Roberto Bolaño’s Ektachrome Transparencies
It’s a story, of course, but also a description (not a review or a critique, but a description) of a film called, probably, The Colonel’s Son, a movie about (“don’t laugh,” the narrator says) zombies. The name of the story? “The Colonel’s Son,” as if—once you get past the narrator’s short opening musing on the movie and its meanings—the story and the movie are one and the same, or at least traveling along the same paths. “I swear it was the most democratic, the most revolutionary film I’d seen in ages, and I don’t say that because the film in itself revolutionized anything,” the narrator claims. In fact, the film is clichéd, obvious, coarse, and yet “every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not in its totality, but a fragment, a miniscule, microscopic fragment of the revolution.” He offers up a comparison: imagine watching Jurassic Park and not only do the dinosaurs never show up, but they’re not even mentioned.
By Nicholas Rombes.