A discussion on the film "Machete"

On Machete (Rodriguez, 2010)

When my best friend asked if I'd seen Machete yet, I didn't really think twice.  She loves gore and action, so a Rodriguez film is right up her ally.  I replied, "no, haven't seen it..why?"  She then proceeded to explain that the film's main character is a day laborer and that they basically fight anti-immigrant people who I gathered were based on the Minute Men.  She also said that Michelle Rodriguez was in it and super hot and revolutionary.  I was floored.  A movie that actually portrayed day laborers?  And not as some joke?  I had to see it.  After watching it once in the theatre with a friend in the immigrant's rights/AB540 movement, and having the best experience in a theatre I had in a while (i.e. sudden urges to yell at the screen, laugh inappropriately loudly, and exchange knowing glances with said friend) I knew I wanted to write a blog about it.  But I hesitated because I wanted to get input from at least one day laborer.  Finally, one night it just perfectly worked out-my brother and his friend, also both  immigrant's rights activists, stopped by to hang out and I asked them if they had seen the film.  They had my same reaction, not knowing the film's premise, thus being disinterested.  Once I told them they had me look up showtimes immediately and we found a screening at the Drive-In Theatre in Montclair.  I suggested we bring Jose and the next thing I knew we were all sharing popcorn on a blanket in front of the big screen.  The experience differed for Jose partially because At times I had to translate dialogue, but generally the film is so exaggerated and action-filled that it was obvious what was happening.  Other than that, watching the three of them watch the film was super enjoyable because the movie depicts some cool shit.  For example:

1. A badass, impossible to kill, quasi-mythical character who is a day laborer

2. Said character is played by Danny Trejo, a former drug addict and convict who became a film and television actor, but usually as the villain and never the lead role

3. The film revolves around corrupt, anti-immigrant politicians (um, hello Joe Arpaio..) and "border vigilantes" (hello minute men) basically waging a civil war against undocumented people

4. The leader of the "revolution" on the side of the immigrants is a woman!  Michelle Rodriguez plays Shé, a female homage to Che Guevara, but in a cool, mythicized, taco truck vending, border crossing assisting kind of way

5. The film portrayed hilarious tropes and stereotypes that only people who live in states which border Mexico could understand.  Pachucas, low riders, hydrolics, paleteros, minute men, day laborers, taco trucks, "homies," and loads of culturally Catholic paraphenalia littered the screen as what felt like inside jokes for those of us that got them

6. Cheech Marin was in the movie!  After Born in East LA (Marin, 1987), Cheech's film that parodied the high occurrences of deportation of Mexican-American US citizens at the time and ended in an all out charge of the border, he has been high on my list of cool media makers.  

7. The existence of a "network" of workers, documented and undocumented, who all communicated and supported one another.

 But the movie was also super exploitative.  It began as a hilarious fake preview between Rodriguez's and Tarantino's Grindhouse (2007) double feature, Planet Terror and Deathproof, respectively.  It was meant to complement the nouveau-"B" movies  and be a spoof of 70's exploitation films.  But because it received such positive feedback (partially because of the preview's mention of Arizona, which was the center of controversy over SB1070 at the time) Rodriguez made it feature length.  Some problematic (And yes, I know that the over-exaggeration is meant to be a joke, but parody still perpetuates what it is parodying) features of the film were:

1. The sexualization and sexual exploitation of ALL the women in the film.  The white women, the nurses, the ICE agent, and Shé were all treated as sexual objects by the camera angles, the characters, and their secondary character statuses to the roles of the men.  And this might seem obvious, but huge breasts, tiny waists, big butts, flawless skin, and long flowing hair describes every female character. 

