In a city governed under the politics of neoliberalism, the system of power orchestrated by the post-revolutionary state through melodrama sharply and violently contrasts with the
28 Roger Bartra in La jaula de la melancholia argues that lo mexicano corresponds to “una adaptación de cánones estrechamente ligados al desarrollo capitalista y a la consolidación de los Estados nacionales. Es decir, a lo que llamamos Occidente modern” [an adaptation of the canons tightly linked to capitalist development and to the consolidation of nation states. That is to say, to what we call the Modern West] (218-219). Bartra proposes a metaphor, the axolotl, through which it is possible to understand the metalanguage of mexicanidad that has defined the Mexican subject. The axolotl is a Mexican salamander that failed to undergo metamorphosis. Bartra recuperates this image and argues that the Mexican state has defined the Mexican subject as an axolotl, as a being that has a primitive—indigenous—soul and character and that has to be educated in order to be modern. However, because the country continues to de “underdeveloped,” there is an implicit blame assigned to mestizos.
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benefits that both systems originally purported would bring to urban poor, working-class, and lower-middle class Mexicans. Through Marcos’s corporal contradictions, especially related to his masculinity, the film shows how the current configuration of elite power justifies its coercive discipline of brown male bodies. What seems to be at stake in the battle that takes place over brown male bodies is the definition of humanity.
The genealogy of the violent campaign to discipline brown bodies and to claim the right to define the human can be traced to the European Renaissance, as illustrated in the sequence where Marcos stabs Ana to death. In the mise-en-scène when Marcos violently confronts Ana, she is positioned in front of a print of a well-known Renaissance painting, Girl with the Red Hat (1665-1666) by the Dutch artist Vermeer (fig. 2.15). Indeed, at several other points in the
sequence leading up to this moment Ana is often visually compared to this portrait. The
presentation of Ana as a continuation of the European ideal of modern womanhood speaks to her privileged upper-class position, as well as to the imposition of an ideology of power on the axis of race and class that has been at play since the Renaissance and that continues to function in the era of global capitalism.
Figure 2.15. Batalla en el cielo. Marcos Hernández and Anapola Mushkadiz. Film still.
Similarly, Marcos is also compared with a painting during this sequence. The visual comparisons of Ana and Marcos situate these bodies in a relationship of exploitation that has
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continued throughout the history of Mexico, where white upper-class subjects have used brown bodies to perpetuate their own privilege. In Mexico, this history of oppression can be traced to the conquest and colonization, which coincides with the cultural imaginary of the European Renaissance.
Marcos’s comparison with a painting takes place while he is waiting for Ana in Jaime’s apartment and stares up at a print of “A Horse Frightened by Lightning” (1813-14) by Théodore Géricault, which appears in an extreme close-up shot (fig. 2.16). The horse is obviously a male, and the painting places emphasis its fearful corporal reaction by highlighting its straining muscles and foaming mouth. The visual link between of Marcos and the horse serves to reconfirm the hegemonic disciplinary mode of perceiving the male protagonist as a powerful aggressive male with naturally strong and uncontrollable sexual desires and an excess of tension and stress. The horse’s natural response to an alarming situation (in this case, a thunderstorm) is one that needs to be tamed if the animal is going to provide useful service to a rider. For Marcos, however, it is the disciplinary situation itself that provokes the agitation and unease manifested in his loss of bladder control just before he stabs Ana. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the systems of power that dominate him, Marcos’s violent act shows instead that he is uncontrollable and violent precisely because he is a brown male lacking reason. By murdering Ana, Marcos is not killing his oppressor nor is he resisting the racist system that is still at work in contemporary society, but rather he performs a contradictory confirmation of his gender identity as constructed through the hegemonic post-revolutionary ideology of the Mexican state and its neoliberal polices.
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Figure 2.16. Batalla en el cielo. Film still.
In Battle in Heaven these systems of power profess to save the brown male from himself, from his natural condition of irrationality, and they do this by exercising dominion over his body.
