Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012 by Ignacio Sánchez Prado (review)

Four meaty chapters, along with a meaningful introduction and conclusion, comprise Sánchez Prado’s optimistic history of Mexican film that begins with the distribution crisis that lasted roughly from 1989 to 1994 and ends “with subtly evaluated, even ‘paradoxical’ measure of success.” To explore the turn-of-the-millennium comeback of Mexican cinema, Sánchez Prado contemplates nearly 260 films and 500 or so written sources. The relatively jargon-free language and the adept interdisciplinary swerves make for a gripping read, turned all the more profound by brilliant close analysis. Sánchez Prado’s analytic gifts benefit from his profound understanding of twentieth- and now twenty-first century Mexican history, along with his knack for extracting main ideas from the muddle of others’ academic writing. An additional reason for the lucidity of his prose emerges in the acknowledgments, where the author thanks an undergraduate, whose editorial comments helped “make the book accessible” (viii). The ultimate reason for the admirable cogency of this text, however, springs from Sánchez Prado’s willingness to deal in nuance.

For example, the conclusion carefully weighs the numbers of the 2011 Mexican box office tabulations. Although in 2011, 90 percent of Mexico’s box office and screens favored Hollywood cinema, compared to Mexican cinema’s mere 7 percent presence, Sánchez Prado elicits a complex story from the disproportion: “the very existence of a 7 percent market share and the release of 62 movies a year is, as paradoxical as it may sound, a success story” (210). That sentence alone warrants publication of this book. Sánchez Prado tempers the melodramatic tendency that holds sway in much assessment of neoliberalism among liberal arts circles. Perhaps Sánchez Prado’s ability to respect nuance stems from his autodidactic, rather than dutifully indoctrinated, approach. Sánchez Prado informs me by email that as a university student he took only one class on film (about “the subaltern”), though he completed additional coursework in cultural studies with thinkers such as Jesús Martín-Barbero, Mabel Moraña, and Hermann Herlinghaus. An intimate labor of love seems to spur Sánchez Prado’s obsessive, almost starstruck hunt for the smallest of articles and the longest of books. Screening Neoliberalismcatalogues, minutely, the range of opinions available on Mexican film, and assimilates them into a nearly seamless argument.

That fluidity, of course, requires certain suppressions, which Sánchez Prado himself recognizes, albeit in terms of other critics’ habits: “Finally, it is important to engage, whenever possible, with the critical traditions developed around specific films to show how certain studies of interpretation and reception are themselves entangled in the same cultural logic deployed by those movies” (14). The entanglement on which Screening Neoliberalismbases its argument, that is, the presumptions that the analysis cannot fully examine, have to do with the vitality of the middle class in Mexico – precisely the implicit subject of so many of these films that staged the film industry resurrection. Sánchez Prado is not necessarily a fan of neoliberalism – much less of poverty or severe income inequality – but his ultimately hopeful viewpoint leaves at least one topic in this book only vaguely interrogated. How can neoliberalism, a system largely denounced by most critics who anchor Sánchez Prado’s main disciplinary fields, coincide with a numerically increasing middle class? A satisfying answer may elude literary and film critics. Sánchez Prado asserts the powerful sway of the middle class as the key to industry success without charting the reasons for its rise: “Thus, in order to survive as an industry, Mexican filmmakers needed to bring the middle class back into the theaters” (5). Screening Neoliberalismmarks the methods of that seduction.

A good example of Sánchez Prado’s willingness to detect complexity appears in passages such as the following, which admits tendencies toward both social mixing and classist segregation in contemporary Mexican theater-going practice: “It is certainly true that the lower middle...