{"id":115374,"date":"2024-08-22T18:12:19","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T17:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=115374"},"modified":"2024-08-31T09:58:29","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T08:58:29","slug":"roberto-bolanos-ektachrome-transparencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/roberto-bolanos-ektachrome-transparencies\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s Ektachrome Transparencies"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nicholas Rombes.<\/p>\n

\"\"
By Nicholas Rombes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s a story, of course, but also a description (not a review or a critique, but a description) of a film called, probably, The Colonel\u2019s Son<\/em>, a movie about (\u201cdon\u2019t laugh,\u201d the narrator says) zombies. The name of the story? \u201cThe Colonel\u2019s Son,\u201d as if\u2014once you get past the narrator\u2019s short opening musing on the movie and its meanings\u2014the story and the movie are one and the same, or at least traveling along the same paths. \u201cI swear it was the most democratic, the most revolutionary film I\u2019d seen in ages, and I don\u2019t say that because the film in itself revolutionized anything,\u201d the narrator claims. In fact, the film is clich\u00e9d, obvious, coarse, and yet \u201cevery 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.\u201d He offers up a comparison: imagine watching Jurassic Park<\/em> and not only do the dinosaurs never show up, but they\u2019re not even mentioned.<\/p>\n

On one level, this feels like the key to all of Bola\u00f1o\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201chave 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.\u201d Detroit. Los Angeles. Cleveland. Philadelphia. It could be any of these places. These are see-through places, palimpsests.<\/p>\n

The story\u2019s 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 Gonz\u00e1lez Rodr\u00edguez, an enormous production complex. In The Femicide Machine<\/em>, Rodr\u00edguez describes how the collapse of traditional institutions in Mexico\u2019s Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez and the agonizing, persistent violence there are, in part, the result of what he calls symbolic shortages, where people \u201cbecome dehumanized, reduced to being one more cog in an enormous production machine: the ultra-capitalist city. . . . Society itself acquires an asocial status.\u201d It\u2019s as if, in the film within Bola\u0144o\u2019s story, that\u2019s exactly what the zombies are, \u201ccogs\u201d in some barely veiled neoliberal order, their uncontained, random violence a vision of humanity \u201cwithout a project other than revenge, without restraint by conscience, faith, or value,\u201d as political theorist Wendy Brown writes in The Ruins of Neoliberalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s 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 Bola\u0144o\u2019s work so often turns to bald descriptions of its workings in film, as in his story \u201cThe Grub,\u201d which also offers a pages-long description of a generic thriller that begins: \u201cThe film I saw was French, I think. It was about two girls who live alone in a house outside town.\u201d The movie, which draws on the legacy of Mexican horror from the 1950s, deploys stock character types drawn from \u201ctimeless icons\u2014Saint, Mad Scientist, Cowboy, Vampire, Ing\u00e9nue\u2014with contemporary nudes.\u201d In \u201cThe Colonel\u2019s Son\u201d the horror tropes are so familiar that the narrator doesn\u2019t even need to disguise that fact that he can\u2019t remember parts of the plot. \u201cSince we forget everything by the end,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m only guessing that they talk about killing\u201d 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. \u201cThe kid came into the room and grabbed her by the shoulders,\u201d goes a line from Antwerp<\/em>, among Bola\u00f1o\u2019s weirdest, most unstable concoctions: \u201cThe two of them wept like characters from different movies projected on the same screen.\u201d Movie scenes describe real-life because they are real life, worn down through repetition to the most basic narrative essentials.<\/p>\n

It happens again and again in Bola\u00f1o\u2019s universe, as in \u201cThe Part About Fate\u201d section in 2666<\/em> as Fate dozes off while he listens to \u201cscraps of a plot\u201d from a Robert Rodriguez film, \u201ca 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\u2019t too hard to figure out, was acquainted with some vampires in Mexico City who roamed at night disguised as policemen.\u201d Repetition + Difference, the formula that is the basis of all art but that Bola\u00f1o foregrounds rather than disguises.<\/p>\n

\"\"
By Nicholas Rombes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/em> (2021), which contains an epigraph from \u201cUp in Flames,\u201d a song written by Lynch for Industrial Symphony No. 1<\/em>. Melchor\u2019s 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<\/em>, snapshot moments that feel as if they had literally been captured on ektachchrome:<\/p>\n

the shot that rang out from the stairwell and which sent the witch tumbling head over
\nheels to the ground floor; fatboy\u2019s sobs as he clung to her body; the woman\u2019s death rattle
\nas he clung to her body; the woman\u2019s death rattle as she choked on the bloodstained
\ncarpet; the unbearable weight of fatboy pressing down on Polo\u2019s shoulders and back as
\nthey made their way to the garage . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a similar way, the blow-by-blow account of the zombie film \u201cThe Colonel\u2019s Son\u201d isn\u2019t a parody or a critique but rather something approaching a one-to-one correspondence with the imaginary film, echoing Jean Baudrillard\u2019s infamous declaration that the era of simulation is \u201cno longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.\u201d Except that, as a fiction within a fiction, the film is not real, although Bola\u00f1o 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\u2019s Son<\/em>\u2014just a flat telling of one graphic zombie action after another\u2014is 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, \u201cThe Colonel\u2019s Son\u201d and The Colonel\u2019s Son<\/em> meet each other in the mind\u2019s eye of the reader, an empty space there awaiting transformation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Nicholas<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nNicholas Rombes<\/a> is author of the novels The Rachel Condition<\/em><\/a> (CLASH Books) and The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing<\/em> (Two Dollar Radio) as well as the 33 1\/3 book Ramones<\/em> and the experimental film book 10\/40\/70<\/em>. He curates the \u201cMinute 9\u201d series at 3:AM Magazine<\/em>. He teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy, in northwest Detroit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a story, of course, but also a description (not a review or a critique, but a description) of a film called, probably, The Colonel\u2019s Son<\/em>, a movie about (\u201cdon\u2019t laugh,\u201d the narrator says) zombies. The name of the story? \u201cThe Colonel\u2019s Son,\u201d as if\u2014once you get past the narrator\u2019s short opening musing on the movie and its meanings\u2014the story and the movie are one and the same, or at least traveling along the same paths. \u201cI swear it was the most democratic, the most revolutionary film I\u2019d seen in ages, and I don\u2019t say that because the film in itself revolutionized anything,\u201d the narrator claims. In fact, the film is clich\u00e9d, obvious, coarse, and yet \u201cevery 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.\u201d He offers up a comparison: imagine watching Jurassic Park<\/em> and not only do the dinosaurs never show up, but they\u2019re not even mentioned.<\/p>\n

By Nicholas Rombes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115374"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115412,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115374\/revisions\/115412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}