Bordersploitation: Hollywood Border Crossers and Buddy Cops

Hollywood 1980s films are so distinctive that we can identify them immediately, partly for their aesthetic but mostly for their mood, for the reassuring tone of family-centered stories with clear moral lessons. These kinds of films provided reassuring dramas in the midst of cultural unrest and political uncertainty. The 1980s were an era of major transformations: increased immigration and transit across the border, the rise of globalization, military defense build-up, the waning of the Cold War, and the US-backed wars in Central America. It was a time troubled by the recent past of the Vietnam War, Watergate, assassinations of public figures, and the revolution in social attitudes wrought by the civil rights era, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and by the health care crises related to HIV/AIDS and Medicare/Medicaid. Hollywood border films are symptoms of this cultural morass; they stage immigrant disruptions to national identity in story lines drawn from a cinematic repertoire of "American" good guys: vigilantes, cowboys, and buddy cops. The bad guys are the male border crossers who infiltrate the national body as carriers of cultural, economic, and political ills. These Hollywood narratives provide or suggest solutions that double as fantasmatic resolutions and templates for public policy.

Several border films work together to form a coherent cultural response to crises of the 1980s: Borderline (1980) with Charles Bronson, The Border (1982) with Jack Nicholson, and Flashpoint (1984) with Kris Kristofferson. These films have fast-paced buddy-cop plots full of chases and intrigue, desire for the forbidden immigrant (but no contact), plenty of double-crossing and risky business, and reminders of traumatic events of US history, particularly Vietnam. In Borderline, Charles Bronson's character is a veteran cop who goes off on his own path of justice for an attractive young Mexican woman whose child was killed while crossing the border. In the process, he discovers that his partner's murderer is a Vietnam veteran who has created a big business with corporate sponsorship of running undocumented immigrants across the border, using the skills he learned in Vietnam to evade the border guards. This plot is revisited in The Border where Charlie, a border agent with a heart of gold, makes it his personal mission to help an attractive young Mexican woman reunite with her child who was seized by corrupt border officials. Charlie falls in with the corrupt border guards who aid the coyotes, immigrant smugglers, in return for extra cash, but eventually exposes this corruption. British director Tony Richardson, perhaps because of his vantage point outside of the US and Hollywood, offers a rather scathing critique of the emptiness of American consumerism and pop culture; nonetheless, the story relapses into the messianic nationalism inherited from the Western. Flashpoint unfolds in a more complicated series of events that invokes two unincorporated traumas of US history: the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War. The story is about two maverick Texas border guards and best friends—Logan, a Vietnam veteran and Green Beret hero, and Wyatt, a young idealistic rookie—who find a large amount of cash along with the remains of a man buried in the desert, evidence which turns out to be related to the assassination of JFK—a fact that federal agents will do anything to suppress. These films work and play well together because they all flirt with a liberal critique of government, but remain faithful to the conservative conventions of the Hollywood border genre. They traffic in nostalgia for the era prior to the consolidation of the liberal policies of globalization, for the good old days of the early Westerns populated by wrangling and free-wheeling cowboys, morally upright law enforcers, and virtuous women—best iconized by blonde ingénue Grace Kelly in High Noon (1952). The border film provides symbolically rich material for managing the contradictions and uncertainties of this transitional moment in history.

Beyond the Border Principle

Since Touch of Evil (1958), the Hollywood border is represented as a lawless place ruled by a dark mythology, and home to every illicit sexual activity and industry, from sex-trade to drug-trade. The...