Noir Affect by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

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Llámenme Mike (Call Me Mike, Alfredo Gurrola, 1979), a unique and not widely known film, tells the story of Miguel, a corrupt Mexico City police officer from the drug division. After he participates in the theft of a cocaine shipment following his commander’s orders, he is chosen to be the scapegoat and promised to be released from prison in six months. In prison, he is beaten up by the criminals he arrested and, as a result of a surgery performed to heal him, Miguel comes to believe that he is Mike Hammer, a detective from a series of novels by Mickey Spillane. Immersed in the character’s persona, Miguel begins to imagine that he is fighting a communist conspiracy, which leads him to gradually and unwittingly take down the network of corruption in the police department, without ever realizing the truth. This Quixotic story shot in Mexico City’s nocturnal underground was produced with minimal resources, but it is a sharp parody of the hard-boiled US stories globalized by the rise of the television serial, drawing elements from the 1958 adaptation of Spillane’s novels, as well as the picaresque detective Columbo from the long-running TV series (which debuted in 1971), and even Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In its brazen parody, the film has significant critical power. It references Arturo “El Negro” Durazo, the corrupt and larger-than-life chief of the Mexico City police who would be arrested in 1984 for corruption and his complicity in the cocaine trade. As a result, the film was censored for three years and could not be released until Durazo left the post. Gurrola spearheaded a revival of the noir in cinema: his following film was the first adaptation of Taibo’s first Belascoarán novel, Días de combate (Combat Days, 1979).52

Llámenme Mike is an example of the role that noir forms have in the mediation of capitalist modernities, even when cultural products seem to mimic hegemonic forms of transnational cultures. It is produced at a point of crisis in Mexican cinema, when state funding was diverted to commercial productions, censorship was low profile but real, and the mass audiences of the golden age had withered. Its comedy responds to the emerging takeover of global television by the United States, by enacting the absurdity of US genres when read against the backdrop of a Latin American reality. It is a critique of the noir mediascape’s imperial materiality, while appropriating critically its symbolic weapons. The film also enacts Mexico’s sociological noir: in the middle of the short-lived oil boom that would collapse in the 1982 crisis, in a country ruled by a president who did not even face the weak candidates the opposition could usually level against the ruling, it became the one film that spoke of the corruption of the state, that narrated a horizon of justice and that, almost prophetically, would render visible the longstanding relationship between the police and the drug trade that would plague Mexico for decades thereafter. It

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