2. The extreme and graphic violence.  Did you watch it? I'll give you a hint: intestine.

3. "The revolution" ended after the minute men/network battle

4. Lindsay Lohan.  I don't care what role she played, this movie was too badass to let her be a part of it

5. Machete's lack of politicization. Sleeping with an ICE agent? Ew.

6. The cringeworthy scene where Jessica Alba's character  Sartana gives a speech to the day laborers and says "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us!"  This is messed up for many reasons. a) Ms. Alba has made comments in the past that she doesn't know why everyone refers to her as Latina b) This is the first time she has played a Latina role c) Her character is an ICE agent.  When did she become part of the "us" that the border crossed?  d) She is not cool enough to say that classic immigrants rights tagline 

e) The scene seems out of place-Luz/Shé is the revolutionary,  Sartana is not even close

And something I'm ambivalent about: Steven Seagal as a Mexican drug lord.  Feeling weird about the brownface and Seagal's Spanish, but then liking the dying scene.  So funny.

The conversation I filmed was the second segment as my brother, his friend, Jose, and I had a good talk in the car on the way home and then my friend came and I taped round 2.  There was a lot to say, but I chose 5 minutes of some of my favorite critiques from the over-an-hour worth of footage I captured.  

As a positive addendum to my critique of the body sizes of the female characters, I would like to share some re-imaginings of Shé  and  Sartana by a talented Long Beach artist named Julio Salgado from a series he calls "Chubby Girl Art" in which he makes famous women "chubby." 

Luz/ Shé 

Sartana

  I hope you like the discussion and please, if you haven't seen Machete, watch it and comment!

Una Mirada a los Invisibles

Video Essay: Una Mirada a los Invisibles

The assignment was to show visual culture and as filmmakers we were to work within communities with whom we were already working.  For this reason I thought of the jornaleros (day laborers) I teach English and computers to on the a local street corner.

Near the end of the film, one of the jornaleros who I will just call Jose, asks me why I am interviewing them.  I found the question a little uncomfortable, which is what I was hoping for. Filming a population that is in constant danger if made visible is a tricky thing, and though many of the guys were happy to help me just because we trusted each other, being asked “why are you filming us?” is a more than appropriate question.  Of course I had explained to everyone by email and in person what the project was, and Jose already knew, but asking me again I believe was his way of reminding me that I (whether I was holding the camera at the time or not) was indeed filming them.  By answering, I was literally “writing” my thesis statement, but instead of placing it at the beginning so the audience knows what I am attempting to convey I placed it at the end.  I am then reversing the standard essay form and explaining my intent as a filmmaker which erases or at least influences the interpretive possibilities.  This will challenge “readers” to “see” what they saw, see my intent as the filmmaker, and to question my privilege along with the subjects in the film.

Aside from the form change, creating a visual essay rather than a written one enabled me to create something to be shared among a wider audience.  This is one way that the theory is able to turn into practice.  This video can be used for educational purposes or promotional purposes (i.e. volunteer recruitment), and the actual act of making the film created a dialogue among the corner community.  Were this to be a written essay, even if it were in Spanish, it would only be accessible to those who speak the language of academia.  This video, being in English and Spanish, can be shared with a larger population of people.  Another thing about making a video essay rather than a written essay is that it is a lot of work, but the work is very different.  In being different, I was motivated to learn in a fresh sort of way.  Putting this video together has already given me incredible appreciation for film form and peaked my interest in being more playful the next time around.  

Catching the uncomfortable was an important part of capturing the humanity of all of us.  Just as Jose made me uncomfortable, I believe I made who I will call Pancho uncomfortable when I talked about sexual harassment, and our interaction is meant to make the viewers feel a twinge of something as they wonder what will happen when he defensively says he wasn’t trying to make me uncomfortable when he called me pretty and when he brushes off sexism meanwhile taking racism seriously. 

Though I explained the concept of the video to the guys, the conversations were organic and I took a lot of footage to be able to select the parts of conversations which were appropriate for the film.  Many times I asked questions expecting certain answers and was reminded that this is a naive method of research.  For example when I asked one of the men if he feels that he is in a community, I was expecting him to talk about the jornalero community, the immigrant community, or something like that and he instead saw community as the dominant and himself as on the outside.  His answer was a teaching moment and forced me to think about the terms we use in grad school and the meanings attached to them "on the outside." 

