Resumen de Trauma, gender violence, and spectatorial complicity in Michel Franco's "Después de Lucía and Daniel y Ana"
Award-winning director Michel Franco provides his audience a body of work that points the spectator toward a contemporary young-adult Mexican society characterized by gender violence. Centering his films around the issue of trauma, as it impacts the individual on personal and sexual levels, Franco's narratives explore the ways in which individuals-both male and female-cope with the aftermaths of gender violence. In a simultaneous fashion, Franco directs his audience toward moments of deep self-reflection and introspection when considering both his diegetic characters and their own involvement in the mise-en-scene of violence. Whether it be rape, verbal and physical bullying, or forced incest, issues of gender and trauma are highlighted in both Daniel у Ana (2009) and Después de Lucía (2012). In the following pages, I attempt a broad analysis of Franco's first two films based on the themes of gender, violence, and spectatorship. I argue that Franco's films play out the relationship between trauma and gender development, engaging the question of how gender types and expectations may interact with theories of trauma and recovery. In my readings, I use the theoretical framework built by Cathy Caruth and Shoshanna Felman, where trauma theory is concerned, and the socio-structural theory of masculinity posed by R.W. Connell, which I argue is an important measure of subjectivity in Franco's films. In a separate but not disconnected trajectory to this argument, I further pose that the director's films explore the ethical relationship between the spectator, spectatorship, and the production and consumption of mediatic violence. I discuss Franco's emphasis on this modern-day violence in Mexico, and his insistence on the audience's complicity in this violence, through his exposition of universal problems that are also inherent to the particular sociocultural context as a result of a dominant hegemonic masculinity, which his film achieves by employing specific camera angles and positioning with the mise-enscěne, which encourage the participation of an active viewer rather than a passive spectator.
