Borderline Justice/States of Emergency Orson Welles Touch

of Evil
Pease, Donald E.
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring
2001, pp. 75-105 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2003.0044
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Fordham University Library at 10/09/10 10:58AM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v001/1.1pease.html
75
Borderline Justice/
States of Emergency
Orson Welles Touch of Evil
D O N A L D E . P E A S E
Darthmouth College
T H E A N X I E T Y O F T R A N S F E R E N C E
Three different versions of Orson Welless noir classic, Touch of Evil, have
been distributed internationally over a (o-year period. (A directors cut of
the lm was produced in :8 out of the o-page memo Welles had written
to Universal executives after viewing Harry Kellers remake of several key
scenes).
1
But the lm, which recounts Miguel Vargass decision to interrupt
his honeymoon in the imaginary border town of Los Robles, with his
American wife Susan, in order to investigate and thereafter to prosecute the
corrupt policing practices of Hank Quinlan, has enjoyed almost no com-
mercial success. Universal refused Welles editorial control over the rst
release and produced a -minute version of the lm with little distribution.
After a showing at Brussels World Fair in :8 and a two-year run in Paris,
Touch of Evil virtually went out of circulation.
Touch of Evil has recouped its losses at the box ofce, however, through
the symbolic capital it has accumulated in the academy where it has exerted
an unprecedented inuence in the formation and reconguration of various
academic disciplines. After a lm archivist discovered a :o8-minute version
in :;, Stephen Heath conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of the lm in
two successive issues of Screen that, in consolidating lm studies epistemo-
logical rationale, signicantly elevated its academic standing.
2
In an essay
that he published in Screen eight years later entitled The Other Question:
the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse, Homi Bhabha detected in Heaths
argument the symptomatic features of a colonialist fantasy whose critical
elaboration subsequently became crucial to the formation of post-colonial
studies as an academic discipline.
3
In The Cultural Front published in :6,
Michael Denning articulated Welless involvement in popular front causes to
what Jose David Saldivar has recently named the discourse of the Border-
lands when he proposed Orson Welless role in the Sleepy Lagoon Case as
the key required to decipher its political unconcious.
4
The variations in the lms academic reception have turned on the dif-
ferent values that that these disparate disciplinary formations have associ-
ated with the cinematic representations of the border laws which pertain at
the U.S./Mexican border and the political, social, and cultural strategies
mounted in opposition to them. In his pioneering work on what he has
called its lmic system, Stephen Heath has proposed that the law operating
within the lms narrative should be understood to effect the resolution of
the violent disruption in the order of things with which the lm opens, its
containmentits replacingin a new homogeneity.
5
After remarking that the operations of this law are encapsulated within
the separation and subsequent reconciliation of Miguel Vargas and his
American wife Susan, Heath arrives at the conclusion that the trajectory of
their relationship constitutes the kernel of the ideal lm narrative: Ideally
a narrative is the perfect symmetry of this movement; the kiss that the
explosion postpones is resumed in the kiss of the close as Susan is reunited
with Vargasthe same kiss but delayed, narrativized.
6
But upon observing that Heaths celebration of the formal elegance of
this conclusion has uncritically ratied the means whereby the lmic narra-
tive has established and thereby secured the Mexican/U.S. border, Homi
Bhabha interrupts Heaths interpretation at precisely the moment in which
Heath has restaged the postponed kiss. Bhabha takes issue in particular
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 76
with the following series of observations that he purports to establish the
core of Heaths argument:
Vargas is the position of desire, its admission and its prohibition. Not sur-
prisingly he has two names: the name of desire is Mexican, Miguel . . . that
of the law American, Mike. The lm uses the border, the play between
American and Mexican . . . at the same time it seeks to hold that play nally
in the position of purity and mixture which in turn is a version of law and
desire.
7
According to Bhabha, these comments reveal Heaths wish to substitute
a neocolonialist discourse that would afrm the authority of U.S. national
identity in place of an analysis of the resolutely incoherent usages to which
the lm has put racial and cultural differences.
On that basis [of Heaths mode of analysis], it is not possible to construct the
polymorphous and perverse collusion between racism and sexism as a mixed
economyfor instance the discourses of American cultural colonialism and
Mexican dependency, the fear/desire of miscegenation, the American border
as cultural signier of a pioneering male American spirit always under
threat from races and cultures.
8
After he refuses Heaths claim that the lm resolves the tension between the
law and justice, Bhabha contends that when the unrestrained play of nation-
alities at work in Touch of Evil gets articulated to the characters contradic-
tory sexual and racial positionings, their unresolved conict renders the
divergence between law and justice irreconcilable. Unlike Heath, Bhabha
reads the lms intention to deliver Susan of her mixed sexual quality and to
restore her as a pure sexual object and the effort to remove any traces of
racial mixedness from Miguel Vargas as the telltale signs of the border laws
disposition to marginalize otherness.
As a partial remedy for these interpretive shortcomings, Bhabha supple-
ments Heaths analysis with a redescription of the lms opening scene: If
the death of the father names the interruption on which the narrative is
Don al d E. Pe a s e 77
initiated, as Bhabha articulates his revision, it is through that death that
miscegenation becomes both possible and deferred.
9
The lm represents
the possibility as well as the deferral of miscegenation in Miguel Vargass
relationship with Susan. The contradictory personae through which Vargas
gives expression to this complex are the effects of a process Bhabha would
later call hybridization.
In The Cultural Front published in :6, Michael Denning observed that
when Welles moved the setting of the hardboiled detective novel Badge of
Evil from a Southern California city to the imaginary border town of Los
Robles, and when he transformed the hero into a Mexican narcotics detec-
tive and the defendant into a Mexicano, the twin optics of lm noir and the
discourse of the borderlands brought two otherwise divided aspects of
Welless personalitythe representative of the cultural avant garde and the
popular front activistinto lively interaction. In explicating the signicance
of this convergence of Welless cultural prestige with his political persona,
Denning has recovered the forgotten history of a social movement which
had emerged throughout the Southwest in collective resistance to the social
and civic injustices that pertained at the border.
Dennings effort to remember this forgotten history entails his shifting
the focus of the lms attention away from Miguel Vargass relationship with
Susan and onto Sheriff Hank Quinlan, whose part Welles had played in the
lm. Denning interprets Quinlans efforts to frame the migrant laborer
Manolo Sanchez as a metamorphosis of Welless personal involvement in the
1943 Sleepy Lagoon case.
10
In the case to which Denning refers, a corrupt
Sheriff of the Los Angeles Police Department falsely accused a young
Mexicano, Harry Leypes, along with twenty-four other Mexican-Americans,
of the murder of Jose Diaz, and, in the process of investigating the case,
planted evidence of their guilt.
Upon ascertaining the signicance of Quinlans corrupt implementation
of border law to the lms plot, however, Denning has also disagreed with a
claim central to Bhabhas account. Bhabha described the structure of rela-
tions underwriting the neocolonial relationship between U.S. citizens and
Mexican laborers as socially unjust. But Denning has associated the injus-
tice that Bhabha described as a structural condition with historically specic
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 78
examples of the states unequal application and enforcement of immigration
laws, as well as the history of the resistance movements mounted in oppo-
sition to those laws. In the elaboration of this reading, Denning has opened
up a space within the lm that permits him to install the otherwise elided
history of the paralegal tactics through which participants in this movement
successfully overturned unjust border laws.
More specically, Denning has identied Miguel Vargass prosecution of
Quinlans illegal framing of Manolo Sanchez with the popular front cam-
paign that brought the corrupt sheriff responsible for the violation of the
civil rights of Harry Leypes and the z( other migrant laborers to what Gloria
Anzaldua has called the justice of la frontera. In making this argument,
Denning has transposed Welless involvement with the Sleepy Lagoon case
fteen years earlier into what Joan Copjec has described as the noir lms
absent cause, which is to say the element which does not appear in the eld
of the lms effects but underwrites its mise en scene as what the lm desires
to represent.
11
I have provided this brief itinerary in order to suggest that the genealogy
of the lms reception has operated according to the logic of the transference.
Each emergent disciplinary formation has produced a discourse about the
lm which claims a knowledge that the lms previous interpreters either
would not claim or could not know. For example, Homi Bhabha derived the
force of his reading of the lm from the representation of Heaths narrative as
a complicitous reconciliation with the neocolonial relations that emerged at
the U.S./Mexican border. But in restoring the history of political resistance to
the structure of neocolonial relations, Denning has opened his analysis to
questions that Bhabhas ahistorical framework could not accommodate.
In producing these incompatible knowledges, each of these disciplinary
formations has materialized a site of dislocation between the state and its
citizens that the lm has represented in the relations between national cul-
tures at the Mexican/U.S. border. By way of the transferential anxieties that
it gathered around this site, Touch of Evil has actively solicited from these
emergent disciplinary formations the desire to extract and thereafter nd
the terms that would do justice to the subaltern knowledgescolonial
discourse and borderlands discourse respectivelythat their predecessor
Don al d E. Pe a s e 79
formations were predicated on forgetting. Touch of Evil has thereafter oscil-
lated in status between an object of disciplinary knowledge within lm stud-
ies and and as the object-cause for these alternative ways of imagining the
relations between knowledge and power.
The impasses and quandaries into which these accounts of Touch of Evil
have eventuated would tend to ratify what has become the conventional wis-
dom concerning the lm noir; namely, that lm noir emplots within its nar-
rative the ideological contradictions and social antagonisms intrinsic to the
U.S. social order. But in lm noir, the desire to resolve these contradictions
through the solution of a crime, as would happen, say, in a classic Hollywood
detective lm, gives way to the recognition of the lm noir heros ineluctable
complicity in the crimes and actions under investigation. The double indem-
nity of lm noir heroestheir indebtedness to antagonistic arrangements of
the social orderis disclosed through their participation in overlapping but
noncomparable realms and the impossibility of their resolution.
The dening feature of lm noir entails its capacity to draw out of the
lm genre from which it emergesthe detective lm, the cowboy western,
the sci- thrilleran element which cannot be accommodated by that
genres conventions. This feature in part explains why the analysis of noir
lms has proven so hospitable to the emergence and transformation of the
academic disciplines. Film noir facilitates a knowledge that the system of
representations it inhabits either cannot acknowledge or must disavow as
the precondition for its coherence.
12
S T A T E H Y B R I D I T Y , T H E R A C I S T U N C O N S C I O U S ,
A N D T H E S T R A N G E C A S E O F C I T I Z E N V A R G A S
Having proposed the central role played by the logic of the transference in
the history of the lms academic reception, I should make it clear that it is
not my intention to inaugurate yet another disciplinary formation out of the
knowledge that borderlands discourse might have foreclosed. Instead, I
want to bring into critical focus a character within the lm who has been the
unchallenged beneciary of the anxious transferences underwriting the his-
tory of the lms reception. In leaving his motives and actions unexamined,
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 80
each of these readings has positioned Miguel Vargas as the subject who is
supposed to know what a previous understanding of the lm had either dis-
owned or foreclosed. When they are attributed to Miguel Vargas, the disci-
plinary knowledges produced within these elds signicantly enrich Vargass
investigative procedures and contribute additional dimensions to Vargass
understanding of his complex relationship with Susan. As the subject within
the lm through whom these formerly disavowed knowledges has been artic-
ulated, Vargas would appear to have already assigned each of these knowl-
edges separate tasks: the critique of juridical norms produced within
borderlands discourse enables him to bring Hank Quinlan to justice; the cul-
turally hybridized site from which he accomplishes this purpose puts into
place a multi-racial sexual imaginary that undermines the U.S. system of
monocultural representations and solidies his relationship with Susan.
Orson Welles certainly adapted knowledges about hybridity and the bor-
derlands to his production of Touch of Evil. But in constructing his noir hero
by way of Charlton Hestons efforts at brown-face self-presentation, Welles
also underscored the historically specic social and political conditions that
prevailed at the moment of the lms productionwhat Julian Murphet has
described as its racial unconsciousthat is somewhat anomalous to Bhabhas
and Dennings descriptions of these phenomena. Murphet locates the histor-
ical origins of lm noir in the aftermath of the Second World War, when,
Murphet remarks, anxious white men introjected images of racialized other-
ness that had become the dening force in urban culture, in order thereafter
to expel racial markedness from the eld of visibility altogether. Black every-
day urban life is necessarily seen, and seen to be a spreading, threatening tis-
sue of systematic deprivations and counter-cultural afrmations, Murphet
explains; it is then repressed from view as it contradicts national mytholo-
gies of democracy; the existential qualities of the scene are nevertheless
retained and harnessed by the subject of vision for his own convenience, to
enhance his own authenticity and depth as an alienated social agent.
13
According to Murphet, the genre tracked the means whereby this
process of introjection resulted in a white-noir hero who appropriated the
economic and political suffering of a racialized Other for the purpose of
drawing out of it the cultural authenticity and the political authority of an
Don al d E. Pe a s e 81
alienated cultural minority. When he transformed the role of the white
detective that Charlton Heston was originally cast to play into the part of a
Mexican attorney for which Heston was required to make himself up in
brownface, Welles reproduced what Murphet has called the racial dialectics
of the white-noir subject.
14
But he also redirected the contradictions that
this character would at once produce and enact at the controversies over
immigration policies at the U.S./Mexican border in :;. When Hestons
white-noir character appropriated the affective dimension of political
activism at the border, he did so in order to buttress the policing power he
exercised there.
In order to understand Welless rationale for representing Vargass rela-
tionship to the border law through a presentation of Charlton Heston in
brownface, we need to examine Miguel Vargass divided loyalties. Miguel
Vargass decision to become involved in Hank Quinlans investigation of
Rudy Lennakers murder is the outcome of two very different concerns. He
wants to manage the potentially dire consequences of this violent border
incident for Mexicos international reputation; and he wants to prove to his
American bride that Mexican law will enable him to take care of his own
wife in his own country. The bomb, which killed the wealthy real estate
entrepreneur Rudy Lennaker, has frightened Susan because it also took the
life of Zita, the blond sexworker whose services he had contracted for the
evening.