The title of my film was created by Jose, as he is a poet.  It literally means “a look at the invisible.”  The title is the thesis, in short.  However, the title doesn’t quite convey my role as subject in front of the camera.  As I stated in the film I am sometimes too visible, and my presence as a filmmaker is also visible.  However, the title is also about power-the truly invisible character which we attempted to make visible in this movie. One may literally and corporally see the men and me: see our gender expressions, the color of our skins, interpret our class positions.  But what I hope to bring “into the visible” is the power relations that decide these divisions.  As one of the (anonymous) men said in the movie: we as human beings all feel the same emotions, “the same pain,” and ending these divisions would ultimately mean ending the power structures which aim to victimize and separate us. 

After "finishing" the film it went through a series of peer reviewers (Dr. Juhasz and a Pitzer professor) and I ended up making several edits and moving footage around.  Since my brother, his partner and I invited Jose to see Machete (for another blog post I'm ruminating on) I showed the video essay to Jose afterward and asked him what he thought about it.  He thought it was very interesting and was adamant about taking all my footage and all the other footage that people have taken over the years and making a documentary and we had a long talk about the complicatedness of making a film for a a wider audience.  I included footage of his viewing practice and his reception to indicate the participatory and consensual nature of the film as well as the agency of the subjects.  I just hope that the setting-change isn't too distracting.

Visibility pensamientos

"...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength." Audre Lorde

When i was thinking about my visual project and my thesis of visibility vs. invisibility I thought of the famous Audre Lorde quote listed above.  I emailed my brother, my most trusted translator, and asked about translating her quote in the best way for my video on the guys.  Instead of translating it he said he wasn't sure that the quote really applied to the jornaleros in the way it applied to queer women of color (whom Audre was referring to).  I thought about this and just kind of dropped it.  Then tonight I saw a woman who is running the queer women of color collective I am interning with post the same quote on facebook and it made me think more about the difference between being "visible" as an undocumented person (which to a large percentage of the population makes you a criminal and/or a terrorist) and being "visible" as a person of color or  queer or a person with one breast (which Audre also theorizes about in terms of visibility), or being a woman.  I have a dear friend who was running a very respectable, political and highly artistic website consisting solely of videos of AB540 students "coming out," becoming visible, showing their faces, revealing their names and their legal statuses.  In this case, Ms. Lorde's quote can work; the students are politicizing themselves by making themselves visible and fearlessly confronting the risk of being "outed."  In the case of the men that I filmed however, my intent is to show them representing themselves and being visible while not putting them at any risk by revealing their names, legal statuses or locations.  So though I agree with my brother about the quote not applying in this particular case, I think it can apply to undocumented people whose visibility makes them incredibly vulnerable, but whose fearlessness can inspire and motivate people in ways that those who have the privilege of not being at risk just by existing can not. 

Dear Billy/Asher/Seth, I am Sorry

The month of September has proved to be particularly deadly for queer teens.  First Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself in his grandmother's barn, prompting gay journalist Dan Savage to kickstart a video campaign aimed at preventing teen suicides by telling teens that "it gets better" after middle/high school.  Unfortunately, Billy's death was shortly followed by the deaths of Asher Brown, 13, who shot himself, and now Seth Walsh who hung himself on a tree, was found and brought to the hospital, and died Tuesday after 9 days on life support.  For my job at the Queer Resource Center, an undergrad student and I compile a weekly newsletter.  I put him on the task of writing a blurb about Asher Brown (this was earlier today, before the news of Seth came out) and he came across the above image.  The image struck me; my heart sank.  I have been invested in the issue of queer teen suicides and have began publicizing the It Gets Better project so that students in Claremont can participate, but watching the motivational videos, and seeing photographs of the dead teens smiling on the news articles was a stark contrast to a huge picture of a noose.  When the student showed me the flier, he looked up at me expectantly, he was excited about what he found and was seeking approval.  I sort of glanced at him and said he could go ahead and attach the file to the newsletter and walked away.  Why didn't I get as excited as him?  It wasn't until later that I decided to re-look up the picture in the comfort of my home that I realized what made me so uncomfortable.  Had I forgotten that my father had committed suicide by hanging?  I wasn't old enough to understand yet, but knowing that my mother found him in the garage still brings a very vivid image into my mind when I am triggered, which I am realizing I am.  I am interested in suicide because my life has been affected by it and I truly feel for the families who go through that pain, particularly in cases that are preventable, such as bullying.  

