ABSTRACT
In Aztec myth dead souls were guided to the underworld (Mictlán) by canine figures or hellhounds often associated with Xolótl the human/dog god of twins and monsters. This energy, in conjunction with the more intoxicating trickster Tezcatlipoca, filters through Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros (2000), an exemplar of New Wave Mexican cinema that fuses places of transition with animal psychopomps. As the core characters slide into and out of personal underworlds, their passage is magnified, reflected, and eased by canine child surrogates. Trickster steers each of these unions, guiding the overlapping narratives that drive Iñárritu's key themes of loss, liminality, and the slippery passage to self-awareness. The motif infuses each physical and emotional space in the text via thresholds, underworlds, chaotic release, moral transgression, underhand commercial transactions, shape-shifting, anthropomorphism, and the delicate space between ego ideals and the time it takes for love and its consequences to shatter them. This wildness and downward movement to the instinctual, cuts through the social barriers separating ‘us’ from the bestial ‘them’, making this text a wily piece of mythic revision.
