conflict and eventual breakup, it’s ultimately because of his unwillingness to really let himself live. Isabel brings color into his gray.
It’s only once he pays attention to universal signs as she does, and embraces her deeply connected, spiritual way of living that he can have her love again, and, in effect, really live. He’s now chasing the family he spent most of his life avoiding.
Every rom-com has its issues, and this one certainly does, but Perry and Hayek’s individual spark along with their chemistry, actually makes you root for them. Hayek feels like a pretty solid stand-in for those who have dated outside their culture and have had to wade through the discomfort that can bring without sacrificing themselves or their convictions.
The role of Alex could have easily been a slog — full of obvious jokes and gross exotification — a basic jerk who somehow captures a sensual, caring woman. But Perry’s humor and warmth carried him, and that can’t go unnoticed when too often the easy route is the one taken.
That’s a testament to who he was as an actor and as a person.
The people of New Mexico were the first victims of the atomic bomb, the result of the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test on July 16, 1945.
Dating outside your culture can be hard, especially when your partner is white. Because in a world that upholds, protects and centers whiteness, you’re always the other, and that can seep into your relationship.
That’s evident in “Fools Rush In,” but what’s also evident is the importance of not accepting someone as they are but loving and embracing them because of it. Even if that means a bunch of her brothers shoot at you with rifles and you end up drunk and covered in cactus pricks.
Alex Zaragoza is a television writer and journalist covering culture and identity. Her work has appeared in Vice, NPR, O Magazine and Rolling Stone. She’s written on the series “Primo” and “Lopez v. Lopez.” She writes weekly for De Los.
