Fear and Loathing in San Juan
A few weeks ago, Johnny Depp gave a press conference during a junket for his new film Rango, during which he announced that he was no longer in the running to play Pancho Villa in Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s upcoming film about the Mexican revolutionary. “I feel like [he] should be played by a Mexican and not some mutt from Kentucky,” he was quoted as saying. The competition to play Villa (opposite the Lebanese Mexican Salma Hayek) is now said to be between a Mexican actor, Gael García Bernal, and a Puerto Rican, Benicio Del Toro, both of whom have starred previously as the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara.
The mutt reference being to various reports of his ethnicity–which includes Irish, German, French, and Cherokee–and not to his character in Rango, described in press materials as “an ordinary chamaelon.” By alluding to his mongrelization, Depp reveals why Latino roles have often been played by “American” actors in films ranging fromWest Side Story to Scarface.
In 1939, Yiddish theater actor Paul Muni played Benito Juárez and 13 years later, Marlon Brando once played Emiliano Zapata. Natalie Wood, of Russian extraction, persists in the memory of many deluded moviegoers as the symbol of virtuous, youthful Nuyorican womanhood. Critics have called this regressive casting phenomenon “brownface” (referring to the now-banished blackface) but sometimes it’s Mediterranean-face, olive-face, Asian-face, and even Afro-Latino-face, in the case of the 2000 Shaft remake, where African-American Jeffrey Wright plays Peoples Hernandez, a Dominican drug lord.
Still, if Depp is to be commended for stepping aside in favor of Gael or Benicio, I’m wondering how much influence, if at all, he had in rehabilitating the screenplay for Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary. It’s a novel that is quite frankly filled with so much invective toward Puerto Ricans that it seems to be a dry run for the Fear and Loathing he experienced in Las Vegas. (Those experiences, which became a classic narrative of both alternative journalism and countercultural drug use, were made into a movie in 1998 starring Depp as Thompson and Del Toro as Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, a Mexican-American civil rights lawyer who eventually sued Thompson over who invented the term “gonzo” journalism. The settlement of that suit included the publication of two books written by Acosta.)
To say that Thompson’s prose is condescending is giving him credit. From the start, he is tormented by a faceless brigade of Puerto Rican passengers on the plane to San Juan, who stand between him and his object of desire, a petite blonde traveling alone. When not referring to the moneyed class, which is seen as shifty and decadent, his favorite word for typical isleños is “the natives,” as in loud drunks and killers of small animals. In Old San Juan, demonstrators in front of the offices of his newspaper (modeled on the old San Juan Star) are a “dirty mob.” Puerto Ricans migrating to New York to make way for the Showcase of the Caribbean economy (the last spurt of Operation Bootstrap) are “naive and ignorant–they hadn’t read the travel brochures and the rum advertisements, they knew nothing of The Boom.”
In San Juan: Memoir of a City, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá offers an explanation for Thompson’s Fear and Loathing. The budding gonzo journalist and his crew of misfit “gringo” journalists acted “like colonists in their scorn of a place they had come to because they were second-class citizens in their own countries.” So the turmoil Thompson felt over not “fitting in” (which was brilliantly channeled later on in his stunning diatribes against the repression of the counterculture and the ascendency of Republican conservatism) was turned against an easy target, a subjugated, colonized people.
How will Depp, who plays Thompson’s alter ego Paul Kemp in the screen adaptation, handle this? In a conversation I had with Del Toro in 1998, while promoting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he assured me that he, Thompson and Depp were friends, that Thompson, who died in 2005, would call him and say things like “You’re one of those New Age actors with a Rio Piedras mentality.”
The Rum Diary, whose release date is still not set, was filmed in Puerto Rico with some benefit from tax incentives that predated the Fortuño administration, and have since been recently increased. According to the Puerto Rico Film Commission, films made in Puerto Rico in 2009 and 2010 generated $188 million economic activity, and tens of thousands of (temporary) jobs. Some edgy independent films have taken advantage of this–Soderbergh’s Che biopic; The Men Who State at Goats, a comedy about a CIA program for psychic intelligence starring George Clooney; Del Toro’s venture as a producer Maldeamores. And there’s been mind-numbing stuff like The Losers, Fast Five, and, ironically Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights. It’s nice to see new projects like Sonia Fritz’s America get a push but I’m not sure if this constitutes something resembling the birth of a Puerto Rican National Cinema.
It’s no surprise that Fortuño was beaming when Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, who are thinking of building a studio complex on the island, made a recent appearance promoting the new incentive. With less tax revenue, Puerto Rico’s government budget would shrink and large corporations would make most of the profit generated by the films. With the new law expanding the law to TV programs and documentaries, perhaps the best way to take advantage of this is to pitch a reality show or documentary about the thousands of government job layoffs and the UPR student strike’s attempt to shed light on passing on costs to students and the government’s privatization agenda. This way a filmmaker would get a tax break to make a film about why we shouldn’t be giving tax breaks to Hollywood production companies and other multinational conglomerates.
Any Miguel Moores in the house?