Retablo — Justice and Judith Butler

Part I — This Feels Like Cheating

I feel like I should open this essay with a note on my methodology. My goal in this is not to pick movies that are ripe for queer analysis and apply that frame to them, but to do it with just whatever movie I come across. I like to play this game on nightmare mode, which is why I choose these movies relatively blindly. I did no research into them at all, aside from a trailer viewing. Which is how I came across Retablo. The trailer looked good, and I didn’t have very much in the way of Latin American film in my watch list, so I decided to watch it.

So… remember how I said I didn’t want to necessarily do analyses of queer movies? Whoops… Turns out, if I had done the barest bit of research, y’know, like looking at the metadata tags on Netflix, I would have seen that this is an LGBTQ film.

But first things first, Retablo is a beautiful movie. It’s full of sad, senseless, cruel, common (in both the Atticus Finch way and the fact that it’s not a strange set of occurrences), violent, painful acts; but its totality is a beautiful song of exquisite pain and transcendent endurance. It is the song of queerness.

Part II — A Litany of Bummers in the Form of a Plot Synopsis

Noe is a master artisan, married to a disabled woman, teaching his son and apprentice Segundo his craft. He makes and delivers a retablo, a religious panorama/figurine cabinet, for which he is celebrated. He gives Segundo lessons on how to make retablos. He visits a church, who is another customer, and while in town, we meet Felicita, whom the camera takes extra special care to fuck for you, in case you were wondering how you’re meant to feel about her.

Segundo’s friend, Mardonio is a foul-mouthed embodiment of the phrase “toxic masculinity,” whose ambitions don’t appear to extend much beyond drinking, fucking, and making money. He’s also the son of a village elder. This will become important later. He pitches Segundo a plan to leave the mountains and work the fields as a migrant worker, promising they can make a lot more money. Segundo is his father’s apprentice, though, and leaving would mean breaking that relationship and also failing to take on the master artisanship from his father. He leaves the question ambivalent.

While riding into town in the back of a truck he and his father hitched on, Segundo is awakened by a bump in the road and sees his father giving the driver a handjob. Over the course of the next couple of days, this shocks Segundo into an ever more uncomfortable silence. Segundo starts a fight with his father when the tension finally breaks, and he goes off to get drunk with Mardonio. They talk about going down to the fields and fucking and fucking Felicita specifically.

Presumably under the weight of his doubts about his own masculinity (see the bit about the community changing in Part III for more on this), he breaks into Felicita’s house to assault her in her sleep. He cries and is unable to do it. His moping continues until Noe comes home one day beaten all to hell. Noe’s wife goes to sort this out with the village elders and comes back enraged at Noe’s betrayal of her. Segundo goes to get help from Mardonio, who runs away from him like a coward. His father comes out and chases him off, making it clear he’s not welcome in the village anymore. Segundo’s maternal grandmother comes to visit and while she’s a little more sanguine about the situation, she’s no less horrible.

She and Segundo’s mother beg him to come with them (to the village she came from), but he refuses to abandon his father. He nurses Noe back to health and continues his father’s work. While delivering a retablo, Segundo is beaten by a crowd of local boys for being gay, which to be clear was his dad’s thing, and Noe slips into a deep depression.

While Segundo is out one day, Noe tips himself into the well and dies. Segundo builds the casket, buries his father, and closes the bright blue door of the shop they worked in, having gathered up all the tools of the trade. Roll credits.

Part III — The Butlerian Jihad, and Mourning What (and Who) Was Lost

The question at the core of this film is, simply put, is this: Is queer life worth living and is queer death worth mourning? In the climax of the film, the villagers, almost every single one, metaphorically shout “NO!” as they’re beating Noe senseless (mercifully, off-screen). And Noe seems to acquiesce to the opinions of the crowd by trying to send Segundo away. His physical pain echoing his emotional and spiritual pain, he decides his own queer life is not worth living and his death is not worth mourning. In the denouement, when Noe commits suicide, no one comes to mourn him. Everyone has left him. Everyone.

Except Segundo. Segundo makes his father’s coffin, buries him, and mourns him alone.

But isn’t a dead man always worth mourning? Judith Butler tackles this question in Violence, Mourning, and Politics (from which I will quote extensively and summarize and synthesize the arguments, but cite only the first time), in which she says “The question that preoccupies me… is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (Butler, 2004)

Perhaps naively, or perhaps just optimistically, she posits that there could be such a thing as a global “we,” by virtue of our social nature and our individual vulnerabilities to each other, and the inevitability of grieving some loss at some point in our lives.

