Amores perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film

film index: 59
relationship with architecture: thematic characterization of the storytelling resemblance strng existance of architecture
study subject in: "film+architecture" Course, Harvard Design School. (click HERE for syllabus)


film: Amores perros
director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
writers: Guillermo Arriaga
production: Mexico
release: 14 May, 2000
playtime: 153 min
visual:
Language: Spanish
Subtitles:
Genre: anthology
Cast: Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero, Vanessa Bauche, Jorge Salinas, Adriana Barraza, Gustavo Sánchez Parra
size: 694 mb

reference: www.foriegnmoviesddl.com, www.divxturka.net, Taringa.com, www.thefilmjournal.com

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Amores perros is a 2000 Mexican film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is an anthology film containing three distinct stories which are connected by a car accident in Mexico City. Each of the three tales is also a reflection on the cruelty of humans toward animals and each other, showing how they may live dark or even hideous lives.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros juxtaposes three independent tales, which converge in a kaleidoscopic auto accident. The first deals with the incestuous love between an adolescent, Octavio (Gael García Bernal), and his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche). The second is about an editor, Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero), who abandons his family to live with Valeria (Goya Toledo), a model that eventually has her leg amputated. The last tale focuses on an ex-terrorist and professional killer, "El Chivo" (Emilio Echevarría), who tries to recover the love of his daughter. Since González Iñárritu relies on the Aristotelian notion of characterization, he does not develop the inner life of the agents nor does he individuate them as Proust might. Nonetheless their choices reveal shocking personalities. Most of their attributes radiate from their actions, not their inner essences. It is as if they were points destined to move erratically along a plane until they meet a crack in the surface (the crash) or an edge (murderous brothers meet). The result is a Picasso-like architecture.

(to read more about the description and relation to architecture scroll down at the bottom)

imdb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245712/
wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amores_perros

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reference: http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue9/amoresperros.html

Amores Perros : A Tragic Weltanschauung
By Liliana Wendorff & J. Thomas Morley

Liliana Wendorff's interests are broad. She is interested in Hispanic cultures and literatures, especially as promulgated by new forms, such as film. Liliana received her Ph.D. in Spanish-American Literature in 1995 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Thesis: La aventura de escribir: Parodia y metaficción en La tía Julia y el escribidor de Mario Vargas Llosa).

J. Thomas Morley's main interest lies in epistemology. Tom received his Ph.D.
in Philosophy in 1986 from the University of Tennessee (Thesis: Picturing and Thinking in Seeing: Adverbial Theories of Perception).


Aristotle postulated the possibility of a drama without characters. According to The Philosopher, action should be the ground and source of the individual characters: "Without action the tragedy would not arise, but it might arise without characters" (13). Henry James held that the fictional character, "Homo fictus", should be equal to action: "Character in any sense that we can get at it, is action, and action is plot" (22). Such action-induced characterization frames the tragedy Amores Perros. In this work, we explore the Weltanschauung of the protagonists of Amores Perros, who are trapped in different nexuses of contemporary Mexican society.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores Perros juxtaposes three independent tales, which converge in a kaleidoscopic auto accident. The first deals with the incestuous love between an adolescent, Octavio (Gael García Bernal), and his sister-in-law Susana (Vanessa Bauche). The second is about an editor, Daniel (Álvaro Guerrero), who abandons his family to live with Valeria (Goya Toledo), a model that eventually has her leg amputated. The last tale focuses on an ex-terrorist and professional killer, "El Chivo" (Emilio Echevarría), who tries to recover the love of his daughter. Since González Iñárritu relies on the Aristotelian notion of characterization, he does not develop the inner life of the agents nor does he individuate them as Proust might. Nonetheless their choices reveal shocking personalities. Most of their attributes radiate from their actions, not their inner essences. It is as if they were points destined to move erratically along a plane until they meet a crack in the surface (the crash) or an edge (murderous brothers meet). The result is a Picasso-like architecture.

Melodramatic elements--infidelity, secrets, love triangles, prohibited sexual desire and violence--abound in Amores Perros. But while typically in a melodrama there are two antithetic figures: the protagonist who personifies the good, and the antagonist who personifies the evil, in Amores Perros all the Homines Ficti are antiheroes. In addition, they are very superficial characters. They inflict pain on one another without an apparent motive, even self-interest. Schadenfreude is their only pleasure. All have feet of clay-vices expected by current aesthetic sensibilities. Told separately, the tales of Amores Perros resemble modern soap operas. Intrigues and antiheroes abound and the reality reflected represents the extremes of life.

The egoism of the characters of Amores Perros blinds them to opportunities to change. Instead of emphasizing human complexity, the director centers on the plots, which generate the characters (defined by how they are ensnared). Contradictory motivations which generally reinforce the characters as dramatic figures, and make them more convincing, recognizable, and definable must be inferred. The observer must project meaning to recover any familiar sense of agency.

Román Gubern defines the characters of a fictional narrative as:

… un conjunto de atributos que se deducen de un sujeto en el transcurso de una narración. Estos signos son el resultado de la construcción mental previa de un autor, que el lector hace también suya, en el curso de su lectura, pues el sistema simbólico del texto desemboca en un logomorfismo que otorga vida imaginaria al personaje, al hacer que el lector proyecte un haz de motivaciones psicológicas coherentes sobre su constructo literario. (9)


… a set of attributes that are drawn from a subject in the course of a narration. These signs are the result of a previous mental construction of an author, that the reader also appropriates, through reading, because the symbolic system of the text leads into a logomorphism that grants imaginary life to the character, by making the reader project a bundle of coherent psychological motivations over his literary construct. (My translation)

The primary language of the "symbolic system" is that of surface features. The protagonists of Amores Perros appear on the screen characterized by their physical appearance, behavior and gestures, almost never by their thoughts. For that reason, it is difficult for the audience to understand their psychological motivations just by what is seen on the screen (which is, after all, a surface). The director dictates what his fictional creations are and do, in order to erect a sturcture of feelings expressed in the vulgar language of actions. Reciprocally, these beings are responsible for their actions, but their freewill is conditioned by their vices. It is as if God had planted the seed and they, because of their weaknesses and circumstances, always chose to act badly. Agents, caught like loose molecules constrained by elemental forces to movement along a plane, delude themselves into believing they can escape. This architecture of flat surfaces may be observed front to back or in reverse much like a viewing of a house. Effects may precede causes.

Despite these degress of randomness, the film manifests a fatalistic worldview. The shower scene, when Ramiro beats Octavio up, after Octavio gives him a head butt as if he were in a boxing match without a referee, is only one example of the chaos and violence that permeate Mexican society. All of the characters are vicious, no matter what their position in the social hierarchy is. Even the model, whose "vices" are masked by beauty and makeup, tramples on others in the professional field, because the business of modeling is just as ferocious as the dogfights. Each one of the vices of the characters provokes a disaster in this Machiavellian universe. Nevertheless, the director is a moralist. Dante's Inferno similarly situates the inflicted, each according to his sins: narcissistic pride, avarice, lust and incest. Punishments await like "pishtacos". The spectator soon learns to predict what is going to happen after each action. The brotherly rivalry exemplified twice over by the dogfighters Octavio and Ramiro, and the murderous Gustavo and his stepbrother Luis, leaves little doubt that retribution is forthcoming. In the Aristotelian dynamic adopted by the director, wickedness necessarily requires a reprimand. The protagonists, then, stay subjected to a complicated mechanism of alienation that converts them into slaves.

The screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, utilized the title "Amores perros" because he wanted to show "un amor mordaz, devorador, intenso, temible, que estuviera al borde del abismo" (viii) (a corrosive, devouring, intense, feared love that would be at the border of the abyss [my translation]). Furthermore, his use of the word "perros" in the title seems to be intentional. The dogs, emblems of faithfulness, are as important as the persons in the plot development. As James Borman notes, dogs are "prizes of consolation for the losers in love's lottery" (91). But they are more than booty for the bereft. Each has a character located on the passive-aggressive continuum. In Cofi, a black Rottweiler, we have a well-developed instinct and loyalty. He represents the paradigm of the masculine: he is brave, strong, aggressive and damaging. Cofi contrasts with Richie, the small white Maltese who exemplifies the stereotype of the feminine. Richie is loyal, has little intelligence and utilizes his cuteness to manipulate and achieve his objectives. These dogs also provide a dual reality that "leads into a logomorphism that grants [another layer of] imaginary life to the character" (Gubern 9) by way of canine metaphors present in the film. Sometimes the dogs are like twins of the protagonists-Richie and Valeria; Octavio and Cofi, El Chivo and Cofi. In other instances their actions mimick those of other characters-Valeria and Richie--underlining their instinctive behavior. The comparisons between dogs and people suggest a Hobbesian world in which: "The life of man in a state of nature is vile, nasty, brutish and short". A fundamental difference between dogs and people, that underlines human primitiveness, is that dogs are ruled by instinct and do not have laws, while people have social contracts. In the human realm of Amores Perros the social contract is honoured in the breach.

