“Coco,” a Story About Borders and Love, Is a Definitive Movie for This Moment
“Coco” is a movie about borders more than anything—the beauty in their porousness, the absolute pain produced when a border locks you away from your family. The conflict in the story comes from not being able to cross over; the resolution is that love pulls you through to the other side. The thesis of the movie is that families belong together. I watched it again this week, reading the news that Donald Trump is considering building an unregulated holding camp for migrant children, that ICE showed up on the lawn of a legal permanent resident and initiated deportation procedures, that a four-month-old baby was torn away from her breast-feeding mother. If justice is what love looks like in public, then love has started to seem like the stuff of children’s movies, or maybe the stuff of this children’s movie—something that doesn’t make sense in the adult world, but should.”
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
be luckie. 