The opening scene of this movie immediately situated the audience in a very different world than the previous films shown in this class. One of violence, corruption, and even more so, disturbing acts of terrorism. As the camera panned around this house filled with suffocated bodies stuffed into the walls of the rooms, I imagined that we were about to start watching a horror movie. This film by far depicts Latin America in the most violent manner. The sense of corruption and fear portrayed in the town of Juarez through the procession of images of mutilated bodies was gut wrenching.
However, even though the violence is in a sense “worn on the sleeve” of Juarez, I think this film does a good job of situating America within the violence related to the war on drugs. By this I am referring to the fact that, although the multi-unit task force that Kate joins in the film seems to have some “good” intentions (ie. minimizing the amount of drug cartels that America has to deal with), they go about attaining this goal through a manner of corrupt and illegal actions. As the viewers are moved further and further through the film, we become aware of just how far this CIA led task force is willing to go to get their way – by joining up with Alejandro, a man from the Colombian drug cartel, in order to help them get rid of a Mexican one. I think the mentality of this task force / Kate’s supervisor Matt, is to rid themselves of the worse of two evils, but at the end of the film, I feel that viewers are left wondering what right America has to assert their dominance in the way shown in this film.
One of the most interesting things I observed about this film, was the way “real” action/justice was depicted as requiring a level of illegality. For example, in many of Matt’s convincing speeches with Kate, he references how her work with the state department is just mitigating the trickle down effect of the drug cartels, whereas his task force/ the CIA aims to hit the cartels at the source. This assumption made Kate’s regular work in some ways seem quite useless and manipulated her into pursuing further engagements with this task force. By the end of the film, we have seen the lengths that this group is willing to go to fulfill its objectives, but I think the audience and Kate are left feeling the sense of, “at what cost?” I felt a sense of confusion over whether anything had really been improved at all considering the objective wasn’t really to reduce the amount of drug trade or corruption, but rather just reduce the amount of cartels that were responsible for the corruption.
On a very different topic of gender dynamics, it was interesting to see how Kate was the member of the state department chosen to take up this multi-unit task force. It seemed that her “supervisor” Matt picked her because she was beautiful and single (and therefore an attractive distraction for their task force’s projects), as well it seemed that she was chosen because she was assumed to be more accepting of their illegal actions (as indicated by Matt’s reference to ‘not wanting any lawyers on the task force,’ likely because they would be more likely to report illegal proceedings). Although Kate’s emotional responses to the violence depicted throughout the film did appear to be a natural response, I did feel as though this showed a bit of a gender binary around being able to cope with malicious violence. Whereas it seemed as though the men could somewhat turn off their emotions or were trained out of having them all together.
Overall this was a very interesting film in terms of the relational dynamics between America, Mexico, and Columbia, and its depiction of America’s involvement in the war on drugs.
Hi Kat, I’m confused by the character Kate in Sicario. You suggest she was chosen by the CIA, or Matt specifically, because she was attractive and single and served as a “distraction?” I don’t get it. She is an up and coming star in the FBI. She led the squad into the criminals’ compound at the beginning of the film, she’s not a rookie, she’s supposedly not naive. She would have had access to information that would have outlined the increasing presence of drug cartels on American soil. So why does she morph into the Babe-in-the-woods character easily manipulated by a CIA?
Hi John, thanks for your comment. I’m not meaning to belittle Kate as a character, I think she is very strong for many ways, but the way I saw her interactions with this CIA task force was as a progression of revealed manipulations. For example, when she was being selected for the task force, one of the only things Matt asks her is “are you married?/divorced/have kids…” When we see later on that she is intentionally pursued by a corrupt cop in order to get information, the understanding I got from Matt was that he was somewhat using this beautiful single woman as bait. And as the film unfolded and it was shown that she was really only part of the task force because they needed someone from the state department to confirm that all the actions of the task force were “legal” it seemed as though they chose her because they thought she would be easier to manipulate than Reggie, her male, lawyer partner.
If it seemed as though they wanted to groom her to continue work with them, this may have been a different story, but the way I saw it, they manipulated Kate for this mission, but didn’t really want her expertise, they just needed an easily controllable person. Of course this is only my opinion and I am curious to see what the rest of the class thought today.
Cheers.