'Machete' continues exploitation film trend of highlighting racial issues

By Sarah Sluis

I had no plans to see Machete, a "Mexploitation" film from Robert Rodriguez that originated as a trailer within the movie Grindhouse. But today, I scrolled through Ain't it Cool News and discovered that a Machete trailer has been released in honor of Cinco de Mayo--and even though the movie was made a year ago, the plot

seems like a direct response to the controversial illegal immigration legislation passed in Arizona.

Culled from the Internet, the story goes like this: Danny Trejo plays a Mexican Federale (police officer) who fled the country after a bad encounter with a drug lord (rising drug violence around the Mexican border, anyone?). He's a day laborer who accepts a $100,000+ fee to kill a senator who is sending illegal immigrants out of the country. As he goes in for the kill, he's shot himself, and it turns out he's been set up in order to build support for the bill. With the help of fellow illegal immigrants, he pursues vengeance as he is hunted down by a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agent.

While it's social issues movies like Crash that get rewarded at the Oscars, exploitation and horror movies have a long history of tackling racism and discrimination. They appeal to deep emotions and fears, and it can go both ways: just as promiscuous teenage girls are punished in slasher films, often being the first to die, who can forget the black man in Night of the Living Dead surviving a night of zombies only to be killed by vigilantes at the end who assume he is the bad guy?

Pam Grier, who coincidentally has been in the news lately because of her memoir, starred in movies like Coffy

and Foxy Brown that showed strong, powerful black women and centered around issues of drugs and violence. In Coffy, she sets out to kill the drug dealers who gave her sister contaminated heroin, and in Foxy Brown she goes after the gangsters that killed her law-enforcement boyfriend. The movies can be subversive and expose issues like objectification of women (which works out fine for Grier, who seduces people before killing them). At the same time, the blaxploitation genre has been viewed as a double-edged sword: did it expose black issues or did it perpetuate stereotypes? You could say the same about Machete. The plot is driven by anger, fear, and mistrust. The Danny Trejo character embodies many negative qualities and stereotypes, from what I saw, but it's impressive that the trailer opens with him saying, "$70 a day for yard work. A hundred for roofing. $125 for septic." It's exposing the economic realities of his situation and makes his agreement to kill someone for over a hundred thousand dollars justifiable. I'm now curious to see Machete and find out if Rodriguez has packed the movie with commentary on immigration in between the sex, explosions, and guns. It wouldn't be the first time exploitation films have covered this territory.