Review of "Los niños invisibles" (Colombia)

“Los niños invisibles” is a charming Colombian film from 2001 about adolescent love and a more innocent time. It details the adventures of Rafael, a portly nine year old, who harbors a crush on his neighbor, the seemingly unobtainable Martha Cecilia. While his quest to gain the attention of this girl seems to obsess him, in reality, what is most charming about this film is not a story about first love, but the evocation of an idyllic upbringing in a small Colombian town, even if not lacking in social unrest. It is not as peaceful a period as it may seem, but nonetheless, there are certain timelessness that evokes not only the adventure of comradeship, but also, the quest to prove oneself.

It seems as if the inhabitants of this village out in the provinces are consumed by beauty pageants. They have a local representative who apparently has been chosen to compete in the national contest, and this mirrors the quest that the little boy has to gain a certain amount of recognition. The beauty pageant is, of course, an exercise in national unity, a reflection of the need to create rituals to unify the people. It is a coming-out party for this small town on the edge of a river.

The fantasy life of these adolescent boys is typical for all youngsters at that age. Desire propels them to believe in ghosts, in spirits, in the more dogmatic elements of a Christian theology that is both charming as well as repressive, in witches and in the hucksterism of a small-town itinerant trinket seller who has a ready supply of potions and elixers to combat all manner of diseases, amulets and pamphlets that promise, wonder of wonder, to provide a means to achieve invisibility! This is, of course, part of an oral tradition in which succumbing to the spell of the snake-oil salesman as he sang the praise and virtue of his wares was part of the enchantment, a willing part that bespoke a world filled with marvels, with the promise of novelty, with a recognition and temporary refutation of the anxieties that beset us all.

Rafael is seduced by the possibility of achieving invisibility, and he sets out to buy this pamphlet, one that he needs to acquire through trickery because it is ostensibly “not for children”. It contains spells, after all, one requiring the acquisition of a cat’s heart, and a hen’s liver, and the throwing of a scapulary with the image of the Virgin Mother, all done at midnight in a cemetery. It, of course, enchants the boys, who challenge each other to carry out their part of the bargain. But it is no modern-day parable of Glaucon, to recall that found in Plato's book about the man who finds a magic ring that confers invisibility to him, only to find himself becoming a murderous despot (a theme reprised in H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man).

The children do seem to be a little too stilted in their delivery. They take too much time, more than seems natural, to respond to each other in a prose that seems plodding. Martha Celeste, the girl in question, seems to be particularly wooden in her delivery, but the same could be said of the actors who portray the parents. There seems to be a lack of natural rhythm, as if the prose of a short story had been too faithfully reproduced, and not the vivacity of ordinary dialogue.

This movie does charm the viewer, however, I found it in the way in which the town gathers at night to greet the arrival of the first television station that, appropriately enough, is broadcasting the national beauty contest. It also is evident in scenes such as the storefront where a group of old men gather, caught as they are in immobility, not moving a muscle as the little boy circulates among them, a Mercury too fast to be detected, or in the effeminate shopkeeper who can’t help but tease the boy who inquires as to whether or not it might be possible to buy an “unblessed” scapulary. The town has its charms, even those evident in the revolutionaries who are just getting word of the message of labor agitation, the barber who incites the theater projectionist to strike because he is being exploited. If the movie is, indeed, meant to be a portrayal of life in Colombia in the 50s, we can’t help but be reminded of the fact that there was a civil war raging at the time, one known popularly as “La violencia”.

Enough to say that the children succeed, after a fashion, in achieving invisibility. Who can deny them their dream? As with any quest, however, perhaps it delivers to them treasures that they hadn’t suspected were there, ripe for the taking. The child lacks self-confidence, and while able to inquire about “radiographies” and about what makes him separate from little girls such as Martha Celeste (something he no doubt knew about in the narrowest sense because of his voyeuristic episodes watching the bathing woman), he finds that, rather than achieve invisibility, what he craved rather was to become precisely the opposite, to be awarded with the attention of someone whose affection and love he might win.