In response to his decision to interrupt their honeymoon, Susan accuses
Vargas of placing his marriage to the law above his conjugal responsibilities,
and she requests that he move her into a motel on the U.S. side of the bor-
derwhere she will be safer. Given these different motives, Vargass efforts
to manage this international crisis should be understood within a dual con-
textthat of his personal relationship with Susan and that of his ofcial
position within the Mexican state. When he shifts the focus of public atten-
tion onto the illegality of Quinlans procedures, Vargas speaks as a repre-
sentative of the Mexican state eager to divert international attention away
from evidence of its inability to regulate its borders. But he also acts as a
husband intent on disproving his wifes belief that Mexico is unable to pro-
tect its citizenry.
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 82
Although Hank Quinlans prejudice against Mexicans supplies Vargas
with a psychological rationale for aggressively pursuing this course of action,
Vargas does not accuse Quinlan of police corruption as an expression of his
solidarity with the political efforts to right the history of injustices at the
border. In exposing Quinlans illegal policing practices on the U.S. side of the
border, Vargas struggles to persuade Susan of the higher standards to which
the police are held on the Mexican side of the border. While Susan was about
to take up residency as Miguel Vargass wife in Mexico City, she has never-
theless maintained her citizenship status within the United Stateswhose
protection of her rights reaches across the border.
Vargass position endows him with the privilege of unimpeded access to
constituencies on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border. In his ofce as the
chief investigator of the Pan American Narcotics Investigatory Commission
(a.k.a. P.A.N.I.C.), Vargas enjoys the extraterritorial status otherwise reserved
for diplomats and rulers of state. Indeed his extraterritorial privileges
become the basis for Vargass primary relationship to his cultural hybridity.
His cross-border expertise has made him a temporary member of multiple
communities. As the presiding member of an international investigative
body, Vargas becomes an insider and an outsider in both the United States
and Mexico. He performs multiple roles in multiple contexts wherein he
speaks from more than one perspective to more than one community and
about more than one reality.
But in his efforts to prove Quinlan guilty of planting evidence in the
Sanchez case, Vargas transforms the extraterritorial position that he shares
with diplomats, international observers, and rulers of state into a quite lit-
erally unlocatable social space. Vargas takes up this exceptional position
when he recites the standards and norms through which he declares himself
empowered to regulate Hank Quinlans investigatory procedures. A police-
mans job is supposed to be tough, Vargas explains to Quinlan. It is only
easy in a police state. In any free country, a policeman is supposed to enforce
the law and the law protects the guilty as well as the innocent.
At the very same moment in which he pronounces Hank Quinlan respon-
sible to uphold the legal standards that protect the guilty as well as the inno-
cent, however, Vargas has also hollowed out a space in which he enjoys an
Don al d E. Pe a s e 83
exemption from the norms and rules through which the law regulates the
social order. The site Vargas produces in the act of enunciating this com-
pelling account of the differences between the free state and a police state
constitutes a third state. This state, which is more commonly known as the
state of emergency, names the legal ction whereby the governing powers in
a free state empower themselves to use police state measures in order to
reinstall the rule of law.
When he accuses Quinlan of violating the rules he was mandated to sup-
port, Vargas removes from Quinlan the right to bear this shield of protec-
tion. As the apparatus through which he would ascertain Quinlans guilt,
Vargass surveillance procedures are perforce exempt from the rules and
standards that he has accused Quinlan of violating. In taking up this posi-
tion within the state of emergency, Vargas has granted himself the legal
authority to perform the very police state tacticsplanting evidence, pre-
suming guilt, invasion of privacy, interrogation without benet of counsel,
denial of civil rightsof which he formerly accused Quinlan.
When he enters this exceptional space wherein a higher legal standard
regulates the rule of law, Heston recalls the role he played the year before as
Moses in The Ten Commandments. In The Ten Commandments Cecil B.
deMille constructed an analogy between Moses subordination of the
Israelites to Gods law and the Hollywood Screen Guilds subordination to
the U.S. cultural apparatus. But in Touch of Evil, Heston invokes the laws
power to regulate the practice of its enforcement for three interconnected
reasons: to secure Mexicos borders, to override any restriction on his polic-
ing powers, and to declare Susan Vargas under the protection of Mexican
rather than U.S. law.
To explain how these reasons informed Welless decision to paint
Charlton Heston in brown face, I need to turn Homi Bhabhas observations
about Miguel Vargass racial and sexual mixedness toward Julien Murphets
about the white-noir subject. Homi Bhabhas description is especially perti-
nent to understanding this dimension of Welless lm in that his account of
colonial mimicry explains the process whereby Mexican migrant communi-
ties negotiated the political violence and the capitalist imperatives of both
the U.S. and the Mexican states. Mimicry named the means whereby they
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 84
survived those violences through the invention and representation of differ-
ent cultural alternatives.
Hybridity emerged, in Bhabhas account, as a strategy whereby colonized
subjects mimicked the identity imposed upon them by the colonial author-
ity. According to Bhabha, colonial mimicry did not merely open up a dis-
tance between the colonial subjects and the images through which the
colonial authority assimilated them to its system of imposed representa-
tions (they were the same but not quite). Colonial mimicry opened an
internal distance within the colonial authority as well. The hybrid condition
effected in the colonizers and the colonized thereby reversed the effect of
colonial dominance, in that the subaltern knowledge which the colonizer
had disavowed turned around on the culturally dominant discourse,
thereby dissevering it from the bases for its authority.
15
But Welless choice of Charlton Heston to play the role of Miguel Vargas
complicated Bhabhas analysis of the political effects of mimicry. As a repre-
sentative of international law, Vargas places the multiple cross-cultural per-
sonae through which he practices hybridity into the service of establishing
and thereby securing the border separating the Mexican national culture
from the United States. In enlisting Hestons brown mask to consolidate
Vargass power to instruct Hank Quinlan of the higher standard to which
ofcers of the law were beholden, Welles, pace Bhabha, had not undermined
the border laws authority. Welles had instead disclosed the ways in which
immigration law had appropriated the hybridity that had been deployed as
a counterhegemonic strategy throughout the borderlands and placed it into
the service of governmental rule.
When he asked Heston to play his character in brownface, Welles
intended to recover the unofcial histories of migrant communities political
resistance to injustice at the border. But he then overlaid these histories with
the cinematic memory of the roles that Heston had played in a series of clas-
sic Hollywood Westernsas Buffalo Bill in the : lm Pony Express; as
William Clark in the Far Horizons, Universal Studios : rendition of the
Lewis and Clark expedition; as a cattleman who led a ght with Indians and
Mexicans over water rights in Big Country released the same year as Touch of
Evil. These roles established Hestons primary cinematic identity as identical
Don al d E. Pe a s e 85
with the gure that Bhabha described as the cultural signier of a pioneer-
ing male American spirit always under threat from races and cultures.
The face of the actor Welles had browned up for Touch of Evil had
become the index for the frontier mentality responsible for the history of
forcible resettlements of Mexican and Indian populations and the construc-
tion of the border between the two national cultures. When he cast Heston
as the ofcial representative of the international law regulating transactions
at the border, Welles had not afrmed La Fronteras power transgressively to
mimic and thereby undermine U.S. neocolonial relations with Mexico.
