ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Mel Gibson's recent "b-films" Get the Gringo, Blood father and Machete Kills present Latino masculinity as a violent, socially destabilizing force to be contained by the Gringo Savior, who, in the process of containment, is able to redeem his own masculine agency on and off screen, and safeguard the cultural authority of white masculinity at large in North America. The mimesis of sanctimony finally inspired the author to lower his head and made a solemn and undifficult promise: from now on, he would avoid the cinema of Mel Gibson. That promise remained undifficult for the next thirteen years, despite the Internet's habit of enabling his televisual nostalgia for the early 1990s, a period of happy times for him and for Gibson, when the author was a suburbanite playing with toys a little late into preadolescence.
