Donald Pease Touch of Evil

7/27/2019 Donald Pease Touch of Evil

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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

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75

Borderline Justice/

States of Emergency

Orson WellesTouch 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 -year period. (A directors cut of

the film was produced in out of the -page memo Welles had written

to Universal executives after viewing Harry Kellers remake of several key

scenes).1 But the film, which recounts Miguel Vargass decision to interrupt

his honeymoon in the imaginary border town of Los Robles, with hisAmerican 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 first

release and produced a -minute version of the film with little distribution.

After a showing at Brussels World Fair in and a two-year run in Paris,

Touch of Evilvirtually went out of circulation.

Touch of Evilhas recouped its losses at the box office, however, throughthe symbolic capital it has accumulated in the academy where it has exerted

an unprecedented influence in the formation and reconfiguration of various


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academic disciplines. After a film archivist discovered a -minute version

in , Stephen Heath conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of the film in

two successive issues ofScreen that, in consolidating film studies epistemo-

logical rationale, significantly 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 Frontpublished in ,

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 films 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 strategiesmounted in opposition to them. In his pioneering work on what he has

called its filmic system, Stephen Heath has proposed that the law operating

within the films narrative should be understood to effect the resolution of

the violent disruption in the order of things with which the film 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 hisAmerican wife Susan, Heath arrives at the conclusion that the trajectory of

their relationship constitutes the kernel of the ideal film 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 ratified the means whereby the filmic 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

B o r d e r l i n e J u s t i c e / S t a t e s o f E m e r g e n c y 76


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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 film uses the border, the play between

American and Mexican . . . at the same time it seeks to hold that play finally

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 affirm the authority of U.S. national

identity in place of an analysis of the resolutely incoherent usages to which

the film 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 signifier of a pioneering male American spirit always under

threat from races and cultures.8

After he refuses Heaths claim that the film resolves the tension between the

law and justice, Bhabha contends that when the unrestrained play of nation-alities at work in Touch of Evilgets articulated to the characters contradic-

tory sexual and racial positionings, their unresolved conflict renders the

divergence between law and justice irreconcilable. Unlike Heath, Bhabha

reads the films 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 films opening scene: If

the death of the father names the interruption on which the narrative is

D o n a l d E . P e a s e 77


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initiated, as Bhabha articulates his revision, it is through that death that

miscegenation becomes both possible and deferred.9 The film 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 Frontpublished in , 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 film 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 significance

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 socialand civic injustices that pertained at the border.

Dennings effort to remember this forgotten history entails his shifting

the focus of the films attention away from Miguel Vargass relationship with

Susan and onto Sheriff Hank Quinlan, whose part Welles had played in the

film. 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 corruptSheriff 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 significance of Quinlans corrupt implementation

of border law to the films 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 specific



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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 film 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 specifically, Denning has identified 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 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

fifteen years earlier into what Joan Copjec has described as the noir films

absent cause, which is to say the element which does not appear in the field

of the films effects but underwrites its mise en scene as what the film desires

to represent.11

I have provided this brief itinerary in order to suggest that the genealogyof the films reception has operated according to the logic of the transference.

Each emergent disciplinary formation has produced a discourse about the

film which claims a knowledge that the films previous interpreters either

would not claim or could not know. For example, Homi Bhabha derived the

force of his reading of the film 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 tothe 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 film 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 theseemergent disciplinary formations the desire to extract and thereafter find

the terms that would do justice to the subaltern knowledgescolonial

discourse and borderlands discourse respectivelythat their predecessor



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formations were predicated on forgetting. Touch of Evilhas thereafter oscil-

lated in status between an object of disciplinary knowledge within film 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 ofTouch of Evil

have eventuated would tend to ratify what has become the conventional wis-

dom concerning the film noir; namely, that film noir emplots within its nar-

rative the ideological contradictions and social antagonisms intrinsic to the

U.S. social order. But in film noir, the desire to resolve these contradictions

through the solution of a crime, as would happen, say, in a classic Hollywood

detective film, gives way to the recognition of the film noir heros ineluctable

complicity in the crimes and actions under investigation. The double indem-

nity of film 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 defining feature of film noir entails its capacity to draw out of the

film genre from which it emergesthe detective film, the cowboy western,the sci-fi thrilleran element which cannot be accommodated by that

genres conventions. This feature in part explains why the analysis of noir

films 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 VA R G A S

Having proposed the central role played by the logic of the transference in

the history of the films 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, Iwant to bring into critical focus a character within the film who has been the

unchallenged beneficiary of the anxious transferences underwriting the his-

tory of the films reception. In leaving his motives and actions unexamined,



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each of these readings has positioned Miguel Vargas as the subject who is

supposed to know what a previous understanding of the film had either dis-

owned or foreclosed. When they are attributed to Miguel Vargas, the disci-

plinary knowledges produced within these fields significantly enrich Vargass

investigative procedures and contribute additional dimensions to Vargass

understanding of his complex relationship with Susan. As the subject within

the film 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 solidifies his relationship with Susan.