Welless construction of Hestons part instead exploited what Juliet Murphet
has called the racist unconscious at the heart of the noir lmic system. In
projecting an image of Mexicanness that bore no resemblance to any of the
actual Mexican actors in the lm, Charlton Heston had substituted for
Mexican identity a look to which no actual Mexican could conform.
Charlton Heston had donned the brown mask to conceal his frontiers-
man imago. But Welles exposed the frontier mentality of Hestons lm per-
sona as the racist unconscious of the international juridical apparatus
responsible for the supervision of the border laws regulative of the relation-
ship between the United States and Mexico. Welles had resignied Hestons
character in the image of a Mexican to demonstrate how that resignication
enhanced Vargass regulatory authority. It was precisely the lack of t
between the frontier code that Heston represented and the brownface
through which he masked it that constituted Miguel Vargass authority over
every Mexican in Los Robles. Rather than looking like Manolo Sanchez,
Charlton Heston in brownface mandated how Mexicans should look before
they could acquire Vargass lawful authority.
16
Wheras hybridity under Bhabhas description would undermine the pos-
sibility for a unity that could ground any identity, then, the law that Vargas
exercises effectively collapses all that is different about Mexicans into a uni-
tary image of the Other. In dissociating the law he represents from the
signier of Mexicanness that could not conform to his image, however,
Vargas also dissevers his position within the social order from any residual
associations with either a Mexican or an American identity. Vargas there-
after invests the processses of identication out of which he constructs his
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 86
social identity wholly into the persona through which the law exercises its
emergency powers.
O P E R A T I O N W E T B A C K / E M E R G E N C Y S T A T E S :
T O U C H O F E V I L
In proposing that Vargas has transposed his racial mixedness into the desire
to become identical with the laws power to regulate itself, I mean to suggest
that Vargass primary social relationship involves his identication with
those powers. The law becomes for Miguel Vargas the meta-social process
through which all others are produced as Other, as well as the locus for his
personal desires. In his desire to destroy the civil identity of Hank Quinlan
and in his desire to transform Susan Vargas into a ward of the Mexican state,
Miguel Vargas might be understood to have personied the laws desire to
decide upon the civil standing of persons who travel across its borders.
If noir names what cannot be integrated within a lms narrative, then
the noir aspect of Touch of Evil should be understood to have emerged when
the emergency powers of the law that Miguel Vargas personies become
indistinguishable from the forms of illegal violence to which he has taken
exception. After the controversies concerning the legality of the state of
emergency that the U.S. government declared to empower its mass deporta-
tion of migrant laborers in the four years before Welles began work on the
picture, however, that deportation policy comprised a more compelling loca-
tion for the lms political unconscious than does the Sleepy Lagoon Case,
as Michael Denning has contended, or the spectres of the cold war, as more
recent commentators have argued.
17
Welles explicitly correlated lm noir
conventions with this deportation policy in the lms concluding scenes
when his camera tracks separate images of men whose trans-border work
requires them to become immersed in the same polluted waters separating
the United States and Mexico that are reputed to leave their mark on the
backs of migrants. After Welless camera follows Miguel Vargas wading
across the river with the listening device designed to record the evidence of
Hank Quinlans guilt, it focuses in on the image of Hank Quinlans immobile
body oating belly up in the waters, and thereby animates a relay of visual
Don al d E. Pe a s e 87
connotations that articulate Welless depiction of the two gures involved in
the production of a corrupt cop with the gure produced within the histor-
ical scenario that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
called Operation Wetback.
In concluding with this condensed visual signier, however, Touch of Evil
has exposed the collusion between the economic, the governmental and the
political realms as the agency responsible for the commission of a crime that
pervades the entirety of the social order. In place of solving the Lennaker
case, the lms processes of investigating this crime have reperformed the
crimes of the emergency state which constitutes the lms historical context.
With the image of Quinlans bloated corpse, Welles has also effaced any
meaningful distinction between the political agency responsible for the pro-
duction, exercise, and legitimation of Operation Wetback and its literal
victims. Because the position from which the lms viewers focus in on this
restricted image of police corruption has emerged within a polluted envi-
ronment that catastrophically involves the state in which these crimes were
committed, I should briey touch on that mise en scne now.
When the INS assigned the name wetbacks to migrant laborers who
were unable to earn a subsistence living in Mexico, they did so as a way to
depict Mexican migrant laborers as still bearing the physical signs of the
means of entry across the :,6oo mile border that had eluded the attention of
the ofcials assigned responsibility for its security. These undocumented
workers typically gained entry during harvest time when they were swal-
lowed up by factories in agricultural elds overseen by processors of plant
products and foodstuffs and compelled to live under unlivable conditions.
Reducible to the imaginary physical evidence of the illegal means of entry,
migrants bore the mark of the border that they were also made to personify.
Lacking identication with either Mexico or the United States, the wetback
named the state of deterritorialization effected through the unsuccessful
transition from one condition to another. Marking the space where the trans-
formation from one national identity into another identity might be under-
stood to have repeatedly failed, the wetback inscribed the site of non-
identity where that transformation never stopped not taking place.
The classication wetback operated an internal exclusion that ofcial
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 88
INS policies thereafter rendered indispensable to the construction of the
nations borders. The wetback was the states name for a gure who was at
once less than yet also more than a supplement to the national citizen.
Something less in that a wetback signied what the civic order was lack-
ing; something more in that the wetback also signied the addition of
what was lacking. But in supplying what was lacking inside the national cul-
ture, the operation also constituted the nations outside (its borders). If the
nations outside was formulated by way of a lack internal to the system that
it supplemented, however, what was lacking inside also produced the need
for an outside to contain it. To protect against the recognition of the lack
within the nation, INS agents erected and defended the nations borders
against wetbacks who were thereby made to become identical with what
the nation was required to lack.
Holding the position within the social order for what Jacques Lacan has
called the stain of the Real (i.e., what cannot become integratable within the
preexisting forms of the social order), the wetback hollowed the space
where the symbolic order arrived at the limit of its mandated positions. The
citizen is produced out of the subjects active disinvestment of bodily needs.
If this act of bodily sacrice constitutes the precondition for taking up an
unnmarked position of disinterested participation in the civil order, the
wetback names the condition of the body lacking a subject to accomplish
this disinvestment. Put differently, the wetback named the position that
the social order included, but as the rigid indicator for what could not be
included within it. As the placeholder for what was not identical with any of
the positions within the social order, the wetback might be described as
holding the position of the null gure that the social order was compelled to
exclude in order to effect the illusion of its self-enclosure.
When I proposed that Welles had transformed the image of the wet-
back into the concentrated image with which he concludes the lm, I meant
to claim that the image of Hank Quinlans corpse aoat in the polluted
waters between the United States and Mexico coincides exactly with the
image of the migrant laborers social condition. Both of these images
describe husks from which all the vital energies have been depleted. Like the
wetbacks, Quinlans labor-power has been extracted from his body. But
Don al d E. Pe a s e 89
whereas the wetbacks energies had become the disposable means of pro-
ducing fruits and vegetables, Quinlans corpse was made to signify the dis-
tinction between the illegal use of violence and the rules and norms through
which the law reproduced itself.
