Pelo malo or The Growing (National) Pains of the Margins

• In Event: Cinematic Views of and from the Margins

Abstract

This presentation examines the 2013 Venezuelan film Pelo malo directed by Mariana Rondón. I will analyze this text through the dialogical interaction of two frameworks, the historical tradition of cinematic melodrama in Venezuela, and the film’s discourses of queerness. Many contemporary Venezuelan films still carry with them the influences of two particular traditions: the realist aesthetics of the New Venezuelan Cinema that emerged in the mid-1970s and the melodramatic practices of the pre-1970s filmmaking (which was heavily influenced by the Mexican cinema’s dominance in the country up until the 1950s). Consequently, contemporary films attempt to be both popular and socially relevant by exploring issues, themes and characters that are germane to Venezuela’s national imaginary in the context of the social institution of the family. Pelo malo synthetizes the realist trend and the melodramatic mode by focusing on a poor family (a young widow, her 9-year old son, and her baby boy) who lives in a Caracas’ housing project. The film creates a distinct version of everyday life that shows the difficulties of defying normative discourses of race, gender and sexuality under an Eurocentric patriarchal order. In particular, the character of Junior represents the difficulties of negotiating a sense of national belonging for those whose subjectivities deviate from hegemonic definitions of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. As a result, Pelo malo becomes exemplary of the trend that B. Ruby Rich has identified as “the rise of a brilliant ‘third queer’ cinema outside of the North American-Western European axis” (621).

Author

• Gilberto M Blasini-Cáceres, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee