Machete

^[1]1,480 words

I saw Machete on Friday afternoon. It was gross, it was hilarious, and it communicated an important message: Mexico is a filthy, impoverished, backward, corrupt country inhabited by ugly, treacherous, cruel people. Mexicans are invading the United States, bringing Mexico with them. Mexicans corrupt every American who comes into contact with them, and their power to corrupt is so total that they even corrupt the patriots and politicians who oppose them.

In spite of their cruelty to one another, Mexicans pull together with a fierce solidarity when facing Americans, who are merely selfish individuals out to make or save a buck. People like that can always be bought off or intimidated. This solidarity gives Mexicans a vast support network in the United States—a network that includes the Catholic Church—which aids them in taking jobs from Americans, undercutting American wages, and leeching off American social services.

What do these locusts think they’ll do once they strip America bare? Well, locusts don’t think. But if they did, they would probably conclude (a) they would be no worse off than they were in Mexico, and (b) there’s always Canada.

Machete was directed by Robert Rodriguez, a Texas-born Mexican-American (a white man by the looks of him), who is versatile and highly talented but also wildly inconsistent. (His masterpiece is 2005’s Sin City, but he has also done some stunningly awful crap ^[2].) The character of Machete first appeared in Rodriguez’s delightful Spy Kids movie. The movie Machete was based on a faux “trailer” in Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s “double feature” Grindhouse (2007).

Does Machete promote violence against Whites, as claimed by some who have not seen the movie? To answer that, I must say quite a lot about the plot, so stop reading here if you don’t want to know.

Machete, played by Danny Trejo (more than half Amerindian by the looks of him), is a Mexican Federale, a cop, whose wife and daughter have been horribly murdered by a Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal, who is half-Jewish, half-Irish) in cooperation with his own corrupt superiors. A few years later, Machete shows up in Texas as a day laborer. He is hired by a White American Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to kill a state Senator, John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro), who is a fierce opponent of immigration. Booth explains that business in Texas depends on cheap labor. Thus the border must remain open. Thus the Senator must die. (This speech is a concise and eloquent proof that capitalism is subversive of patriotism.)

Machete takes the job, but discovers that he is being framed as a fall guy. A henchman of Booth wounds the Senator, and Machete is hunted down as the Mexican would-be assassin. It turns out that Booth actually works for the Senator, and he has cooked up the assassination attempt to revive his flagging poll numbers and stir up hatred against Mexicans. We eventually learn, however, that Booth is actually working for the drug lord Torrez, who wants the border tightened up so that the cost of his products rises in the US. He also hopes to build in back doors to the new electrified border fence proposed by McLaughlin.

McLaughlin is no sympathetic dupe, however. He is introduced hunting down illegal aliens with his friends, a posse of border vigilantes clearly supposed to be the Minutemen. The vigilante leader Von Jackson (Don Johnson) shoots a pregnant Mexican woman while making a speech about the anchor baby problem, and the Senator shoots the woman’s boyfriend. He has the whole incident filmed to show it to his “big money donors.”

But it is hard to say what Rodriguez’s intentions are. Does he really think that immigration opponents are like this? (If only . . .) Is it an attempt to tar anti-immigration advocates by putting their messages in the mouths of ruthless killers? If so, then it fails by being too over the top. It comes off more as a parody of the paranoia and hysteria of the left-wing critics of the anti-immigration movement.

When Jackson shoots Luz, a leader of the Mexican underground network played by Michelle Rodriguez (a Puerto-Rican actress who looks about one eighth black—hard to tell given the popularity of plastic surgery in Hollywood), the network rallies under Machete’s leadership for a battle with the vigilantes.

The Mexicans attack in a fleet of chrome-plated, rainbow-tinted, bouncing and shimmying low-riders and choppers. I laughed my ass off. Jackson’s vigilantes look like a low rent motorcycle gang. After a brutal battle, the vigilantes are put to flight. But it is hard to have too much sympathy with them. After all, they are dupes of Jackson and Booth in league with Torrez.

So, does Machete promote racial war against White people? Yes and no.

Yes, since the bad guys are almost all White people.

No, because the Whites are not just any White people, but corrupt traitors to their own race and dupes of said traitors.

No, because the politics of the film, insofar as it has any, is quasi-Marxist. The enemies are the Rich (the Mexican Torrez, the American Booth). The good guys are “the people”—most of them Mexican, but one of them is a White American working with Mexicans as a dishwasher. Luz’s alter ego is Shé (with the accent, as in Ché), a revolutionary pinup girl.

In truth, I suspect that this film’s real agenda is pretty much the same as that of Rodriguez’s friend and frequent collaborator Quentin Tarantino, namely: sheer nihilism ^[3].

This movie is really all about making brutal and sadistic violence funny. Machete stabs, slashes, beheads, slices, dices, and juliennes people with his machete. He also kills with guns, grenades, rockets, knives, surgical implements, vehicles, garden tools, a meat thermometer, his bare hands, and probably his bad breath. Rodriguez follows the Chekovian dramatic principle that if a corkscrew is left on a counter, it had better be used to gouge out someone’s eye before the end of the act. In one scene, Machete rips out a man’s intestines and uses them to rappel off the side of a building.

And Machete is far from the only killer in this movie. Machete’s brother, a Catholic priest (Cheech Marin, who appears to be heavily Amerindian as well) dispatches a number of assassins with shotgun blasts before being crucified in his own church. Booth’s slutty daughter April (played by Irish-Italian American Catholic girl Lindsay Lohan) dresses as a nun and blows the Senator away with a 45.

It is all very droll, so I guess Rodriguez can count this movie a success.

The aesthetic of Machete seems to be derived from biker magazines. Where else does one find hideously scarred, fat, tattooed old satyrs who are inexplicably alluring to young, scantily clad women sporting fake boobs and machineguns?

To capitalize on the controversy about the Arizona immigration enforcement law, a trailer for Machete was released with a warning to the state of Arizona. Having seen the movie, I have to dismiss the trailer as a cheap opportunism rather than a serious political message. For this movie has no serious political message.

Yes, Machete does promote Mexican solidarity against Whites. Sartana, a Mexican-American immigration agent played by Mexican-American actress Jessica Alba (who cannot be more than one eighth Amerindian) does learn the value of solidarity with her people. “There is the law,” she says, “and then there’s what’s right.” And racial solidarity is what’s right.

But ask yourself: Whose mind is this message more likely to change? The mind of a Mexican, most of whom already eat, sleep, and breathe solidarity with “La Raza”? Or the mind of your average deracinated White American, who also gets to observe the contrast between Mexican solidarity and the corruption of his selfish, individualistic fellow Whites? Mexican solidarity needs no promoting. So the result of Machete might be a net increase in White solidarity.

At one point in the movie, one of Booth’s bodyguards remarks that it is strange that Americans allow Mexican gardeners and nannies in their homes when they don’t want them in their country. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

The same bodyguard speaks to Machete in Hungarian. He does not understand, of course. It points out the fact that all the other immigrant groups who came here learned English, so why don’t the Mexicans learn it too? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Yes, Machete delivers a warning to Arizona and the rest of America, but not the one its director intended. Machete portrays Mexicans as profoundly alien and threatening. It shows that their racial solidarity gives them an advantage over Americans, whose selfish individualism brought them here and keeps them here even though they are destroying our society. It shows our leaders as corrupt, sociopathic race traitors.

The conclusion: If Whites are going to save our country, we must first develop racial solidarity, toss out our corrupt leaders, and reign in traitorous capitalists.

I can hardly wait for the sequel ^[4].