Rafael Padilla Drummer

El Monstruo

Amen. All they need is the power (or the money) and they can unleash another disaster of biblical proportions, and begin again.

As for this week’s song, “El Monstruo,” it’s not a generic metaphor for a king from the Kingdom Come era of Iron Age Mexican history. It’s a poetic re-making of a character in Alejandro Iñárritu’s 1996 acclaimed film directed by Fátima María Jiménez, in which she starred with Javier Bardem’s Rafael Padilla, and it’s an adaptation of Iñárritu’s original screenplay. In the film, a brutal war between warring groups of Aztecs and Mixtecs is being fought out on an island where the participants are all clones. A pivotal moment for Iñárritu as a filmmaker, when he showed the film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, ended up inspiring the director to write and direct his biggest blockbuster.

As a tribute, let’s try to imagine the film version of what it would have been like to be in that film: We know there are replicas on that island and even many of them are different from a complete person on the outside, something that takes place in the film, but it’s more complicated on its face; that’s the film’s imagery.

The remake of Iñárritu’s film is a maelstrom of tribalism and terror. The characters constantly “blame” others for bad things and “cover up” their own bad deeds. The one thing they stop at is making up a story or embellishing an action, even more than they were brave enough to commit atrocities together. There’s also a strange subtext of the Aztecs and Mixtecs, and of race and blood, and those terms don’t end up as useful for depicting a tragedy. What they do are cheap tactics, but by replicating each other’s ideals as represented by the leaders of these groups. They, without actually saying so, represent, at least, the ruthless depravity we associate with this time before the Cross.