Stanley Brandes’ work outlines the ever expanding idea of a Mexican view of death. Mexicans “scorn death, they mock death, they are disdainful and irreverent in the face of death” (Brandes 128) but also that “the Mexican view of death appears highly contradictory” (130). He suggests that films, books, and music all point to one thing, Mexicans' infatuation with death. In his work, Brandes outlines these points of conflict and while many have decided that there is a Mexican view of death, “Mexicans are like everyone else in expressing an ambivalent response to death, a simultaneous fascination with and repugnance from it” (133). Still, Mexico’s so-called “culture of death” is the subject matter for various pieces of literature and media in both American and Mexican settings. The phenomenon of death seems to follow every Mexican, spanning from years of violence and the celebration of Día De Los Muertos, but what do films created by Mexican directors tell us about this “culture of death?” Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and Tigers Are Not Afraid or Vuelven (2019) give two different notions of the relationship between Mexicans and death—both contradicting the idea of a Mexican view of death and supporting it. The two films are able to mirror Brandes’ suggestion on the Mexican culture of death, explaining how it is impossible to create a “pan-Mexican uniformity at the expense of variations by class, ethnicity, age, religious affiliation, and place of residence” (128).
In Alfonso Cuarón's famous road film Y Tu Mamá También (2001), the presence of death is not at the forefront of our protagonist's story. The film follows the relationship between two friends and an older woman who all embark on a journey to a fictional “Boca del Cielo,” a beach the two boys make up. Luisa, the older woman, decides to join the two in the journey to Boca del Cielo after receiving news from a doctor and news from her husband, who has been cheating on her. The main plot follows the three protagonists’ companionship and sexual poralus within the context of Mexico’s violence, death, and destruction. Though the film centralizes on the various journeys of the two boys, Julio and Tenoch, and Luisa, in various instances, the story diverges via the narrator. Almost all of the divergences by the narrator are involved with death, each bringing to light information that otherwise would not be known visually.
In the first instance of this divergence, Julio and Tenoch are driving from the airport after sending off their girlfriends on their trip to Italy. The two joke around in the car bickering on what could possibly be the cause for the traffic. Julio suggests it could be from a leftwing demonstration to which Tenoch replies that left-wing chicks are hot. It is a minute detail that is seamlessly incorporated into their dialogue of profanity. Suddenly, the audio silences, the voice of the narrator breaking through that silence. He informs the audience that in fact three demonstrations had occurred around the city that day, but that the traffic was actually caused by a pedestrian that was hit and killed by a bus. The camera pans from Tenoch’s vehicle as they pass, a body barely covered by a white piece of fabric is surrounded by onlookers, and a pool of blood stark red against the otherwise dim background. The view of the body is fleeting, quickly blocked by a bright yellow Volkswagen and other cars behind Tenoch and Julio. The narrator goes on to explain that Marcelino, the man killed, always crosses the highway because using the pedestrian bridge added three miles to his journey to work and that it took four days for his body to be claimed at the morgue.
Here, the film is already contradicting the idea that all Mexians view death in a certain way between the two protagonists and the divergence by the narrator. Julio, and especially Tenoch, are members of the upper class. Tenoch’s father is a politician, and the family live in a large home, as we see later in the film. Their relationship to death is removed, having no direct connection with death at any moment in the film. In this moment the film conveys one of the many relationships to death Mexicans are perceived to have. Death here is “triumphant or scorned, venerated or feared, but always and at every moment, walking inevitably alongside us” (Brandes 129). While Julio and Tenoch do nothing more than drive by the incident, they inevitably are beside death wherever they go. Instead of acknowledging the event, Julio and Tenoch joke around about traffic, stinking up the car, and having sex. Throughout the film, the narrator brings up similar socio-political issues while we watch as Tenoch and Julio smoke drugs, have sex, drink alcohol, and so on. The two have a distant connection with death, but because of their environment, they are unknowingly moving alongside it.
