fandomhigh_ooc | Spotlight on Fandoms: The Mexico Trilogy

The Movies

We call the Mexico Trilogy the Mexico Trilogy because that’s what it says on the DVD box set. It’s also called the Mariachi trilogy. It doesn’t actually feel like a traditional trilogy (say, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or even, God forbid, the Matrix) because it was never actually conceived as such.

The first movie,

El Mariachi

, was conceived by writer/director/producer/cameraman/everything Robert Rodriguez as a way to practice making movies and earning a little cash by shooting an action movie in Mexico and selling it to the Mexican home video market. It was made on an impossibly low budget (7,500$) and is mostly cast with his friends. Sorry ladies, no Antonio in this one.

What he didn’t expect is that the movie would be a massive hit, making enormous profits, garnering him major critical acclaim, and transforming into a Hollywood player almost overnight.

Sometime later he directed an almost-not-quite-sequel called

Desperado

, which is where most people came to know El Mariachi.

Quentin Tarentino, who plays a minor character in the film, commented to his friend Robert Rodriguez that this was his “Dollars Trilogy” (Clint Eastwood’s famous trilogy.

Fistful of Dollars

A Few Dollars More

, and, of course,

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

.). Tarentino said that if Rodriguez made a third movie, he should call it

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

.

Rodriguez ended up doing exactly that, out of a combined desire to test new HD Digital Cameras and to bring his directing style to a sort of epic level. And El Mariachi’s story seemed to be the ideal thing to do it with.

The following will contain spoilers. Some of them you might already know from your characters talking to El or reading his posts. Since each movie is heavily influenced by the events in the previous, it’s rather difficult to be completely unspoilery. But I shall endeavor to do my best.

Characters

Now. Here we hit a tricky part. Because there’s only one character that actually makes it into every movie.

El Mariachi.

In fact, no character makes into more than one movie in an actual physical state. They may show up in dreams or flashbacks, but El is the only person who actually shows up physically, much like the Man With No Name in the previous mentioned Dollars Trilogy.

And, much like the Man With No Name, El has no name. At all. None. He has never been given a name in the movie, Rodriguez and Banderas have never stated what his name is, and in all the scripts he’s simply called “The Mariachi”. The first two movies had him never refer to himself as anything or introduce himself. By the third movie, El’s reputation had grown so much that he was referred to in dialogue as “El Mariachi” and was called “El” several times by the character of Sands.

Here, however, are the significant dramatis personae of El’s world.

Domino: Domino only ever appears in the first movie, El Mariachi, but she is immensely important towards the whole series, as it is her fate that makes the man into the myth. That makes un mariachi into El Mariachi. She shows him kindness, gives him a place to stay and, more importantly, a place to work (if only for tips).

Their relationship is somewhat ambiguous in the first movie, but in the second movie, the dialogue identifies her quite clearly as the woman he loved.

Azul: When El starts his journey he is just what the name says he is. A mariachi trying to make it with his guitar, just like his father and his father’s father before him. The problem is that Azul is running around town dressed all in black and carrying a guitar case full of weapons on his own vendetta run. And thus the problem starts, as a horrible case of mistaken identity as Moco’s men run around trying to kill Azul and mistaking El for him.

Moco: The man Azul is out to kill. And the man who is also in love with Domino. And, funnily enough, the local drug lord of the town. He sends his men out to kill Azul and they end up targeting El Mariachi instead. He, not Azul, is the one who is responsible for El’s tragedy at the end of the movie.

Buscemi: So named because the character is played by Steve Buscemi. El’s only friend in the movie Desperado, although we have no idea where they met. We only know that they are close as brothers and that Buscemi has been helping El with his vengeance massacre, although he is obviously getting extremely sick of it.

Carolina: If Domino was El’s first love, then Carolina is El’s second. A hopeless idealist who owns and operates a bookstore in a town where “no one buys books”. Like so many other things in the town, this place actually a front for drug transactions, and is mostly financed by the local drug lord, Bucho. It is suggested that Bucho has some sort of affection for Domino, but nothing particularly defined. El falls in love with her as she continually patches up his wounds and helps him find the truth. At the end of the movie, they ride off into the sunset together.

Bucho: The latest drug lord in El’s vengeance run. Unlike Moco, he is much more cold tempered and intelligent, and capable of acts of charity in some situations. He holds a connection to El’s past from even before the first movie.