Orson Welles certainly adapted knowledges about hybridity and the bor-

derlands to his production ofTouch of Evil. But in constructing his noir hero

by way of Charlton Hestons efforts at brown-face self-presentation, Welles

also underscored the historically specific social and political conditions thatprevailed at the moment of the films 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 film 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 defining force in urban culture, in order thereafter

to expel racial markedness from the field 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 affirmations, 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 thisprocess 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



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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 hisAmerican 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 official

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 awayfrom 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.



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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 office 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 multiplecommunities. 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 shareswith 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



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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 fiction 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 benefit of counsel,

denial of civil rightsof which he formerly accused Quinlan.

When he enters this exceptional space wherein a higher legal standardregulates 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 film in that his account ofcolonial 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



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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 establishingand 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

officers 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 intothe service of governmental rule.

When he asked Heston to play his character in brownface, Welles

intended to recover the unofficial 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 film Pony Express; as

William Clark in the Far Horizons, Universal Studios

rendition of theLewis and Clark expedition; as a cattleman who led a fight with Indians and

Mexicans over water rights inBig Countryreleased the same year as Touch of

Evil. These roles established Hestons primary cinematic identity as identical



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with the figure that Bhabha described as the cultural signifier 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 official representative of the international law regulating transactions

at the border, Welles had not affirmedLa Fronteraspower 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 filmic system. In

projecting an image of Mexicanness that bore no resemblance to any of the

actual Mexican actors in the film, 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 film per-

sona as the racist unconscious of the international juridical apparatusresponsible for the supervision of the border laws regulative of the relation-

ship between the United States and Mexico. Welles had resignified Hestons

character in the image of a Mexican to demonstrate how that resignification

enhanced Vargass regulatory authority. It was precisely the lack of fit

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

signifier 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 identification out of which he constructs his



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social identity wholly into the persona through which the law exercises its

emergency powers.

O P E R A T I O N WE 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 identification 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 personified 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 films narrative, then

the noir aspect ofTouch of Evilshould be understood to have emerged whenthe emergency powers of the law that Miguel Vargas personifies 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 films 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 film noir

conventions with this deportation policy in the films 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 wadingacross 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 floating belly up in the waters, and thereby animates a relay of visual



15/32

connotations that articulate Welless depiction of the two figures involved in

the production of a corrupt cop with the figure produced within the histor-

ical scenario that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)

called Operation Wetback.

In concluding with this condensed visual signifier, 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 films processes of investigating this crime have reperformed the

crimes of the emergency state which constitutes the films 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 films 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 briefly 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 , mile border that had eluded the attention of

the officials assigned responsibility for its security. These undocumented

workers typically gained entry during harvest time when they were swal-

lowed up by factories in agricultural fields overseen by processors of plantproducts 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 identification 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 classification wetback operated an internal exclusion that official



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INS policies thereafter rendered indispensable to the construction of the

nations borders. The wetback was the states name for a figure who was at

once less than yet also more than a supplement to the national citizen.

Something less in that a wetback signified what the civic order was lack-

ing; something more in that the wetback also signified 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. Thecitizen is produced out of the subjects active disinvestment of bodily needs.

If this act of bodily sacrifice 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 ofthe positions within the social order, the wetback might be described as

holding the position of the null figure 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 film, I meant

to claim that the image of Hank Quinlans corpse afloat in the polluted

waters between the United States and Mexico coincides exactly with theimage 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



17/32

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. InHomo Sacer, Agamben describes the figure

of the migrant laborer as one of the names for the figure 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 figures that a

state produced when it established a historically specific concretization of

the universalizing process known as nation-formation. These paradoxicalfigures materialized at and as the site where the state asserted the distinc-

tion between the nation as a universal form and its historically specific par-

ticularization. As a limit internal to the nation, such figures specified the

difference between nationalism as a universal modern norm and a states

historically specific particularization of that norm.20

But the space wherein such exceptions were produced was not, as the

final lurid image ofTouch of Evilattests, reducible to these signifiers of theinternally excluded. It also included the rules of law themselves, which by

definition 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



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could be numbered among the wetbacks who illegally crossed the Rio

