Sean Penn and El Chapo: Vanity, Hollywood and Reportage

Leaving aside Sean Penn’s personal history with drug use, let alone alleged efforts to get a slice of celebrity in portraying a drug lord, the furore surrounding his interview with El Chapo (Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera) is instructive in a few respects. One is worth noting: the blind rage it has provoked with some US political figures and advocates who show how utterly lacking in understanding they are of their own liberal market system, one that oils the machine of violent celebrity, promotion, and its seedy underbelly.

Guzmán, as head of the murderous Sinaloa cartel, has had quite a stash of honours from the view of indictments. Seven US federal district courts have felt him worthy of legal attention. The Chicago Crime Commission deemed him Public Enemy Number One in 2013, the sort of language that would never be out of place in the Hollywood argot. In 2014, he was captured after 12 years on the run. In July 2015, he made a spectacular escape via a mile-long tunnel from his cell. On January 8, his recapture was announced by the Mexican government.

Penn’s piece in Rolling Stone (Jan 9) conforms to a certain type of reportage. It has a strong political slant, and one far from unfavourable to the drug lord. He even goes so far as to consider him the other Mexican president, indispensable to its political fabric, a central folkloric being.

Penn commences the piece with an observation from Montaigne, though he is by no means clear in bringing it back to its relevant point: “The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.” He writes about Guzmán as a figure involved in the shopping and shipping “by some estimates more than half of all the cocaine, heroine, methamphetamine and marijuana that come into the United States.”

If such a discussion, and spectacle, was in poor taste, it was only because the subject matter that implicated both producer and consumer could be deemed such. The implications of Guzmán’s behaviour and success are transnational, a play between supply and demand. To target Penn for being unethical in engaging Guzmán is hardly a basis for dismissing the material. Historical accounts are filled with the unclean and journalism would be skimpy without that purview.

An even more interesting point is that of mutual exploitation – the screen actor who seeks to engage history; the historical actor, however cruel or devastating, who makes use of the celluloid medium to do what it has always done: promote. Penn, in this interview, had his own celluloid bridgehead to the cartel – the Mexican soap actress Kate del Castillo, who claimed in 2012 on Twitter that the El Chapo Sinaloa cartel was more trustworthy than the Mexican government.

In that sense, the celluloid creature will always be drawn to charismatic, or powerful figures. Penn been previously captivated by Hugo Chavez and the Castro regime in Cuba, an unsurprising fact given his suspicions about the nastier side of US hegemony. Penn has shown a tendency to be bewitched by such subjects, a point that has led to criticisms of stenographic tendencies. Being critically engaged about such matters can be a difficult exercise; the room for a fair appraisal is dramatically shortened.

Penn insists that the American public shared “complicity in what [it]” demonized, as much as the US has failed in pursuing that abstract crusade called the war on drugs. The state north of Mexico nurses an “insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics”; in doing so, it shares in Mexican corpses, and the eviscerating of institutional credibility. This may seem like adolescent rage, but it is far from being inaccurate.

As has been pointed out, this is pure Hollywood. If the marines or police cannot do it, Penn can. But his efforts to shield Guzmán effectively had the reverse effect, if one is to believe the views of the Mexican authorities, making Guzmán an easier fish to catch. Guzmán, being given the exposure to Penn, was also seeking his own platform, giddying in its dimensions about how best to film his life. He certainly did not need Penn or Hollywood, but the flattery was very much present.

Such flattery was not appreciated by the National Border Patrol Council. El Chapo had escaped a maximum security position. Mexico, according to the NBPC’s Shawn Moran, had failed in its obligations to “keep this man behind bars”. Penn had simply served to “celebrate” and “capitalise” on the situation.

The narcotics industry, from its production to its consumption, feeds the vanity of vanities. It produces its businessmen, its celebrated outlaws, and its tragic victims. It also produces its own logic of reverence.

Republican Marc Rubio, in attempting to understand what had transpired, indulged himself with an underdone sociological statement on Penn’s behaviour. “If one of these American actors who have benefited from the greatness of this country, who have made money from our free enterprise system, want to go and fawn all over a criminal and a drug trafficker in their interviews, they have a constitutional right to do so. I find it grotesque.” And what better than to have an actor off screen to cover an actor of life? Grotesque, but very apt.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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