Storylines: Spectral Traces of Ungrievable Lives

by: Jessica Wax-Edwards , February 6, 2024

Mexico’s 17-year-old ongoing drug war has claimed more than 300,000 lives. Since its 2006 launch by then-President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), levels of violence, murder, and ‘disappearances’ have mushroomed leaving families devastated and towns abandoned. Such is the reality of the parentless child protagonists of Issa López’s Vuelven/Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017). These children (Estrella, Shine, Morro, Tucsi, and Pop) live on the margins of what is left of their town. They are forgotten by wider society but leave their marks all over the city in graffiti, and artistic assemblages of drawn-on and tampered with toys. Through these markings they insist upon their story and their existence, despite society’s abandonment of them.

Vuelven marks López’s hard-earned departure from rom-coms and is her first global success. During decades working as a writer, producer, and director in Mexico and the USA, she has expressed an interest in horror, but has been repeatedly met with perceptions of horror as a substandard, ‘B-movie’ genre—deemed inappropriate subject matter for a woman director. After the loss of her father, López decided, ‘I didn’t have control over a lot of things in my life but I had control over the stories I wanted to tell’ (TIFF Originals 2020). Vuelven offers her own take on the impact of Mexico’s drug war, corruption, and gang violence. These themes had thus far been reserved for male filmmakers like Amat Escalante, Gerardo Naranjo, and Fernando Frías. Indeed, while these three directors’ films debuted at Cannes (Heli 2013, Miss Bala 2011) and Tribeca (Ya no estoy aquí/I’m No Longer Here, 2019), López’s Vuelven was rejected by the major mainstream circuits. It wasn’t until she approached horror genre festivals that her film garnered the attention it deserved.

Through the horror genre, López engages with similarly pressing concerns to the above films, namely the powerlessness of citizens in a climate of ongoing conflict. The film then advances the theme by focusing on the perspectives of children. López and her characters write/draw their own stories, stretching what is possible through imagination. In the context of war, these children’s lives are both precarious (at constant risk) and ungrievable. In Frames of War, Judith Butler defines ‘ungrievable lives’ as ‘those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed’ (2009: p. xx).Agency and humanity are stripped from the protagonists, who strive throughout the film to build their own community, however small and inconsequential to the world around them. The State also erases these lives through biopolitical framings, that is, when the dead are understood as statistics, criminals or objects.

Such an approach works to further discredit the value of these lives by dehumanising citizens. On the one hand, graphic images of brutalised corpses on TV, or worse still seen at their site of disposal, function as narco press releases and reinforce that personal precarity—as a result of what Sayak Valencia (2018) terms gore capitalism—is a constant part of ‘life’. On the other, continual government reduction or dismissal of the dead and disappeared serves to erase their stories, their humanity, and their lives from official discourse. Calderón’s government referred to the drug war dead as ‘recursos humanos’ (human resources) and tarnished the majority of the deceased by claiming they were involved in the trafficking of narcotics. Under his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), 43 students were forcibly disappeared by the State in collusion with organised crime. And Mexico’s current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) has further militarised the country, increasing the intensity of the conflict. Thus according to the State’s actions and discourse, civilian lives are without value. Existing in this environment means enduring the constant threat of brutality, whether experienced personally or through news or media. Conversely, remembering and honouring the dead through acts such as memorialisation often functions as a sort of counter-victimisation ‘affirming that a victim does in fact exist’ , (Tarica 2015) such that a loss is felt. So it is for our protagonists, who express their grief and (lack of) control through writing and drawing. It’s unsurprising then that these utensils are the ones that help them to communicate with each other, the dead and the disappeared.

In horror, our capacity to commune with the dead is accepted. Any supposed planes of separation are dissolved into one another. The ghost need not be a literal spectre but can instead be a haunting reminder of the precarity of the present. The ghostly dead’s state of being, a non-presence/non-absence, parallels the state of non-life/non-death embodied by the ungrievable. Because war too is horror and living in prolonged subjugation to the threat of death is unstable and disturbing. Storylines engages with the practice of how to represent these sensations by capturing what is and isn’t there. In the act of editing, I was able to bring together visceral lines traced in blood and Rorschach-esque saturations with the written-on-skin, of stone and pens, of chalk and spray paint. The video then explores how lines are drawn between and traverse planes of existence and modes of being. To what extent can grief and control be felt, insisted upon, and seized?  And if received history is unreliable, what narrative meaning can the living lay claim to? It is this haptic, palpable nature of the inquiry and the process that drew me to  the subject of this video and the methodology.