Violent Visions

México: Amores perros

Amores perros ["Love's a Bitch"] of 2000, is probably the only one of these Latin American films which many of you will have seen, having had very wide international distribution, and having received almost universal critical acclaim for its original vision, cinematic style, and intelligence in its registering of the interlocking power grids of modern urban society. Although it does not use natural actors, it shares with Pizza, birra, faso the extensive use of hand-held cameras, giving it a dynamic, in-your face and in-the-street filmic style.

• Dog-fighting
• From dog-fight to TV studio
• Systemic connections
• Mass-media and disavowal
• Conclusion

Dog-fighting

Rather typically, the film's distribution in Britain was delayed due to concerns not about the violence enacted on human beings in the film, but about the portrayal of dog-fighting and the occasional animal smeared with stage blood.

• Displaced violence
  Yet the dog-fighting is clearly acting as a displaced metaphor, an allegory even, for human violence in the film, and indeed dog-fetishism generally in the film takes the form of a displaced and dislocated cipher and substitute for impeded human relationships.
   
• Allegory of "wild" capitalism
  The functioning of this allegory could not be clearer. If human relationships are mapped onto canine ones, then the business of dog-fighting becomes in itself a powerful allegory for the systemic violence inherent within globalized capitalism.

  The owner of the dog-fighting business runs his firm according to strict and sound neo-liberal, market-oriented practice. "Esta es mi empresa," he explains to the two new lads, "no pago impuestos, no hay huelgas ni sindicatos, puro billete limpio" (0:25:50) ("This is my firm, I don't pay taxes, there are no strikes or unions. Pure, clean cash").  As an example of no-barriers private enterprise, of "flexible" accumulation operating with a labour force battered into passive submission, I am sure that the IMF would no-doubt approve most highly.
   

• Defetishization
  At an even more fundamental level, the dog metaphor functions to defetishize social relations for the spectator. Because the dog-fetishism of all the characters, rich or poor, is ironized, it makes visible in a most uncomfortable manner the very libidinalizing processes by which the systemic violence of capitalism is disavowed or masked behind the screen of glossy images, beautified poses, and image status-symbols.

From dog-fight to TV studio

I'll show my last clip now, one which marks the transition between the major focus of Part I (‘Octavio y Susana’) and Part II (‘Daniel y Valeria’), and serves to illustrate the way in which the film makes these systemic links. The sequence begins in an illegal dog-fight and ends in a television studio. Indeed, it is precisely in the juxtaposition of these two sequences, in the cinematic gaze which dares to think them together and to relate them, that the radical nature of Amores perros lies.

Here, the mean, tough, streetwise bully Jarocho has challenged Octavio, one of the young protagonists, to a private dog-fight, after having lost several previous fights to him. At the end of the sequence, we'll see the international super-model Valeria Amaya, the subject of Part II of the film, who has just told a pack of fibs about her supposed relationship with star Andrés Salgado.

Systemic connections

• About
  For those of you who haven't seen it, the plot of Amores perros is the intersection of three different human stories and tragedies on the streets of Mexico City, all of them linked only by the devastating car crash we saw there. The intersection of the three stories is carefully and masterfully worked out in filmic terms by up-and-coming director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screen playwright Guillermo Arriaga.
   
• Thinking global
  The film could almost be a case-study example for Fredric Jameson's dictum in his book The Geopolitical Aesthetic that:

all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such. [ . . . ] On the global scale, allegory allows the most random, minute, or isolated landscapes to function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall. (Jameson 1992: 3-5)

• Spatio-temporal linkage
  It also illustrates fantastically, in its intersection of simultaneous narratives, the point, summed up by Doreen Massey, that place is the intersection of spatial lines of power interacting within the temporal domain:

'Space' is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global. [...] There is no choice between flow (time) and a flat surface of instantaneous relations (space). [... S]pace is by its very nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and co-operation. (Massey 1992: 265)

Mass-media and disavowal

Apart from the dog allegory, the film achieves this, I believe, through the constant theme of mediatization, from mobile telephones to mass-media image capitalism, particularly in the story of super-model Valeria Amaya. This helps to explain the sharp juxtaposition we saw there between street violence and television screen, the screen representing very precisely — and in a self-reflexive fashion for cinema — the disavowal and dissimulation of the systemic violence underlying global image capitalism.

• The violence of capital (Baudrillard)
  This is a point I cannot make more succinctly than Baudrillard in his famous essay on "Simulacra and Simulations":

this is what must be said at all costs, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking [...] a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality — this is what is scandalous. (Baudrillard 1988 (1981): 173)

Conclusion

Like all of these films, Amores perros poses questions about visibility and invisibility, and in particular about visibility and invisibility as simulation and dissimulation.

• In Los olvidados, as Peter Evans points out (86), the blind Don Carmelo, referring to the street children he has been abusing, cites the Spanish proverb "cría cuervos …", leaving implicit the corollary "y te sacarán los ojos" ["bring up crows, and they’ll peck out your eyes"].
   
• In one of the closing scenes of Pixote, the young boy vomits while staring transfixed at the television screen he and his now dead friends had bought with the proceeds of their crimes: what remains of their lives is now a flat televisual surface, and his vomit is the accumulation of all that somehow does not fit within the sanitized screens of Brazilian society.
   
• In Pizza, birra, faso, the protagonists attempt to get into a glitzy nightclub from which they are barred by virtue of their social status: their bodies must remain invisible, slinking in the dark and dangerous corners of the city, and violence is the only way for them to transgress the spatial lines of power which govern the right of access to public visibility.
   
• In La virgen de los sicarios, after the violent death of Alexis, Fernando finds a replacement in Wilmar, a youth who declares his greatest desires in life to be: "unos tenis marca Reebok, unos blue-jeans Paco Rabanne, tres camisas Ocean Pacific, ropa interior Calvin Klein, una moto Honda, una mini-Hussi, y una nevera marca Whirlpool pa' mi mamá" (1:22).
   
• Finally, in Amores perros, the old tramp and ex-guerrilla El Chivo makes strategic use of his social invisibility to transgress the power-lines of the city, violently shattering the plate-glass screen of a Japanese restaurant with his assassin’s bullet (see still), or playing, literally, with his image as he sticks a photograph of himself into his estranged daughter’s graduation photograph. As such, he is the perfect corollary for the image-conscious Valeria, who, with her carefully simulated TV-relationships fabricated for global televisual  consumption, is forced to confront the lack which those images disavow, as the car crash leaves her beautiful body mutilated and amputated. Her image on the advertising hoarding for global beauty product manufacturer Enchant is thus revealed as pure façade and simulation. It is the screen of a violence whose very terms cannot be understood without thinking its linkages to the power-geometry of informational global capitalism.