On a final note, the pace of the film seems a little plodding. It is slow, and at times it delves into a form of slapstick humor that doesn’t seem to accord with the idyllic nature of small-town life where, in a jarring element, we are greeted with the murder of the small-town revolutionary. (This seems much in line with the typical mode of a García-Márquez novel, in which strange outsiders arrive to disrupt and inject an element of violence that signals an intent to control.) “Bajo al Centralismo”, Down with Centralism!, yell the town dwellers at the end of the pageant whose broadcast they are all watching, as they greet the return to a familiar form of control, where the beauty queen from the capital wins.

The boys are of an age in which they yearn for their own form of autonomy. It is a reflective film in which the adult muses on what has been lost, because at the end, we are left with the impression of something that has disappeared.

¡Juventud, divino tesoro,
ya te vas para no volver!
Cuando quiero llorar no lloro,
y a veces lloro sin querer

(Canción de otoño en primavera, Rubén Darío)




Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013

Review of "The Quiet Earth"

The Quiet Earth is a thoughtful and slow-moving movie about a future apocalypse. It was released in 1985, during a period of heightened cold-war tension, and on one level (a very superficial one) it can be interpreted as a cautionary tale. In such an interpretation this critique would be directed above all against the United States, and the insatiable and paranoid demons that besiege a superpower in an age where its empire is being threatened. In a similar line pioneered almost two hundred years ago by Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein, it also represents a long-standing critique of scientific hubris and of humans who, as one character expresses it, would play “God”.

The premise of this movie is that human civilization has come to an end. It wasn’t the slow and drawn-out process we fear, those gradual and terrifying scenarious that involve plagues or environmental destruction. It was a sudden and abrupt end that was thoroughly unanticipated and yet logical. It is like falling over a cliff while sleepwalking. (Sleep represents a powerful motif, a living death that seems to consume the characters.)

Apocalyptic endings seem to be an long-standing and enduring motif in our culture. From a narrative standpoint they are compelling, for they signify that final element in a story in which significance and meaning are assigned to the prior sequence of events. A conclusion is the necessary precondition for the engagement of a new story, for a new beginning, and as such, these apocalypses are always transition points. What will come after?

Currently, one of the most popular television series is one that represents an adaption of Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead. As with the stories of alien invasion that were so popular in the 1950s and were parables of Cold War angst, or the genre of future and culminating war novels popular in the late 19^th century (there must surely have been many other instances), these would seem to reflect period of heightened angst.

Perhaps these cultural narratives of decline and decrepitude or extinction reflect the anxieties that accompany periods of change. Whether it be the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution or the fear of decolonization or the supposed perils of demographic bubbles that are being shattered, or the rise of alternative and competing systems or just the bewildering nature of economic bubbles that are shattered as with the Wall Street meltdown of a few years ago, the groundwork for these narratives has already been laid and they are, indeed, memes that find fertile terrain.

How else can we explain the appeal of zombie movies or the element of darkness and pessimism that seems to characterize so many contemporary series? It is an apocalyptic sensibility that has been stoked, and we are fascinated by the assorted retinue of compelling figures, such as those of the anonymous zombies (we are they, after all) that have relentless appetites and aggressive impulses that, rather than seem bewildering, seem all too recognizable.

 

It is my contention that we are not as frightened by the unknown as we proclaim to be. The unknown produces paralysis, perhaps, or wonder, or maybe, boredom that leads to its dismissal. We are frightened, instead, by what we know and what we find familiar, and in zombies and in the vision of a self-destructing social system, we find a logic that seems compelling.  It is our pretensions that are being shattered, the illusions we so carefully cultivate.

However unpleasant we may find cadavers, and however much they may remind us of our susceptibility to disease as well as all the many material and social ailments that befall us, it is nonetheless the case that they represent a circumstance against which we have developed powerful defenses. Whether it be euphemisms or the ethical narratives that help us to accept them, we can and always have adjusted to them. But what proves to be much more compelling, however, in the case for example of zombies, is the spectacle of a self-feeding mechanism that resists ethical judgement. There is no meaning in zombies other than to posit that we are always in the process of devouring ourselves, in all the metaphorical ways in which we elaborate our social behaviors. It is the urge for power as an appetite that can never be fulfilled.