Barillo: If every series needs a Big Bad, the one behind it all, then that man for the Mexico Trilogy is Barillo. Head of the largest cartel in Mexico, the man who all the other drug lords report to. Both Moco and Bucho worked for Barillo. In Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he initiates a coup de tat plot against the current President, who is coming down hard on the drug lords.

General Marquez: The man Barillo is paying for the coup de tat. He is also the man responsible for destroying El Mariachi’s life a second time, which is how El finds himself involved in these events.

Agent Sands: A corrupt CIA agent who is working behind the scenes to manipulate the coup de tat for both the gain of the United States (getting rid of a troublesome President) and himself (financial gain). He is notably psychotic and occasionally kills several people for the hell of it. He is also, in Fandom High timeline, the one responsible for El’s position at FH, to get El out of Mexico for undisclosed reasons.

Billy Chambers: Barillo’s left hand man and lead assassin. Billy is an outlaw from Texas on the FBI’s list and is growing both homesick and disgusted with the way Barillo does business.

Special Agent Jorge Ramierz: A retired FBI agent with a vendetta of his own against Barillo. Jorge is extremely good at his job, being responsible for the capture of two Most Wanted criminals and almost getting the third in Barillo before the man escaped to Mexico. Barillo also tortured and killed Ramierz’s partner, making it that much more personal for him.

Agent Ajedrez: A Federale agent and one of Sands’ co-conspirators. They plan to escape with the money prepared to pay Barillo for the coup de tat. Unfortunately for Sands, she has plans of her own.

El Presidente: As the name suggests, the current President of Mexico. He is moving to fight back against the cartels, saying that they are the ones responsible fore destroying the soul of Mexico.

Campo, Queno, Lorenzo, and Fideo: El Mariachi’s comrades-in-arms. Camo and Queno from Desperado and Lorenzo and Fideo from OUaTiM. Like El, they are all Mariachi gunfighters, equally at home playing the guitar as they are with shooting a man. And, like El, they are all possessing of an almost outlandish guitar case-related weapon. They join with El for various reasons, from a shared hatred of Drug Lords to simple money.

What About El Pistolero?

Truth be told? I made El Pistolero up. Completely and utterly. He’s from the gap between Despeardo and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Basically someone El tried to train to be like him. Not like Campo and Lorenzo and the rest of him, but someone like him. Unfortunately, this went entirely the wrong way, as El Pistolero’s bad experiences drove him psychotically insane.

The reason I created a new villain for El instead of using someone else is because, well, his enemies are all dead. And he’s already taken on the head of all the drug cartels of Mexico. The only real way to go from that is to fight himself.

Why Should We Watch?

The El Mariachi movies can be best described as modern spaghetti westerns. Impossible, over-the-top action sequences, a tragic, moving storyline of how violence begets more violence. It’s about men becoming myth, and how myth can become truth if told far enough.

El is a legendary figure, a sort of storybook mythic hero. When not on his trails of vengeance, he tries to right wrongs wherever he can. His skills reflect this sort of mythic status. He does things that are only talked about in story. And unfortunately, he has to pay the price for these impossible abilities.

It’s an homage to Sergio Leone’s classic Westerns (a man with no name with a different cast each time). The brace I occasionally refer to El wearing? Is the same prop that Clint Eastwood wears in A Few Dollars More.

It’s a filmmaker’s movie, as you watch them, learn their respective budgets, and go “Holy crap, it was that freaking cheap? How did he do that?” And the great thing is? In the commentary and 10-minute flick schools? Robert Rodriguez explains exactly how he did it, how you can do it, and why you should be out doing it.

And more than all of those? The movies are really. Freaking. Cool. Actions sequences that cannot help but make you go “That was so badass! Go back, I wanna see that again!” And subtle humor that doesn’t always hit you the first time around, when you think it’s a movie that’s supposed to be taken completely serious.

Go. Watch. Try not to pretend you’re El the next time you have a guitar case for whatever reason.

Where Can I Get Them?
Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico occasionally run on TBS and other such networks, but heavily edited. And given the immense amount of awesome violence and a sex scene between Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek (which the entire crew showed up for. Even the people who didn’t need to be there.)

They’re all available on DVD, alone, in sets of El Mariachi and Desperado, a set of Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

No, I don’t know why. I just know that it made it very difficult to get all of them without owning two copies of Desperado.

Recently though, they’ve come out with a wonderful box set of The Mexico Trilogy. If you’re willing to pony up the dough, I promise that it’s worth it.

It’s also, of course, available on Netfilx and Blockbuster Online.

And it's totally worth it.

Spotlight on Fandoms: The Mexico Trilogy

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