If you log onto Hulu today, you’ll see something rather…odd…featured in its rolling “look at me!” entries right up top: you’ll see Hulu urging you to watch Arturo Perez Torres’ 2007 “documentary,” Super Amigos, about…
…well, it’s about Mexican wrestlers, in complete costume, working in the community to solve social problems, like gentrification, homophobia, and environmental destruction.
Mexican wrestlers…progressive politics…and it’s dead serious.
Mexican culture as seen in the U.S., and by extension much of U.S. Latino culture, is puzzling on its best day. Filmmakers, writers, performers want to be taken seriously, and deserve to be…and yet so much of the most visible content from Mexico is wildly over-the-top, like telenovelas, slapstick comedy and–of course–the joyful insanity of Mexican wrestling. So when you see Super Amigos touted as Hulu’s “Pick of the Day,” you have a tendency to wince. Look at the picture: half a dozen big, fat guys in silly costumes, complete with capes and masks, “battling evil” in the squared circle. It’s like a throwback to the 1960’s “camp” Batman, about as far away from Batman Begins as you can get. That’s Lucha Libre for you.
But it’s more than that. Super Amigos is really a rather amazing work by Mexican writer, designer, and filmmaker Arturo Perez Torres (take a look at his cv and samples here) that is not just a parody a la Spinal Tap. Yes, it’s bizarre beyond words to see “Super Barrio”, in his bright red costume and silver cape, sitting down with a desperately poor family to help them figure out how to avoid being evicted, along with 30 other families, by a landlord bent on gentrifying their building. It’s equally weird to see that family’s blind abuela treat him with automatic respect and authority–like, you know, you have superheroes stopping by la casa to talk about
urban economics and social activism all the time. And it can make one a bit woozy to see these crazy wrestler-types calling themselves “Super Animal” (for animal rights), Ecologista Universal, Super Barrio (fair housing, see above), Fray Tormenta (poverty) and Super Gay (guess), saving Mexico City and the whole damn planet and wrestling bad guys like “Homophobia” and “The Matador.”
As one of the on-the-street people say, “This is not a joke; this is not a prank. They’re not clowns. They are human beings, fighting against inequality, against the authorities that don’t keep their promises. They are Quixotes of La Mancha. And Perez’ remarkable combination of staged pieces with the Super Amigos, wrestling footage, animation, and on-the-street interviews is both fascinating and oddly effective. By the end of it, you actually feel kind’a good…and all this time, you’ve been watching Mexican wrestlers. But Perez does tell you what to expect from the very beginning. The first words on the screen are “Reality begins when we all choose to believe.”
The most remarkable thing, of course, is that Hulu has chosen this, among everything that’s out there in the cybercineverse, to feature at the top of its Summer line-up, at least for a little while. Obviously they’re stretching; it’s the dead of summer, and most of the original programming on the nets or cable are either unavailable to them or delayed by weeks, so they’re heavy into showing BBC series that never made it to cable, like Misfits and Whites, or short-lived critically acclaimed American TV shows that have been off for a year or three. But among all those, Super Amigos is the only one this side of Akira Kurosawa classics that’s actually in a foreign language (e.g., not American English) and subtitled. And combine this with the recent news that Netflix, the other current giant in streaming video content, has announced its first big international push is going to be into Latin America (not Europe, not Asia–Latin America), and you have to wonder: have these media-folk finally seen the value of the Latino marketplace, and begun to understand it’s not just a cut-and-dried “hispanic market” separate and unique from real Americans? ‘Cause this is Hulu, not HuluHispanic or some marketing offshoot. This is rolling Super Amigos, in all its Lucha Libre glory, right down the middle of mainstream American culture.
They are Mexican wrestlers, my friend. Changing the world for you.
