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6. “You’re Giving Me a Nervous Breakdown”: Strain Theories and Traffic
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| 83 6 “You’re Giving Me a Nervous Breakdown” Strain Theories and Traffic This chapter deals with strain theories—explanations arguing that individuals turn to crime when they cannot cope with the strains and stresses of life through legitimate means. We begin with Traffic (2000), Steven Soderbergh ’s celebrated film about the effects of drugs trafficking. Then we turn to strain theories, showing how they inform Traffic and other movies. Traffic Traffic deals with the drug trade on three levels: the national level, where it explores trafficking relationships between the United States and Mexico; an intermediate level, where it focuses on midlevel drug distribution and U.S. government efforts to curb it; and the individual level, where it shows the impact of drugs on characters whose lives are in one way or another transformed by them. The movie weaves together three different plots; like other films that disrupt and fragment narrative lines, Traffic is less interested in telling a single coherent story than in juxtaposing bits of multiple stories to see what the contrasts and echoes will reveal. Yet despite its fragmentation , Traffic makes an impression of profound unity, partly because the three plots deal with aspects of a single phenomenon—the drug trade—and partly because it uses the same type of explanation (strain theory) for the film’s numerous crimes, ranging from prostitution to murder, illegal surveillance to smuggling, freebasing to torture. Viewing the film, one is unaware that the plots share this single criminological viewpoint—indeed, Soderbergh himself may not have been familiar with strain theory in any formal sense. Yet the single interpretation of crime that cuts across the plots unifies the film despite its initially puzzling fragmentation and its quick leaps among plot- 84 | “You’re Giving Me a Nervous Breakdown” lines. Traffic is a tour de force in which strain theory accounts for the drug trade and drug use on all levels. Plot 1, the most complicated of the three narrative lines, is where the movie starts. Set in Mexico, its scenes are overlaid with a golden-sepia color that invokes not only the sand of the desert and dust of Tijuana, where many of the scenes take place, but also the skin color of its characters, all of whom are Mexican.1 These characters speak only Spanish to one another (their words are subtitled in English)—a sign of Soderbergh’s determination to maintain an authenticity of place and be as respectful of the Mexican as of the American settings. The central figure in this plot is Javier Rodriguez (played by Benicio Del Toro), one of two police officers who intercept a truck full of cocaine and arrest the smugglers, only to be stopped themselves by a high-ranking official, General Salazar (Tomás Milián). Announcing that he will now take over, Salazar dismisses the two officers but later asks Javier, who has impressed him, to capture Francisco Flores (“Frankie Flowers”), a hit man for the Tijuana drug cartel lead by the Obregón brothers. Javier dutifully brings in Francisco and passes him over to Salazar; later, he hears Salazar’s men torturing Francisco, who gives up the names of key figures in the Tijuana cartel. Salazar arrests them and as a reward for his apparently vigorous clampdown on the narcotics trade, he is named Mexico’s drug czar. However, Javier, already troubled by Salazar’s use of torture, now learns that the general himself is working for the rival Juárez cartel. This was his underlying motive for seizing the truck full of cocaine and making war on the Obregón brothers. Javier is at first an ambiguous character, perhaps shady, perhaps tolerant of the corruption he sees around him,2 but he is also charming, relaxed, and reliable, and as the film goes on we discover he is a gentle, altruistic man. It is significant that Javier, the film’s hero, is Mexican: Traffic is a film about not only the drug trade but also racial and ethnic stereotypes of those involved in the drug trade. Throughout, the film makes a point of contradicting these stereotypes. When Javier’s partner, Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) is killed by drug lords for selling information to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration , Javier decides to cut a deal with the FBI, which is also trying to interdict drug smuggling from Mexico. What does Javier ask for in return for risking his life to wear a wire and pass on his insider’s information...