ABSTRACT
Based on a fake trailer inserted between the two features that make up Grindhouse (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, 2007), Machete (Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Manquis, 2010) went into production due to the audience interest that trailer for a nonexistent film created and began provoking controversy months before it was theatrically released in September 2010. Some critics roundly condemned it as manipulating viewers into imagining a world that is deeply racist, antiwhite, and indiscriminately proimmigration. Machete's infamous “Arizona” trailer (2010), which premiered on Cinco de Mayo four months before the film itself, was specifically condemned as advocating violence against “real,” racially white Americans, a category that rather pointedly excluded Hispanics and Latinos. 1 Libertarian Alex Jones of infowars.com argued that this trailer “glorifies and potentially incite[s] attacks on white Americans” (Jones and Dykes 2010); John Nolte (2010), writing for the conservative website Big Hollywood, argued that it embodied a “blatantly racist double standard” that “intentionally stoke[s] racial tensions” and “race war” by promoting “racial divisiveness” and plays into the hands of “effete leftist critics and writers” through furthering “their racist agenda.” The conservative Christian website movieguide.org (2010) deemed Machete itself “one of the worst movies ever” with “a racist, AntiAmerican worldview,” in which the United States “is a corrupt, miserable, horrible place.” Additionally, the Texas Minutemen, Inc., a group of selfappointed immigration-law enforcers, felt targeted as subjects of ridicule by the “Arizona” trailer, and the filmmakers themselves were clearly criticizing the state of Arizona for the passage of its restrictive immigration bill (noted in Fernandez and Kit 2010).
