Bardo:
Mexican & American Non-Existence

Posted By Steven Clark On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]3,127 words

Bardo. Not Bardot. Certainly not Bridget. Bardo is a Buddhist concept referring to a limbo state of existence, and this concept is the theme of Alejandro Inarritu’s latest film, a stream-of-consciousness story where fantasy and reality intermingle in the mind of its protagonist, much like mind and matter did in Birdman, another Inarritu film.

In Birdman, Riggins (Michael Keaton), a superhero movie star, forsook the money and glory of making Birdman IV for the dubious honor of presenting a Raymond Carver story on stage in a New York that seemed to ignore and despise him.

In Bardo, the protagonist is Silverio Gama (Gimenez Cacho), a Mexican journalist and writer now living in Los Angeles who returns to Mexico City to receive an award. It is a kind of ordeal similar to Riggan’s stab at Broadway. Silverio is called a traitor, a malinche (a Mexican term referring to a turncoat taken from Malinche, the name of an Indian woman who joined Cortez as his interpreter and who helped make the conquest of the Aztecs a reality). He is at once disliked for having sold out to El Norte, but also for having been so successful at it.

Unlike Riggan’s tortured solitude, Silverio brings his family with him: his wife Lucia (Griselda Sicilliani), his son Lorenzo (Iker Sanchez Solano), and their daughter Camila (Ximena La Madrid). Bardo is a family film in many ways; Silverio’s family tries to come to terms with being both Mexican and American. Mexico is itself a kind of family that is unsure where it stands in subtle and not-so-subtle American-Mexican sparring.

Symbols are thrown at us; in Chapultepec castle, Silverio speaks to the American ambassador about Amazon’s plans to buy Baja, California (why not? Best they do it before Bill Gates does). While they debate the efficacies of wise capitalist buyouts, American soldiers storm the palace as they did in 1848 during the Mexican-American War (Silverio reminds the ambassador), and one of the Niños, the Mexican cadets who fought off the gringos, leaps to his death, wrapped in the Mexican flag — but then he bounces back up. It was a kind of bungee jump, staged for a film, and those American soldiers all wear obvious Dutch-boy blond wigs under their swarthy Mexican skin. Tragedy flashes to the absurd.

It’s an example of Bardo‘s visual splendor and the humor Inarritu brings to analyzing Silverio’s life (a thin stand-in for Inarritu) and Mexican-American relations.

There isn’t any of the troubled angst we see in northern European film families. Silverio and Lucia have a playful marriage. Their children are caught between being Mexican and American; Lorenzo insists on speaking English at the breakfast table, and Camila lives in Boston, but is torn between being there and returning to Mexico. They relate as a family; they grump and pout, but come together. There’s joy, but also a personal family tragedy they never quite shake off: the loss of Mateo, Lucia’s first child. We see this in the opening scene, where she gives birth while Silverio anxiously awaits — then he is told that the baby refused to come out, and insists on staying in.

Throughout the movie Mateo appears and reappears; sometimes he tries to come out, but Lucia has to shove him back into her womb. Again, the visual comedy of this is superb.

Silverio’s return to Mexico is a farcical mix; he is feted and lashed by former cronies who felt he deserted them for all that gringo money. He appears on a talk show and tries to speaks, but nothing comes out. His host, a former friend, mocks him. Silverio tries to communicate and move, but finds his feet nailed to the floor.

[2]

You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here [3].

Silverio later dreams he is on a streetcar in Los Angeles carrying a pair of axolotls, salamanders native to Mexico. The bag bursts and the amphibians fall on the floor, and then the car is filled with water as Silverio tries to catch them. The dream ends in his house, now a toy-sized structure in a desert.

The axolotl was considered sacred to the Aztecs, and was thought to be the fire god, Xolotl, who disguised himself in order to not be sacrificed. Axolotls also are unusual in that they never metamorphasize into adults, remaining aquatic and gilled. Silverio returns to this dream, referring to his life. Does he ever remain free of Mexico? Is he an axolotl that cannot mature?

