Apple TV+’s Spanish language series Las Azules (Women in Blue) is set in 1971 and depicts Mexico City’s first female police force.1 It’s stunning to look at with the delightful ‘70s wardrobe, the vintage-inspired color intensity, the midcentury architecture. Las Azules shares the aesthetic of crónica roja, a Latin American branch of contemporary literary journalism. Narratives with blood running through it. The red chronicle searches for ways to express the despair and political frustration of the time, the grittier side of documentarian work. But where Las Azules really shines is in how it moves beyond prior genres and narrative tropes in its interrogation of intergenerational cycles of violence, how it tries to provide an account of violence against women that is neither sentimental nor noir, but something more like analysis.
The show’s four protagonists represent four very different women. There’s Maria, the doting wife and mother with a suppressed lifelong desire to pursue detective work; her younger sister, Valentina, a feminist activist; Gabina, the optimistic striver who has always wanted to be a police officer, yet her police officer father forbade her; and, finally, Ángeles, who is the quirky, socially awkward, yet brilliant loner whose parents were murdered when she was a baby, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother. Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer known as the Undresser, targeting Mexico’s women.
Here come the spoilers—the Undresser’s first victim was deemed to be a saint, a woman named Rosa who ran a foster home. One of her foster children, a boy who was selectively mute at the time she first took him in, becomes a suspect in the case. Rosa went to the police to gain information about him. “Let me look into his past. You know better than anyone, that once we’re aware of the wounds of the past, we can begin to heal.” This dialogue pierces me, that somehow our past can express itself into the monstrosity of our future. The police officer then details the violence the young boy witnessed. How he saw his mother tied up in nothing but her underwear, how she was left to die at the bottom of a metal container at a water treatment plant, how his father sat nearby drinking as she begged to be untied, the water level slowly rising to fill the container. The police officer proclaims, “Like father, like son, both of them are sick.”
I’m all too familiar with this line of reasoning, too common in the genre of horror. I spent my early childhood being raised by a single mother who suffered from, in my opinion (and experience), undiagnosed mental illness. At times this looked a bit manic, like whimsy, taking buses all over town to diners with toasters on the table where I got to order and make my own toast, or twirling her around and around to the Bee Gees. But her absolute favorite was snuggling up to watch horror films. Elvira, Alfred Hitchcock, and I’ll never forget the psychological thriller The Bad Seed, based on William March’s novel of the same name. The premise is that pristine, blonde, wide-eyed, eight-year old Rhoda is a sociopath who likely killed her Spelling Bee-winning classmate. Christine, Rhoda’s mother, discovers she was adopted, and Rhoda’s biological mother was a notorious serial killer. Hence the name of the film: is Rhoda’s sociopathic behavior genetic?
For too many reasons to list here, by thirteen I landed in foster care. Yet I think even sooner than that, this narrative of the bad seed had somehow wound its way into my subconscious. So much language around abuse, or around terminating an abusive relationship, suggests “breaking the cycle.” The trope that violence is hereditary is common in horror films: Texas Chainsaw Massacre suggests the Leather Man descends from a family lineage of cannibals; Rosemary’s Baby offers a baby of demonic origins, spurned from a generational cycle of evil; and The Shining depicts the madness of an alcoholic experiencing writer’s block (same), who is revealed in the final scene to have been reincarnated and returned back to the hotel from the past, or he has a distant relative who worked there.
I’ve been aware of this anxiety, that at my core lay a monster, and that eventually others would discover this. Whenever I considered the idea of having children, I’d pass along this red streak. Intellectually, I was aware that suffering from abuse wasn’t the only precursor to becoming abusive yourself, but there are many narratives that support that idea. According to scholar Lauren Berlant by way of Jacqueline Rose, “anxiety is the core affect of femininity.”2 I can see how this came to be, our evil ovum haunting us. Does whatever seep through our mind and heart express itself through our offspring?