Something that has always been hard for me about Christianity and Christian values is that suicide, like "homosexuality" is a sin.  If for only these two reasons, I know and have known that the Christian value system and my own are starkly different.  It pains me still to hear anyone use this rhetoric, even though I don't believe it.  For example, I very much disliked the film Wristcutters for portraying people who committed suicide as being in purgatory/hell.  The huge difference between my father and queer teen suicides is that he was not "driven" to suicide, he was simply depressed.  The youth that are depressed and die as a result of harassment are in hell in life, and see death as a more pleasant alternative.  Those responsible are not 2 or 3 kids you can name from school, but a homophobic and hateful society of parents, administrators, students, and community members who punish difference; they are complicit in murder.  

As a post-script to this blog, 18 year old Tyler Clementi, another queer teen, committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.  That makes 4 this month.  I suspect that the beginning of a new school year is one of the hardest times for young queer students, and hope that we have seen the end of this string of violence.


As a post-post script to this blog, a fifth and final queer suicide happened before September ended.  

Raymond Chase, 19, hung himself in his dorm room at Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island September 29.  September is now over and I can only hope that October does not bring us anymore of these deaths.  

Searching for QWOC on Reality TV: a Time-Suck at the Least

Some people consider reality television a version of cinema vérité or “truthful cinema.” Others dispute this, arguing that it is casted and staged, while others argue that some reality shows are “realer” than others and some more technologically advanced and creatively designed. As Queersighted blogger Dave White’s “film-nerd husband” said in regards to the newest season of Project Runway: “Are the Maysles in charge now?" Now, discussing cinema vérité as “real” and “reality” TV as manipulated creates a problematic as all documentaries are manipulated in a variety of ways, but if there is such thing as a scale of reality then there is certainly a lot of wiggle room for both documentary film and reality television.

A fun and depressing study of television, cinema, advertisements, and magazines is to look for commonly underrepresented people: fat people, Black people, queers, especially lesbians and transmen, Latin@s, Asians/Asian Americans, women in nontraditional roles, etc. Dr. Alexandra Juhasz has more recently begun the scholarly study of YouTube and shared this student-made video on Black representation on YouTube. Check it out.

Blacks on YouTube

Zulema Griffin

Much in the vein of VannaBlack4u’s search for Blacks on YouTube, I would like to do a quick rundown of reality TV in search of queer women of color. Because there is a much more noticeable lack than plentitude of QWOC on reality TV I would like to mention a few shows that have queers or women of color. We all know that Bravo was the home of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as well as TV specials about lesbians and gays such as Great Things About Being Queer, and Out of the Closet. But in my scrutinous search for lesbian women among the gay man/straight woman constancy in Project Runway I came across some interesting information. For one thing, it turns out that in season 4 there was a white lesbian model names Marie Salter. Secondly, remember Zulema Griffin from Season 2? Her character arc ended after she shocked her colleagues by stealing another designer’s model (sweetheart fashion professor Nick Verreos) just to get herself and the model eliminated in that episode. Well, it turns out that throughout the show she was an out lesbian with a partner but that information was completely edited out and she was portrayed as a single woman. I managed to reach behind the Tim Gunns and Michael Kors’ to reach a QWOC but unfortunately only the few of us looking can find her.

Another strange gay-erasing edit on Project Runway was the budding romance between Daniel Feld and Wesley Nault as documented by blogger Allison Kilkenny who chocked it up to homophobia. I am pretty sure most people consider Bravo a gay male TV station rather than queer or LGBT, but there is no denying that Top Chef has had its share of lesbian contestants, Preeti Mistry and Ashley Merriman of season 2, Lisa Fernandes and her partner Jennifer Biesty of season 4 and Jamie Lauren of season 5 were all “out” and Jennifer and Lisa’s relationship was a storyline rather than being erased.