The next narrator divergence occurs in Y Tu Mama when Tenoch is speaking to Alejandro, a writer and his cousin. Alejandro is giving Tenoch advice who hopes to become a writer himself when the narrator explains that Alejandro’s father died when he was three. Later, Luisa and Alejandro speak about the spilled wine on Alejandro’s white suite. The narrator once again interrupts their conversation, informing the audience that Luisa lost both of her parents in a car accident when she was ten, then losing her great aunt, who took care of her after her parents died. The mention of death casually in this way occurs frequently throughout the film, “conveying the impression that Mexicans develop a close relationship not necessarily to deceased relatives but, rather, to an abstract entity known as death” (Brandes 128). While these particular examples are of relatives, they exemplify the idea of Mexicans all being intertwined with death. The deceased relatives are not the highlighted issue of the narration, but instead, the presence of death within both characters' pasts suggests the importance of death within the story. None of the information given by the narrator is echoed by the characters themselves.
The narration, ultimately, allows for the audience to receive information about the past, the present, and the future going beyond the visual to explain how all of the information given is important to what we see on screen. This is what stylistically, allows for the audience to understand the omnipresence of death, both death from the past and death in the future. The most significant death occurs in the footnotes. Luisa dies due to terminal cancer only a month after the trio visit the Boca del Cielo. In the final scene, Tenoch and Julio meet again after a chance encounter and this is when Tenoch tells Julio of Luisa’s death. It is the first instance that death is intertwined with the two, having spent weeks with Luisa traveling to the Boca del Cielo. Still, neither of them cry or overtly morun. Instead, the two sit in awkward silence, deciding to part and promising they will see one another again. The final narration breaks through, telling us that this is in fact the last moment the two will ever see each other. Perhaps Tenoch and Julio are depicting here “the macho Mexican, a person allegedly unwilling to demonstrate fear and imbued with a hard, indifferent exterior in the face of danger” (Brandes 129) or it may be that the films has taught us is while death is a permanent concern, the omnipresence of death has allowed for a desensitization to death.
Tigers Are Not Afraid or Velven (2019) tells a different version of the complexity of violence and death in Mexico. While following a young girl, Estrella, the film tells a narrative of death that follows. During school, Estrella experiences a shootout with local cartel gangs. Amidst the violence, her teacher gives her chalk to signify three wishes. When she returns home, she finds her house empty with her mother absent. Estrella uses the chalk she was given by her teacher to make a wish–she wishes her mother would return. Unknowingly, Estrella brings back a different form of her mother, who was murdered by cartel leaders. Woken by the strange figure and frightened, Estrella leaves her home and joins a local gang of kids all orphaned by the cartels. The film, in contrast with Y Tu Mama Tambien, does not tell a story of Mexicans living alongside death, but of Mexicans being followed by it. The first scene in which this contradicting depiction is shown is on Estrella’s walk back home from school. She stumbles upon a scene of a murder, similar to the run over pedestrian in Y Tu Mama. The woman is hastily covered with a sheet, blood clear on the sidewalk and walls. Instead of a fleeting, distant image of a dead body as we see in Y Tu Mama, the camera pauses on the body as does Estrella. Estrella stares at the body for a minute, before turning to leave. However, from the pool of blood around the woman, a trail forms, following Estrella to her home. In explanation of this idea, Issa Lopez said that “that's not something you can do with violence—you can't turn your back and walk away. It will come after you until you look at it and you understand what's going on” (Fadel).
Later, Estrella sits in her living room, waiting for her mother to return. The trail enters the home, leaving a line of blood in its path until it gets to a hung up dress, perumsably Estrella’s mother’s dress, and soaks the article with blood. In each instance when the blood trail is present, a death is soon to follow, all connected through Estrella. Another instance of death follows, the children are in a large abandoned mansion, hiding from Chino and the other cartel members looking for them. Estrella is walking around the mansion, looking for Shine when she sees one of the men looking for them. She turns and runs down a hallway as the camera focuses on a blood trail following right behind her. Estrella is found by one of the men and he takes her to a large room where Shine is also taken. Murro, the youngest of the children, shoots and kills one of the men, only for the other to shoot Murro in return. The children escape once again, but Murro is fatally wounded and dies.
