Carlos Reygadas referred to Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el Cielo, 2005), his second feature film, as his "problem child." In his filmography it is situated between his acclaimed debut feature Japon (2002) and what many consider his masterpiece Silent Light (2007). However, Battle in Heaven is a much more antagonistic film than either of those films. While the general aesthetic of his films is consistent, (long-takes, stark framings, insistence on affective close-up images devoid of context, sonic disruptions only within the diegesis) Battle is stripped of much of the ethereal sense of wonder and philosophical pondering (however crassly it may be represented) that his other films contain. Battle is a film that visually and narratively seems to lash out, to struggle, and assault both the spectator and itself internally. It is a film that is antagonistic toward class, toward Mexican history and myth, in its portrayal of Mexicano race relations, and finally even self-reflexively perhaps at the director himself, for casting his own family's former chauffeur as the main character (who plays a chauffeur to a wealthy General). The imagery of the film itself rejects the beautifying or even degrading sense of Mexico City that is so common in Mexican film of this era, and rather posits itself antagonistically against any coherent image of self and place. 

One could think of this film in the sense of a failing cognitive map; the trajectory of a sense of the social and self disintegrating into surface level fantasy and failure, a sinkhole of subjecthood. Thus, in a manner of thinking, it visualizes the map, but with no utility. As Marcos, the chauffeur, says in close up, masturbating to color-commentary on the television of a Football match, “it’s a fantasy.” For the commentator, heard through the fuzz of a cheap television, it is celebratory, for Marcos, empty—masturbatory, one-sided joy sans object, a cognitive map with no route marked. Perhaps, it is apt to think of this as Reygadas’s metaphor for the failure of a Mexican mytho-poetic cohesion. Instead, it provocatively, primarily through its eruptive sexual acts (including, I would argue, its final sexual penetration with the fetish object blade rather than a failed phallus), sees the act of fucking as a desperate attempt to reconcile the primordial cleft; a vulvar haunt borne from perceived betrayal to an Other’s phallus, that irrevocably defines Mexican history and mythos. Reygadas seems to visually manifest the failure of the desire to resituate a phallic primacy. This most definitively portrayed when, in the sweaty aftermath of the central sexual encounter, after the camera has engaged in its own transference of the voyeuristic through its panoramic sweep (as though suggesting that the sex scene taking place is failure, Mexico city of the now is the material, there is no going back to the womb of La Chingada), we are given a two-shot from above, showing both nude bodies, so distinct in visible gender and ethnicity markers, but then a cutaway only of her vulva. The phallic can be cast aside as a depleted signifier. The sex act itself is ultimately a failure as in the post-coital, there is only separation, damp sweaty genital remnants. The shot of their hand-holding, a pathetic cinematic insistence that amounts to visual nothingness.  As Octavio Paz says in his profoundly beautiful Labyrinth of Solitude the Mexican refers to him/herself as “hijos de La Chingada,” (in reference to La Malinche, the mother of the first mestizos) children of the fucked, and fucked they shall be, just never in the way that a coherent mytho-poetic sensibility would demand.    

During The Screening Group’s™ discussions of this film, a point was well-raised as to whether this film was antagonistic, or rather more in line with the sense of provocation. I think this is quite valid, however, I think the film’s pathology about its own history, both immediate and mythically, allows an aggressivity that goes beyond simple provocation. I do think the film provokes, and to allow a continued sexual metaphor, prods. It seems to want to disrupt and upset, but it does not necessarily need a response, as per a provocation. In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” Jacques Lacan points out that our aggressivity, part and parcel of antagonism, comes from a moment of internal transference, wherein we engage in antagonistic behavior toward others against that fault which we unconsciously reject in ourselves. Lacan says “the two moments, when the Subject negates himself and when he accuses the other, become indistinguishable…It is the very delusion of the misanthropic and beautiful soul, casting out onto the world the disorder that constitutes his being” (Lacan, 2006) Antagonism, in my understanding of it, requires this aggression, a desire to assault, and moreover to instill in the receptive party (be it audience, society, individual etc…) a lasting (negative?) sensorial position. In this case, Reygadas and his visual style, and mobilization of nationally specific mythic imagery, via the Lacanian, seeks to create in the other a morass of aggressivity, one in which he, and all the “Hijos de la Chingada” are already drowning in the depths of, and there is no way out, neither fucking nor praying, nor the cinema itself. It is antagonism, but perhaps failed antagonism.