The Blue Beetle: “¡No contaban con mi astucia!”

Editor’s note: This review was first published in the online journal “Feminism and Religion”. It appears here with permission from the author. To read the original version please click here (https://feminismandreligion.com/2023/08/24/the-blue-beetle-no-contaban-con-mi-astucia-by-yara-gonzalez-justiniano/?fbclid=IwAR3dGvhDlSl-XaqX00UXqJvCpD2KyHgLS0BKFYNTr-GZX7oOEUOt2bnoLwg) A Spanish version was later published in “Todas.” To read the Spanish version please click here (https://www.todaspr.com/the-blue-beetle-no-contaban-con-mi-astucia/)

Literally, you did not count on my astuteness. Or in other words, you underestimated my intelligence. It is the perpetual trick of arrogance that white supremacy and classism plays on racially and ethnically minoritized people and the joke/yoke these people carry. It is the most frequent microaggression I experience in academia in the supposed –– disque–– compliment of “you are so articulate!”

El Chapulín Colorado (The Red Grasshopper) is a Mexican comedic superhero character created by artist Roberto Gómez Bolaños, better known as Chespirito (little Shakespeare), in the 1970s. Whenever Chapulín untangles a mess, whether on purpose or by chance, he says “¡No contaban con mi astucia!” The movie Blue Beetle, which pays homage to this beloved character across Latin America and Latinx people is ––entre otras cosas–– exactly that, astute! Puerto Rican director, Angel Manuel Soto, and Mexican writer, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, take the DC comic book story of Jaime Reyes’s Blue Beetle (2006) and transform it into a film that, more than responds to a Latino superhero gap, it takes representation, impact, and issues of capitalism seriously. The truck, the heart-shaped shield, the tools, and the crickets playing in the background of the outdoor scenes ––to name a few–– are an extension of the characters’ parallelisms and the possibilities of what it means to have higher numbers of representation in mass media-produced films with integrity and astucia. ¡Awiwi!

There is always room for growth, food for thought, space to critique, and things to reject, especially, when it comes to representation and the impossibilities of capturing the ethnic and cultural complexities of a people in motion through generations and experiences in one movie that needs to speak to enough individuals to become a box-office hit. Hence, I want to focus on what the film does and the utopia it points towards in relationships and community, rather than in isolation.

THERE ARE FEMINIST THEMES…

Feminist theologian, María Pilar Aquino, writes about women’s right to integrity, goodness, and beauty as she argues for the “growing necessity to emancipate [women’s] inner drive” (Our Cry for Life, 1993, 183). The women in Jaime’s life are not adornments that support him without a persona of their own but integral to the heart and the shaping of the hero as they actively participate in the hero’s struggle and problem solving. The cultural and ethnic representation hinted at the untold stories of Latinx in US mainstream history, specifically, around military opposition and revolutionary movements. In the movie there is a breaking of the sweet abuela trope, as did the movie Encanto, adding texture to the matriarchs that build these families and the layered histories of relationship to the US and Latin American countries of origin. The villain is also a woman. A character with no redeemable qualities in a Manichean sense ––other than the fact that she is played by Susan Sarandon. In the dialogue, the main characters and herself recognize her as being subject to sexism and gender discrimination. Her evilness is never relayed to her sex or gender.

There is comedy and a sense of humor, but no one is the buffoon, and all characters are important. In the movie, power is decentered by equalizing participation. There is no one savior. The theme around land and gentrification was not only represented in the dialogue and situation of the Reyes family but solidified in the town’s name, Palmera City. Though located in a fictional place, it speaks to the destitution of the land of poor and brown people in the Caribbean and shores of Latin America. It can’t be a coincidence; it shoots straight to the heart of hundreds of thousands of evicted and displaced people ––¿a poco no?

…RELIGIOUS, MYTHICAL, AND TRANSCENDENTAL THEMES.

There are visible Catholic religious elements like la Guadalupe images, rosaries, lighting of prayer candles, and elders echando la bendición. Even our hero prays the Our Father when Khaji-Da (the beetle) is not responding, all hope is lost and he’s about to get smashed into the ground––no le quedaba más que encomendarse.

Moreso, the themes of family and spiritual transcendence consolidate the heart of our hero and centers the struggle for unity and ideal relationships. The Reyes family was not perfect. I thought I was the only one whose family accumulated bad news and let me live in a false sense of security and stability while abroad, only to pop that bubble once returning to my own Palmera city. Yet, the emphasis of each family member and the extended family on the responsibility for one another, and integration of who they are with each other, shows a permanent and transcendental practice of relationships. The movie begins with the realization of the cruelty of upward mobility (see Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011) and the myth of linear progress but ends up showing the webs of relationships and the interdependence and intradependence through generational, ideological, gender, and class difference. Even the deceased and the ancestors are an evident part of the hero’s community and journey. 

Outside of the family unit, the myth of upward mobility is challenged and there is an emphasis on communal relationships. It shows unity and points to the idealism where all Latinxs, even the ones on the “wrong side” working as gatekeepers of power and systems, are morally driven to see one another and change. The movie plays with reality and imagination integrally. It presents idyllic and utopic scenes that paint a seemingly impossible future of equity and socioeconomic justice ––pero para qué nos sirve la utopia, sino para caminar (see Galeano, Las Palabras Andantes).

You might be as suspicious as I am around the insistence of solidarity resisting the lures of capitalism and self-preservation, and the myth of Latinx unity as overcoming xenophobia and racism. The frustration irked by the ease of painting an ideal world vs the reality you contend with daily as an ethnic and racial minority might make one think “I am reading too much into this movie.” You might also be jaded from the disappointment of hoping against hope. But what is hope if not understanding that reality, though material and operational, is not a determinant of all that is possible. The images and ideas movies create help us envision other possibilities though they seem impossible. The magic and la astucia of films are not in the recreation of reality or the legitimization of a real-fake world through amazing special effects, but in the imagery, providing the spectator with a world of possibilities that are not limited to that which one can mirror and relate to, but that we can dream about and hope for.