One of the key elements of the process of domination involves embedding him within a
reductive ethical structure consisting of binary divisions between good and evil, sin and virtue, and guilt and innocence. These, of course, can be traced to the quotidian codes of melodrama that I have been describing throughout the chapter. Under this interpretative framework, the battle over the brown male body is not for his redemption, nor to alleviate his sense of guilt for having committed misdeeds, but rather simply to subjugate him and prompt him to become a full participant in his own self-regulation using the codes of gender conduct circulated through melodrama. Any feelings of guilt ascribed to Marcos are necessarily linked to the structure of power that surrounds him and determines both the socio-economic conditions of his existence and the possible responses he can make to these conditions. The sources of redemption available to him simply involve submission to the same systems of power that propelled him to act as a violent, irrational male in the first place, i.e. the Church and the state. Neither of these
institutions has any real interest in righting the wrongs that Marcos committed, nor do they have any concern for his spiritual or physical well-being. Rather, their primary intention is to induce
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him to recognize voluntarily his own wrongdoings and to submit himself to the police or the care of the Church; in other words, to transform him into a loyal servant.
The Church and the neoliberal Mexican state are engaged in battle with the brown male body and its purportedly uncontrollable nature. This struggle necessarily takes place “in Heaven”
because the ideologies and systems of control are always conceptualized as transcendent and eternal principles which exist above and beyond the sphere human influence rather than as the outcomes of a deliberate effort to maintain elite privilege. In waging this battle, one of the most effective weapons has been the gender category of masculinity. From early on in the post-revolutionary period, the operative technique has been to impose models of masculinity such as that of the Mexican male mestizo, or the white male agent of global capitalism, while
maintaining networks of power that impede brown male bodies from achieving these ideals. As a result of the brown male’s failure, he can be deemed inadequate for modernity. As the brown male body undergoes stress and tension, the danger of violence that would threaten the system of control is attenuated when individuals learn to internalize the source of their angst and seek out disciplinary measures at their own volition.
In Battle in Heaven, Marcos never appears cognizant of the battle that is being fought to keep him subjugated, that is, of the power structures that function to define his daily life and to determine the significance of his body. Rather than developing a utopian narrative of resistance, the film invites the audience to observe the behavioral constraints which remain imperceptible to Marcos even as he is enveloped by them. A key scene where Marcos climbs a hill in the
countryside illustrates the how film refuses to impute to Marcos a critical consciousness of his oppression while at the same time creating a standpoint from which to the spectator can develop an awareness of the battle over brown bodies. Marcos and his family take a trip into the
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countryside, where Marcos leaves the others behind and begins mechanically climbing a hill. As he sets outs, he is surrounded first by exhaust fumes of a tractor plowing a field and then by a thick fog, making it difficult for him to see, a difficulty compounded by the fact that earlier on he lost his glasses when Berta slapped him in the face. Upon reaching the top of the hill, a clear blue sky appears and Marcos stands on a peak next to a steel cross. The camera’s low angle enframes the transcendent view, tentatively suggesting that Marcos has reached a state of clarity (fig.
2.17). However, after the camera completes a lengthy pan over the Valley of Mexico, a close-up shot of Marcos shows that he has covered his eyes and face with both hands (fig. 2.18).
Figure 2.17. Batalla en el cielo. Marcos Hernández. Film still.
Figure 2.18. Batalla en el cielo. Marcos Hernández. Film still.
Apparently unable to cast his gaze out from this heavenly perspective, Marcos has reached a limit point, where the cross marks the boundary that delineates the ultimate definition
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of life beyond which Marcos does not, cannot, or dares not look. Yet the film’s spectators are given the opportunity to think critically about that to which Marcos remains blind, i.e. the
politics of neoliberalism, nationalism, the Church and their treatment of brown bodies, as well as the spectator’s own position and participation in these systems. In other words, the film provides a meta-perspective which reflects upon the lenses through which brown male bodies are read and upon the violence inherent to this reading.