Machete

I had fun re-watching the infamous Grindhouse film 'Machete' the other day - here is a review I wrote from when it first came out:

Seagal's hilarious role as Columbian drug lord and B-Movie villain.

There is no dispute that the ‘Grindhouse’ genre, masterminded by Quentin Tarantino and David Rodriguez, has utterly failed commercially. ‘Machete’ - directed by Rodriguez along with Ethan Maniquis - is its newest exposition. Based on a faux trailer for a B-movie that generated internet buzz in 2007, the feature-length result deserves more than just a cult following.

It would be a feeble euphemism to describe this film as ‘over the top.’ It is all-out sex and head-chopping, or to simplify it as the original trailer did: “Machete – he gets the women and he kills the bad guy.’ Shot with grainy Grindhouse cinematography, the film is refreshing because it is completely aware of itself as part of Hollywood genre, which it deconstructs. In fact it mutilates it. The casting of 63 year old Danny Trejo in the lead role, Jessica Alba and B-movie action veteran Steven Seagal typifies the films autonomy as stylised pastiche.  

The film is not just meaningless hyperbole, it satires real contemporary issues. By using a graphic, comic book stylisation, it aligns the film with comic book's method of exaggeration of real social, political and moral discourses to highlight real issues. The distance from realism generated by employing a mock genre - the 1970s B-movie – reveals a powerful satire on American political ideology when we realise the politics of this exaggerated fantasy-space actually correspond alarmingly closely with real American political immigration policies.

The B-movie is a perfect example of a film that follows a set aesthetic scheme that the audience has encountered numerous times before and which he or she knows exactly how to react to.  By dislocating this dated genre in a contemporary film, Hollywood conventions are brilliantly laid bare revealing how an audience needs genre to feel comfortable in its understanding and expectations - to achieve a moral base in the film. An audience needs stereotype because it needs to recognise who to support and renounce, what is right and what is wrong.

The film's power comes from its mirroring of the composition of ideology in the film with politicians’ construction of social fantasy for political gain.  The way in which genre controls audience expectation and reaction parallels the effect of political propaganda which projects ways of thinking often through images of a cultural 'other' or stereotype. A jingoistic Yankee right-wing politics which portrays the Mexican as a border-crossing, sombrero wearing, moustached peasant, is hilariously ridiculed.