Y Tu Mamá También

Mythologies of Youth

Scott L. Baugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138079823
• eBook ISBN: 9781351627122
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Charting production, distribution, censorship, and reception, this book examines Y Tu Mamá También in its presentation as a journey of self-discoveries.

Three young adults enjoy a road trip together in search of a legendary beach. Behind their stories are mythologies of youth, a network of ideas in the film that reflects life outside the theaters. The deceptively complex film leaves the characters and its viewers with, instead of oversimplified and hollow answers, provocative questions and existential concerns. Made independently in Mexico, the film crosses over transnational issues, global markets, and mainstream and alternative aesthetics. It transforms road movie and youth film genres and shows a 'musical, magical' Mexico to the world. This book synthesizes several approaches in order to extensively examine Y Tu Mamá También. Covering the film's production history, its distribution and censorship, and larger industrial, political, and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the too-often overlooked aspects of youthful sexuality alongside figurations of maturity, rites of passage, and covenants—made, broken, and remade—that not only inform representations of identity but also complicate the processes of identity formation themselves.

1
Aspirations

Immediately following signature silent white-letter-on-black opening credits, Y Tu Mamá También (Cuarón 2001) begins with viewers peering from a hallway vantage through a teenager’s bedroom doorway to find her and her boyfriend in a tangle of naked limbs [see Figure 1.1 ]. Intrigued, do we transport ourselves from the moment and transiently envision our own early sexual educations? Are we vicarious parental figures furtively surveilling or peers peeping in on this young consensual lovemaking? Presented so early in the film, the first-time viewer no doubt will be alerted to empathic, expressivistic, and exploitative possibilities of the sexual representations. Some viewers might pause in dismay or avert their attention, but many will be compelled to discover more. The opening shot triggers a range of questions and experiential responses quite effectively.

Even as the sensual spectacle demands attention, this imagery as a story introduction is like the proverbial groping in the dark. At fade in, precisely half of the frame from right is filled by the darkened wall outside the bedroom. Copulatory bodies appear fragmented in abstract motion. The sexual discourse performs sleight of hand. If half of the scene seems revealed, more than half is hidden. This threshold moment formally (as opening establishing shot in long take) and thematically (as hallway and door passageway) proves as prophetic as it is disarming.

The R-rated version of this film entirely foregoes the initial 24 seconds of this 122-second long take, which is telling in its own way. ¹ For viewers of the original not-rated version particularly though, this opening shot offers paradoxical suggestions of inclusion and exclusion, of invitation and boundary crossing, of intimacy and distance, of enticement and observation, of advocacy and scrutiny, of fantasy and graphic reality—in between objectivity and subjectivity—all as a constellation of unanswered questions and only partial or sometimes contradictory revelations. As the uncensored shot plays on, longer than feature-film opening shots normally do, before resequencing conventional continuity patterns, viewers may find themselves even more in an interrogative, contemplative, searching frame of mind. Indeed, only partial answers cohabit with one another throughout this film.

Figure 1.1 Mysteries Around the Corner

If the core impulse of Tu Mamá is asking questions, particularly the kind of questions that inform forging identity like those most of us ask during the inherently transitional adolescent passage into adulthood or in anticipation of equally significant, complicated, uncertain life changes, then the corresponding core concept of the film enacts a rebuttal against singular, unequivocal, facile determinations. One thing for sure, Tu Mamá is deceptively complex.

This exchange of questions and answers appears most clearly and directly in the film’s characters, their in-formation maturity and sexual identities, their existential growth and frustrations, and their desire for liberation from fundamentalism; on the way, it also helps justify competing notions of (trans)national political principles, economic philosophies, and several global-cultural issues that surround the characters, their stories, and the film as a whole. Much of this can be situated for viewers in a mix from playful innocence, immaturity, and naiveté to hard-fought, ruminative lessons, first on the individual level but then also collectively as a generation turning to the 21st century. It formulates but never fully resolves a millennial worldview.

Where clearer answers might have offered some stabler (if reductive or even hollow) senses of being, acts of questioning correlate with acts of becoming and progressive, transformative possibilities. Processes of identification systematically override any singular identity or issue as product. Universal, existential associations lift up to metaphysical and ecstatic-spiritual revelations at key moments in the film viewing as profoundly as art experiences can. These are admittedly high stakes for global-commercial entertainment. Youthful sexuality with its painstaking measures of intimacy and vulnerability provides something like a Rosetta Stone, perhaps something between prism and oracle, seemingly miraculous, for the development of these discoveries.

Y Tu Mamá También presents a mythological journey of self-discoveries. It depicts three young adults taking a road trip together. Two typically immature late teens, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), eager for sex, drugs, and rambunctious adventure, fatefully find themselves traveling with an attractive, disillusioned late-20-something woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú). Tenoch and Julio have finished high school, see a prescribed adulthood looming before them, but linger in the liminal threshold of the seeming simplicity of their adolescence. Luisa learns both of the continued infidelity and sexual indiscretions of her husband, Tenoch’s older cousin, and also of a chronic condition that not only explains her infertility but, even more horrifically, will soon take her young life. All three contemplate in-formation and in-crisis identities.