The death of a person, says Butler, forces the community into a kind of mourning, which can cause them to lose a part of themselves. Moreover, Butler proposes that human beings define ourselves by our relationships to each other (see also: Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic). Far from being ships passing in the night, if I define my concept of “I” as inextricable from my concept of “you,” and my concept of “you” changes when you die and are no longer around, then in a way, everyone who defines themselves in relation to you, in a weird social way, dies a little bit.

Butler is talking about death in her essay, in which she says “If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do… At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.”

But what of queerness? Butler relates her view that mourning death is the mourning of changes in the relationships and connections we have with a person. When they change significantly, the effects can be much the same. My coming out to my family as queer caused them to mourn the death of the presumed straight person they thought they knew. I, as a queer person, can never fill the void left in my parents’ lives by the death of my straightness, and they’ve expressed as much both verbally, and by wanting nothing to do with me. Moreover, due to their closeness with me, their relationality to me, they become a little bit queer themselves. To say that they resent this is… the understatement.

Similarly, the villagers who beat Noe and cut off all ties to him and his family, forcing his family to flee (not that his wife or her mother had anything particularly loving, sensitive, or nice to say about him after they found out he was queer), were experiencing disgust with themselves and their newfound relational queerness as much as with Noe, which they felt the need to cleanse with violence. “If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the ‘we’ is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation.”

Seriously. Go read this essay, it’s amazing. Easiest 25 pages by a philosopher and spiritual student of Derrida and Boudrillard I’ve ever read. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” Beautiful…

To be clear, this does not justify the anger people feel toward the queer people, but it does explain it in part. For an explanation as to why that distinction needed to be made, see the essay previous to Violence, Mourning, and Politics in Precarious Life, which is also a fascinating work called Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear. It details the difficulty we have in distinguishing analysis from apologia. I think the argument can be summed up quite nicely by pointing out, apropos of nothing I’m sure, that Butler’s distinct contribution to queer theory is called “Performativity Theory,” and then really dig deep on why you felt that was an attack.

There is one other aspect of this movie I want to discuss before I mercifully release you and let you get back to your life. The dreaded T-M. You know it, you hate talking about it, you probably think it means man=bad, Toooooooooooooxic Masculinityyyyyyyy! Ooooooooh boy is there some toxic masculinity just front and center in this movie. Noe is just about the only positive male influence in Segundo’s life. His best friend and son of the village elder is the obnoxious Mardonio, who can’t stop humping things and talking about humping things. Boys will be boys, right? He reduces the belle of the village, Felicita, to her sex appeal, and dreams of little else than fucking and making money, and encourages Segundo to do the same. He’s a terrible friend to Segundo, he likes talking shit with him, but when shit gets real, i.e. when the villagers beat Noe severely for the crime of being gay, and Segundo comes to him for help, Mardonio runs away. His father has to chase Segundo off because for all his bluff talk, Mardonio is a consummate coward. The boys of the village are no better. When Segundo tries to carry on after the attack on his father, the boys beat him up for his father’s “crime.” To prove his manhood (presumably to himself), Segundo breaks into Felicita’s house while she’s asleep to have sex with her (there’s a word for that). There’s an immense social pressure on him to abandon his father.

But he doesn’t do it. Segundo leaves Felicita’s house without having touched her, and stays with his father, nursing him back to health, and making plans to move with him elsewhere when he recovers. There is a moment in the film, after refusing to assault Felicita and getting beaten by the local boys and being shunned by the village and abandoned by his own mother for supporting his father, there comes a moment when you question… Is Segundo perhaps gay?

There’s no evidence to support that, and I think it’s interesting that it’s a question you end up asking yourself. Fellas: Is it gay not to rape a woman to prove your manhood? Is it gay to not abandon your gay father after he’s beaten into bedrest? No, and the psychosis of toxic masculine society is laid bare when you ask yourself how you came to that question. Segundo isn’t sexual in this movie. He explicitly rejects sexuality (because it’s a crime in this case). So why did we think the question needed to be asked? Answers on a postcard.

Part IV — For the Love of Fuck, Play Me Out with Something Upbeat

When it comes to bummers, this takes the cake, and I’ve talked too much about it. I’m tired. So what do we learn from this? What’s the message? I dunno. I guess it’s that killing queer people is a social activity. Which holds a mirror to society, but also makes it easier to wash your hands of responsibility at a personal level. It’s cover. The violence is at once shameful and somehow redemptive in the mind of the participants.

I guess it comes down to this: why do we have to pay for your shame with our deaths? Ponder that, and next time we’ll talk about a movie that isn’t such a wild bummer. Have a good night. I won’t.

Butler, J. (2004). Violence, Mourning, and Politics. In J. Butler, Precarious Life (pp. 19–49). London: Verso.