Carlos Reygadas’ Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven (2005): Disarticulating the brown male body from myths of Mexican masculinity

Abstract

Abstract This article examines questions of masculinity in Carlos Reygadas’s film Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven. Using a comparative approach to address Reygadas’s allusions to the melodramas of Mexico’s cinematic Golden Age, the discussion shows how the model of mestizo masculinity established in the post-revolutionary period remains prevalent in contemporary society as depicted in the film, despite its detrimental effects on the lived experiences of actual Mexican males. Close examination of the main character, Marcos, offers a perspective on how the state’s centring of the male mestizo’s social and economic agency has continued to uphold the established racial hierarchy and traditional relationships of exploitation in Mexico, despite the most recent reconfigurations of the national political economy under neo-liberalism. With particular attention to Reygadas’s aesthetics of realism and the prominent juxtapositions of European oil paintings in the mise-en-scène, the argument contends that Batalla en el cielo denounces the contradictory national model of masculine identity by revealing its effects on the racialized bodies of brown males.