To Van Sant, pitting rich against poor was too blunt a binary. Instead, Mala Noche traces the subtle negotiations of power between people living on the fringes of society. Walt may be an overnight janitor and bodega clerk, but it gives him an edge – enough money to be a kind of small-scale benefactor to wayfarers who cross his path.
Johnny and Pepper claw back power using intangible forms of currency – Johnny through the satisfaction of rejecting Walt’s advances, Pepper by miming vomiting at the prospect of gay intimacy. Later, Walt speculates that Pepper, feeling embarrassed about taking money for sex, used his penis as a weapon to deliberately hurt him, as if to rebalance the scales. Still, their interactions also contain moments of genuine tenderness, as when Walt nurses Pepper back to health from the flu and teaches him how to drive.
For his part, Streeter understands how the criticism directed at the age and power imbalances in Call Me By Your Name, for example, could be retrospectively applied to Mala Noche, though he worries this reading flattens the complexity of the relationships.
“Johnny and Pepper are young, destitute, and undocumented, that’s absolutely true, but it’s also possible to see Walt as the romantic innocent being exploited by the street savvy, thieving young men,” Streeter said. “My view has always been that art, at its best, should stage these subtle conflicts, not moralize about them.”
What ultimately tears asunder this network of relationships on Skid Row is the invasive violence of the state. Johnny disappears without explanation for a long stretch, and we learn later that he was forcibly deported by federal agents. Johnny learns on his return what the rest of us have now witnessed in lurid detail: Pepper, paranoid and fleeing pursuit, getting gunned down in a hallway by police. Gutted by this revelation, Johnny runs off, living out the harried panic of being hunted that is so often endemic to existing as an immigrant in the United States.
Streeter tells Little White Lies that the sole criticism he heard of the film in the early years of its release was that the police shooting felt unnecessary and tacked on. It did not appear in Walt’s original story. At the time, Streeter assumed Van Sant had felt compelled to gin up more drama to bring the film in line with the expectations of modern American films. But he now believes Van Sant built the story to an essential insight: that the people most hounded and exploited are the easiest targets to become disposable scapegoats. “In light of everything going on today, it may have been prescient, if too modest,” Streeter says.
As ICE and US Border officials continue to inflict deadly violence on the public and Minneapolis finds itself under paramilitary occupation by more than 2,000 armed agents – patrolling streets, breaking into homes, snatching people from cars, raiding schools and businesses and shooting unarmed protesters – Mala Noche’s vivid depiction of state violence inflicted on immigrants now lands with renewed and blood-curdling urgency.