By Nicholas Rombes.
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.
On one level, this feels like the key to all of Bolaño’s work: the awful machinery of history is there, clawing at the frames, which feel honeyed like those old Kodak ektachrome transparencies, never having to reveal itself because its revelations lie in the actions of the characters. You can see through the images he conjures. They are transparent, ghostly, in the way that photographs can never be. The zombie cannibal violence is raw, sure, although its structural causes are deliberately obscure, if not invisible. Where is the movie set? Somewhere in North America, the awful birthplace of the very neoliberal order whose bad thoughts metastasized across South America during the 1970s. The colonel’s son and his girlfriend Julie, on the run from the zombies, emerge from hiding in the tunnels beneath a military base onto the streets above, which “have a desolate look. The film was probably shot on the outskirts of some North American city: deserted neighborhoods, the sort of half-derelict buildings that directors who have no budget use for shooting after midnight.” Detroit. Los Angeles. Cleveland. Philadelphia. It could be any of these places. These are see-through places, palimpsests.
The story’s violence is both onscreen and offscreen at the same time, as if the one-dimensional characters are simply part of, to borrow a phrase from Sergio González Rodríguez, an enormous production complex. In The Femicide Machine, Rodríguez describes how the collapse of traditional institutions in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez and the agonizing, persistent violence there are, in part, the result of what he calls symbolic shortages, where people “become dehumanized, reduced to being one more cog in an enormous production machine: the ultra-capitalist city. . . . Society itself acquires an asocial status.” It’s as if, in the film within Bolańo’s story, that’s exactly what the zombies are, “cogs” in some barely veiled neoliberal order, their uncontained, random violence a vision of humanity “without a project other than revenge, without restraint by conscience, faith, or value,” as political theorist Wendy Brown writes in The Ruins of Neoliberalism.
Perhaps it’s because the horror genre has been, sturdily and reliably, the basement of our fears, expressing through familiar tropes the radical inexpressibility of cultural and political disquiet, that Bolańo’s work so often turns to bald descriptions of its workings in film, as in his story “The Grub,” which also offers a pages-long description of a generic thriller that begins: “The film I saw was French, I think. It was about two girls who live alone in a house outside town.” The movie, which draws on the legacy of Mexican horror from the 1950s, deploys stock character types drawn from “timeless icons—Saint, Mad Scientist, Cowboy, Vampire, Ingénue—with contemporary nudes.” In “The Colonel’s Son” the horror tropes are so familiar that the narrator doesn’t even need to disguise that fact that he can’t remember parts of the plot. “Since we forget everything by the end,” he says, “I’m only guessing that they talk about killing” Julie, the main zombie. A weird form of nihilism: what does it matter what happens in the movie, as conventions have already dictated its plot? There is an emptiness, a void, only to be filled by types. “The kid came into the room and grabbed her by the shoulders,” goes a line from Antwerp, among Bolaño’s weirdest, most unstable concoctions: “The two of them wept like characters from different movies projected on the same screen.” Movie scenes describe real-life because they are real life, worn down through repetition to the most basic narrative essentials.
It happens again and again in Bolaño’s universe, as in “The Part About Fate” section in 2666 as Fate dozes off while he listens to “scraps of a plot” from a Robert Rodriguez film, “a story of whores who gave wise advice or maybe they were just whores with hearts of gold, especially a whore called Justina who, for reasons that escaped him but weren’t too hard to figure out, was acquainted with some vampires in Mexico City who roamed at night disguised as policemen.” Repetition + Difference, the formula that is the basis of all art but that Bolaño foregrounds rather than disguises.
It’s not postmodern pastiche, for there is no ironic winking here at the audience. The same absence is (present?) in the work of Fernanda Melchor, who has spoken about the influence of David Lynch on her dark, ultra-violent novels, especially Paradais (2021), which contains an epigraph from “Up in Flames,” a song written by Lynch for Industrial Symphony No. 1. Melchor’s cinematic space draws on those slim, imagistic moments from screenplays, the short expositions in between the dialog, as in this passage from near the end of Paradais, snapshot moments that feel as if they had literally been captured on ektachchrome:
the shot that rang out from the stairwell and which sent the witch tumbling head over
heels to the ground floor; fatboy’s sobs as he clung to her body; the woman’s death rattle
as he clung to her body; the woman’s death rattle as she choked on the bloodstained
carpet; the unbearable weight of fatboy pressing down on Polo’s shoulders and back as
they made their way to the garage . . .
In a similar way, the blow-by-blow account of the zombie film “The Colonel’s Son” isn’t a parody or a critique but rather something approaching a one-to-one correspondence with the imaginary film, echoing Jean Baudrillard’s infamous declaration that the era of simulation is “no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.” Except that, as a fiction within a fiction, the film is not real, although Bolaño makes it feel real, and alive, and fun, and empty, all at the same time. In fact, the emptiness of the description of the film The Colonel’s Son—just a flat telling of one graphic zombie action after another—is precisely that which makes it alive. For it is within the voids, the empty spaces of the story, that readers create their own spaces, imagining motivations and desires that are only hinted at in the story. Folding in on each other, “The Colonel’s Son” and The Colonel’s Son meet each other in the mind’s eye of the reader, an empty space there awaiting transformation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Rombes is author of the novels The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books) and The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio) as well as the 33 1/3 book Ramones and the experimental film book 10/40/70. He curates the “Minute 9” series at 3:AM Magazine. He teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy, in northwest Detroit.
