The Geography of Pop Culture
A Look at What Miami-Dade’s Various Communities Like to Watch and Read

How will people ever get beyond superficial contempt for each other’s cultural references without pushing past the Vin Diesel barrier?

By Rebecca Wakefield

It’s the dead of summer. The scandals are at low ebb. The traffic has thinned and the beach beckons. These are the fun lazy times before the hurricanes come. Thus I indulge in one of my hobbies, commerce patterns as pop psychology. In other words, what are we reading and watching, and what does that say about us? In lieu of actual serious research, I turned to the good folks at a couple of popular online sites for quick and meaningless answers.

Netflix has a feature on its Web site that allows you to see which movies people in your area are renting. As you might expect, people in different parts of the county have wildly divergent tastes.

We watch a lot of foreign films in Miami Beach, mostly from Argentina, Brazil, and Spain. Some of our picks are great, like La Dolce Vita, Amores Perros or Run Lola Run. Some of them are merely decent, such as this week’s top local favorite, Deus é Brasileiro (God Is Brazilian). I can only surmise that this is a side effect of our obsession with the World Cup. Too bad this year’s soccer Deus is, sadly, French. Balseros, a movie about Cuban rafters, also makes sense, as does Ushpizin, a comedy about ultra-Orthodox Jews trying to live in the modern world.

Our mainstream American favorites of late are lamentable — from The Godfather, Part III (why, people?) and Scary Movie 3 (again, why?), to a particularly bad Vin Diesel vehicle. After that, the local picks include Plata Quemada (Burnt Money), an Argentine thriller about gay bank robbers in love and on the lam. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime) is a black comedy from Spain about a lady-killer department store salesman forced to take up with an unattractive woman who spotted him committing a murder. Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) is another Argentine film about criminals, but this time it’s a con job involving stamp collectors, a hot woman and the requisite hubris of the fall guy.

Also in the bunch are movies about a heroin-shooting lesbian nun, a child-molesting priest, a philandering priest, a gang of Venezuelan kidnappers, gay prison love, straight men pretending to be gay and several about harsh realities from the perspective of unrealistic children.

Analysis: We here in Miami Beach know that life is strange and frequently awful, but we revel in it. Pedro Almodóvar is our transgressive muse. We want to be locked up, set free, coerced into sex and violence, and enjoy our kinky obsessions about our mothers and our confessors.

As a point of comparison, in Miami, the movie obsessions coincide neatly with political ones. The Magic City’s number one local favorite this week is Balseros, followed by Lista de Espera (The Waiting List), a story about Cubans waiting for a bus. Then it’s Vampires in Havana, Guantanamera, Strawberry & Chocolate (a gay-straight odd couple set in post-Castro Cuba), Entre Ciclones (sex, crime, comedy and hurricanes in Cuba), and Cuban Blood, a weird one that casts Harvey Keitel in the unlikely role of a Cuban casino owner surviving the revolution.

For flavor, Miamians also threw in an Uruguayan love story, a Venezuelan kidnapper drama (Secuestro Express, intense), a few Almodóvar films, a couple of Argentine capers, some dalliances with prostitutes and a couple of movies about mother issues. The only American film on the list was a terrible one starring Ashlee Simpson.

Check out the favorites for North Miami Beach and it’s mostly American films, from gay cowboys (Brokeback Mountain) to kid wizards (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), Israeli revenge (Munich), rapper biopic (Get Rich or Die Tryin’), hapless detectives (The Pink Panther) and supermodel bounty hunters (Domino). These folks aren’t delving much into the foreign films. It’s a similar picture in Homestead.

I’ll just go ahead and say that what this town (“town” being my vague reference to the collection of self-absorbed neighborhoods that never quite add up to an identifiable whole) needs is a local movie exchange program. How will people ever get beyond superficial contempt for each other’s cultural references without pushing past the Vin Diesel barrier?

Miami does not have a reputation as a city of high culture, but occasionally we do read more than the 411. Amazon.com offers a similar list of the most popular purchases made in the last month by city. Miami Beach doesn’t show up, but Miami does. So what are we reading? Judging by Amazon, we are a utilitarian lot, interested in business books and college textbooks more than great literature (the notable exception being Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres Tristes Tigres).

Nevertheless, I choose to see something in what we’re buying lately. There’s the practical: Cuentos Chinos (Chinese Tales), Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer’s treatise on failed Latin American economic policies. Also the intriguing: Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy, which no traveler of Miami’s socio-sexual crossroads should be without.

And for cynical observers, the promising: Mediation, Citizen Empowerment and Transformational Politics.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.