Character transmogrification also has its dual in the canine realm. When Cofi is introduced for the first time he is just a pet. He is neither adorable nor admirable. When he is made to fight with other dogs Cofi executes his job with aggressiveness, an inherent aspect of his nature. Cofis is divided between two brothers: Ramiro, who is his owner, and Octavio, who cares for and utilizes him in the fights. Motivated perhaps by jeaulosy and avarice, the brothers fight instinctively and bestially-the same way as the dogs do-to establish their primacy. Octavio gets aroused when his brother makes love to Susana. Like Cofi, a docile housedog who becomes a fighting dog, Octavio gets transformed from a harmless youth into an assassin.

Octavio is a handsome sixteen year-old dreamer bedeviled by a desire to escape the slums of Mexico City with his sister-in-law, Susana. The archetypal love triangle of romantic novels laced with soap opera adultery and violence is made explicit. One natural interpretation could be that the romantic interest of Octavio emerges partly from a personal vendetta against his brother Ramiro, who, with their mother's support, has replaced him as paterfamilias. Octavio searches for an identity within his home and for a place in society. The channels for psychological and emotional development that society offers him are scarce if not nonexistent. Octavio lives in an oppressive and loveless environment. He does not have a father, his mother is distant and his model is his older brother, a thief and a criminal who hates him. His attempts to become a leader within the family lack support. Octavio is a youth who lacks a clear sense of self, incapable of establishing significant interpersonal relationships. Within the family he has a low social status due to his age. He needs to prove his maturity, starting with making a living. But his "mature" acts consist in having an affair with his sister-in-law and in easily falling into the underworld of dogfights, because it is the only one that affords him the opportunity of escaping his environment and of winning Susana for himself. His actions function as a distancing stratagem designed to alert us about his naïveté.

From the point of view of personal development, Octavio's actions represent regression more than progress. He not only does not become self-sufficient but rather loses everything: his only brother, his friend, his lover, his family and his dog. All his attitudes and plans are programmed for failure since the beginning. There is no indication that he has the resources needed to carry them out. Susana never assures him that she is going to leave with him and in the end, demonstrating a marianista attitude, she opts for staying with her husband, even though he abuses her. From treating her with tenderness initially, Octavio starts pressuring her to have sexual relations. His love evolves into unbridled passion once he starts contributing to the support of his sister-in-law and his nephew. Even at the end, after his own accident and the death of his brother, Octavio continues pursuing his plan to escape with Susana. She tells him sarcastically, professing a deterministic ideology: "Si quieres hacer reír a Dios, cuéntale tus planes" (If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans [my translation]). The disparity between Octavio's plans and his frustrated romantic relationship creates an irony that contributes to the effectiveness of the plot and accentuates its melodramatic content. Octavio is defined as a character by his wild violent actions. It is as if he were a maniac that constantly repeats the same thing, as if he found pleasure in hitting himself rhythmically against the wall. It is difficult to sympathize with him because he loses his quixotic innocence by transgressing many social norms--commiting incest with his sister-in-law, ordering that some thugs beat his brother up, and knifing his rival.

Strong connections to the canine realm are also evident in the tale of the professor. In it, dogs constitute an invisible hand known as "petting the dog", utilized normally by the screenwriters to subliminally influence our opinion of the character.1 At the beginning it is easier to sympathize with the dogs than with El Chivo, but, when this man who does not seem to love anyone reveals a weakness for the dogs, his image softens and the audience starts sympathizing with him. When Cofi instinctively kills his other dogs to exercise his territorial power, El Chivo becomes possessed with a reflexive vengeance. Cofi is spared. El Chivo contains himself when he realizes suddenly that he himself is an assassin just like the dog. From that moment on, El Chivo is going to try to mend his ways. It is difficult to digest this happy ending á la Hollywood and to accept that from one moment to another El Chivo will change radically, because one does not know his motivations. There are no indications that he likes killing or that he does it for money. Nevertheless, it is his occupation. He seems to be satisfied living anonymously and in squalor. As a professor he could express himself in a different way and live a better life, but he is not interested. Instead he lives violently. Deborah Shaw interprets the inclination of the Chivo for commiting violent acts as a manifestation of his ire against the society that incarcerated him, made him lose his family and obligated him to abandon his political ideals (58), but revenge is an emotion and the professor is dead emotionally. He kills without passion, automatically; for him, killing is an occupation like any other.

