1st Edition

Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television Hollywood’s Cartel Wars

By César Albarrán-Torres Copyright 2021
188 Pages 45 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

188 Pages 45 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

188 Pages 45 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book draws on a multi-method study of film and television narratives of global criminal networks to explore the links between audiovisual media, criminal networks and global audiences in the age of digital content distribution. Mapping out media representations of the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico and the United States, the author delves into the social, cultural and geopolitical... Read more

Introduction: cartel media

1 How Touch of Evil set the rules for Hollywood cartel cinema

2 Cartel westerns: the new frontier (South of the border)

3 From Weeds to Ozark: the suburbs, threatened

4 Queen of the South: doing linguistic mish-mash and "Mexican face"

5 Walter White and the use of Brown bodies in Breaking Bad

6 The Sicario saga and chromatic othering

7 Netflix’s Narcos: cartel media in the age of digital distribution

8 "El Chapo" gets the Netflix treatment: theorising cartel mythologies

Postscript: cartel media beyond Hollywood

Biography

César Albarrán-Torres is a Mexican-Australian scholar and film critic. He is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches Global Screen Studies. He has been widely published in academic and non-academic titles as a film and literary critic, author and translator. His current research focuses on film and television, as well as the negotiations between social media and politics in Mexico, particularly concerning the drug cartels. His book Digital Gambling: Theorizing Gamble-Play Media was published in April 2018. He is editor at the online journal Senses of Cinema.