SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. If Kate was removed from the story and either replaced by a Alejandro/Matt type of character or was uprooted as the vantage point, the events of the film itself wouldn’t change. The same underhanded techniques, brutal forms of interrogation, and then bursts of violence would still happen. Kate isn’t able to prevent any of these incidents and is forced to watch them as such, which is why her removal/replacement wouldn’t alter the event proper.

However, making such a move reveals just how necessary Kate’s perspective is to casting the events of the film in such a brutal light. It’s only because they’re seen as overwhelming, daunting, and unforgiving that they gain context as horrific and extra-ordinary as opposed to being accepted as standard operating procedure. The violence isn’t allowed to be normalizes; it’s constantly given space to be questioned from. This is what gives Sicario both its visceral impact and its thematic heft.

2.Just like The Silence of the Lambs, Sicario presents an analysis between gender and violence. Like Clarice in Lambs, Kate is constantly surrounded by the presence of increasingly violent men. She goes from woman in charge to woman in the background. Her rule-of-law centered approach runs contrary to the anything-goes charge of the men she follows, who present themselves as zealots but feel like little more than assassins at other times. Her position as woman is cemented in our minds via Alejandro’s comments on her similarity to his daughter, but the association with being-women is highlighted earlier by Reggie, when he makes comments about Kate’s bra.

Furthermore, she is almost “raped” by Ted (Jon Bernthal) after trying to eliminate him. I use the terminology of rape here because both Villenevue and Sheridan refer to the scene’s construction as a “rape-scene.^[1]Taylor Sheridan and Stacey Wilson Hunt. (2016, January 1). The toughest scene I wrote: Sicario’s delicate, complicated sex scene. Vulture. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from … Continue readingI’d argue that even though Ted is trying to kill Kate, the construction of the scene utilizes the trappings of a “rape-scene” in an attempt to utilize the logic of it as metaphor later on. First, Ted and Kate get back to her place and start to initiate intimacy. Kate then reneges and Ted tries to convince her back into a compromising situation, promising one thing while very intentionally meaning another. Then when she attempts to stop him, via shooting him, he throws away her gun, blames her for what’s about to happen, and then starts to choke her while stationed over her body. She is saved from this fate by Alejandro, who both serves as a representative of the “male” order and the one who casts Kate in the “ideal” position of his daughter.

However, Sicario extends the logic of “women” in its context to entail a subject’s relation to law and ideal. After Kate attacks Mat, soldiers push and hold Reggie down on the floor. The head soldier tells him to: “Just lay back, baby. Let it happen.” Reggie, like Kate, is an idealist who is desperate to maintain a faith in the rule of law, but he is likewise put in a compromising position, held down by a man, and then told to “let it happen”.

On the other hand, Alejandro does not spare all the traditionally assumed women in the movie. After kidnapping Manuel (Bernardo Saracino), Alejandro immediately threatens the drug lord’s young daughters with the threat of rape by multiple men – a succinct reminder that to be women in this world is to be constantly in proximity to a violence which threatens to obliterate. While he lets the maid at Alarcón’s(Julio César Cedillo) mansion live, he still kills the drug lord’s wife without a moment’s hesitation. Is this because the former reminds him of his daughter like Kate and the latter is irredeemably tied to Alarcón’s image and thus must be punished because there’s no “innocence” left to protect? Given Alejandro’s threat to Kate at the end, that her death would be tantamount to suicide – another form of victim blaming, it seems that his ideal of daughter only matters if it operates in a mythical land that no longer exists. Because the world belongs to men qua “wolves”, ideals can only exists as a façade that operates in the periphery.

Taken in this sense, to be “women” in Sicario means to be aligned with ideals both in image and in pursuit of the law. To be “man” means to be oriented towards execution of the appearance of the law with no regard for anything else. The use of gender politics is thus employed as a metaphor for the sacrifice of ideals for the sake of achieving goals. Ideals are only allowed to be preserved insofar as they remain subservient to the violence which is really in charge, transforming lofty ambitions into compromises between lesser evils.

This also explains why Kate’s gun constantly is usurped from her. The gun is an extension of one’s dominance in an arena of violence and as soon as she is made to use that gun in the “land of the wolves” – the domain of “man” – it is removed from her possession. It first happens when Ted stops her from shooting him and holds her back from getting her gun. It’s then repeated when her gun breaks down in the tunnel and she’s forced to go to her pistol. However, she’s still immediately shot and put out of the battle when she tries to confront the wolf himself in Alejandro.

