Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

film foray: THE THREE CABALLEROS 235
Tenth Proposition: Prefigurations of Things to Come Illusory
reciprocity constitutes the very core of this fi lm. As we’ve seen, the
production of meanings in The Three Caballeros is both explicit and veiled,
brazen and coy. Much of the fi lm’s fascinatingly devious elusiveness derives
from the intricacy of its reversals, from deceptive reciprocities in which
there is no real exchange, or in which what is exchanged is not what has
been promised. Anthony Wilden, writing in System and Structure on logical
typing and the triangulation of binary oppositions, notes how the apparent
symmetry of the binary pair is often governed by an “invisible” third term
which converts difference into hierarchy. 5 In this case, the “third term”
between the North American and the South American may be the neocolonizing
ambition of the former.
A fi lm which reportedly set out to be an offering of friendship toward
Latin America adopts the reverse as its core premise. Latin America fetes
Donald Duck, showering him with birthday gifts and hosting his visits
to Bahia and Mexico, much as, in relation to the fi lm’s production, Latin
Americans hosted Disney and his team and much as, in relation to the fi lm’s
reception, Latin America was offered up as ready host to Donald Duck’s
successors, the American tourists. The perverse dialectic of economic aid,
which rewards the donor while impoverishing the recipient, is replicated
(one is almost tempted to say prophesied) here.
Disney’s “gift” of intercultural understanding turns out to be the act of
packaging Latin America for enhanced North-American consumption. The
unspoken pact which makes that package possible rests upon the equation
of cultural expression with femininity and cultural exchange with heterosexual
conquest, and upon the positing of a shared assumption between
conqueror and conqueree: that the female of the species is a willing target
of appropriation.
To its enduring credit, The Three Caballeros does utilize Latin American
music, accents, performers, locales, artifacts, and modes of cultural expression
more extensively than any previous Hollywood fi lm. Disney’s quest for
cultural authenticity was to that extent both sincere and successful. The results
are often dazzling, even by today’s elevated technical standards. But all
these good intentions cannot mask the discomforting evidence which hides
just below the comic frenzy: all cultural reciprocities are not created equal.
Discussion Questions
• Explain and support the argument that The Three Caballeros is a
U.S. version of an international foundational fi ction, i.e., that the union of