Towards the end of the film, Estrella and Shine switch the phones with Chino, trying to trick him into taking the phone without the evidence. As the two make their way out, Estrella stops, begging Shine to tell her the truth about the video they had seen on the phone earlier. Estrella realizes that Chino was the one who killed her mother in that same building, and she decides to use her wish to end Chino. The blood trail appears again, this time crawling up Shine’s leg and soaking his foot before he is shot and killed. A chase ensues as Estrella runs from Chino, the blood trail following Chino as he runs after her. Estrella hides in a vent tunnel, where she meets with Murro’s animated stuffed tiger who hands her a lighter. He leads her to a room where all of Chino’s victims are placed, rooting. Making her way into the room, Estrella uses the phone flashlight to see what looks like hundreds of bodies piled and wrapped in plastic. Estrella finds her deceased mother, who gives Estrella her bracelet. Chino opens the room and is locked in by Estrella. Shine appears, his face half hooded as the two stare at one another. They shake hands and Estrella hands Shine the lighter. We see the room’s door outline glow orange as Shine enters the room. The blood trail leads into the door, no longer following Estrella. The blood, like a snake, enters the room and disappears from the floor, the glow emanating from the door frame growing. This blood trail and the choice to have the victims all burn at the end bring to light indigenous ideals of death where “the dead do not leave, they live with us, and their home will be the place where they are burned” (Soria et al 272). The dead in this film live with Estrella, manifesting as the blood trail but also as physical ghosts.
Following the death of Murro, Estrella is abandoned after Shine figures out that Estrella was not the one who killed Caco, another cartel leader. Left alone with Murro’s body, Estrella gets up to leave when the camera pans, revealing the ghost of Murro and his now animated stuffed tiger. The camera pans again as Estrella looks back at Murro’s body, now sitting up but still covered by the blanket. All the bodies are covered in this way, almost dehumanizing them by removing their defining features. She begins to hear the voices of the Chino’s victims again. Estrella turns when she hears noises. At the end of the long tunnel are groups of people, all victims of Chino, standing in the shadows with only their silhouettes lit in green. One stands in front of the group, just a figure of black as they all tell Estrella to “bring him to us.” She quickly leaves the tunnel, only to find the group again in the street. In this lighting, the state of the bodies are more clear, covered in blood and tied in fabric, they are all around Estrella repeatively begging “bring him to us!” The victims follow her throughout the film, giving her advice but also coaxing her towards Chino in order for Estrella to learn the truth.
Later, Estrella is sitting in a park swing, unsure of what to do. The camera backs, revealing Murro sitting next to her on the swing set. He tells Estrella that the other boys are burying him and that he is cold. It is the first time that Murro speaks, silenced in his time alive by the horrors he witnessed. Estrella finds the group of boys as they push Murro’s body into a body of water, giving him a “proper” burial. The group move to leave and Estrella sees Murro one last time, standing over where his body was thrown into the water. The film then puts an emphasis on the burial aspect to death as well, or what comes after death. Lopez states that this choice of having ghosts “became sort of the leitmotif of the movie: How death will come with you, will walk with you, until you accept and embrace the situation you are in” (Fadel). At first, Estrella is frightened by the ghosts, constantly running from them, but eventually she embraces them, helping them aid her in defeating Chino. No one else in the film can see the ghosts, showing how “many, many times you don't realize that you're dragging a ghost behind you.” (Fadel).
In Tigers, though the children all experience loss of loved ones, many of them have no clue what actually happened to them, taking on the equally present phenomenon of disappearance. This is described by Soria-Escalante as “the term “ambiguous loss” to designate these situations of unclear loss, when the person can’t be verified as dead or alive” (280). Ambiguous loss is what drives the group of children together, all searching for answers but especially Estrella, who witnessed no violence in relation to her missing mother. Much of the film drives on this fact, as we see “confusion, inability to grieve, ambivalence, and defiance towards the idea of closure-since” and that “there can be no closure when a body is missing” (Soria et al 280). This differs from Y Tu Mama, where the relatives die from known causes and all deaths are explained. This shows a difference in the response to death, and while both films express the presence of death, knowingly or unknowingly, the difference in experience and mourning exemplify how it is impossible to generalize a cohesive Mexican view of death.
