Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado's Screening Neoliberalism is a necessary addition to the contemporary scholarly literature on Mexican cinema. Taking off from a nostalgic introduction that recalls his childhood experiences as a cinema spectator in Mexico City in the 1980s, Sánchez offers a clear, well-defined thesis, arguing the ways in which Mexican cinema has undergone a profound transformation since the economic crisis of the Salinas de Gortari administration (1988–1994), accompanied by the reinvention of movie audiences in Mexico over the next twenty-odd years.
The book takes as its starting point a much-needed reevaluation of the emphasis on crisis and trauma as the paradigm for studies of post-classical Mexican cinema, an emphasis that came to the fore with the publication of Charles Ramírez Berg's watershed book Cinema of Solitude, in 1992. What is most significant about this contribution is Sánchez Prado's movement away from the usual approaches (Paz, masculinity, the nation) and its problematizing of genre shifts and spectator responses based on business practices, economic (under)development and the rise of middle-class cinema audiences. In short, the book is a response, a critique, and a continuation of the arguments made by Ramírez Berg in the 1990s, which have weighed down scholarly approaches to Mexican cinema for the past two and a half decades.
Sánchez Prado breaks down his history and analysis not by decades or presidential administration (though he cannot fully escape this typical taxonomy of Mexican politics, economics, and history), but rather by topics and by the ways in which movies have adapted to new audiences and reflected Mexico's transition to the neoliberal politics and economic realities that came into being under Miguel de la Madrid in the 1980s and became cemented under Salinas de Gortari in the 1990s. Significantly, the neoliberal turn in Mexico's economic and social policies was directly associated with the cinema's swinging generic reconfigurations, from nationalist narratives in the classical era to the “cinema of solitude” crisis of the 70s and 80s, to the romantic, neo-Mexicanist stories and aesthetics of popular films like Como agua para chocolate and Danzón in the 1990s.
Perceptively, the book looks closely at the shift away from all these tendencies, which came with the liberalization of ticket pricing, the rise of high-end multiplexes, the flood of US cable TV networks and specialized channels, the intuitive discovery of the potential for marketing movie soundtracks, and the necessary encounter of more affluent urban and professional middle-class audiences. These audiences, Sánchez Prado argues convincingly, were largely apathetic to both the simplistic traditions of national (and nationalist) cinema in its classical and neo-Mexicanist modes, and to the popular subgenres of sex comedies, trite melodramas, and masked wrestler movies directed to working-class spectators.
Sánchez Prado successfully argues and demonstrates with case studies the rise of the romantic comedy—influenced by US situation comedies and the “Sundance” aesthetic—as the new site where the urban professional middle class (by now, the largest movie audience in the country) could see its real and imagined quotidian anxieties about love, security, and class, addressed and, occasionally, resolved. This argument gets somewhat repetitive by the middle section on new types of political films in the 1990s; while illustrative of national cinema trends, it does not add much to the argument that cinema audiences were losing interest in the traditions of Mexican cinema. The framing of this discussion with sociological and Latin American cultural theory of the 1990s is also less helpful and distracts from the core argument: that in their biting critique of Mexican politics these movies have taken risks heretofore unseen by large national audiences.
The book's final chapter on the continuing work of Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu in the national cinema scene, and their rupture from it, is particularly welcome. The disproportionate amount of scholarly interest in these auteurs among US and UK academics typically fails to place them in constructive dialogue with the Mexican cinema tradition from which they emerged. Sánchez Prado succeeds, for the most part, in expressing why these men achieved international success as they liberated themselves from the nation's cinema and went on to realize an aesthetic and narrative evolution in style and genre that the neoliberal turn allowed Mexican cinema after 1988.
The book is not perfect. There are a few infelicities and paradoxes in content: a tendency to compare, as if to more forcefully validate, the book's case studies with better-known US and European films; a number of misuses of language specific to film studies, and others. Nonetheless, this is a substantial entry for scholars of Mexican film that offers a useful, readable contribution that is engaging and thoroughly researched.
