Reframing (Post-)Magical Realist Celluloid: Magicorealism in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids Trilogy

Reframing (Post-)Magical Realist Celluloid: Magicorealism in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids Trilogy Noelia Gregorio From literary adaptations to original narratives, magical realism has motivated long-running debates in contemporary film studies. Some critics, such as Maggie Ann Bowers and Gerret Rowlan, consider magical realism just a visual aesthetic within certain realistic films. In more recent years, though, this claim has been completely debunked by putting the spotlight not only on the avant-garde aesthetic that takes up the ideas of pioneers Roh or Carpentier, but the transgression and complexities that the geopolitical and cultural elements, as with their literary counterpart, have brought into (post-)magical realism and the Latin American tradition. Following this trend, and drawing a parallel between magical realism and post-modern theories, Frederick Luis Aldama interrogates the concept of magical realism prompted by the “boom” writers by identifying contemporary magical realism as “magicorealism,” an expression applied to ethnic writers and filmmakers of the late twentieth century, especially those coming from the Latinx sphere. This term is used to construct global narratives of resistance that, apart from making subaltern modes dominant and turning the “other” into the main subject, embrace their dialogical intersection with European/US narrative modes. In the case of Latinx studies, this postmodern conception of magical realism encompasses contemporary Latinx/Hispanic cinema, in which Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids trilogy can be included. In this particular work, as I will argue in this article, the persistent presence of both sociopolitical Mexican and US references and a magical realist visual aesthetic brings these films to the aforementioned cinematic conception. Elements of magical realism have been ever-present in Hispanic cinema over the past decades, as we can observe both in Guillermo del Toro’s films such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and in more recent Latin American movies such as Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) and La Llorona (2019). As Deborah Shaw [End Page 95] states, this trend is intended to reach wider global audiences with its combination of realism, fantasy, and the supernatural. The ambivalence of Rodriguez’s Spy Kids trilogy, however, emanates from the use of magicorealism as a commercial tool, suggesting an intentional blending between Mexican and Anglo-American cultural aspects and displaying a concomitance with the Indigenous-European transcultural essence of magical realism itself. Chicano cinema used to have, and still maintains, the “battle against the Anglo oppressor” as one of its fiercest emblems. Nevertheless, Robert Rodriguez’s films are exceptions to this trend, showing that Chicano identity is also the result of socio-historical fluctuations and embracing, thanks to the inclusion of magical realist elements, a transnational concept of the Latinx heritage onscreen. In this way, this article examines Rodriguez’s Spy Kids trilogy from the point of view of one of the most influential and transnational manifestations in Latin American culture: magical realism. As I will further explore in this article, new trends as magicorealism help to create “new realities” that unify the two “Americas” to which Alejo Carpentier referred, and that can also be seen in the cinema of Rodriguez as well as in contemporary Chicanismo. Magical realism in Rodriguez’s trilogy confers on the “other” the unequivocal possibility of being the subject, starting a dialogic conversation between the Hispanic and the Anglo elements within a family genre film production. Thus the intertwining of Latin American and Anglo-American narrative and visual resources permits Rodriguez’s Spy Kids to translate some magical realist codes to a Hollywood genre that, until that moment, had strictly delved into the fantasy realm. Development of the Magical Realism Concept The oxymoronic term magical realism refers to the combination of realism and fantasy, both in literature and in the cinema or the plastic arts. This kind of fiction combines the realism and the fantastic such that the fantastic elements spring from the reality represented in the texts and it becomes substantially difficult to distinguish between real and non-real events. The mythical and the supernatural are integrated into the cognitive structure of reality without a direct correlation to the understanding of the characters. Magical realism, from its conception, aimed to create “new realities...

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