Grande River. The connection that McCarran adduced between the influx of

migrants and the threat of enemy infiltration 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 official inves-

tigation. Although this legislation had not specifically targeted Mexicans,

Senator McCarran nevertheless recommended that the McCarran-Walter

Act of 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 officially to inaugurate the encompassing project

of mass deportation that required the concerted efforts of various sectors of

the federal government in , , , and . Because the emergency

measure placed all Mexican-Americans under suspicion of membership

within its operative category, Operation Wetback provided government

officials 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 , , , migrants were apprehended. According to the INS, at

the end of July of another , illegals left California. By the time

Orson Welles had begun work on the production ofTouch of Evilthe total of

deportees had risen to ,,.23

P A T R I C K M C C A R R A N , M I G U E L VA 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 ofTouch of Evilin 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 antagonisticrelationship 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.



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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 specifically 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

fields 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

benefits 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, Wellesproduces 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 theseprojections 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

finding 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 reflect 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



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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 files, to interrogate him without

counsel, and to plant a wire to gather evidence against him.

But this is not the first 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 andMcCarrans 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 anequivalence 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 traffickers into the service of proving Quinlan guilty of

improper policing, however, he adopts the McCarran Committees rationale



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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 officially classified

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 Evilwith 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 figure of the wetbackthat 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

filmfrom the American wife of Miguel Vargas at the films 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 thegrounds 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 significant 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 togather incriminating evidence against Quinlan.

When Welles draws upon the political controversies surrounding Opera-

tion Wetback to obscure Vargass complicity with the emergency state, he



22/32

adds one more layer to Charlton Hestons brownface mask. The crime that

the film 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 film cannot acknowledge.

The film spectators identification 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 filmrepresented 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 forcenecessary 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



23/32

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 restorethe 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 wherethe 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



24/32

the full force of the violence the state exercises over the exception becomes

all too vivid in Susan Vargass negative transformation.27

The films 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 fire escape of a hotel for transients.

When she sees Vargass open convertible pass under the hotel, she calls outMikes 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 officer 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 first 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 officially mandated his position within it.



25/32

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 conflated 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 first 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 personification of the emergency power of the state want in a

wife that he has come to Casa Grande to find?

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 films outset. The Vargas who desired to alienate Susan fromher 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



26/32

who wants the Susan who has become a criminal suspect released into his

protective custody has become the personification of the emergency powers

of the state. As a personification 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 sacrificed.

Only the Susan who has been placed outside the condition of belonging

can gratify the sexual fantasy Vargas announces in Casa Grande. After

finding in Susan the objectification 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 violationof its own rules.30 But when Vargas thereafter enjoys the violation of the law

to which he has subordinated others, it is difficult 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 films reception oper-

ated according to the logic of the transference. The observation with which

I have concluded the essaythat the film 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 films conclusion thebodies and the relationship of Rudy Lennaker and Zita, whose disappear-

ance had precipitated the state of emergency at the outset.



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N O T E S

1. Charlton Heston traces the history of the films 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 scriptBadge of Evil, see John Stubbs

The Evolution of Orson Welless Touch of Evilfrom 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 official

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



28/32

Twentieth Century(New York: Verso, 1996). The Sleepy Lagoon case lies behind Touch

of Eviljust as the Harry Bridges case lies behind The Lady from Shanghai. Obviously,

there is no literal connection between the cases and the films. 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 calledLa Fronterajustice 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 difficulties in defining film 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

film 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 films by black directors call attention to thisinvisibility to heighten the sense of self-presentation Noir byNoirs: 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 office 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 firsthand when he filmed there in

1948, when he came up with this name. In the Arena; An Autobiography(New York:

Simon & Schuster: 1995), 154.



29/32

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 onFilm Noir inFilm 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



30/32

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 fits into the long history of Chicano repres-

sion, see Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicanos Struggle to Liberation (San

Antonio: Canfield 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 ReportInternational Migration Review2, no. 2 (Summer 1977):

149177; and Arthur F. Corwin, Mexican Emigration History, 19001970: Literature

and ResearchLatin American Research Review8, 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. Foucaultexplains 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 define, 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



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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 define 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 objectification 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 ofjouissance: through fantasyjouissance is domesticated. Slavoj Ziziek, The

Sublime Object of Ideology(London: Verso, 1989), 123.

28. See Paul Schrader, Notes onFilm Noir inFilm 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 astake 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



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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).


Documents

Donald Pease Touch of Evil