#11 The Rum Diary

As I finished watching The Rum Diary I could’ve mentioned a couple of things that caught my attention. From these things I can choose the one that captivated more my attention and it’s the compare and contrast given to Puerto Rico by the tourist/traveler perspective portrayed in the movie. A couple of weeks before, we were assigned to study the perspective a person gets from the Internet about Puerto Rico in the current year, 2014. Of all the perspectives I heard from my classmates the ones that I could relate most to the movie were the idea researchers get from the news articles that talk about the island and the fact that they’re all related to either corruption in politics or high criminality. Now a days, it is clearly not as dangerous, as it is seen in the movie, to go outside the tourist areas if you don’t know the island well enough but there could still be a chance that, even in the tourist areas, you may even get robbed in a street or even followed by strangers with the intent of hijacking your car, like our Professor told us happened to her. In the current years we have been also exposed to the types of corruption that is seen in the movie, but they may have a twist on what happened in the movie with the land that was wanted by the investors. Also the fact that the in the movie the media was manipulated to publish another version of the story is seen nowadays in the political campaigns the major parties or Puerto Rico have.

There are many more examples on how, I may also call it othering, affects the tourist, since an American is treated differently by the locals when they are visiting the island. This may be because of the history between Puerto Rico and the United States, which is in part portrayed throughout the entire movie, The Rum Diary. A part related to the tourist/traveler perspective the movie portrays is when we are exposed to a married couple of Americans that are interviewed at a bowling alley and all they have to say about the good things in the Island are the Duty Free shopping or the casinos they go to spend more money. In another question they are asked about what happens outside the areas they normally visit, they respond in such a way that they seem to display a scary attitude since their response is that outside from where they go it is unsafe, due to the criminality of the native Puerto Ricans. This is still something that is not only seen in the movie but it is also seen today, as in the article posted below in which the investor wanted to make an image of Puerto Rico that wasn't the real one, since the real one was not as good as what they needed it to be. 

In the following link, titled A Ritz Ups the Ante in Puerto Rico, there is a clear example of how the Media or the business sector wants to change the image that Puerto Rico has on the world as it says: “It is in a corner of the Caribbean that for decades has been more associated with grit than glamour.”

Link to article