Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment

7. Luis Alcoriza; or, A Certain Antimelodramatic Tendency in Mexican Cinema

7 Luis Alcoriza; or, A Certain Antimelodramatic Tendency in Mexican Cinema marvin d’lugo Beyond its reactionary content and its schematic formulation, cinema is going to connect with the hunger of the masses to make themselves socially visible. Jesús Martín-Barbero Mexican Mothers in Melodrama At the center of Luis Alcoriza’s award-winning 1971 film Mecánica nacional (National Mechanics) we find a scene that self-consciously parodies one of the prominent tropes that historically have shaped Mexico’s movie melodramas : the cult of the iconic maternal figure. Set in a rural locale on the outskirts of Mexico City, the scene involves the makeshift lying-in-state of the family matriarch, Doña Lolita (Sara García), who, the night before, had come with her family to view the final laps of a national car race but died suddenly after overeating and drinking. A television crew assigned to cover the racing event captures the improvised ritual of mourning for the lavishly adorned corpse as they await their real job, the race’s finale. In this way, a scene of family bereavement is transformed into a theatrical event in which the savvy television director even orders Doña Lolita’s grieving son, Eufemio (Manolo Fábregas), to look upward in a pious gesture that mimics the convention of religious paintings of supplicants praying to heaven. This insertion of the television “gaze” mockingly reminds Alcoriza’s audience of the connectivity of certain melodramatic tropes that cross popular visual media, blurring the distinction between experiences that are lived and those that are performed. Jesús Martín-Barbero has argued that the key to the obstinate persistence of melodrama lies in part in its adaptability to changing technological formats . Through its circulation across cultural and political borders, melodrama interpellates an ever-increasing mass audience, enabling individuals to bear witness to a collective “total spectacle” in which they may see themselves as part of a unified social and cultural whole otherwise denied them by hierarchical , class-bound society (125). Instead of naturalizing staged emotional gestures, however, the scene from Mecánica nacional exposes the very artifice of melodrama’s appeal, showing us how individual feelings are reshaped by recognizable performance codes and circulated by mass media so that the experience and its representation become indistinguishable. By self-referentially staging the multiple planes of imagery in this scene, Alcoriza reveals the double project of his film: first, to engage his audience in the recognition of the artifice of their seemingly natural responses to Doña Lolita’s unceremonious death; then, to deflate the quasi-religious cult of the mother by staging the death ritual as a parody of sacred maternity. Alcoriza’s deconstructive impulse is aided in a conspicuous way by his choice of casting . The deceased matriarch is, of course, not just any old lady. Doña Lolita is played by “The Mother of all Mexicans,” Sara García (Mora 1985, 230), an actress whose career portraying the long-suffering maternal figure in dozens Sara García as suffering mother a certain antimelodramatic tendency · 111 of Mexican films began in 1933 with her performance in this stock role in Jorge Bell’s El pulpo humano (The Human Octopus). Over the years her increasingly more clichéd appearances as the self-sacrificing mother and later as the grandmother became fixtures in Mexican melodramas.1 The cult of the mother that is the brunt of Alcoriza’s parody is rooted in a critical conflation of maternity with sainthood that, as Julia Tuñón reminds us, was one of the rhetorical axes of Mexican cinema’s golden-age melodramas (185). The sacredness of maternity, as played out endlessly in Mexican films of the 1930s and 1940s, explicitly aligned melodramatic gestures with Catholic religious iconography (Mora 1985, 229). By joining this “classical” movie trope with its updated television version, Alcoriza calls into question both the melodramatic stereotype and the community’s dedication to the hoary cultural sensibility embedded in the cliché. He explains his conception of the film’s project this way: “I mock symbols. I think it is very legitimate to love one’s mother. I love mine very much, but this has nothing to do with Mother with a capital ‘M.’ What terrifies me—I repeat—are symbols of Mother, of Father. . . . The taboos, the authorities, respect for everything” (Reyes Nevares 71). Mecánica nacional is especially noteworthy in this regard...