The film is not about the need for America to build a wall across its Mexican border, even as, with the movie beginning with a small flood of Mexican immigrants making a break into the country, one of whom carrying with him, a grenade, and with Mexico isolated as the country in which Somalia terrorists gateway into the U.S., it certainly on the surface would seem to be. Still, it isn't. And the reason it isn't is because a wall would represent a permanent address to the immigration "problem," and thus a removal of the pleasure the film is about offering to several of its key characters: that what you'd built up for yourself as giving you a kind of immunity to the harms of the world, is indeed as strong and protective as you'd hoped. With the wall, with problems, stopped... you'd never know. Maybe you were going about in full confidence in your daily life, thinking you'd got life licked, but were the whole while believing that what had once legitimately provided protective mana before had long ago deteriorated away, and you were as naked to obliteration as anyone. Beginning to become worried about this, something has got to be available to prove to you that this isn't in fact the case. THAT, a wall unfortunately stops.
The young girl in the film is a daughter of the leader of Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, and there is no real way any mere school principle would dare contend with her. She knows that if someone successfully contends with her, hems her in, it gives latitude for people thinking that maybe the cartel boss isn't as powerful in his reach as most people contend it is... it weakens his own reputation, so it would never happen. But nevertheless if isolated in a principle's office for an offence she knows would lead to anyone else's expulsion, and pressed upon by a stern, authoritative adult... how absolutely sure would she be in that instance of her immunity? The audience, along with her, might doubt, for a second, but when she would subsequently bring up her father and with it producing the, of course, absolutely inevitable reaction of his immediately backing down, both would have renewed faith in the power of this shield against attack. She'd leave his office, dancing, and exhilarated, with no need for a re-test for quite some time.
If you were the chief go-to when the government needed someone who would deploy any means, break any rule, to stop a phenomena that cannot be allowed to persist -- the bombing of mothers and children within supermarkets -- someone who couldn't be balked by the police, or the FBI, because no one less than the President has your back, then you'd know at some level that your immunity might in fact be infinite -- that even the Secretary of State might be wary of contesting you, for you're all that stands between absolute mayhem and some genuine semblance of secured order. Still, let's say the Secretary of State orders you to do something that you in fact don't comply with entirely... that is, that suppose rather than killing all those who bore some inconvenient knowledge, you killed all of them but one, but certainly didn't let her go, let her escape, but brought her back within the reach of state control -- so, still showed some quasi-agreement with the whole aim, and full agreement with the principle behind it -- then you know at some level you wouldn't really be punished for it all that much. But still, when you made the decision to go against directives, and were reminded of it by the fellow members of your team, there'd be a moment's trepidation as you felt, perhaps, all-alone and powerfully tested by all-forbidding powers. But then soon exhilarated and reborn, renewed, as you bore through this unaccustomed feeling of being so tested, this return of brain-stem-ruled mind, of early memories of fear and excitation, of the past ruling what you know, to being more corpus-callosum, more conscious brain, more maturely-set, reality-tested, again.
if you were an elite trooper whose polish, whose quaint mannerisms and orderly style, seemed almost half of why you seemed to persist through so many missions, you're not about to expect that if a bullet strikes you, it'd do the like of producing some kind of gross neck wound, but rather do what you'd ordained for it to do, and strike you were you never-failingly, diligently set yourself to be struck -- within the confines of your bullet-proof vest. But nevertheless in a battle situation where things that are not supposed to be happening, evidently, with your own ostensible troops firing at you, are, you might doubt if this time, still true. But would be that much reassured, with stray bullets hitting you where you dressed protection, that so long as you maintain yourself with the same manner of regular polish, your immunity will continue to remain, and bullets, if they strike you, will do so... fittingly.
If you are the most dangerous assassin in the world, a man who kills more effectively and efficiently than anyone, people will know you at some level as someone who also, surely, must be great at bearing through instances of being wounded, of being successfully, himself, attacked, for both are required for your reputation as a guy who knows both the top-shelf and bottom-drawers of lived experience. But if you're too much success and too much elite style, if you've grown accustomed to seeing yourself as that, and that only, then you might with your distance from the gutter wonder if perhaps you'd lost the ability to take a knife wound, survive somebody's garrot-attack, if in future, tested. So when such attack occurs, if you take a shot to the head... and come to shake it off, you're going to feel again in the presence of others that sense that in any situation, at all, you're the perfect agent, the one with the highest likelihood to pull a miracle even out of an impossible situation: you are in one person, someone with the resources of a collective, and it's appropriate that you serve as the person who, with your finally making use of a grenade to implode a carload of people belonging to the other side, to our enemies, quits all the grenade carnage that made our side feel vulnerable and shook.
If you're a kid who gains approval by assisting his side in exporting refugees across the border, and who succeeds in proceeding through an initiation process that would have him kill a person set before him, when others DO quail away from doing so, then you know at some level this gives you some avenue for free expression, to balk, to resist. The feted hero is allowed to quit the party early, perhaps even in disgust, so long as the other revellers aren't prevented in their doing so. So when you've just "done the deed," actually moved from being an ordinary school kid to a gangster who on demand, kills people, you know that you've got avenue to pull away for a bit, because you're operating in a zone where anyone who'd go at you too much for doing so would be stepping on something sacrosanct to an honour they themselves pride themselves in upholding -- that the initiated gangster is no longer a patsy, a weak boy, prey to everyone's abuse and manipulations, but someone with earned liberties over people, someone who has gained flexibility, leniency, a right to embody his own particular place; that the initiate who proves loyalty through something that can never be taken back and is imagined as transporting you from a state of powerless subjection to a state of manhood, is now emboldened to make immediate demonstration of strengthened status, his peerage. Still, when you hopped off a truck to set off on your own, to drop out of the party, early, you know you're still rebuking people WHO STILL VERY MUCH DO shoot people for acts that read only as betrayal... and mightn't your action look ONLY like that? And mightn't there sense of agitation over it be enough that rather than speed along on their very urgent task assuming that, concerning you, concerning an issue of significant lesser concern right now, they'd judge that at some point you'll regroup and rejoin them -- as what other life is now available to you? -- they actually decided to do the unlikely, the unimaginable, and instead stopped dead to finish you? It's impossible, as everything favours their not doing so, yet--. And so when it happens, when you succeed in separating from them, you'd know the thrill of having tested something you knew must be secure but found out REALLY ACTUALLY WAS, and you'd proceed along your way, for quite awhile, assured in the protective worth of whatever apparatus had in the past proved you were in operating within a realm of invulnerability.
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