Affect and Search for Self in Amores Perros
Carrie Pascale
SPAN 3900
May 2016
Affect and Search for Self in Amores Perros
“Los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.”
Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Billboards, mirror reflections, photographs, and canine companions represent each protagonist’s doomed search for self-image in Amores perros. In this essay, I will examine the contributions of self-image to the film’s emotional project, drawing on the affective tendencies of its scenes. Affect is explored in the characters’ in grueling miscommunicative moments: a poignant look as a person walks away, a sequence of unanswered phone calls, a longing stare at a photograph, an arm raised in greeting answered by the quick close of curtains. An understanding of “the affective bloom of a processual materialism” (Seigworth & Gregg 9) is useful to viewing Amores perros: the scenes often promise some emotional arrival, but this catharsis is not seen until the very end when el Chivo sobs to his daughter’s answering machine, and has picked up every other character’s emotional struggle. As such, the disjointed emotions experienced by the characters are duplicated in the viewing experience. Despite any conscious expectations resulting from the hopeless realities experienced by the characters, the film ultimately plays with the viewer’s preconscious desire for resolution. Therefore, I argue that the real violence of the film exists within its emotional impact, rather than its “notorious violent surface” (Reber 281). To this end, Judith Butler’s words on Hegel’s self-enslavement are useful: “the childish and stubborn pleasure that the skeptic takes in watching another fall turns into a profound unhappiness when he is, as it were, forced to watch himself fall into endless contradictions” (45). Amores perros challenges and extends the spectator’s ability to watch physical suffering. As the characters’ hope for emotional recourse is continually annihilated by the film’s disjointed aesthetic, physical violence is not what makes the film laborious, but rather, the fruitless emotional labors of the characters.
This essay focuses on the emotional project of the film, but attention must be paid to its political message. Dierdra Reber writes of the criticism launched against neoliberalism via emotions:
“All too often we dismiss affective content as banal or infrapolitical. We must learn, on the contrary, to read contemporary cultural production in this new register of affect—to detect and decipher its decidedly political content, or else run the risk of failing to understand the full contours of the political battle unfolding around us, a battle that encompasses all of us as its cultural subjects.” (295)
The film relies on self-recognition as an affective tool, yet to an international audience, is not particularly self-conscious. There are few obvious landmarks that mark the location as Mexico City; much of the action takes place in nondescript, gritty places like the interior of cars, El Chivo’s unkempt warehouse, Octavio’s cramped family home, and fluorescently-lit gas stations. However, sparse yet poignant cultural cues like its soundtrack and the calls of street vendors lend the film its contextual deliberateness. It’s a refusal to particularize that could be taken as González Iñárritu’s answer to the demand for cultural production to create and uphold mexicanidad (Smith 38), and at the same time, allows for distinct viewing experiences predicated on the viewer’s familiarity with a Mexican context. This duality that allows the film to achieve commodified international appreciation, but also possess harder-to-spot critiques against neoliberal hegemony (Reber 281). About its reception in the U.S., Paul Julian Smith writes: “Amores perros may have made González Iñárritu ‘unstoppable and international’, but still Mexico is the ghost at the feast” (15). A critique of the hypocrisy of the neoliberal values plaguing Mexico takes the form of mere suggestive undertones, excess of emotion, and overlapping narratives. The characters experience emotional struggles related to failed attempts at recourse: Octavio wants Susana, Valeria wants to maintain her career in the face of the crash, and el Chivo wants to reconnect with his daughter. The three interwoven narratives play off each other's’ emotional agony—for instance, we see that Octavio’s brother dies in an attempted robbery, but hope is briefly restored by the next scene, a flash to Cofi’s alert, breathing form under the paternal care of el Chivo.