Some Notes on Racial Trauma in Peter Weir's Fearless
2000; Salisbury University; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoIf Italo Calvino's assertion is correct, that cities (or nations) are built from fears, what landscape might an absence of fear reveal? What borders might disappear, what walls come crashing down, what new identities be constituted? My reading of racial trauma in Peter Weir's Fearless has evolved from a series of questions: could Carla, the Rosie Perez character, have been played by an established wellknown white actor-say, Glenn Close, Julia Roberts, or William Hurt? How would their visible ethnic and sexual markers have changed the trajectory of this story, its ideological landscape? Why is it necessary that Jeff Bridges's counterpart in trauma, his partner in the voyage through this other city the crash elicits, be his sexual and racial other? What economy of desire do Rosie's ethnicity and gender inscribe? From what cultural and social fears does his trauma (as opposed to hers) release him? What becomes possible when the white male hero loses his fear? How does his journey metaphorically suggest another upon which a traumatized nation might embark? What kind of guilt evokes such trauma? And where, with whom, in this filmic economy, lies salvation? If we were to base our response to this last question on the film's ending, salvation would seem to lie with the white, European, bourgeois wife and mother who can bring Max Klein back to the sober reality of his yuppie kingdom. But films are not made of endings, alone. Indeed, this ending could almost be taken for granted, as Hollywood films go. What I interesting in this case is the racialized landscape that unfolds as part of the process Max Klein must undergo to home-that is, in the film's discourse, to find the mother, to be cured of his guilt and trauma, to choose life. He cannot get without Rosie; he needs her to restore the identity this metaphorical crash calls into crisis. As such, the space of trauma maps out an imagined community 1 at once full of possibilities and painful limitations. It is a space that suspends the historically specific power dynamics that have traumatized and haunt mainstream American culture; and it therefore presents itself as being beyond politics-a dangerous space in which to believe. I will focus here, then, on the we get there and on what an absence of fear (or, in translation: the assumption of guilt, of an overwhelming national guilt) makes possible before the film's all too comfortable closure. I will argue that at least on one level-that of the relationship between Max and Carla-the film functions as a national romance, and that as wounded ethnic other, Carla's healing (Max's ability to heal Carla) evokes an idealistic and finally quite racist resolution to larger, national, color-coded wounds. If the crash of Inter-city flight 202 echoes the ethnically marked violent crashing of inner cities throughout the U.S. in the eighties and nineties, Fearless suggests how we might save our privileged white selves while salvaging something from the wreck. It has been suggested that borders are more important to the foundation of nations, to their integrity, than originary founding fathers, an idea that reverberates throughout this film. The film slips and slides along the Mexican-American or Latino-American border, suggesting that the reconstitution of U.S. national integrity depends on our successful navigation of this border. The opening sequence maps out the terrain: white noise, sounds of helicopters, a cornfield not immediately identifiable as such. Smoke, a feeling of disorientation. Jeff Bridges as Max Klein thrashing his way through the green stalks, a baby in his arms, a child close behind. The scene recalls the green jungles of Central America. There is no history, no context that allows us to make sense of what we're viewing. The camera zooms back and we see a larger picture, people following Klein, dazed, as though they are emerging from darkness into the light. We realize they are winding their way through a cornfield, not a jungle. …
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