Trump Nation and the Three Amigos

Last updated on: September 1, 2015 at 7:28 am by Anne Kennedy

Trump Nation and the Three Amigos 2015-09-01T07:28:31-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Family movie night, which has lately and unfortunately been occurring more than once a week, not sure how, other than through a grave parenting deficiency, or some other personal failing, is growing only in difficulty and weirdness. The trouble, as of course you can imagine, comes when the parents discover they’ve had enough of every Disney, animated, kid approved piece of cinematic tripe and start looking for movies they can bear. And from thence the trouble easily grows when the father looks back fondly over his fun childhood of the seventies and eighties, and the mother, who, let me say it again, Is Not From Here, is unable to know that every single fondly remembered film must fall, as the children begin to understand the term, under the genre of Inappropriate.

Last night was vaguely better, though. Matt was sure none of us had seen The Three Amigos, even though we all knew we had, so we watched it, and it was funny, even the second or third time. Although, as I mentioned occasionally as the film rolled ever on, I’m pretty sure in modern categories it must be racist and therefore will never rise to the glory of a remake. Unlike Big Trouble in Little China, which apparently isn’t racist at all…but that must be a discussion for another day.

So, anyway, the reason I’m blathering on about this is because I think, through the watching of The Three Amigos, that I have unlocked the door to America’s Greatness, and therefore am able to understand whatever it is about Trump.

At the outset, I should clarify that 1. I am a political conservative and that therefore 2. I will not be voting for Trump because, as Ace of Spades has so cleverly noticed, he’s a democrat. I mean, I know he’s running as a republican, but, um, well, whatever. Also, 3. I am more and more falling into the Let It Burn camp and so I am enjoying the Trump whatever it is and won’t really mind if he wins, even though I’m not going to vote for him, because, if you look at it from a far distance, I’m pretty sure that the inevitable consequence of eight years of Obama is eight years of Trump. So anyway, I’m just laying this out there, not so you’ll agree with me, because I’m pretty sure none of it matters anyway, but so that you’ll know and understand, Oh Best Beloved, that what I am about to say could be meaningless but could also be The Thing That Makes It All Make Sense.

So, The Three Amigos. First observe the glorious and careful contrast of color. On the one hand there is the brown, dusty, reality of the Mexican people and landscape. Everything is covered in a layer of dirt and if it were a different movie, the sense of realism would be preserved at all cost. Think of this particular visual landscape as Reality. And truly, without a hint of sarcasm at all, this landscape, while beautiful, is tortured and violent. In the absence of laws and law enforcement, the strongest jerk (and how strange, at this point, did I find the introduction of the Germans…I mean, um, funny funny, funny, but also ?!) shoots his way easily into a winning position. Think of the Dusty Beautiful Landscape as the Entire World. It could be Syria, or wherever it is in China that just suffered another explosion, or anywhere really.

Into the dust and violence arrive the shocking, incongruous, and uproariously funny Americans. They are dressed in shiny black and silver. They are ridiculous. The don’t understand anything that is going on around them. They live out one narrative while everyone around them is living out another. They don’t understand the language, or the circumstances, and of course they are suspicious of the food. If ever you have observed an American wandering around the great and beautiful places of the world, dressed in the bright cheerful colors of optimism and wealth, you will laugh so much at the charming moment the Three Amigos break into My Little Buttercup in the dim chaos of the Mexican Saloon. It is a moment of recognition, of charm.

The Three Amigos, as they sing and dance and pun their way through the violence that surrounds them are so wonderful, I think, because they are so brightly cheerful and so embarrassingly weak. They aren’t meant to be in this Real Landscape and when they discover the mistake, the truth, they want to run away. Well, they do run away. They don’t want reality, they want the shininess of comfort and wealth. And here, to simplify the entire political landscape of the last fifty years, is where the tension lies. One portion of America thinks we should stay out, should remain in our bright bubble of buttercups and songs. The other portion looks at the dust and the violence and wants to do something about it. The Three Amigos, or course, turn around and come back and save the day, even though it is completely ridiculous and there’s no way they should be able to. The village itself is only able to survive by dressing up like the Amigos themselves.

It was that image, of everybody dressed in shiny black Amigo outfits, the incongruity of the sparkle against the dust, that made it all click together in my mind. Why is Trump so popular? Well, he’s the American everyone loves to hate. If you saw him at the Eiffel Tower with his hair and his camera you would laugh at him. He is brash. He doesn’t care if all or any of his words go together in coherence and order. He is like Steve Martin in black and silver singing and dancing. It’s fascinating to watch. And yet, when he says Let’s Make America Great Again, or whatever his slogan is, it stirs up the desire in beleaguered onlookers to turn around from running away and try to go back and do something about it, even though the odds are incredible and the task basically doomed to failure from the start. And really, are they wrong, these onlookers, in their new kindled desire, just because Trump is ridiculous?

And yet, and yet, the optimistic raising up the eyes, the rallying together against injustice and violence, carries with it a potentially fatal flaw. Very nearly at the end of the movie, as the Amigos are trying to encourage the tiny, persecuted village to stand up and fight, one of them (gosh, I don’t know their names, the only one I recognized was Steve Martin) stands up and soliloquizes about ‘the El Guapo in your life’. Everyone has an El Guapo! he cries. It might be…I can’t remember the exact list, but stuff like bad teeth and not enough money. The village furrows the brow in confusion. What are you talking about? The El Guapo in my life? There is an actual real El Guapo bearing down on us right now. It was a true and funny moment from practically every sermon preached everywhere on the average Sunday all over this great land. Who or what is your giant? Don’t be afraid! Stand up and fight! We will win with a cunning and funny plan.

In the desire to escape from the singular and real trial of El Guapo, the American person lifts up the eyes and the voice in an optimistic, and frequently incongruous to reality, joy. It’s not about the particular, it’s about freedom and justice for all! And so, over many many many years, the particular, the real, has been traded and dealt away for an inspiring sermon or a flashy political speech. The thing is, rising up out of the dust is incredibly extraordinary. The world’s reality remains violence and disorder. America’s own order and optimism, strange though it feels in foreign lands, has radically impacted those landscapes. While I don’t believe in trading away the particular, the real, for the transcendent and optimistic, I see and feel the pull, the hope. I see the wave of the hair, the bright shiny teeth, hear the brash rhetoric and think, well, at the very least we can have a pretty good laugh.

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