Hollywood deaths: an American dream

Mexico City —  A few years ago, as I was watching the premiere of “Amores Perros,” I thought that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu truly had penetrated the depths of the “dogged life” in this anthropological experiment that is Mexico City. That is why he was able to convey the mysterious duality (the mixture of violence and coexistence) that characterizes the city.

The characters’ tragedy is universal, with fate playing a key role connecting -- through a horrific car accident -- three stories of love, loss, regret and life’s unforgiving realities. But the tone is Mexican. The final scene in which the two assassins, “El Chivo” and his dog, wander off into the horizon on volcanic ground, is quintessentially so, almost even in a geological sense.

After the film’s broad success, Gonzalez Inarritu once again decided to enter the belly of the beast and approach, with the same bluntness, the theme of death. Though not death in the way that it is usually dealt with in Hollywood (as the outcome of the story, with its background music, its sentimental tonalities and its predictable moral lesson), but rather death as a beginning and root of the story.

“21 Grams” is a complex and rich response to ancient existential questions. How much does guilt weigh upon the person who, without intending it, brings about the death of innocent people? (Benicio Del Toro, whose character drives into three pedestrians.) How heavily does pain affect the person who loses the people most dear to her? (Naomi Watts, whose character’s family is killed.) How burdensome is fear for the person facing death? (Sean Penn, whose heart is failing.) That is, how heavy is the reality of death?

Mexican audiences received the movie with great enthusiasm. It is only natural. Indigenous Mexican culture and Hispanic culture both face death with a stoic familiarity that in some ways still colors contemporary Mexican life. In Europe, “21 Grams” has had an excellent reception from the public. In Italy it is a box-office success. “Surprising, as brutal as a punch” declared Liberation in Paris. In England, “21 Grams” received five nominations for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards.

In the United States, though, the critics and the public have been less unanimous in their praises, and the film itself did not receive any Oscar nominations, though two of its actors -- Watts and Del Toro -- were nominated for their performances.

U.S. critics recognized the great talent of Gonzalez Inarritu as a director of actors, the almost physical aggressiveness of his images and the formidable performances he elicited from his three lead actors. But some have suggested that the film’s sliced-up structure confuses viewers and prevents them from identifying personally with the characters. Perhaps they are right, but I suspect that their estrangement with respect to “21 Grams” reveals less about the limitations of the film and more of their own attitude, and the attitude of American culture in general, toward death.

The French historian Philippe Aries has noted that Americans began pushing away the reality of death around the beginning of the 20th century. Americans, he wrote, had distanced death from their daily horizon, relegating it to an accidental condition. Death became something that happens to certain people far from home, in the neutral and remote spaces of the hospital. With respect to this, the theologian Jacques Maritain pointed out: “You reach the point of thinking in a sort of dream that the act of dying amid happy smiles, amid white garments like angels’ wings, would be a veritable pleasure, a moment of no consequence. Relax, take it easy, it’s nothing.”

Hollywood trivializes death with implausible shootouts and abstract rivers of blood. It sweetens it, it softens and embalms it, as in the scene from “Mystic River” in which Sean Penn sees his daughter’s ivory corpse, approaches it, and significantly, pulls away without kissing it. Curiously, in “Mystic River,” which according to American standards is supposed to be brutal, the dead girl is so “clean,” so “germ-free” (aseptico, we say in Spanish) that it actually neutralizes the pain.

In show business, you can do anything with death except look at it head-on.

With “21 Grams,” Gonzalez Inarritu proposed to make a film that lifts the ban on death. He wanted to look at it head-on. The movie, it is true, demands that viewers go to the limits of their own resistance: It oppresses them without giving in, it keeps them twitching without giving them a flash of hope, until, finally, love redeems them and “las mazorcas reverdecen” -- that is, hope springs eternal (as the film’s closing dedication, written by Gonzalez Inarritu’s wife, explains in relation to the young son that the couple lost several years ago).

This confrontation becomes intolerable for those who come to the movies only to entertain themselves, not to involve themselves. “You have to have very good reasons to kill two children in the outset of a film,” states a critic on the website Slate. But as the ancient Greeks knew very well, death by accident does not attend to reason, nor does it always necessarily send a warning or ask for permission.

The weight of the emptiness that death leaves is the specific theme of the movie, to which one can recall the words of Octavio Paz writing about Luis Bunuel’s “The Forgotten,” a film that depicts the all-too-familiar fate of a single mother in the slums of Mexico City, whose only child, the sweet Pedro, gets involved in the life of a criminal gang that will eventually result in a double tragedy. The mother is seduced by “el Jaibo,” the ruthless leader of the gang, who later kills Pedro when he tries to free himself by revealing Jaibo’s crimes.

Paz writes: “The weight of reality that it shows us is of such an atrocious character that it winds up seeming impossible to us, unbearable. And that is the way it is: reality is unbearable; and for that very reason, because it cannot be borne, man kills and dies, loves and creates.”

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has doggedly refused to make concessions to a hedonistic culture that generally avoids the unbearable confrontation with death. But this brutal exhibit of extreme suffering (which is the theme of the Book of Job) contains a message of great moral value, a lesson in humility and wisdom for a society that, in some sectors of itsculture, has forgotten the tragic dimension of man.

Enrique Krauze publishes Letras Libres, a literary magazine in Mexico and Spain. He wrote “Mexico, Biography of Power,” published in English in 1997.