The professor evokes memories of the Zapatistas and Abimael Guzmán, the former leader of the Peruvian terrorist group "Shining Path", who assassinated and bombed for their ideals. Abimael attempted to change Peruvian society. El Chivo abandoned his family to transform Mexican society. Both were dogmatic and inflexible. El Chivo becomes a paid assassin for none other than Mexican government officials. He wanders through the streets of the Mexican capital and he lives "okupando"2 (as a squatter) a dilapidated apartment with three dogs. His nickname "El Chivo", male goat, in Christian mythology represents Satan, lust, voluptuosity and masculine fertility (de Vries, 218).3 His nickname--simplest level of characterization--animalizes him and serves as a mask to hide his complex personality from both the audience and the other protagonists, and at the same time it establishes the Manichean image that is going to follow him throughout the film.

El Chivo utilizes the dogs as substitutes for people, transferring his love to them. His excessive devotion toward the animals is logomorphically, albeit quixotically, combined with his misanthropic attitudes. He is like Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazis, who also established close relationships with dogs. El Chivo, partly because he was jailed for a long time, has lost the ability to establish or maintain close connections with people. He can observe or participate in the saddest situations without getting emotionally involved. It is as if he were anesthetized. He does not show remorse even when he kills. Ironically, he derives no get pleasure from the suffering of others. Nothing moves him. His personal experiences have disillusioned him. He feels like a victim of his ideals and he knows that he has lost something that he cannot recover.

Isolated and insensitive individuals can benefit from the company of animals--constant sources of consolation, affection and inconditional support during periods of crisis (James Serpell124). Cofi, whom the professor re-baptizes Blackie, functions as a therapeutic agent by becoming his companion of adventures. Like Sancho and Don Quijote, the professor and the dog also invert their roles of master and servant when, in a symbolic scene, Cofi exhibits more wisdom and humanity than his putative owner, by letting him see the "light" about his true identity.

None of the characters of Amores Perros, including El Chivo, evinces compassion. The professor steals, kills and prefers animals to people. Throughout the film, El Chivo has several epiphanies that tempt him to abandon his evil ways. Simply seen, it is as if his spirit would be purified by going through different trials. When El Chivo incinerates his dogs-which Blackie has ravaged-redemption seems eminent. The Christian leitmotiv also becomes evident when, metaphorically, from the darkness of "transgression" he takes a step toward the light of "purity". El Chivo had imposed blindness on himself, by refusing to wear his glasses. He was afraid to discover himself by confronting his past. Doing it would have dismantled all his convictions. By putting the glasses on again, El Chivo has to walk toward the light that he has tried to avoid for many years. This symbolic action barely excuses the character's despicable behavior, because one can speculate that living in darkness does not allow him to realize his grave transgressions and, at the same time, it opens a window of opportunity for him to obtain salvation. Unlike Teiresias-the old blind prophet priest of Thebes, who could "see" better than anyone else the will of the gods-El Chivo's self-imposed blindness does not make him wiser.

Furthermore, the supposed "clarity" that he now achieves is stained by his feelings of self-pity. One does not sense a guilty conscience or a cathartic effect. He wants to correct his actions and apologize to his daughter, but when he realizes that his ideology guided him on the road to perdition, he feels sorry for himself. He agonizes about how to silence the voice of his conscience without losing much in the process. His epiphanies leave him in a cynical position4 that is to recognize that the world is bad. Since he cannot change it, El Chivo, then, takes the easiest road, which is to get away from this vile world with Cofi and with his booty. His escape encapsulates a hero's redemption only if the shards of his past can somehow be made whole. But the audience cannot be given a comedy since it has no inkling of the inner conatus of the professor's soul. El Chivo remains a windowless monad. Clues to his subjective turn are dropped like red herrings. In a scene reminiscent of Cain vis-à-vis Cain, he leaves the two brothers ready to kill themselves. Furthermore, the scene takes place in a Biblical desert half barren and half black on the outskirts of Mexico. According to Paul Julian Smith, this symbolic and sacrificial landscape, from which the father perhaps will return purified to reunite with his daughter, suggests an open endedness (57). No closure can be expected.