18
Giorgio Agamben has analyzed the paradoxical space held by these ille-
gal aliens with great precision. In Homo Sacer, Agamben describes the gure
of the migrant laborer as one of the names for the gure which could not
be included in the whole of which it was a member and cannot be a mem-
ber of the whole in which it was already included.
19
Because they named the
limit to national inclusiveness, wetbacks also held the place for what the
social order excluded to achieve order and coherence. They thereby pro-
duced what might be described as the illusion of an enveloping border for
the members of the national society who had not been excluded.
As the member that the nation must exclude in order for the state to
achieve coherence and unity, wetbacks also designated the gures that a
state produced when it established a historically specic concretization of
the universalizing process known as nation-formation. These paradoxical
gures materialized at and as the site where the state asserted the distinc-
tion between the nation as a universal form and its historically specic par-
ticularization. As a limit internal to the nation, such gures specied the
difference between nationalism as a universal modern norm and a states
historically specic particularization of that norm.
20
But the space wherein such exceptions were produced was not, as the
nal lurid image of Touch of Evil attests, reducible to these signiers of the
internally excluded. It also included the rules of law themselves, which by
denition could not be subject to the norms they would regulate, as well as
the state of emergency. A nation can be understood to enter a state of emer-
gency when its members are subjected to the extreme conditions of a war or
a natural catastrophe. During an emergency, the states requirement to pro-
tect the nation against a danger to its security takes precedence over its obli-
gation to acquire the peoples consent for its protective measures.
In :(, Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada linked the description of
migrants as non-assimilable aliens with the emergency measures of the
national security state when he charged that politically subversive agents
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 90
could be numbered among the wetbacks who illegally crossed the Rio
Grande River. The connection that McCarran adduced between the inux of
migrants and the threat of enemy inltration led the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, chaired by Willaim E. Jenner of Indiana, to appoint
McCarran and Senator Herman Welker of Idaho to conduct an ofcial inves-
tigation. Although this legislation had not specically targeted Mexicans,
Senator McCarran nevertheless recommended that the McCarran-Walter
Act of :z be deployed to subject migrant workers to deportation and
denaturalization if their leaders were found guilty of subversive activities.
21
Following McCarrans construction of this homology between Mexican
laborers and state enemies, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the
INS and U.S. border patrol ofcially to inaugurate the encompassing project
of mass deportation that required the concerted efforts of various sectors of
the federal government in :(, :, :6, and :;. Because the emergency
measure placed all Mexican-Americans under suspicion of membership
within its operative category, Operation Wetback provided government
ofcials with legal warrant for various anti-democratic activities. Mexican-
Americans were routinely arrested, denied due process, and sent to intern-
ment camps that had been set up to detain them.
22
Between July :, : and
June o, :(, 6zo,zo; migrants were apprehended. According to the INS, at
the end of July of : another (o,ooo illegals left California. By the time
Orson Welles had begun work on the production of Touch of Evil the total of
deportees had risen to :,oo,ooo.
23
P A T R I C K M C C A R R A N , M I G U E L V A R G A S A N D
E X T R A T E R R I T O R I A L C I T I Z E N S H I P
Pat McCarrans operations affected the production of Touch of Evil in several
ways. Welles deployed the political resistance to Operation Wetback that
had been mounted on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border as an emo-
tional surplus that he drew upon in his representation of the antagonistic
relationship between Hank Quinlan and Miguel Vargas. Welles turned the
growing awareness of the plight of migrant laborers into the backdrop for
Vargass condemnation of Quinlans denial of Manolo Sanchezs civil rights.
Don al d E. Pe a s e 91
Vargas was a percipient witness when Quinlan planted two sticks of dyna-
mite in the apartment that Sanchez shared with Marcia Lennaker, the
daughter of the murdered contractor.
The dynamite used in Lennakers assassination specically linked its
economic and political dimensions to the growing opposition to Operation
Wetback. The dynamite called attention to the usage to which Lennakers
construction crews (composed of Mexican migrants and American ex-con-
victs) had regularly put such explosives in their extraction of cheap building
materials from the Mexican environment. U.S. entrepreneurs like Rudy
Lennaker who owned the factories in the agricultural and construction
elds in border communities like Los Robles deployed Operation Wetback
to faciltate their exploitation of both the Mexican ecology and the migrant
labor force. Operation Wetback enabled them to hire migrant laborers at
much lower wages than unionized workers demanded and to refuse them
benets of any kind.
In establishing the fact that Manolo Sanchez had worked on one of
Lennakers construction crews on the Mexican side of the border, Welles
produces a correlation between Quinlans denial of his civil rights and the
McCarran Commissions comparable treatment of migrant laborers. When
Vargas discovers evidence that Quinlan has brought two sticks of dynamte
from his turkey ranch and planted them in Sanchezs apartment, Hestons
character draws upon the borderland communities righteous indignation
over the injustice done to migrants.
But Welles also introduces elements into this scenario that impede these
projections of collective indignation. From the moment he enters the apart-
ment that Marcia Lennaker shares with Sanchez, Vargas makes it clear that
he is less interested in protecting Manolo Sanchezs civil rights than in
nding Quinlan guilty of violating them. Vargas is uncomfortable over the
fact that the apartment Lennaker shares with Sanchez belongs to her and
that the public perception of their interracial romance will reect badly on
his own marriage to Susan.
Rather than identifying with the political cause that the Sanchez case
symbolizes, or defending Sanchezs civil rights, Vargas uses his discovery of
planted evidence as the basis for producing a distinction between his social
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 92
standing and Sanchezs. At the very moment that he accuses Quinlan of
planting evidence, Vargas opens up a space within the apartment that I ear-
lier described as the extraterritorial site where the law declares an exception.
When he enters that space, Vargas produces an unsurpassable gulf between
himself and Manolo Sanchez. More importantly, he gains access to the same
emergency powers that enabled Pat McCarran to declare wetbacks a threat
to the national security.
After he apprises Schwartz, the states attorney, of his intention to inves-
tigate the legality of Hank Quinlans policing procedures, Vargas assumes the
emergency power to take whatever means necessary to accomplish this pur-
pose. Schwartz authorizes him to enter Quinlans private property without
a warrant, to obtain access to his police les, to interrogate him without
counsel, and to plant a wire to gather evidence against him.
But this is not the rst time Vargas has exercised these powers. When
the Mexican state appointed him the head of the Pan-America Narcotics
Commisssion, it granted Vargas powers comparable with those which the
U.S. government had invested in Pat McCarran. Vargass commission and
McCarrans committee both came into existence as a result of the panic over
the perceived threat that illegal substances and illegal aliens were reputed
to pose to the publics moral health. In :;, the year that Welles directed
Touch of Evil, the McCarran Internal Security Committee worked closely
with Mexicos drug commission as they jointly policed the borders between
the two territories.
U.S. Immigration policies produced the framework that established an
equivalence between the illegal substances over which the Vargas commis-
sion exercises control and the illegal aliens that the McCarran Committee
rounded up. These policies constructed an implicit equivalence between ille-
gal substances and illegal aliens. This equivalence proposed that the eco-
nomic needs of migrant laborers be construed as indistinguishable from the
bodily needs of the drug addicts who were presumed to be the consumers of
the prohibited substances.