Tila Tequila and the cast of a Shot of Love

My research on the subject of QWOC on reality TV is largely based on my consumption of advertisements and certain shows and on the advice of my Facebook network. No one knows reality TV better than my hometown friends and student colleagues in the media studies department, and they made to sure to point out that VH1’s dating shows are “pretty diverse”. Since they have more dating shows than Pandora radio has commercials (zing!) I will only mention a few.  Flavor of Love actually has women of color as contestants, and a Shot of Love with Tila Tequila featured a queer woman of color as the bachelorette who dated both straight men and gay women. I’m not sure if anyone has seen Bad Girls Club on Oxygen but it also features lesbian and bisexual women, mainly in party and club-scene environments. Brandi, Kayleigh, and Flo (from different seasons, not sure which as I do not watch this show) were out as lesbian and bi and Cordelia, a straight girl, suddenly becomes jealous of a female housemate’s boyfriend. According to commenter BAngieB, Cordelia acts “the way the fake-gay girls act on TV” adding that “If Tila Tequila is a lesbian, I'm a sparkly unicorn.” This brings up the oh-so-relevant point of “fanwhoreism” and lesbians as titillating ratings increasers. Can we ever forget the awkward Sandra Bullock/Scarlett Johannson or Madonna/Brittney Spears kisses? But there is a difference between gay characters played by straight actors, the contrived celebrity kiss, reality shows about queers, and reality shows that feature queer and questioning characters. Often the queer or LGBT communities shame questioners, saying they are just following a trend, and straight people and separatists pressure bisexual or queer individuals into “picking a team/side.” Therefore I will say that many people look down on New Jersey Housewife Danielle Staub who has of-late been insinuating that she is lesbian and Tila Tequila who has recently been self-identifying as lesbian rather than bisexual. For an example of bisexual pressure, see this clip from Bad Girls Club which unfortunately ends in violence.

Bad Girls Club Flo and Amber fight

The Cast of the Real L Word:
Tracy is to the far left and Rose is in the wine colored tank

I would like to briefly mention that Logo TV has brought us such queer goodies as RuPaul’s Drag Race, Gimme Sugar (QWOC!!!) and Transamerican Love Story, but unless you have access to more than basic cable (which I don’t) looking for QWOC is harder. VH1 and Logo also paired up for a dating show called Can’t Get a Date in which contestants represented a variety of sexualities. The Real World and America’s Next Top Model have brought us a few gay, bisexual and transwomen, some being QWOC, but I would like to end with The Real L Word (which is being called a “docu-series” by the way) as it shows lesbian relationships rather than just featuring gay characters and some of them are actually WOC! So Rose is supposed to have been the inspiration for Papi in the L Word which makes sense because both Papi and Rose have no depth and seem pointless. She is billed as a “sexy Latina” and a “flirtatious firecracker” (um exploitation much?) while Tracy is never discussed as a WOC but speaks to her mom in Spanish. And whether Sara (a love interest of Whitney’s, and she rolls the “r” every time!) is a WOC is a mystery to me, as well as Natalie, Rose’s girlfriend who is either a white girl who dresses a little on the chola side or a bleached blonde WOC. So yes, there is QWOC representation, in moderation and sporadically, on reality television, but you really have to look and within that small pool there are other issues such as butch/femme/genderqueer diversity, size and class diversity and as is always at issue in reality TV, a lack of self-awareness, reflection and critical (in this case queer) thought.

Espie Hernandez, 16.  One of the filmmakers of Mariposa

But I would like to end on a positive note. Reality television is made by rich people. Even the lesbian and gay producers such as Ilene Chaiken and the boys over at Bravo are upper crust. And as hard as it is to look for QWOC on reality television, I urge readers to look elsewhere. There are amazing QWOC filmmakers out there, whole organizations and film festivals devoted to them in fact. One notable group is the South Central based collective ImMEDIAte Justice which mentors and helps young QWOC to empower themselves to make films. One such film was shown at the Human Rights Watch film festival last year and is definitely worth a watch. This is an example of a community strengthening itself from within, placing tools in the hands of those without access and allowing young QWOC to become autoethnographers rather than only to-be-looked-at. The film is called Mariposa. See for yourself!

