Of gasoline and violence: liquidity, toxicity and combustible encounters in Julio Hernández Cordón’s Gasolina ( Gasoline , 2008)

In Julio Hernández Cordón’s Guatemalan film Gasoline (Gasolina, 2008), three middle-class teenagers – one of them with asthma – embark on a nightmarish escapade. In the span of a day, they steal gasoline, pick fights with others, and drive out to the sea. This essay considers how a story of urban violence in Gasolina offers a contemporary take on Guatemala’s postwar malaise fueled literally and metaphorically by gasoline. The ways in which the disaffected youth use and abuse gasoline point to the different forms that toxic violence – racial, social, and generational – continues to take hold in Guatemala. I argue that Gasolina offers a novel way of understanding the legacies of the country’s civil war (1960–96), framed in terms of a damaged ethical response to the country’s violence. In this light, Gasolina engages obliquely with a nation’s past in sharp contrast to the master text of Guatemalan cinema, Luis Argueta’s El silencio de Neto (The Silence of Neto, 1994), in which the protagonist’s asthmatic disability resolves in national unity. Instead, in Hernández Cordón’s film, the thick and sticky substance of gasoline spreads through a claustrophobic narrative of silence and complicity without promising any reconciliation. Gasolina suggests a cinema of toxic substances in which the volatile and liquid nature of gasoline becomes intertwined with other bodies, objects, and fluids by way of what I call combustible encounters. These episodes register the (in)visible ways in which gasoline marks a trajectory of escalating violence while also indicating a steady erosion of civility and respect for others.