Death

In middle school I used to think gangs were cool. Most of the kids in those gangs were Mexican. I never knew what they did exactly. They had cool names. CCG (Corpus Christi Gangsters), LE (Los Encinos), NSBS (Northside Bomb Squad), Sureños (13), Latin Kings, Piru. They wore Starter jackets with L.A. Raiders, L.A. Kings, or UNLV. Supposedly they fought each other. 

     I also knew some dudes who could defend themselves pretty good who would say gangs are stupid. I guess there’s always been an appeal to (along with an aversion to) prove your manliness through defending the honor of a larger group. From wars to wannabe gangbangers, it’s been a part of our nature. Apart from defending the colors of your nation’s flag or your set, there’s a separate honor that man can fight to uphold: the blood feud.

 

El río y la muerte (1954, Luis Buñuel) is a Western set in Mexico about the historic transition from savage to civilized. But it also deals with codes of masculinity forcefully conditioning a society of men awaiting the inevitable moment when it’s time for them to defend their honor with guns. El río y la muerte pathologizes the blood feud. It’s a tale of violence. Excessive violence. And it’s imagery is simple. A black canoe ferrying a coffin across the river (to the other side) is what this culture is based on. And tradition also dictates that the dead man in that coffin visit the home of his killer. So really what I mean to say is El río y la muerte is about death.

     The tone of the film is stark. Heavy. Foreboding with doom. And the narrative is told through flashback. The village of Santa Viviana is characterized by isolation, tradition, and ignorance. The framing of the plot is set in the present day and centers on the last two surviving descendants of a blood feud that’s over a hundred years old, between the ANGUIANOS and MENCHACAS. The present day stuff is weak. The bulk of the film is the flashback violent Western that follows FELIPE ANGUIANO. And Buñuel manages to pull it off.

     There are a few laughs though. Like okay there are a few scenes of a man backhand slapping another dude in the face. But in an early scene GERARDO ANGUIANO, this educated doctor, is in an iron lung in the hospital, and his blood feud nemesis RÓMULO MENCHACA pays him a visit and as they argue Rómulo backhand slaps Gerardo in the face; even though Gerardo is in an iron lung! Sorry if I think that’s hilarious. But another one that’s kinda silly is there’s a card game, in the flashback Western, and the pacifist CHINELAS fed up bemoans how the only two guys in the village who don’t own a gun are him and the PADRE, but the priest brandishes his pistol and is like what do you mean? No. Of course I have a gun.

 

Thematically El río y la muerte is totally a Buñuel film. If my main idea about Buñuel is how he depicts the way with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion; then next up I’d add something like as humans we all hate each other and there’s a brutality in us. Yet what Buñuel shows is that this brutality can range from emotional to homicidal. 

     As a Western, El río y la muerte has this unique quality going for it, in that instead of showing law and government as the civilizing agent (i.e. the Hollywood tradition), it places the onus on education. And okay typically I hate when movies have an overt message. And Gerardo has some speeches where he says stuff like the only way to end the cycle of violence is if the gates of education were open to everyone. Please. I don’t see Buñuel as the one who’d be striving to include these kinds of speeches. I’d imagine they were forced upon him. But anyway, I can accept it as showing the movie is trying to be slightly a little more than strictly a genre Western.

     And what matters most to me thematically is how the flashback Western ends. When the wise old TATA NEMESTO dies, Felipe and FILOGONIO actually squash their beef once and for all. They do it for him. And then some bratty little instigator just has to manipulate them through lies to reignite the hostilities. It's the youth that don't want to listen to the aged. That outweighs all the education slogans.