Page - 142 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

One of the most memorable lines of the Mormon director Jared Hess’s 2004 smash-hit comedy Napoleon Dynamite (US 2004) occurs as the titular charac- ter’s grandmother leaves to go four wheeling in the Idaho sand dunes. When Napoleon (Jon Heder) asks her what he should eat while she is gone, she re- plies, “make yourself a dang quesadilla!” The comedic aspect of this statement is difficult to communicate through writing because Hess highlights an ironic pronunciation – the grandmother pronounces the ll as one would in English rather than Spanish – that evinces her total ignorance of even the simplest forms of Mexican pronunciation and cuisine. This is one of many scenes within the film where white, implicitly Mormon, characters engage with Mexican cul- ture in ignorant and/or offensive ways. Many of Hess’s representations of the relationship between rural (white) Americans and Mexican immigrants could be read as paternalistic. At the same time, the director depicts the immigrants of Preston, Idaho in a generally positive light. Across his cinema, Hess has rep- resented the Mexican Other in ambiguous ways that affirm the humanity of the United States’ southern neighbors while at the same time signaling them as irreconcilably different from – and perhaps simpler than – their North Amer- ican counterparts.1 This holds especially true in Napoleon Dynamite and Na- cho Libre (US 2006), his two most commercially successful films. The Mexican protagonists of both movies win the audience’s affection in part by playing to stereotypes that rigidly separate them from US culture at large. Mexico’s over- sized role in Hess’s aesthetic is obvious even to the casual viewer; however, few critics have attempted to reconcile the director’s combination of paternalism and solidarity with people from south of the US border. In this article, I argue that Hess’s ambiguous representation of Mexican peoples and cultures reflects a type of “benevolent racism” that is common within white North American Mormon communities that paradoxically view people of Mexican descent both as Others and as the physical and spiritual heirs of the peoples of the Book of Mormon. None of the current scholarship has situated Hess’s representations of Mex- ican people within the context of his faith. While there are many reasons for this, it mostly reflects the difficulty critics face when ascribing elements of di- rectors’ films to their faiths, particularly when the directors do not explicitly make the connections themselves. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why this approach feels justified and fruitful when viewing both Napoleon Dyna- mite and Nacho Libre. Firstly, Hess studied film at Brigham Young University (BYU), which is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), the largest Mormon denomination in the world. Much of 1 In this article I use the term North American to refer to people and cultures from the US and Canada. 142 | David S. Dalton www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 141–165