The model's tale also leaves one hanging. This tale may also be viewed from the canine standpoint. Richie, unlike Cofi, is a lap dog, as beautiful and delicate as his owner. Richie is Valeria's constant companion, and emphasizes her refinement. He is exactly like the mascot one could expect of a woman with the physique and temperament of the pampered. Richie and his owner are a mere illustration, a saccharine portrait of profound love between a person and her mascot. Both live in the princely, domesticated world of the Mexican bourgeois, which contrasts with the nasty world of the other protagonists who constantly fight and rebel against poverty. Richie is not ferocious like Cofi, nor does he show to have developed instincts or sagacity. Even the tricks that Valeria has taught him are performed unconvincingly. When his toy ball falls in the hole of the floor of the apartment, Richie runs to fetch it, but cannot find his way out. His helplessness is like a brooch for Valeria.

Valeria is a model valued for her great physical beauty. The accident alters her life completely: she loses her job, her relationship with her lover deteriorates rapidly and she loses a leg. From being a beautiful, educated and delicate woman, she becomes a barking bitch, just like Richie. She insults and shouts at Daniel uncontrollably. She feels helpless and claustrophobic in the apartment where she is convalescing. Her situation is like Richie's, who, also helpless and claustrophobic, is trapped under the floor and is being attacked by rats. For Shaw, this parallelism suggests that the couple, even with their fortune and status, cannot escape the cruel reality of the City of Mexico (63). But this social commentary extensively simplifies the film. The tale has a more biting psychological hermeneutic, an internal interplay of submerged interpretations visible only through the surface reflections. The metaphor of the rats can represent several levels of discord: 1) the doubts of Daniel and his family's dismemberment; 2) "bites" in the model's career; and 3) the fight between Valeria and Daniel, among others.

Like the other protagonists in the film, Valeria's character remains static. Some critics (Shaw among them) hold that one does not know what identity Valeria will adopt now that she can no longer be a model. Others argue that she does not overcome her misfortune. Richard Schlickel holds that the model "cannot endure the pain, loneliness and loss that follow the accident" (78). Her superficial world finally crumbles when her leg is amputated. Losing her beauty and becoming disabled represents a loss of all that is meaningful to her. She is her worst adversary. Valeria is as empty inside as the empty advertisement of "Enchant" located in front of her apartment. González Iñárritu places a heavy load on this character. Valeria, who is afraid to be left alone-physically and emotionally, loses the utopia of hope and remains trapped in her misfortune, in her beauty, in her talent and in the apartment. She no longer enjoys praise from anyone and what she needs most is peace, but instead she must continue enduring an intolerable and insurmountable situation. Valeria lacks family support and has lost her lucrative job. Smith points out that the loss of her image represents social death for the model: the empty advertisement where her image was displayed before is now available but she is not (48).

In Valeria's lover, Daniel, development of character cannot be appreciated either. He does not sympathize with the dog, but rather tolerates it because of Valeria. When he finally rescues Richie from under the floor he seems to connect with him, but in fact he feels sorry for himself, and all he does is to project his own feelings on the dog. Since his affair with Valeria did not have the outcome he had planned, the father that abandoned his home for a young, beautiful woman now looks for refuge in it. At the beginning, Valeria represented "arm candy" to him. Valeria is to Daniel what Richie is for Valeria, a simple decoration. Daniel felt proud of possessing her. He enjoyed the adoration and recognition of the public and the sexual love.

Merely being perceived as a Casanova, even when one is not, is as effective as being a real Casanova. When Daniel suddenly finds himself deprived of his precious and appreciated gift, his image changes drastically. Instead, he feels trapped now that the beauty of his lover eludes him and his relationship has become suffocating. He himself is the culprit of his dilemma: to stay or not to stay with Valeria. He has abandoned his wife and his daughters for this beautiful woman, but the price now seems to him to be too high. There are indications that he wants to go back to his home because he starts calling his wife on the telephone.

