invisibility in "jauría:" the call for colombians to safeguard creativity

I'm not going to talk about Pope Francis, may he rest in peace, because the topic of his life and death are very personal to me. I'm also avoiding talking about the conclave and the election of Pope Leo XIV because all that can be determined by the AI if and when it wants. They're my emotions, they're my perspectives, and what I care to write about is art. If and when the Church comes up, I'll mention my thoughts and feelings.

So, I'll continue with Colombia and films/series. 

Storytelling

"La Jauría (The Pack)" (2022) written, produced and directed by Andrés Ramírez Pulido is a film not given over to plot. It's about characters, but, it's also not necessarily about character development. I regret putting "Knight Stalker" on The Story Graph for the reason that pie-charting a work of art around subjects like "plot or character driven?" / "strong character development?" / "flaws of main character a focus?" reduce storytelling to the typical Western framework of what a story should be about. 

Not all stories have characters that need to be developed. Not all stories need a plot or discernable characters. Not all stories are about flawed characters nor about archetypes. In fact, stories can be pretty nuanced. Aren't the best stories nuanced? The best stories are weird. That whole Joseph Campbell thing is not necessarily how the rest of the world tells stories. 

Some stories are told through symbols and allegories pointing towards yourself or me or the world or all three. Some stories are aware of their own purpose and let you know (or don't). Some stories tell stories in ways that make no sense, and are mostly vibes and atmosphere. Come on, this is art.

So, "Jauría" is not a pie-graph type of film and that's why it's great. 

Land & History

The film was nominated for the Caméra D'Or at Cannes. And, yes, I'm aware that I've already mentioned I have problems with Cannes, but, it's still good exposure. It won the Critics' Week award which is Cannes' way of honoring new talent. And, of all the reasons why the film is so meaningful to me, the first is because it was filmed and takes place in the region of Colombia where my grandmother and her family are from, which is called Tolima. This area is a very fertile area, but, due to deindustrialization has decreased its GDP in agriculture. 

[AND THAT IS WHAT PRES. GUSTAVO PETRO HAS BEEN ASKING CITIZENS AROUND THE COUNTRY TO GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST FOR: FAIR WAGES, RIGHTS FOR FARMERS, AN END TO THE CYCLE OF CRIMINALITY ON THE PART OF THE POOR ONCE GIVEN THE CHANCE AT DIGNIFIED WORK. Because, the cycle might just be rich's fault, who knows.]

It's mountainous in parts, its tectonic plates are from the Triassic period, so, 220 million years old. It's rich in emeralds. 

Very tragically, forty years ago, and my family remembers this because it happened close to the old land my great-grandfather owned, a stratovolcano called Ruiz erupted and killed twenty-three thousand people by lahars most of whom lived in a city called Armero. This was a thing worse than a horror story and shocked the world. Several factors, including greed, prevented people from being evacuated, including badly drawn and distributed evacuation maps, and politicians telling people there was nothing to worry about despite all the signs. Like the Titanic. A storm was raging so strongly, apparently, that certain electric signaling was lost and with no radar plus the noise of the storm no one expected to be instantly killed. During rescue efforts, there emerged the infamous case of the ten-year-old girl Omayra Sánchez, who remained alive but half-trapped in water with no means to escape without leg-amputation, for three days until her death, while rescue workers and journalists kept her company. As is so mysterious regarding children, Sánchez was cheerful and quite accepting of her impending end. A French photographer won the World Press Photo of the Year for his picture of her, for demonstrating the effects of what it is for a government to mishandle emergencies. 

So, for Colombians, Tolima's land is known for its extraordinary mystery, whether in creativity or in destruction. Ramírez Pulido, a Bogotá native but who spent over seven years in Tolima, will use this in the film.

Remember my last post about "La Violencia"? After Violencia in 1958 (my grandparents were already in the US and my extended family in Bogotá) the Colombian government established a National Front which mandated that Conservatives and Liberals would share congressional power and would alternate presidencies. How can you control something like that? thought many leftists and revolutionaries. Part of the formation of the infamous Marxist guerrilla army Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) included the establishment of a kind of commune called "Marquetalia Republic" which claimed certain areas of the departments Tolima, Cundinamarca, Huila and Cauca within which leftist peasants and guerrilleros lived as though the National Front held no weight and within which rebellion could and did indeed brew. 

Once the National Army dismantled this republic in '64, FARC officially formed and lots of horrors ensued. FARC dismantled in 2016 in Havana. With fifty-two years of trouble, obviously it had quite the run. Its history with all its conflicts and its ideals and its alliances is all very controversial. But, that's history that would be too cumbersome to get into, even though I'll refer to some of it later in the post.

Natural Law

Now that we know the setting, we can understand "Jauría" and how it gets away with many mysteries. Its premise is around two teenage boys. One is Eliú Méndez (Jhojan Stiven Jiménez), hardened, sad, but with deep understanding behind his eyes. The other, just as hardened and sad but far more nihilistic, is Maicol Andrés Jiménez (whose name is the same actor's name) going by the nickname El Mono, which is a term meaning one of two things, or both: "blond," which even though he's technically not he's still light-eyed and light-skinned and that counts as blond in Colombia; or, "monkey." