Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Originally published on Letterboxd on 05/05/23

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

-All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps the most exacting, damning observation of the annihilation of the self I’ve seen in any work of art, documenting in all its grit and sweat and dirt what it means to live beyond this annihilation-  not living in some abstract, metaphysical sense, but living as a fragile body carrying with it the weight of every mistake that has led you to an end you can see coming so clearly and yet cannot being yourself to accept. A work of genuine and terrifying enormity precisely because it is so sharply dismissive of dignity and honour in death- when someone is shot or fatally wounded due to mere circumstance in a Peckinpah film, they do not whisper sweet nothings as they die. Instead, they are either reduced to their post primal selves- as children, crying at being unable to accept the blood seeping out of the bullet holes in their chests- or they are rendered immobile, felled like a barren tree in the deserts that they once roamed through. Here, there are no delusions of dignity- there is only grief and a single-minded desire to destroy the world around you the same way it destroyed yours.