As much as the vibrancy of youthful life does, death travels with the characters. Death correlates with existence, the dread of the former making the latter that much more vital. There are materialist matters involved in the existentialist questions, but, rather than remain static, existence is perpetually dynamic. The film’s director, Alfonso Cuarón, deliberates on this point:

You can’t really enjoy life until you have an awareness of death. We tend to have an awareness of death only when something critical happens like the passing on of a loved one. We should have an awareness of death every day…. Finding your identity is a life-long, ongoing process, and the more you are aware of death, the more your identity evolves.

(quoted in Lawrenson 2002: 19)

The film does not easily translate the life-death concepts around a simple oppositionality. Nor does it synthesize them into practical social contracts and direct moral lessons. Instead, the film provides enough clues to Luisa’s illness that viewers, immersed in the film’s questions and mythic explorations, interpretively infer that something is dreadfully wrong but not necessarily the grave extent until disclosure at the story’s conclusion. In adolescent cluelessness and solipsism at an extreme, neither Julio nor Tenoch initially detects, nor cares enough to investigate, that anything is significantly wrong. If things seem half-hidden at start, their journey progressively reveals parts of the story that not only are frequently ignored but prove most difficult to confront. Each character must find some compromise but not full resolve by film’s end, and so might we as viewers.

The three travel by station wagon (nicknamed Betsabé, Spanish-inflected Bathsheba) in search of a legendary beach cove known as Boca del Cielo, ‘Heaven’s Mouth,’ intonating simultaneously bawdy and supernal suggestions. The tone of this film veers in and out of sophomoric silliness as much as its teen-driven wagon meanders through country lanes and dirt-road byways, all of which disguise several of its probing messages. As our characters face cruxes, the film reveals comparable changes for the end-of-century Mexican nation and the world. Tu Mamá frames this Mexican cinema passageway and crosses the threshold into an age of globalization—in art, culture, and commerce. Interrogations of Alfonso Cuarón’s auteur branding, collaborations with his brother Carlos Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki, and Tu Mamá ’s aesthetic give shape to this passage.

The filmmakers aim in Tu Mamá to devote equal weight to characters and to the contexts and environments that surround them and us, according to Alfonso Cuarón, ‘one to inform the other or clash with the other’ (quoted in Galloway 2014). Through readings of this film, viewers will come to appreciate that clashes are no simple thing. Frequently presented thematically as disputed facts, half-truths, and outright lies, contradictions, unrealized promises, or even paradoxical positions, a strange dialectics leaves viewers less fully informed and more puzzled, arguably, than genre-heavy mainstream commercial cinema does by rule. Rather than merely representing current issues, Tu Mamá exposes several of the social structures and institutional models behind these issues and displaces their values. It equally exposes its own narration and artistic convention and, in a poststructuralist method, re-sequences them in an address to its viewers.

If global-commercial cinema by the end of the 20th century theoretically conflates activities of expression and reception-perception according to prescriptive codes (representational, narratological, generic, etc.), then reimagining the discursive relationships among filmmaker, spectator, and film, as Vivian Sobchack contends, returns the ‘film experience’ to an ‘originary activity of cinematic signification’ (1992: 9–17). Before differentiating structural codes restrain heuristics, a film and its viewer both contain and make sense: an ‘address’ between them operates according to phenomenological modes of sensuous ‘becoming’ that yield ‘wild’ meanings, ‘primor-dial’ considerations of in-formation existence (ibid: 17, 11). Upon ‘radical reflection,’ retrospection that (re)constitutes experiences, Sobchack argues, ‘embodied’ realities appear mediated but also radically materialized; imaginary but also historically and cultural contextualized; synthesized through regulatory structures but then also thoroughly ‘undone’ (2004: 1–4, 1992: 6–9, 89–93). The ‘proof’ is not when a viewer actually lives any single experience but when an ‘experience’s structure [is] sufficiently comprehensible’ that a viewer ‘might “possibly” inhabit it (even in a differently inflected or valued way)’ (Sobchack 1992: 5).

Tu Mamá advances a film experience that partially satisfies the tendency toward classical paradigm readings and cultural codes but then also highlights opportunities to redress them. It teases viewers with provocative, sensuous themes that prompt radical reflections on structured experiences—some stereotypical, some ceremonialized—to expose and destabilize the structures (artistic and social) and the values concording them. Disarmingly, Tu Mamá denies any individualistic-heroic stance, dramatizing adolescent immaturity and identity crises but emphatically overcoming them through assemblages of intra-, inter-, and extra-subjective perspectives and characters-in-place experiences, multiply contradictory identifications simultaneously. Backgrounds resituate foregrounds, actions repeat, and storylines and aural-visual details counterpoise against one another.

