Much has been made of Sean Penn’s recently released secret interview with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, mastermind of two daring prison escapes, and the author of immeasurable suffering the world over. That Penn would shake hands with El Chapo isn’t too surprising, given his well-documented affection for other human misery factories like Hugo Chavez and Madonna. Also not surprising, the “interview” is as incoherent as it is fawning, yet another example of an actor overextending himself in the pursuit of some misbegotten intellectual ambition.
But let’s set aside Penn’s obvious stupidity. Let’s set aside his near-inability to construct a cogent sentence. And let’s set aside his history of flattering manifestly evil individuals in the name of Marxist crusading. Let’s just reflect for a moment on what might be the worst thing about this story (besides El Chapo himself): We might have to sit through an El Chapo biopic starring Sean Penn.
Their meeting may have taken place in the jungle and not at The Ivy, but it was meant to get the ball rolling on a movie based on El Chapo’s life. Of course, drug kingpins have long occupied an outsize role in our popular culture. Their rags-to-riches stories fit nicely into the formal archetypes of film and television, not to mention the progressive predilections of Hollywood. The poor young drug kingpin is born in a slum and learns that capitalist life is unfair. He then decides to use the tools of capitalism to his own benefit, murders a bunch of people, accumulates money, houses, fast cars, beautiful women, and gives back to the poor. Then, paranoia or hubris (or both!) leads to a fall, but not before our heroic kingpin demonstrates how backwards our values are for supporting a corrupt government.
Dozens of these blow-boosted bildungsromans have hit the big and small screen in the last 30 years or so. Their formulaic nature appeals to Hollywood, but Breaking Bad is the only one, at least since Brian DePalma’s enduring schlockfest Scarface, to arouse any meaningful cultural response. And it only did so by undermining the genre at every turn. The rest are derivative and unremarkable: Carlito’s Way, Blow, American Gangster, Narcos… the list goes on and on. Do we really need Sean Penn to add to it?
Maybe if Hollywood would just forget the drug-lord drama, they might actually make more movies fit for a kingpin.