In large, Y Tu Mama Tambien paints a picture of the choice of ignorance. In another scene, the three teens are driving past armed soldiers who are raiding a citizen’s truck. The camera focuses on the soldiers and their menacing stares as the protagonists drive-by, urged by Julio to “not look.” The world around these characters is chaotic. Accidents, unnecessary deaths, and politically driven attacks are of the subjects brought up by the narrator, but the protagonists are not engaged in the chaos. The characters in both films do not engage with the chaos until the chaos engages with them. Julio and Tenoch do not experience any engagement, leaving them removed for the entirety of the film, however, Estrella is prompted to join the world of violence when her mother is taken. Later on their trip, when Tenoch and Julio go to “cheer Luisa up” with sex, they find her sobbing in her bed and they quickly retreat back into their room, but the camera lingers and we continue to watch as Luisa rocks back and forth, crying. Much like the narration of before, these scenes are not for the protagonists who do not see or experience those events. They are for the audience to understand the grand scope of the world in which these protagonists exist, becoming witnesses themselves and given the option to ignore or acknowledge. Similarly, this describes Estrella’s life before her mothers disappearance, choosing ignorance or the sense of familiarity with violence as we see when she witnesses the murder scene.
But most importantly, these stories are not just about death, they place emphasis on the ways that death is bound up with rebirth. In Y Tu Mama Tambien, though Luisa is dying of terminal cancer, she finds rebirth through sexual freedom. With or without the inclusions of these sociopolitical narration inputs, the film reads as coming of age. The deaths in these films are not always the actual death of characters, but also the deaths of past selves or of innocence. In the final scene of Tigers Are Not Afraid, Estrella opens gate doors to reveal an expansive field of luscious green grass, flowers, and mountains in the distance. In a way, she is given a second life here, finding relief in knowing what had happened to her mother and resolving the deaths of the other victims of Chino. The death that occurs in Y Tu Mama Tambien with Tenoch and Julio happens to them in the final scene as they are almost unrecognizable. The two are dressed in sweaters and jackets, hair slicked and styled. Both have transitioned to adulthood, leaving behind the ignorance and bliss of youth. They reveal that both will be attending universities soon, and ultimately, the death of their relationship bookends the film.
In the end, both films display contradicting ideas of what a Mexican culture of death should be. In Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuaron is able to intertwin a narrative of death paralleling that of the protagonists, stylistically utilizing the narration to highlight this underlying story of violence, death, and despair. On the contrary, Tigers Are Not Afraid stylistically expresses death that follows and death that leads, using a blood trail to signify how death drives the story in this film. While Issa Lopez states that “the entire thing about Latin America is magical thinking, and witchcraft, and ghosts, and leading with our death,” she also recognizes that “many of the themes that the movie touches upon, you can find them across the world” (Fadel). As Brandes notes, it is impossible to say that all Mexicans view and experience death in the same way and as we see through these two films, though they share similarities in how death is received and confronted, death is not an experience unique to Mexico.
Work Cited
Fadel, Leila. “In 'Tigers Are Not Afraid,' a Dark Fantasy amid Mexico's Drug War.” NPR, NPR,
25 Aug. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/08/25/753877130/in-tigers-are-not-afraid-a-dark-fantasy-amid-mexico-s-drug-war.
Brandes, Stanley. “Is There a Mexican View of Death?” Ethos, vol. 31, no. 1, [American
Anthropological Association, Wiley], 2003, pp. 127–44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3651867.
Soria-Escalante, Hada, and Juan Jaime De la Fuente-Herrera. “Culture of Death in Mexico:
Psychoanalytic Inquiry about Mourning Rites and the Symbolic Function of Society.” Culture & Psychology, vol. 27, no. 2, June 2021, pp. 270–285, doi:10.1177/1354067X20976505. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354067X20976505.
Tigers Are Not Afraid. Dir. Issa Lopez. Filmadora Nacional, 2017.
Y Tu Mamá También. Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Besame Mucho Pictures, 2001.
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