A Touch of Evil (1958): The dangers of biases

He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

Touch of Evil serves as a layered examination on the varying degrees to which racial prejudice affects our perception. From the offset, we are presented with two groups: the Law enforcement of the US vs the Mexican crime family. At once, the USA vs Mexico is presented to us as a wholly binary set in opposition to one another, and is supported by the existence of the "border", a separation line between the concepts of good and evil. Welles implies an implicit perception of whiteness as goodness. With this in mind, Vargas is presented as good that comes from evil, while Quinlan is inversely presented as evil that comes from good. 

Welles uses the viewer's existing underlying prejudice to characterise Vargas and to create a positive impression of him within our minds; a mexican man with no accent, married to a white american and operating within law enforcement... i.e. a professional that holds himself to a strict moral code and disapproves of unscrupulous practices.

It should be noted that although Vargas is the personification of justice within the events of the story, he himself is largely unsympathetic to the plight of his fellow man (as seen in his encounter with Sanchez, taking on a position of "guilty until proven innocent", despite Sanchez's attempts to connect to him based on their shared language and heritage... he also barely blinks an eye at the US detectives' abuse and treatment toward Sanchez). His identity seems to be based on a rejection of his own culture and a complete adoption of palatable whiteness. Yet despite all this, in the eyes of those on the US side of the border, he is still a Mexican, and therefore less trustworthy than Quinlan. Vargas, in his desire for respectability, sheds his culture and aspires toward whiteness, no matter how steep of an uphill battle it seems.

Quinlan on the other hand, has been well equipped to succeed. The watchful eye constantly cast upon Vargas looks away from Quinlan's corrupt practices. Quinlan is representative of those that benefit from the existing structure of whiteness; He harbours a very clear disdane for those south of the border, yet interestingly holds a flame for Mexican-Romani brothel owner Tana. (Although Tana herself does not seem to partake in any evil unsavory behaviours, perhaps it is what she represents that is of interest to Quinlan: "corruptability" and vice.) 
Quinlan is honour atrophying, his once prolific stature now a mere shadow in his twilight years. His flirtations with "evil" from the comfort of the false goodness he presents is mirrored by his relationship to Mexico and manifests in the breaking of his sobriety and his eventual unravelling. 

Across the runtime of Touch of Evil, Welles shines a light on the cracks forming in the separating line between `'good" and "evil", culminating in the smashing of the line in an exclamation, that those perceived as good are capable of great evil and that those seen as evil might not be. And then the grand revelation of Sanchez's confession hits us.

So it turns out Quinlan was right after all.

Welles makes us consider if all this was for nothing: Quinlan's reputation will go on to be unsullied in the white public eye, as the Mexican was proven to be guilty all along. His nuanced treatment of the characters leads us to question our own biases and forces us to reevaluate racism as a taught concept. Will we let the narrative continue or break out of our systemic stereotyping?

Originally posted on Letterboxd on 22 July 2024