When Vargas places the emergency powers that he formerly exercised to
prosecute drug trafckers into the service of proving Quinlan guilty of
improper policing, however, he adopts the McCarran Committees rationale
Don al d E. Pe a s e 93
as more suitable for his purposes. In characterizing Quinlan as posing a
threat to the security of a Mexican citizen, Vargas also pronounces Quinlan
a threat to Mexicos national security. It is no small irony that at the time
Welles played the character of Hank Quinlan, the security apparatus of the
United States had assigned to Orson Welles a security rating that was com-
parable to Quinlans. As a consequence of his involvement in popular front
activities like the Sleepy Lagoon case, Orson Welles was ofcially classied
as a potential threat to the national security.
24
T H E E R O T I C L I F E O F S T A T E S O F E M E R G E N C Y
Thus far I have argued that U.S. immigration policies and Mexican Drug
policies supplied Touch of Evil with the organizing metaphors out of which
its narrative constructed homologies associating the migrant laborer
Manolo Sanchez, who is forcibly displaced from the social order, with the
bad cop Hank Quinlan, whose exercise of corrupt policing practices is
responsible for Sanchezs displacement, and with the gure of the wetback
that the national security apparatus constructed as the pretext for its gen-
eralized surveillance. By way of a conclusion, I want to explain how the spec-
tacular transformation that Susan Vargas undergoes in the course of the
lmfrom the American wife of Miguel Vargas at the lms outset into a
suspect released to his protective custody at its conclusionadds yet
another homology to this series.
Before turning to that task, however, I need to state more clearly the
grounds for the claim that underpins this entire series of homologies. When
I correlated Vargass treatment of Quinlan with the McCarran Committees
of migrant laborers, I did not propose that this linkage should be construed
as having exonerated Quinlan for planting evidence in the Sanchez case. But
I did want to call attention to the signicant distinction between the tactics
that Quinlan uses in his botched attempt to frame Sanchez and the immense
state powers to which Vargas obtains access when he states his intention to
gather incriminating evidence against Quinlan.
When Welles draws upon the political controversies surrounding Opera-
tion Wetback to obscure Vargass complicity with the emergency state, he
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 94
adds one more layer to Charlton Hestons brownface mask. The crime that
the lm does not acknowledge involves the emergency powers that Vargas
enacts in his investigation of Quinlan. Unlike Welles, Vargas does not share
the gathering political sentiment directed against the injustices suffered by
migrant laborers. The association of that just cause with the organized vio-
lence that Vargas puts to the task of destroying Quinlans reputation only
constitutes an alibi for the state crimes that the lm cannot acknowledge.
The lm spectators identication of these causes with Vargass pursuit of
Quinlan occludes the fact that Vargas does not want justice, he wants to
exercise unregulated state power.
25
Indeed, when he represents Vargass investigation as a form of resistance
to Quinlans overt racism, Welles might be described as having produced an
unconscious in which the states racism could go undetected. Racial justice
is technically impossible to obtain in a state whose juridical system is
authorized by the states emergency powers. States of emergency derive their
juridical authority through the production of exceptions; e.g., wetbacks,
upon whom the state has inscribed racial markings. Moreover, had the lm
represented Vargass use of the states excessive force as a crime, it would
have been required to accuse the state as the agency responsible for its com-
mission. And no state could adjudicate a crime which the state itself was
accused of having committed. The citizen-subjects of liberal states abrogate
the right to bring the state to justice when they divest themselves of the
legitimate use of violence and invest it in the state. The state thereafter exer-
cises a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.
Liberal doctrine represents citizens as endowed with the sovereign
power that the state represents. But when it declares a state of emergency,
the states sovereignty takes precedence over the citizens. It is the states
monopoly over the legitimate use of force that empowers it to declare an
exception to the requirement that it obtain the sovereign citizenrys consent
before it declares a state of emergency. Citizens construe their sovereign
rights protected in the last instance by the states power to use all the force
necessary to protect its citizenry.
It is the state of emergency that hails citizen-subjects into existence.
And this emergency power remains dormant within the citizens it calls into
Don al d E. Pe a s e 95
existence. Although external to them, then, the state of emergency might be
said to occupy a place within the citizen-subject that is more internal to the
citizen than the citizens subjectivity. Although internal to them as the power
understood to have inscribed the norms that citizens have internalized, this
power emerges as an utterly external force when it becomes necessary for
the state to protect their rights and liberties. As the power to enforce them,
this emergency power underwrites all of the norms and rules which produce
the normativity of the law.
26
If from one perspective, the state of emergency might be construed to
empower the state to restore the rule of law, from another it might be con-
ceptualized as responsible for the founding of the nation-state. Understood
as a reenactment of the act of sovereign violence responsible for founding
the nation-state, the states emergency power cannot be included within the
nation it rules and protects. A founding act cannot be included in the order
that it founds any more than a state can be a member of itself. Because it is
understood as a reenactment of the act of sovereign violence responsible for
founding the nation-state, the states emergency power required to restore
the rule of law cannot be subject to the rules that it restores. Neither can the
act whereby a law is declared legal or illegal.
Because they describe the activities which produce the distinction
between the includable and the excludable, the states emergency powers
become most evident in the actions the state performs at the borders. At
these borders, the emergency state controls what is inside by producing an
outside. As the paradoxical limit to the national territory, the place where
the state emerges names what cannot be integrated or symbolized within
that which it delineates. A founding act cannot be included in the order that
it founds, and a state cannot be a member of itself.
In restricting the laws violence to a corrupt policing practice that might
be legally named, investigated, and punished, Vargas disallows the congru-
ence between the sovereign violence of the emergency state (its exemption
from regulation by the laws it would enforce) and the more generalized sys-
tem of surveillance and control through which that violence productively
circulates. Vargas thereby renders the emergency powers he exercises the
less visible through the accusationthat Hank Quinlan is alone guilty of
using excessive forcewhich facilitates Vargass usage of these powers. But
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 96
the full force of the violence the state exercises over the exception becomes
all too vivid in Susan Vargass negative transformation.
27
The lms opening scenes represent Susan as moving freely throughout
the town of Los Robles, and as the active bearer of sexual desire.
28
But after
Vargas places her within the control of the Grandi family, the properties of
mobility and freedom and desire are all tangibly removed from her charac-
ter. Having been dislocated from the position she previously occupied in the
symbolic order, Susan Vargas is reduced to the role of a stake in the rivalrous
relations among Joe Grandi, Hank Quinlan, and Miguel Vargas. In between
their worlds but belonging to no world of her own, Susan Vargas is reduced
to the placeholder for all the positions from which she has been excluded.
29
The change in the status of the Vargass relationship becomes most evi-
dent when Miguel Vargas travels to the Grandi Casa Grande desperately in
search of Susan. Along the way to the casino, Vargas passes directly under
Susan who is standing, wearing only the sheet in which the Grandi gang have
draped her, screaming for help on the re escape of a hotel for transients.
When she sees Vargass open convertible pass under the hotel, she calls out
Mikes name. But unlike everyone else in the crowd gathered on the street,
Vargas does not look up at Susan. Instead he drives past her and directly to
the Grandi Casa Grande. Upon his arrival at Casa Grande, Vargas demands
Where is my wife? What have you done with my wife? In lieu of waiting for
a response, Vargas announces I am not a cop now. Im a husband, and
begins to hurl Grandi family members against the walls and to break up the
casinos furniture.
