I was several weeks late catching up with El mariachi, a fine little action picture in Spanish that’s been playing at the Water Tower (and opens this week at the Biograph and Bricktown Square). Judging from all the reviews and press stories I read beforehand, an essential part of the movie’s meaning–almost treated as if it were part of the plot–is that its 24-year-old writer-director, Robert Rodriguez, made it for $7,000 and, now a client of Hollywood’s International Creative Management agency, has a two-year contract with Columbia Pictures, the movie’s distributor, that includes plans to shoot a $6 million English-language remake. Much less important, it would seem, is the fate of the movie’s title hero (played by Carlos Gallardo, also Rodriguez’s coproducer). All he ever wanted, “el mariachi” makes clear, is to be a folk musician like his ancestors, though he loses his guitar, the use of one hand, his music, his girlfriend, and possibly even his soul in the process of saving his skin, which entails becoming a successful killer and appropriating the Anglo villain’s weapons. Still less relevant, it would appear, is the movie’s ironic suggestion that Rodriguez’s fate and the mariachi’s may be one and the same.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Rodriguez’s inspirational success story isn’t supposed to give anything away to the audience or ruin its enjoyment. We aren’t supposed to think that doing a $6 million remake of El mariachi in English for the gringos–or having the original shown in upscale neighborhoods–is any sort of humiliation or defeat. On the contrary, we’re expected to conclude that this is the ultimate victory, the only possible thing a poor Latino filmmaker can or should aspire to. (Why should he want to address other poor Latinos instead of us, who matter so much more than they do?) The bitter tale of the mariachi’s survival comments directly on the movie’s theme, but this is apparently felt to be extraneous (it isn’t about us, except negatively) and has been omitted from the reviews I’ve seen. Virtually all that one reads about is the movie’s deft handling of tried-and-true genre conventions, which implies that what it has to say is either nothing at all (the preferred scenario) or so familiar and hackneyed it isn’t worth talking about.
Consider too that the movie’s Anglo villain–defined by his wealth and his practice of striking matches to light his cigarettes across his male employees’ faces–spends most of his time lounging in and around a swimming pool. He sits and receives drinks and a manicure from a bimbo in a bikini, just like an old-style Hollywood producer. By contrast, the hero, hoping merely to subsist on modest tips in bars like his father and grandfather, soon finds that electric pianos with their built-in, mechanical-sounding rhythm sections and dehumanized Muzak arrangements have virtually supplanted his folk art, rendering it obsolete. All things considered, laying an electric piano on a mariachi is not unlike bestowing a $6 million movie in English on Rodriguez–except that we’re supposed to frown on the former as vulgar and reductive and heartily approve of the latter as hip and progressive.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the musician continues to avoid carrying weapons and driving a vehicle until the gravity of the situation forces him to do both. By the end he’s lost everything he cares about except his life, though he has a motorcycle, the pit bull, a knife, and several guns: “With my weapons I’m prepared.” Will Rodriguez’s technological arsenal and salary at Columbia make up for the loss of his artisanal relationship with his art and his cultural-political relationship with his audience–not to mention the urgency of his message? We’ll see.