He reveres his father, and when he recalls him, Silverio is shrunk to a child’s size but remains a bearded man as his father embraces him.

Dreams roll in and out in this film, because films, like dreams, do not possess time. Both mediums seem real, but are not truthful, and Silverio finds his life full of contradictions and false memories. Bardo is a film you don’t see; it’s one you experience.

What is real about Silverio? His lost son Mateo? His accomplishments in life? Isn’t he, like all of us, an essence outside of his worldly role?

“A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.” This motto was hung in the dressing room of Birdman’s Riggan as he, too, struggled with his identity, dealing with being an improbable serious stage actor or the onscreen, semi-mythical Birdman.

Imagination and reality are prevalent in both films, which seems to be a very Mexican and Spanish sensibility recalling Calderón’s play La Vida es un Sueno (Life is a Dream), where a Prince is confined because he is mad and might do harm, and comes to believe that all of his life is a dream. He says, “What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”

The metaphysical questions Inarritu puts onscreen are never asked in American films. We lack the magical realism of the Latin American mind. We, like the Romans, have to be realistic, with our complexes ironed out, good and simple. We want John Wayne.

When the Romans needed deep thought, they went to the Greeks. If we Americans want deepness, we go to the Jews. As the novelist Anthony Burgess wrote, the Jews have become the conscience of America, its imagination.

But Bardo isn’t tied down by literalness, and its canvas offers a never-ending pleasure in seeing a man’s life unroll — his memories, contradictions, and false ends are well worth the two-and-a-half-hour length. Water and sand intermingle — water for Mateo, where his ashes are scattered on a beach, and Bardo starts in a desert where an elastic shadow of a man running keeps taking off and returning to Earth, finally ascending. Is it Silverio’s hopes? The flight again recalls Birdman, where Riggan, weighed down by the New York nonsense he has to put with, becomes Birdman again and flies up in power and majesty.

A shot hangs on an eagle flying above the desert — a symbol of Mexico, where an eagle guided the Aztecs to their homeland? Yet, the homeland of the Aztecs offers a dubious ancestry of bloodshed, offset by a bloodier one of conquest.

Silverio prides himself on being a great celebrity interviewer. He spoke to a drug lord, who is now imprisoned and who claimed to be the spirit of the devil, demonic and smiling with widened, Satanic eyes.

Thus, it’s not unusual when Silverio in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s central square in front of its splendid cathedral, climbs a mountain of corpses to interview Cortez, who is offhanded and relaxed as he recounts slaughtering the Aztecs and bums a cigarette from Silverio. As Silverio denounces him, he tosses the cigarette away. A corpse complains, “That burns!” Then the corpses squirm to life and roll away, causing the mountain of human flesh to melt away. It turns out that it’s only a take for yet another film. Again, the humor and self-deprecation of Bardo is never-ending.

I enjoy Silverio’s humanity. He goes to a wild party in his honor and dances full of glee with Lucia and his friends, and does a bump with Camila. Is this all linear, or only recollections? Silverio, it turns out, has had a stroke. His family crowds around him and plays music that seems to make him responsive. Does he die, recover, or is he left in the limbo of memory? The movie doesn’t tell us.

A deeper question raised by the film is America and Mexico. Are we adversaries or brothers?

Silverio doesn’t like America, but he stays north. He is wary of its purported goodness in buying Baja, California, and in 1848, conquering Mexico north of the Rio Grande — but, as the American ambassador tells a staring Silverio, “We paid a good price for it, so what’s there to complain about?”

America is, like that stretched figure trying to fly in the desert, a shadow. The only gringo we see in the film is the American ambassador. People flock to the border. Silverio investigates a group of Mexicans herding there who claim to have received a divine vision to go north. Nonsense, he says; Mexicans are just bringing their superstitions and fantasies with them. He implies they won’t “become” Americans. They will remake America, as all emigrants (or invaders) remake their host countries.

