Salvaging The Counselor: Watching Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott’s Really Trashy Movie

Abstract

I argue that Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor, set amid the U.S.–Mexican drug wars, critiques late capitalism through self-reflexive genre filmmaking. Centered on the metaphor of trash, this essay connects the film’s low-art spectacle with the drug trade’s entrenchment in globalization and multinational capitalism. The Counselor, in effect, resists cinema’s central role in the culture industry by tying its “trashy” plot to the historically pressing narcotics crisis and the twenty-first century’s accumulating trash heaps.