Las Azules entertains this idea, but only by way of characters whom we do not trust: “Like father, like son.” For the women in the story, things are more complicated. Most of the story of the foster child accused of being the Undresser is revealed in flashbacks, as Maria and Ángeles are reading through case files and police reports. Maria proclaims, “Growing up around such violence would take a toll on anyone’s mind.” Ángeles argues, “That’s not true. I witnessed the murder of my parents, and I’ve never felt the urge to hurt anybody. A person’s past does not justify their actions in the present.”
Finally: a show that depicts intergenerational violence has the capacity to sit in paradox. That life is complicated, people are neither all good nor all bad, neither all-violent nor non-violent. That our genetics or circumstances alone don’t dictate our fates. Just as author Jonathan Gleason has written in his essay, Proxemics, “I’m skeptical of the past as a perfect cipher for making sense of the present. Dead mother to narcissistic personality disorder to disordered relationship with women to prison. What about all the people who turn out just fine? But I do believe in redemption. I believe people can change. I believe in second chances. And I believe we put people, the innocent and the guilty, in the worst situation imaginable and then act surprised when they become exactly what we fear.”3
If the traumatic past is not to blame for the actions of the serial killer today, then what is? What Laz Azules leaves us with is a picture of violence that cannot be reduced to individual psychology but is instead the product of a social system. While Mexico has elected its first female president, an average of ten women are murdered in Mexico every day. A collection of childhood traumas cannot alone account for these statistics. And by denying the easy backstory, Las Azules is a show that, while taking place in the early ‘70s, speaks to conditions for women in Mexico today.
In Las Azules, the right genre for diagnosing systemic violence is not that of childhood trauma, but that of what Lauren Berlant has called the “female complaint.” Berlant writes, “Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” For Maria, the love she seeks falls more in line with recognition, a love that comes with the sort of freedom that doesn’t require her to abandon the parts of herself that want to pursue a career in law enforcement. Her husband from the very beginning is obviously cheating on her, as the series opens with the trope of Maria surprising him at work with balloons and a cake only to be stuck in a closet in his office listening to him make arrangements for a romantic escapade with his paramour. The effect is to make extreme violence like that of the Undresser continuous with the everyday gaslighting of women, with the compulsion for women to love and be loved, not matter how much it hurts.
In my own work, I’m often required to take up the position of a detective, but what Las Azules ultimately taught me is not to side with the police officer’s easy psychological readings of violence. I’ve worked as a journalist who reports on child fatalities within the child welfare system. In writing about and reporting on these cases, I’m often faced with circumstances that undermine the grievability of these lost lives—whether it be heavily redacted documents or an interest in metrics and data, how many children were negatively impacted by an intervention. In my reporting obligations, I want to ask: what’s a good number? The right number of deaths? As feminist scholar Judith Butler inquires, “Whose lives if lost would incur an incalculable loss?” Similarly, women who are missing and murdered in Mexico become necropolitical subjects. The ungrievable Other.
But it’s the paradox I’m interested in, the conditions that make these murders possible. Berlant writes, “The complaint genres of women’s culture tend to foreground a view of power that blames flawed men and bad ideologies for women’s intimate suffering, all the while maintaining some fidelity to the world of distinction and desire that produced such disappointment in the first place.”4 I take this to mean that this genre does look at overall systemic failures or inequities, but still maintains ties to the systems that produced the disappointment in the first place. The women in blue are exposing a corrupt police force and failures of patriarchy from within the police force. I report on multiple failures within the child welfare system but still look for solutions through public social services. To be both critical and sentimental, here I am, applying feminist theory to case records and coroners’ reports, drowning in all of it. Sometimes, I even pause to stroke a word or two, pet a photo. You are not monsters, I’m saying. You are not monsters. To us.
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Endnotes
- When I returned to the show for this essay, I learned that Apple+ dubbed over the original Spanish in English. For an optimal viewing experience, change the language setting to Español (Mexico) or Original Language with English subtitles.
- Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 16.
- Jonathan Gleason, “Proxemics,” Colorado Review 50, no. 1 (2023): 44.
- Berlant, Female Complaint, 2.
Melissa Chadburn