The danger in making any film in one country which depicts the people of another is dishonesty, to misrepresent or marginalize the Other.
(Already, I've overstepped my scholarly duties by implying that such a thing is bad. There aren't supposed to be any judgment calls in classical film analysis. I once watched a professor scold a kid for mentioning in passing how much he happened to enjoy the film we were analyzing that day. But I've graduated now and I can make all the judgment calls I want)
Three Amigos! tells the story of three silent-era movie stars who are mistaken for real gunfighters by some rural Mexican villagers. They are brought down to Mexico thinking that they will be paid 100,000 pesos to put on a show of their talents. In reality, they are expected to fight off El Guapo, a ruthless Mexican thug who commands fifty men.
In all too many Hollywood productions, the situation is always the same: there's a indigenous population of Others who must enlist the aid of white American men when they are threatened by members of their own kind. The Magnificent Seven (1960), Avatar (2009), Dances With Wolves (1990), etc.
The three examples I've provided are what I count to be poor representations of reality: white America is not necessarily the white knight it tends to think it is. The implications are profound: indigenous ("non-white") people in American cinema are typically either ruthless killers or inept plebeians. What finally provides their salvation is the American patriarchy.
I'd say this type of filmmaking is harmless, except it seems to have actually infiltrated American foreign policy ("Bring it on," etc., and I've heard it said that Nixon once remarked that "Patton would've wanted us to stay in Vietnam," not for any knowledge of the man, but for George C. Scott's performance of same).
So after that preamble, we come to Three Amigos!, which appears to suffer from the exact same problems that the other films do -- except I wouldn't love it so much if I thought it did.
On the surface, it hits all the same problematic plot points as the other films: uneducated ethnic villagers, besieged by another set of ethnics, rescued by the efforts of three white American men. What's more, it would seem that Mexican men come in only two varieties: ruthless gangsters and inept benevolents.
The most proactive member of the Mexican community, Carmen, goes out to find help for her village and winds up mistaking three movie stars for actual gunifghters. Noble but inept nevertheless.
And then we stumble upon the film's subtleties, which ride in to save the day.
Long story short, Three Amigos! is a comedy, and its comedy goes almost as far as its postmodern self-reflexion does in redeeming its admittedly-ridiculous vision of rural Mexico.
In one scene, Lucky Day (Steve Martin) is caught sneaking into El Guapo's compound. With fifty guns leveled at his head, he decides it's as good a time as any to list his three demands: "One: that you stop harassing the people of Santo Poco. Two: that the land of Mexico be redistributed equally among the people, and a proportional system of government be established, consisting of three separate but equal branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. And three: that the girl Carmen be returned to me unharmed."
This lays out what for me is the film's saving grace (one of many, as it were): here it is acknowledging the ridiculousness of American jingoism, the nonsense contained in the idea that America can show up in another country and demand that it spontaneously become something else.
Thus, we have a story which is built from all the same old marginalizing stereotypes (which, coincidentally, tell a fantastically exciting story), but presented in such a way that undermines them. And we get to laugh.
The wonders that can be accomplished with postmodernism.
There's more to this argument than what I've just presented, but this is a blog, not a term paper, so let's just wrap it up with this:
--Serge
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