Bardo’s conflict over Mexico and America recall A Shroud in the Family, Lionel G. Garcia’s colorful, funny view of another conflicted Mexican: an attorney who has succeeded in Texas, but who wants something spiritually fulfilling, and Mexico seems to fill that need. Garcia contrasts his attorney with a group of Texans, Americans who are both human and grotesque. They are at a party; all are wealthy, yet as broken as a box of old toys. They have multiple divorces, drug problems, drinking problems; they don’t have children; they have no conception of anything resembling home, country, or family. They do have families, at least two or more, but it’s all an affluent, stable void. Mexico a shroud? It is the gringos who are shrouded in nothing but material, temporal desires.

Mexico, it is reputed, has a grudge against America for taking their territory north of the Rio Grande. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes noted this early and often, especially in his novel The Old Gringo, where he describes the Rio Grande as a scar on the continent. But is it? Could Mexico, the chaotic, troubled, newly self-liberated nation, have developed and molded the north as America has done? Mexicans are sour at this loss, but it must be remembered that originally, Mexico included all of Central America, which seceded in 1823 as one republic which then later dissolved into the current jigsaw puzzle of isthmus republics. Rule over Texas and California was always unstable, and there was no great movement of Mexicans to what was then an empty, semi-arid land populated by Indians and a string of Spanish missions. Unlike Cortez or the fabled Aztecs, Mexicans weren’t pioneers striking out north. They only came when someone built a paradise for them to enter. There is, I always think, an amount of self-pity when Mexicans refer to these lost lands.

But the affection Mexicans have for this country can’t be understated, even if, as Silverio learns, the north is essentially a conduit and way back to the south, where his true heart is.

It is said that Mexico is more a state of mind than a nation. Many Mexicans have only a tentative link to their own country; it is a childlike love, like that Silverio feels for his father, a man who appears larger than life in Silverio’s memory but who in real life is inadequate.

Like Silverio, Carlos Fuentes was a man of divided loyalties. While a strong defender of Mexico and who admitted to watching a movie in his youth about the Alamo and cheering the Mexicans as they overran the fortified mission, he confessed that he had first thought of writing in English since he felt a strong identification to America. In the end, however, he decided he would have less competition if he switched to Spanish. Thus, being a true patriot was also a shrewd business decision for him. Silverio would smile and nod.

Fuentes became the voice of Mexico, as all novelists were in my youth, the go-to guy one went to for understanding the workings of a people — or at least try to — in Miltonic fashion to explain the ways of God to man, or at least to magazine readers or TV viewers. Fuentes was the official Mexican, the Czech writer Milan Kundera, the official Czech; Günter Grass, the voice of Germany — and America’s voice? Norman Mailer, of course.

America, however, is also in bardo; a kind of decayed, crumbling limbo. There is a fractured sense of what America is these days. People like Silverio come north to make a pretty penny, but they have no loyalty to it. It is “home,” yet he and his family return south to celebrate, cut loose, mourn Mateo, and ponder what they are about. America is a place to hang out, to have a job in Boston, but not somewhere to hang your soul.

Silverio returns to Los Angeles. In a particularly hilarious scene, as he is at customs, shows his passport, and says he’s glad to return home, the blank-faced customs officer says, “No, sir; this is not your home.” He is still on a visa, and is not considered a citizen. Silverio protests. The official stands his ground. This is not your home.

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You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here [5]

Silverio rages at this insult. Of course Los Angeles is his home. How dare this gringo —

But the official isn’t a gringo. He’s a Mexican-American. Silverio goes to the man’s supervisor to protest; a real American, he assumes — but she’s Asian, with a pronounced accent. Rage turns to silliness, especially in Silverio’s imagination, as American soldiers (those 1848 invaders of Mexico in Dutch-boy wigs) hustle Silverio back to Mexico.

So, in a sense, what is an American? Are there any left?

This sly humor recalls the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson, where Paul Mazursky depicts a Russian defector trying to make it in New York while everyone around him is a foreigner, alien, Jewish, or colored. In the film, the only real white men are two FBI agents.

Thus, for us as well as Silverio, home is a phantasm. Hollywood already reminds us that there is no more homeland, white man: just Them. They are now America, whoever the hell they are. It sure ain’t us. That’s all you see on TV, and isn’t TV the true, the only reality? The American dream that bests Calderón’s?

Is there really an America, or a Mexico, or are both merely constructs of a limbo, a passage into something else? After all, we see Silverio and his family, and I like them. They can grump and shrug at each other, but can also laugh, dance, and cry.

What about our American family? Our presidential “first family?” Like the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, Bidens — maybe even Trumps? They’re all degrees of mendacity, sleaze, and pretensions: shades of national amnesia. The prefect showcase of a phantom nation.

It again recalls Birdman, where Riggan’s inner voice, Birdman, scoffs as Riggan levitates in his decrepit dressing room, decrying New York: “How did we end up here? This place is horrible. It smells like balls.” If that doesn’t describe America today, what doesn’t?

Silverio’s concern about America and his inward outrage at being rejected by it is, for the most part, unfounded. As Harold Covington pointed out, since Reagan Mexicans have been honorary US citizens. In a sense, they control the immigration question far more than Americans ever do. Aside from government and corporate compliance in a lax border policy, there is always a danger that a strong minority in a nearby country will overtake the neighboring majority.

In Civil War II, Thomas Chittum studied tribal wars in Europe, recalling how nearby minorities could easily inflame neighboring states. His example was Russia and the breakaway Baltic states, as well as the war in Chechnya. Likewise, Mexico can send its surplus population across the border, where they will destabilize America, but not Mexico. Large neighboring minority populations will control the situation. As Chittum noted, “In a very real sense, America exists at the pleasure of Mexico just as surely as the Baltic countries exist at the pleasure of Russia.” Referring to the Irish struggles, Chittum added that “[i]t is instructive to note that America and Britain are the countries in danger of losing their territory, not Mexico or Ireland; the result of having large internal minorities and a land border with the country of origin of those minorities.”

Yet, the invasion of America is fairly benign, except to the unfortunates who live along the border. Despite fist-shaking cries about La Raza, the Mexicans are fairly pacific. As a Mexican friend of mine said with a smile, “We’re simply taking back the land that was always ours, and there is little you gringos can do about it.” Or, for that matter, is there much we gringos care to do about it? Being in a state of bardo, we have no compulsion to resist, defend, or plan, only to recall when things were not what they are now and wait for a Daddy in the White House, or that phantasmic great election where the absolute majority will at last sweep true conservatives into power and they will make the bad people stop.

Bardo offers the idea that, as seen in the life of one man, Mexico and America are seamless and cosmic. It recalls Fuentes’ The Life of Artemio Cruz, which is a Mexican version of Citizen Kane. Silverio wants to remain a child in the land he came from, but there is always the pull of that pulsing, flashy giant to the north. It, too, needs a film: Citizen Kane updated, and certainly in color. But I doubt an American could make it, because we are almost clinically blind when it comes to seeing ourselves. It’s noteworthy that Ride with the Devil, one of the best films about the American civil war, was made by Ang Lee. There’s also Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by British-Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh. We can almost be thankful that Norman Mailer, one of our “voices,” never made a film about us. It might have been more of a funhouse mirror than a true looking glass; certainly a mirror through a Jewish lens.

I was moved by Bardo and its visual delights of memory and timelessness. Watching it just after our red wave beached helped me to escape the sludge of America and its new motto — not e pluribus unum, but “How did we end up here? This place is horrible. It smells like balls.”

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