La Bamba · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A coin goes up in freezing air and two young musicians watch it turn. Whoever wins takes the last seat on a small plane. You already know how it lands, because the film told you before it told you anything else: an airplane coming apart in the sky, a boy's nightmare that keeps arriving. Luis Valdez put the ending at the beginning on purpose, trading surprise for dread, and that trade changes what every ordinary scene in the picture is made of. A kitchen argument. A cheap session at a small label. A girl's name turned into a ballad. Each of those happens twice: once as itself, once as the last time.

Deleuze has a name for that doubling, and it isn't flashback. He calls it peaks of present. Most films treat time as a line, with memory as a detour off it — we leave 1959, visit 1957, come back. Deleuze noticed that certain films instead hold several presents at once and refuse to rank them: a present of the present, a present of the past, a present of the future, all of them live. La Bamba is built that way. The crash never becomes "later," because it arrived first. It sits beside the recording session and the front porch and will not leave.

This is worth pressing on, because it rescues the film from the complaint that otherwise sticks to it. Ritchie Valens had eight months. No apprenticeship, no fall, no comeback — none of the machinery a biopic runs on. Read as a career, the film has no third act. Read as peaks of present, the missing arc is the discovery: Valdez isn't tracking a rise, he's holding a duration and asking you to feel how thick it is. The suspense stops asking what happens. It asks what it costs.

The crash also returns as a recurring dream, and Deleuze would separate that carefully from memory. A recollection-image has an address — that year, that room, retrievable on request. A dream-image (his word: onirosign) has none. It's a circuit that loops out from the present and finds nothing solid at the far end. Ritchie's plane cannot be dated, because it hasn't happened yet. Adam Greenberg shoots those inserts unmoored, deliberately set off from the warm golds and browns of Pacoima, and Valdez lets the snake in too. The gearshift is inherited work: it comes from Zoot Suit (1981), where El Pachuco could simply step out of realist space, here surviving in a lower key. When a director's own vocabulary erupts inside a character's world like that, Deleuze calls it free indirect discourse — the camera no longer reporting on Ritchie but seeing with him and past him at once.

The other place the film changes gear is Tijuana, where the brothers visit a curandero and the light turns ritual. This is where Valdez's training surfaces plainly. El Teatro Campesino played actos on flatbed trucks for farmworkers, which teaches a specific craft: make the body legible at thirty feet, let posture carry the argument. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls that a gest — an attitude of the body that exposes the social relation it is caught inside, with nobody explaining it. The film's finest gest isn't the curandero, though. It's Ritchie at a microphone singing Spanish he cannot speak. A whole history of assimilation, held in one posture, stated by no one.

Which is why the song matters more than the career. "La Bamba" is a son jarocho from Veracruz that a Pacoima teenager turned into a rock record. The debt here runs through The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), which built a film outward from a corrido — treating a folk song as the historical record, letting untranslated Spanish work as drama rather than obstacle. Valdez runs the same trick backward, building a life out of a song title. Deleuze calls this fabulation: not lying, but legending, the act by which people left out of the official record story themselves into it. He pairs it with a harder claim about political cinema — the people are missing. A filmmaker in a minor position cannot address an audience that already exists, because institutionally it doesn't; the film has to call one into being. In 1987 that was literal. Columbia prepared a Spanish-language version and placed it in selected theaters, an acknowledgment of a bilingual audience studio distribution had never bothered to count. The picture outperformed every expectation set for it.

The soundtrack does something stranger, and Deleuze has the sharp tool for it. He describes crystalline description: a rendering that composes its object and then quietly replaces it. Los Lobos re-recorded the catalog rather than licensing the Del-Fi masters, partly because those thin 1958 sides would sit badly in a modern mix, partly because the songs had to bend to the cutting. The result went to number one. What most people now hum as Ritchie Valens is Los Lobos playing Ritchie Valens playing a Veracruz folk song. Biopics run on a contract that films don't lie about the dead. This one honors the contract and dissolves it in the same gesture, and the dissolution is the faithful part, because that is how a corrido has always worked. A song is a thing that gets re-recorded by whoever needs it next.

Meanwhile Bob is going down. The two-brother armature comes from Boulevard Nights (1979) — one brother toward respectability, one bound to the vida loca, cross-cut so the ascent is timed against the descent — and Valdez keeps the two in dramatic contact even when they're a country apart. What Deleuze would notice is that Bob's ruin has no cause you can point at. It's a line of slope: appetite, entropy, a downward gradient that doesn't require events to happen. The cruelty of the cross-cutting is that Ritchie's line looks like its opposite and isn't. Unheated buses. Midwestern winter. A chartered light aircraft.

So the film ends where it must. Not on the crash, which Valdez handles elliptically, but on Bob alone, hearing. That is Deleuze's seer — the figure left with nothing to do but register, whose seeing no longer converts into action. Esai Morales carries it on his face and his shoulders while the production spends nothing. The Buddy Holly Story (1978) had already refused to show the crash and ended on the last stage; Valdez takes that refusal further and hands the withheld spectacle to one man's body in a doorway.

What it did: it proved a studio picture with a Chicano director, a Latino cast, and a Mexican American subject could be an ordinary mainstream hit instead of a specialty release, and it made its soundtrack the argument rather than the marketing. What it did to the biopic is quieter. It showed that removing suspense doesn't drain a life, it concentrates it — every ordinary minute turns precious under the pressure of a known ending. The open question is whether that's available to any life story, or only to the ones history has already closed. Watch it again and skip the concerts. Watch the dinners. Watch the coin go up.