Mariposa

My new addiction: Drop Dead Diva

When my mom and sister, both chick-flick aficionados, told me to check out a new show on Lifetime called Drop Dead Diva I was initially skeptical. Lifetime: Television for Women has not really been my favorite channel over the years as it generally seems to have a bunch of melodramatic made-for-TV movies which sensationalize violence against women. Recently, however, Project Runway, a favorite guilty pleasure of mine, has been exclusively on Lifetime, so maybe the channel wasn’t so bad. DDD piqued my interest when I heard that its storyline follows a skinny white blonde model that dies and returns immediately as what the blogosphere has generally dubbed a “plus size” white brunette lawyer. I am a huge fan of the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait in which Warren Beatty plays a professional football player who comes back immediately as a millionaire that was killed by his wife and her lover. Magical realism and death are always interesting to me: I loved the show Dead Like Me and the movies Death Becomes Her (1992), Chances Are (1989), and even the 2001 remake of Heaven Can Wait starring Chris Rock, Down to Earth. I decided to give the show a go and immediately realized: this show has Margaret Cho in it! Now, feisty Asian assistant trope aside, Margaret Cho’s involvement in anything gives it all sorts of street cred. One of my favorite glory stories is that me and my friends got to be on the opening clips of her movie Beautiful which was filmed in Long Beach, Ca. I’m shouting at the camera: “Long Beach feminists for Cho!” I was pretty pleased that the editors chose to put us in even though we used the F word. Beautiful, like Drop Dead Diva, is about accepting and appreciating beauty that does not necessarily match up with the unreasonable and impossible expectations set by the media. Cho, like the main character of DDD Jane/Deb (Deb being the skinny model inside), had mainly struggled with her weight as a source of negative body image, so being in DDD is really perfect for her. Cho has also notoriously been both an icon and an activist for the LGBT community and openly identifies as queer or bisexual.

A common problem for minority actors is that they recieve jobs based solely on their look, in this case, Brooke Elliot for her size. The show is what some are calling “fat positive,” though terminology such as fat (another important F word), overweight, and plus-sized are often argued as placing thinness as the normal/default. Jane was advertised as a size 16, though there is a great comments section conversation in which many women said she has to be at least a 20. Whatever her actual size, the show is a mix between a courtroom drama and a feel-good reincarnation story which finds ways to mix law, fat positivity and actual facts about weight in every episode, namely Season 1’s “The Dress.” Jane argues in the courtroom that “the average woman is a size 14” and “66.3% of all women are considered overweight by the AMA” in her attempt to make a high-end clothing boutique carry plus sizes. The same episode tackles the very contemporary issue of Girls Gone Wild and consent considering the recent ruling of a Missouri court that basically said that being in a bar is consent even though the woman said she did not want to show her breasts and was then assaulted. (someone pulled her shirt up on camera.)

When Deb first becomes Jane, the rules of immediate reincarnation are set: Jane/Deb has both Jane and Deb’s intellect, but only Deb’s memories. Thus, Deb, whose history is portrayed as an airhead model, receives the brain of a legal theory expert without having to study at all. In the beginning of the show I wondered if it would follow the storyline of Heaven Can Wait. Warren Beatty, after becoming the millionaire, immediately begins training to be a professional football player and eventually plays again. Would Deb/Jane get skinny and become a model again? This question is answered through the initial story of Deb’s old best friend Stacy who pressured Jane to go on a strict diet and exercise regimen. But what Jane eventually does is accept her body and encourage Stacy to do the same. This then became the beginning of the NOW-esque Love Your Body theme that continues throughout the show.

Though I find the show incredibly entertaining, it would be irresponsible not to mention that the cast is largely white, the characters who are not Jane (Brooke Elliot),  Terri (Margaret Cho), or a judge character played by Rosie O'Donnell, are super skinny and that most characters are also upper class. Though there was a fleeting gay assistant character (how’s that for a stereotype), the issue of sexuality has not been much-addressed aside from Jane’s pseudo-virginity in her new body, Kim (Jane’s skinny and catty colleague) and Parker’s (a partner at her firm) promiscuity and Terri’s boisterous man-crazed attitude.   Though the show has its soap-opera type moments, its Legally Blonde meets Warren Beatty storyline and its white heteronormative cast of characters, I think it brings something new to television and is worth a watch.