In stating that he is not a cop but a husband now, Vargas has explicitly
excepted himself from the rules that would prohibit a police ofcer from the
use of violence. He produces this exception from within the extraterritorial
space he has brought into the bar with him. The position from which he
enunciates the statement is identical with neither the position of the cop
nor of the husband. The I who is being taken up rst as a cop and then as
a husband is the interpellative power of the state that mandates social posi-
tions. When Miguel Vargas declares that he is not acting like a cop now but
like a husband, he is claiming the power to produce the social roles that he
also enacts. Vargas thereby positions himself within the social order, but as
the power which has ofcially mandated his position within it.
Don al d E. Pe a s e 97
What remains unclear is whether the emergency power that has pro-
nounced this distinction intends to grant the husband access to the violence
that would restore the rule of law, or the power to act outside the law alto-
gether. In turning the cop and the husband into co-constituting positions,
Vargas has rendered the husbands right to defend his domestic property
indistinguishable from the states power to use whatever force necessary to
accomplish that goal. In any case, the violence Vargas exercises against the
Grandi family has substituted a power that must necessarily violate the rule
of law its exercise would also restore. Overall Miguel Vargas has conated his
subjectivity with that of the states structural violence. By the structural vio-
lence of the state, I would refer to the emergency power that enables the
state to constitute the subject positions that it also sustains and reproduces.
But the fact that the Casa Grande is rst and last a house of prostitution
suggests still another interpretation of Vargass puzzling utterances. For
example, when we connect the pronouncement Im not a cop now. Im a
husband with the questions Where is my wife? What have you done with
my wife? the composite phrase might also be construed as a set of instruc-
tions for this customers very specialized object of desire. But just what
might the personication of the emergency power of the state want in a
wife that he has come to Casa Grande to nd?
Although Vargass instructions are potentially mind-boggling, he never-
theless gets the object of his desire after States Attorney Schwartz enters
Casa Grande. Schwartz, who has met all of Vargass other emergency needs,
appears at Casa Grande immediately after Vargass repetition of the ques-
tions: Where is my wife? What have you done with my wife? Susan is in
jail, Schwartz answerswhere she was taken after having been accused of
murder and the use of illegal drugs, and where she looks like one of the
Grandi familys hookers the police have arrested in a drug raid.
Because some confusion is possible, I need to distinguish the Susan that
Vargas has found in the jailhouse from the U.S. citizen to whom he was
married at the lms outset. The Vargas who desired to alienate Susan from
her position as a citizen under the protection of the U.S. government and
transform her into a Mexican resident under his protection was the husband
of Susan Vargas, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family. The Vargas
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 98
who wants the Susan who has become a criminal suspect released into his
protective custody has become the personication of the emergency powers
of the state. As a personication of the states emergency powers, Vargas
stands outside the social order he would regulate. What the emergency state
wants is someone who occupies the space of the exception; that is, someone
like the wetback who is included within the social order yet remains out-
side the condition of belonging to a social order. But if the wetback holds
the place of the hollowed-out body from which the emergency state has
removed the vital power, Susan holds the place of the unsublimated bodily
needs that the subject has disavowed in the process of becoming a citizen.
And Vargas holds the place of the emergency state that enjoys the body that
the citizen has sacriced.
Only the Susan who has been placed outside the condition of belonging
can gratify the sexual fantasy Vargas announces in Casa Grande. After
nding in Susan the objectication of this desire, Vargas can reinvest any
sexual pleasure that he might have enjoyed on his honeymoon in the jouis-
sance that attends the emergency states obscene enjoyment of the violation
of its own rules.
30
But when Vargas thereafter enjoys the violation of the law
to which he has subordinated others, it is difcult to imagine the position
he occupies as just a touch of evil. The relationship he now enjoys with Susan
instead enacts what Kant would call radical evil.

I began this essay with the claim that the history of the lms reception oper-
ated according to the logic of the transference. The observation with which
I have concluded the essaythat the lm represents a crime (the states vio-
lation of its own rules) that its viewers cannot acknowledge as a crime
might be understood as grounds for these anxious transferences. A glimpse
of this unacknowledged crime might come into view, however, should we
think of Miguel and Susan Vargas as restoring at the lms conclusion the
bodies and the relationship of Rudy Lennaker and Zita, whose disappear-
ance had precipitated the state of emergency at the outset.
Don al d E. Pe a s e 99

N O T E S
1. Charlton Heston traces the history of the lms production in In the Arena; An
Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1995), 146178. On Touch of Evils various
scripts and Welless transformation of the original script Badge of Evil, see John Stubbs
The Evolution of Orson Welless Touch of Evil from Novel to Film, in Touch of Evil, ed.
Terry Comito (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 17593.
2. Stephen Heath, Film and System, Terms of Analysis Screen 16, no. 12, (1975): 777,
91113.
3. Homi Bhabha, The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse Screen 24,
no. 1 (1983): 732.
4. In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), a volume that he co-edited with Hector
Calderon, Jose David Saldivar has gathered together numerous essays which display the
pertinence of this discourse to political movements and counter-hegemonic cultures
across the Americas. The Borderlands was a political formation as well as a range of spa-
tial practices that interrelated multiple international as well as transnational locales.
Borderlands discourse recorded the stories of the economic and political refugees who
inhabited the barrios, ghettos, and resettlement reservations at and across the borders
of the United States and Mexico. Upon remembering the colonial history that the ofcial
history of the United States had suppressed, this discourse enacted a counter-memory
that could be deployed as a weapon in combatting its hegemony.
5. Stephen Heath, Film and System, Terms of Analysis, 49.
6. Stephen Heath, Film and System, Terms of Analysis. 50.
7. Stephen Heath, Film and System, Terms of Analysis, 93.
8. Homi K. Bhabha, The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse
of Colonialism, in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London:
Methuen, 1986), 15354. I have chosen this version of Bhabhas much reprinted essay,
because in it he explicitly addresses its relationship to postcolonial studies.
9. Homi K. Bhabha, The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse
of Colonialism, 154.
10. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 100
Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996). The Sleepy Lagoon case lies behind Touch
of Evil just as the Harry Bridges case lies behind The Lady from Shanghai. Obviously,
there is no literal connection between the cases and the lms. However . . . the framing
of young Manolo Sanchez by the corrupt policeman Quinlan in Touch of Evil is a . . .
metamorphosis of the Sleepy Lagoon case. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The
Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 401.
11. Joan Copjec, Introduction. Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), xii.
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987) opposed the frontier mentality from which denizens of the
borderlands wanted to be dispossessed through the political movement through which
they struggled to accomplish this state of affairs. The Borderlands opened up a space
that Michel Foucault has called a heterotopia. In remaining outside of the imperial
norms of other cultural spaces, what I have called La Frontera justice permitted of their
analysis, contestation, and reversal. La Frontera contested the frontier mentality most
vigorously at border crossings and other sites of entry.