Amores Perros has been interpreted predominantly in social terms, as an allegory of the moral deterioration of Mexican society. Amores Perros does depict a sort of civil war in a beautiful city, with horrific places, where the violence is endemic and where human relations are corrosive and wicked. In fact, the film contains intentional realism on the part of the director, who utilized real characters from the neighborhood where the dogfights were filmed.6 For David Ansen and Devin Gordon, Amores Perros presents "a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot" (62). Saying that the characters, emblems of modern Mexico, are revealed mostly through their actions constitutes a more acerbic commentary. Amores Perros is built with planes that intersect at different points. All the protagonists are superficial, and their inner lives are developed by action. Within their surface they can act freely, but they really cannot transcend. González Iñárritu manipulates his characters in order to achieve the perfect architecture in his film.

Many critics have suggested the existence of a message of redemption in the film. Arriaga, for example, writes that the characters "discover themselves and realize that pain is the road toward hope" (ix).7 Nevertheless, though the accident modifies their existence, there is no evidence that the characters develop. Rather, they spit self-pity into closed cocoons of the silk of the self. Egoists all have an Achilles heel. The vain and narcissistic Valeria, in order to have a comfortable life, puts all her eggs in one basket, and it does not take much to break the basket of beauty. Similarly, the professor, instead of confronting his situation, opts for escaping the society that, in his point of view, betrayed him. Amores Perros is a slice vignette of social realism blended with a shot of social Darwinism. The mechanics of Amores Perros suggest a stronger interpretation. Heroic elements of character (made base) are captured by action instead of inner moral struggle. The playing field-the plot-is a deterministic chessboard.

Notes

1. Hewitt explains that "petting the dog", in addition to softening the personality of a character, can be utilized with an opposite intention, to underline wickedness, as in the case of Cruella de Ville in 101 Dalmatians.


2. "Okupa", in Spanish argot, means "squatter" in English. The term is commonly used in Spain.


3. Another meaning of "chivo", that suggests manicheism and coincides with the good and bad aspects of the professor's personality, is that, together with the fish, the "chivo" forms part of the tenth zodiacal sign Capricorn. This duality "alludes to the double tendency of life toward the abyss (water) and the altitudes (mountains)", explains Cirlot (125).


4. The word cynic derives from the Greek word for "dog" (de Vries 140).


5. Deborah Shaw has observed three failed paternal models in the film: 1) the paternal absence in Octavio's family; 2) the father who abandons his family in Daniel's story; and 3) the father who initially abandoned his family and now attempts to recover the love of his daughter, in the figure of the professor. She argues that paternal absence can be interpreted as a metaphor of the State, since Amores Perros reflects a corrupt society without effective government (60).


6. The director and his film crew were assaulted by drugged adolescents when they were scouting Mexico City for places in which to film. The adolescents stole all their equipment and eventually negotiated with the filmmakers to be able to film in the same place where they were robbed, in exchange for protection. Several real characters of that neighborhood appear in the film, particularly in the dogfighting scenes.


7. René Rodríguez, Richard Schickel, Paul Julian Smith and Susan Dever agree that there is a message of redemption, but David William Foster warns that although the film suggests hope, it does not spare any effort in demonstrating how redemption should be negotiated in a context of overwhelming probabilities (159).
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Ansen, David and Gordon, Devin. "With the Ferocity of Dogs." Newsweek 16 Apr. 2001, Atlantic Edition: 62.
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Kenneth Telford. Chicago: Gateway, 1961.
Arriaga Jordán, Guillermo. Amores perros. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.
Bowman, James. "Feminist Fatales." The American Spectator June 2001: 89-91.
Cirlot, J.E. Dictionary of Symbols. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971.
De Vries, Ad. Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery. London: North-Holland, 1974.
Dever, Susan. Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas. From Post-Revolutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamérica. Albany: State U of New York P, 2003.
Foster, David William. Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2002.
Gubern, Román. Máscaras de la ficción. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002.
Hewitt, Chris. "Screenwriter's old trick: petting the dog." The News & Observer 21 Aug. 2003: 6E.
James, Henry. "Anthony Trollope." Theory of Fiction: Henry James. Ed. James E. Miller. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972.
Rodríguez, René. "Amores Perros Explores the Animal Element." Hispanic Apr. 2001: 95.
Ryan, Desmond. "Amores perros." The Philadelphia Inquirer Online 11 Apr. 2001.
Schickel, Richard. "A Bite As Tough As Its Bark." Time 16 Apr. 2001: 78.
Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Shaw, Deborah. Contemporary Cinema of Latin America. NY, London: Continuum, 2003.
Smith, Paul Julian. Amores perros. London: British Film Institute, 2003.