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Savages by don winslow5/25/2023 ![]() ![]() The judgment of the American weed merchants may be further clouded by their continual violation of a basic rule laid down by Mr. Savagery is in the eye of the beholder.īoth sides have a point, though prejudices and blind spots make clear judgments doubtful. Some of the Mexicans, in turn, are disgusted by the sloth and shallowness of the gringos, who seem to lack any sense of dignity, tradition, family or honor. The Southern California marijuana dealers on one side of the conflict that energizes the film’s zigzagging narrative are appalled by the brutality of the Mexican narco-traffickers, for whom torture and mutilation are routine ways of doing business. One of the jokes in “Savages,” Oliver Stone’s feverish, fully baked, half-great adaptation of Don Winslow’s ferocious and funny drug-war novel of the same name, is that the film’s title is flung back and forth between north and south - an epithet that is also eventually claimed as a badge of honor. The more salient border, in politics and pop culture, is the southern one, between the United States and Mexico. The 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the Western frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” That frontier is long gone, and the meanings of those words have changed, but the West - California in particular - still thrives in the popular imagination as a place where wildness and refinement, law and violence, inferno and Utopia collide and commingle. ![]()
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