12. For an excellent discussion of the difculties in dening lm noir as a genre, see
Michael Walkers Film Noir: Introduction, in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian
Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 835. In the same volume, see Deborah
Thomass How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male, 5970, for a discussion of how
lm noir dramatizes points of crisis in the lives of its male protagonists, one of which
is the transition from wartime to peacetime, see Richard Maltby, The Politics of the
Maladjusted Text, 348.
13. Julian Murphet, Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious, Screen 34, no.1 (1998): 30.
Manthia Diawara has argued that noir lms by black directors call attention to this
invisibility to heighten the sense of self-presentation Noir by Noirs: Toward a New
Realism in Black Cinema, Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993), 261279.
14. Charlton Heston has recently recalled the part Welles played in this transformation in
great detail: His name was Vargas, we decided; the very bright son of a wealthy
Mexican family on the fast track for high ofce in his country. None of this was either
in the script or the picture, but inventing his background, we could begin to invent the
man. But Welles may have also had in mind Portabiro Vargas, the fascist dictator of
Brazil whose police state tactics Welles experienced rsthand when he lmed there in
1948, when he came up with this name. In the Arena; An Autobiography (New York:
Simon & Schuster: 1995), 154.
Don al d E. Pe a s e 101
15. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse October 28 (1984):
125133.
16. Perhaps in an effort to call attention to the difference between the Mexican actors and
the character that Heston played, Welles cast a Mexican actor whose name was Vargas
to play the biker who expressed an erotic interest in Susan on the streets of Los Robles.
On the larger question of the relationship between the social construction of Chicano/a
identities and Welless cinematic representations and the casting of Chicanos and
Mexicans, see William Anthony Nericcios Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds: Orson Welless
Touch of Evil, in Chon A. Noriega, Chicanos and Film: Representations and Resistance
(Minneappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 183184.
17. See Paul Schrader, Notes on Film Noir in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James
Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 5364, for an explanation of the relation-
ship between the noir gaze and the cold war states surveillance apparatus.
18. Andre Bazin has proposed a reading of Hank Quinlans character that explicitly links
him with the politics of the exception in Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles:
Acrobat Books, 1991).
Quinlan is not really the crooked cop. He doesnt make anything out of his investigations.
He is convinced of the guilt of the people he gets convicted on false evidence. Without him,
therefore, the guilty would pass for innocent. . . . Quinlan is physically monstrous, but is he
morally monstrous as well? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because he is guilty of a crime to
defend himself; no, because from a higher moral standpoint, he is, at least in certain
respects, above the honest, just, intelligent Vargas, who will always lack that sense of life
which I shall call Shakespearean. These exceptional beings should not be judged by ordi-
nary laws. (124)
19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 24. The exception the state produces to engender the limits to
the rule of democratic governance might also be understood to embody the rule that
has produced the exception. As the limit internal to the national order but external to
its conditions of belonging, the exception can consent to this non-position, or the
exception can do what the young Oriental did and turn the limit into legal grounds
for supplanting the entire order.
20. Etienne Balibar describes this moment of emergence in The Nation-Form: History and
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 102
Ideology, in Race, Class and Nation: Ambiguous identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1988) pp. 86106.
21. For a cogent analysis of how this moment ts into the long history of Chicano repres-
sion, see Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicanos Struggle to Liberation (San
Antonio: Caneld Press, 1974).
22. Nelson G. Copp provides a useful historical account of the relationship between Opera-
tion Wetback and braceros labor disutes in Wetbacks and Braceros (San Francisco: R
and E Research Associates, 1971). Ernesto Galarza discusses the campaigns mounted
in opposition to the states antidemocratic measures in Merchants of Labor: The
Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte: Mc Nelly and Loftin, 1964).
23. I have drawn these statistics from Jorge Bustamanta, Undocumented Immigration
from Mexico: Research Report International Migration Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 1977):
149177; and Arthur F. Corwin, Mexican Emigration History, 19001970: Literature
and Research Latin American Research Review 8, no. 2 (Summer, 1973): 324.
24. See James Narremore, The Trial: the F.B.I. vs. Orson Welles Film Comment, January-
February, 1991, pp.2227.
25. D. A. Miller has argued that detective novels, in producing a distinction between their
detection and space exempted from policing power, lull us into the belief that everyday
life is free from surveillance. See The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988).
I would argue that the emergency powers that underwrite the citizen also under-
write and produce a mediation between what Michel Foucault has described as the
irreducible distinction between the citizens understanding of the citizens rights as sov-
ereign and the disciplinary society in which those rights would be exercised. Foucault
explains that from the nineteenth century to our own day, civil society
has been characterized on the one hand, by a legislation, a discourse, an organization based
on public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status
of each citizen; and on the other hand by a closely lined grid of disciplinary coercions
whose purpose is in fact to assure the coherence of this same social body. Hence these two
limits, a right of sovereignty and a mechanism of discipline which dene, I believe, the
arena in which power is exercised. But these two limits are so heterogeneous that they can-
not possibly be reduced to each other. . . . The powers of modern society are exercised
through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of
Don al d E. Pe a s e 103
sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism. The disciplines may well be the
carriers of a discourse that speaks of a rule, but this is not the juridical rule deriving from
sovereignty, but a natural rule, a norm. The code they come to dene is not that of law but
that of normalisation.
See Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 107.
26. Sylvia Wynter has described the visual dominance Susan exercises in this scene as a
version of what she calls the Miranda complex. The relationship of the dominance
of Miranda (although female) over Caliban (although male),Wynter explains, results
from the objectication of Caliban (whose racialized otherness is represented in his
physiognomic, read monstrous, difference) as lacking the rationality which Miranda is
now represented as alone capable of exercising. Sylvia Wynter, Beyond Mirandas
Meanings: Un/silencing the Demonic Ground of Calibans Woman, in Out of the
Kumbla: Caribbean Wokmen and Literature, ed. Carol Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory
Fido (New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990), 35572.
27. Fantasy conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around
some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolizedi.e., the
real of jouissance: through fantasy jouissance is domesticated. Slavoj Ziziek, The
Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 123.
28. See Paul Schrader, Notes on Film Noir in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James
Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 53, for an explanation of the relationship
between the noir gaze and the cold war states surveillance apparatus.
29. In Noir Wagner Elizabeth Bronfen argues that it castrates her by subjecting her to a
stake in a game of masculine bonds of honor, rivalry, jealousy, and camaraderie that
utterly crosses out any agency of her own. Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl, (Durham: Duke
University Press: 2000), 197.
30. For a brilliant reading of the ways in which private enjoyment can destroy a network of
symbolic relations, see Joan Copjec. The Phenomenal/ Nonphenomenal in Joan
Copjec, Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993). In Film Noir and Women Elizabeth
Cowie argues that femme fatale is simply a catch phrase for the dangers of sexual dif-
ference and the demands and risks that desire poses for the man. The male hero know-
ingly submits himself to the spider woman . . . for it is precisely her dangerous sexuality
Bor de r l i ne J us t i c e / St at e s of Eme r g e nc y 104
that he desires, so that it is ultimately his own perverse desire, that is his downfall.
Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993), 125. Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the
Screen (San Diego: A. S. Barnes, 1981). Janey Place, Women in Film Noir, in E. Ann
Kaplan, ed. Women and Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978).
Don al d E. Pe a s e 105