The experience certainly replicates those around the approach to adulthood—cycling through adolescent indecision and uncertainty, venturing toward the unexpected to see what comes from it, hoping but frequently failing to be entirely original. Tu Mamá advances a youthful address that does not as much precisely depict adolescence as it interrogates processes of becoming that are inherently exploratory and transformative, that remain ever-potentially revolutionary but insoluble, and so can be overwhelming and debilitating. The stylistic exigencies of Tu Mamá bring attention to exemplary stories of adolescence that mimic early-21st-century experiences, especially for a transnational-globalized Mexico, but also elevate beyond allegory.

Tu Mamá presents stories as mythologies of youth. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (2012) collects not classic ‘mythologies’ one might expect but rather everyday dramas. Notoriously, professional wrestling, celebrity weddings, royal odysseys, generational advertisements, astrology ethics, striptease art, movie iconography—all serve textual analyses for patterns around ‘high’ and ‘low’ expressions; spectacle; conventionality; and ceremony, ritual, and tropes. Not any one mythology tells the whole story: significance lies in the networks they trace. Mythologies play a ‘constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form,’ like a recognizable symbol that is ‘indisputable’ but also ‘has too much presence’ (ibid.: 227–8). The contextual presence is:

tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent; it recedes a little, it becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed… once made use of, it becomes artificial.

(ibid.)

Myth in this sense ‘hides nothing’ yet ‘flaunts nothing’: it compromises a ‘third way’ between the two that generates ‘distortion’ and ‘deformation’ toward reinvented meanings; its form paradoxically calls out then dismisses in ‘rapid alternations’ of associative meanings (ibid.: 240, 232, 227). Considering a poststructuralist cinematic aesthetic sheds light on the full potency of films, described somewhat oxymoronically by Philip Watts as a ‘Barthes cinema,’ that utilize techniques as part of a ‘“syncopation of meaning” capable of emancipating viewers’ from ‘alienating rhythms of attention’ (2016: xviii). A third way reconceives the rhythms, which may further open up arrhythmic options.

Mythologies proves that audiences make their free-will choices informed by the codes: personal stories depict themes and correlate with allegory and history for collective messages; sometimes personal stories involve growth and existential crises; structures that represent these and offer identification with them also can contain and perpetuate scripts; values seem naturalized and appear largely associational but normalized. Radical reflections upon the meaning-building artificiality expose codification and allow decolonizing processes.

It is interesting, first, that this argument delivers for its death-of-the-author author Barthes what many consider to be a crucial transition in his career between structuralism and poststructuralism (Belsey 2002: 38–43). And as a result of his work among a handful of the most influential theories, scholarship crosses a threshold in approaches to modern textual studies, cultural theory, and related fields. It is more than merely interesting that Carlos Monsiváis’s retrospection on Mexican cinema discusses rigidly conceived ‘mythologies’ that emphasize the role of melodramatic visions of the world as ‘the filmic equivalent of maturity’ and that national cinema’s ‘profound reason for being’ (1995: 117, 127). His 11-item manifesto-like list of ‘mythologies’ overviews ways that canonical Mexican films themselves and the industry as a whole provided national endorsements on ‘entertainment, family, unity, honour, “permissible” sexuality, the beauty of the landscape and customs, and respect for institutions’ (ibid.: 117).

Taken as a whole, Monsiváis’s set of ‘mythologies’ explains the preference for configuring these national themes and issues ‘within Hollywood-derived cinematic structures’ (ibid.). Exactly this conversation over ‘mythologies’ and their structures coincides with transitions in the careers of Tu Mamá ’s film-makers and for international and independent art-narrative cinemas crossing over national markets toward global-commercial mainstreams at 21st-century turns. Tu Mamá ’s aesthetics enact generative responses to structural patterns in cinema and culture, especially through configurations of adolescence.

Mythological youth correlates teen years with the necessarily transitional developments toward adulthood. Independence and self-centeredness weigh against cooperation, intimate relationships, and social responsibilities. We humans explore and create, we invent, and we try to understand and explain ourselves—our very existential being and our aspirations of becoming different through the processes of growth. Sexuality plays a keen role in envisioning ourselves as adult-forward, not childlike, but something in between and incomplete. Ceremonies and rituals script some moments. We push against boundaries and find our positions among conformity and nonconformity. With autonomy in sight, we range emotions through ecstatic revelations to depressing gridlocks. Moments stutter. Life repeats itself awkwardly. We loop around and find ourselves back where we started sometimes (or feel that way). Yet we find ways forward. As much as we defy type-casting or oversimplifying the complexity, the best stories do too.

Tu Mamá convey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• 1 Aspirations
• 2 Creativity
• 3 Originality
• 4 ‘The Charolastra Manifesto’
• 5 Maturity
• 6 Sex
• 7 Development
• 8 Sex (It Bears Repeating)
• 9 ‘Mí Manifiesto’
• 10 Ecstasy
• 11 Pranganeando
• Bibliography
• Index