Returning to the movie under consideration, it was released at a moment in which bluster and increased confrontation seemed to characterize the conflict between the two superpowers. The Soviet Union was undergoing a series of succession crisis, while the United States seems to be pursuing a policy of increased confrontation with a president who seemed unable to strike a conciliatory note. It was a period of provocative actions, and it contributed to much worldwide anxiety. This was reflected in our popular culture.

In this classic movie almost all of humanity has suddenly disappeared. The teeming life of our cities, the struggles and dreams of all those vulnerable masses, the conflict between different world systems and different corporate groups, between different institutional subjects, has all been superseded by the fact that everyone is gone. We have what seems to be only one individual left, a middle-aged scientist by the name of Zac who slowly discovers his new circumstances.

Why he should be the only person left, we don’t know. He seems to be surprised and even a little disappointed to wake up (we find out later that he had taken an overdose of medicine, planning as he was to commit suicide), but old habits die hard. (Life is a habit, is it not?) He leaves his house and is slowly made to confront the fact that only objects have been left behind, and the world has been depopulated in a sudden flash. This is most aptly illustrated by the fact that he encounters kitchen appliances that are still running, showers flooding buildings and houses that are going up in fire, as well as cars that have been abandoned and the remains of crashed airliners smoking on the ground. It is a mystery that, for all its terrifying implications, doesn’t seem surprising to him.

What caused this catastrophe? It all seems to be the result of a top-secret project named “Flashlight”, only the latest of a continual series of examples of technological hubris that produced other calamities such as the mustard gas or the atomic bomb.  The protagonist knows this and seems to accept it, seeing it as a logical culmination at the same time as he seems almost mesmerized by what he finds. We are mesmerized as well, these scenes of an uninhabited city, of untended property, of the detritus of modern consumer society but without the most necessary element that gives it meaning, namely, consumers. What was consumerism all about, then?

When society has disappeared, all those physical as well as ideological restraints that were the source of so much conflict and confusion seem to evoke nostalgia. As much as behavioral scientists have pioneered the development of an analytical framework that traces human institutions and behaviors to evolutionary impulses (a form of economics that has accumulated biological trappings and that serves as a continuation of the materialist trend of analysis), much of social behavior and our own neurotic impulses seem to be rooted in irrational and at times whimsical impulses. Much of it is absurd, and that is part of the appeal of movies and novels and themes and motifs and our fascination with the uncanny and the macabre, for they work to peel back layers of artifice and point to a more primal level of existence. We aren’t as complex and civilized as we proclaim ourselves to be.

Zac discovers that all animal life seems to have disappeared. There are no animals left, no birds, no dogs, no life other than vegetable life. The destruction has been total and complete, and there is a grand and majestic spectacle in these scenes where he wanders from one building to the next, walking or driving along lonely avenues, unimpeded, broadcasting his existence to an indifferent world. The entire world has become Robinson Crusoe’s island. Perhaps survival is an economic proposition, and this will serve to give this narrative its veneer of comprehensibility.

He is not alone, however, and he will encounter two other individuals who have similarly survived under unique circumstances, a young and acerbic woman and a Maori man. It turns out that they had all died at the precise moment in which the experiment was run. Are they, then, leftover spirits?

 

There is little hope for reversing this experiment and bringing back what has been lost. We have, now, only fragile relationships that seem all the more precious because destruction has been so complete. Which is not to say that there is no conflict, no jealousy, and that the hidden demons of the prior age are not still active. They are, legacies that have not been purged, or as the Maori Agi proclaims, people still “lie”.

The pace of the film is languid, for the most part, and despite the vast and empty spaces of these landscapes, seems psychologically claustrophobic. We yearn for closed spaces, by which we take it to mean, those artifices and customs that regulate human society and help to provide boundaries. It is all the more revealing for the fact that consumption is not enough, but it can help substitute for what is needed. Most people never question this, because it does open up vast and threatening spaces that might similarly swallow them.

In the end, we have a film that offers us parables not about endings, but about beginnings. The protagonist is continually divested of human company, and perhaps this helps to explain the way in which his isolation finds its culmination in an act of sacrifice. The sun has been stabilized, at the price of having fear purged. There is no fear at the end, only wonder, and a new landscape, a vast placenta (the ocean) with eerie clouds that loom like white anvils, and above it all, Saturn rising in the twilight.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013