The ending of the film further adds to the nuance between the two subject positions by playing on the nature of Alejandro and Kate’s relationship. He’s the one who saves her from Ted, but after confirming she’s okay, he tells her that she should have shot Ted. The advice feels odd because we, as an audience, know that Kate not only tried to stop Ted but shot and missed at him. It seems odd that Alejandro would have missed this given he would have heard the gunshot from outside or seen the evidence of it from ballistics soon after. This means that his statement isn’t about the nature of shooting, but the act of shooting as “man” as opposed to “woman”. It’s not that Kate is a bad shot. The opening action scene demonstrates that she’s not only agile, but that she’s also an incredible shot. The reason she fails is because she can’t go along with the no-rules barred paradigm in motion.

This is why her long decision to not shoot Alejandro is so meaningful. It’s a gesture towards the position of “woman”. She refuses to acquiesce to shooting as “man” and eliminating Alejandro to pursue her own vision because to do so would concede the authority upon which that vision lies on. This time, the only thing stopping her gun is her, not some external cause that prohibits – she subjectifies the cause of her trauma and makes it her own. It’s not that she can’t be “man”, but she chooses to be “woman”. Because of this, Alejandro’s decision to turn around and wait for the shot opens up the possibility of a move towards instating the paradigm of woman. He threatens her when she holds the gun to him the first time, indicating that she should never do it again. However, in spite of her violation of that order, he leaves her alone. The same man who gunned down two kids and a mom leaves Kate alone in spite of the fact that she violates his orders. Obviously, this could be because he does not see her as shooting as man qua “wolf” and therefore does not consider it symbolically meaningful or because he recognizes, but it allows for the possibility that he’s willing to recalibrate his take on just how many rules you can break.

I personally believe the ending leans more towards the miserable side and think Alejandro leaves Kate because he knows she won’t shoot him due to her position, an idea which is amplified due to his perceived connection between her and his daughter. He forces her to sign her name on an order, thereby legitimizing the abhorrent violence of “man” under the guise of “woman” and has nothing left to take from her. Killing her would be undue work for no reason and he’s accomplished his mission so he just leaves. This is accentuated by the cut-back to Silvio’s family, now missing a father figure and still stuck in a land with violence bursting at the seams. In spite of all of Alejandro and Matt’s machinations, nothing has gotten better for the people in the midst of the terror. However, I think the counterpoint above is worth thinking about and makes Kate’s decision more hopeful than one would otherwise think.

3. This idea about ideals is extended in the movie’s recurrent use of the American flag, the symbol par excellence. It starts off closely aligned with Reggie and Kate and shows up in the images associated with them (the first image in the fourth gallery on the non-spoiler section shows the flag directly aligned with Reggie after he drops off Kate). When Kate first argues with Matt over the mission in Juárez, she’s directly aligned with the flag in contrast to Matt who stands for “nothing”.

After Kate and Reggie report Matt to Forsing, they are dejected when told that what they’re doing is proper procedure. The law loses its allure and the flag appears darkened in the corner as Forsing’s reflection is next to it is dark like a shadow. The lack within the ideal has now been revealed – the veneer peeled back. Kate still struggles to hold onto to the ideal, and kisses Ted at the bar with American Flags draped on both sides of the couple. Her hope in love, in the belief that a cop meant to serve and protect would be a partner, is propped up here as a response to the brutality of what she is forced to endure. However, in spite of that, the image is unable to sustain itself and breaks apart. The flag is nothing more than a signature meant to authorize a constant mobilization of arbitrary violence.

4.Alejandro’s “puppeteering” of Silvio represents, in my view, what Forsing and co. view the role of wolves in relation to the law. The unhinged violence of wolves forced the law to act as it should in theory when it doesn’t do the same in practice. Silvio is a police officer who should be helping his community from violence and resisting the cartels. Instead, he’s corrupted and aids and abets those who attempt to circumvent the domain of the legality.

When Alejandro threatens Silvio to do his job and be a “good” police officer, he’s doing, in a round-about-way, the execution of what the law should be doing. His violence forces the emissary of the law to do its part – a corruption that neutralizes another corruption to restore some notion of the ideal. Silvio dies because the ideal cannot be fully restored, only partially. The wolves can emulate the function of the law but can’t make it work as it should in its entirety, so some sacrifices have to be made. In this way, Forsing and his peers’ acquiescence to Matt’s ways is natural. The ideal matters less than the authority it’s mean to represent.

5.All these points together culminate to, in my opinion, the singular best scene in the film: Guillermo’s(Edgar Arreola) torture. The scene starts with Matt and company force feeding Guillermo water. Matt’s comment about the water immediately makes the viewer go to water-boarding – the sanctioned form of U.S. torture. Then the scene cuts to Alejandro drinking a cup of water hurriedly. He carries a large sealed cannister of water through the hall towards Guillermo’s room. The act, in front of all the officers of the law, further solidifies the expectation that water boarding is going to happen.

As soon as Alejandro gets to the room, Guillermo starts to freak out. It’s at this point that Alejandro walks over to him, then removes his own pants, and shoves his groin into Guillermo’s face. Matt laughs and comments that Guillermo recognizes Alejandro – additional humiliation. It’s at this point the additional soldier gets up, leaves the room, and then makes a point to turn off the video camera recording the event. On the record, it’s water-boarding, but then a cruel realization creeps in. Villeneuve cuts to an overhead shot of the drain in the room along with the still sealed cannister of water. However, the audio reveals Guillermo being moved and a series of suggestive grunts. The camera continues to push in towards the drain, but no liquid comes out.

Given the utilization of rape as metaphor, the implication here seems clear: Alejandro is raping Guillermo. While one could argue that there’s a possibility that he’s urinating in Guillermo’s mouth and is going to waterboard him by drinking from the cannister and urinating to completion or that he’s planning on waterboarding him soon with the water from the canister and is just “beating” him at the moment, neither explanation seems as cohesive or in line with the patterns the film establishes than the rape implication.

Additionally, Alejandro’s interrogation of Ted demonstrates that he has no qualms about entering other peoples’ bodies. He shoves his fingers down Ted’s ears with no regard to the suffering he’s inflicting Furthermore, according to Benicio, Denis pushed him to “get closer” and “penetrate” during his interrogation scenes, so the leap to imagining Alejandro going so far to commit the atrocity isn’t that difficult.^[2]Oscars. (2015 ,September 17)Academy Conversations: Sicario.[Video].YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxoHEZdv5Do&ab_channel=Oscars @ the 4 minute mar

Viewing the scene through the lens of “sanctioned” rape demonstrates the logic of my second point. The law recognizes a water-boarding and sets up expectations towards the same. The end-point of water-boarding is to get the information needed. This is why so many discussions of the scene err towards the scene being water-boarding. Like the law’s attempt to preserve it’s own image by turning off the camera, a viewer is allowed to “look away” from the violence and imagine something more pleasant: water-boarding.

Whereas the other rape attempts are visually referenced but never completed, this one is only hinted at through the audio despite its completion via “penetration.” By hinting at it and not showing it, Sicario reveals our biases and complicities in washing away the violence in favor of thinking about the end goal. It’s fine that Alejandro “did what he had to do” to get the information, because the information was needed to achieve justice. The viewer can always just imagine “waterboarding” as an alternative. Just think about that – imagining waterboarding here is a pleasant alternative to the idea of Alejandro raping Guillermo. It’s a subtle, yet effective demonstration of the way violence is “gendered”.

6.The opening scene is marked by a repetition of dust: first, it comes from the breaking of the house; second, it comes from the walls of the house being torn down; third, it comes from the explosion of the house. Each moment obfuscates what Kate and company know and usurps the previous moment of peace. Given that the movie is about the smoke-and-mirrors of the law, it makes sense that the appearance of a visual disruptor would represent dissolution of the image. Smoke tends to cover and smother while serving as a palliative for other concerns.

This is why Kate’s increasingly severe smoking habits represent the corruption of the ideal through the film. She starts off right after her first mission and given Reggie’s concerns the second time she starts up, it’s clear that smoking is her coping mechanism. After she’s attacked by Ted, she opens up another fresh new pack. Now the cigarette has taken up the full frame – the ideals of the flag she hoped to represent are unable to sustain her. She needs the kick of the cigarette.

Finally, at the end of the film, she’s still smoking, this time covered in curtains which are unable to provide the distance she needs from Alejandro, who manages to infiltrate her residence with ease. The smoke and mirrors go from being external products of the environment to internal products of utilized to stave off the trauma of the environment.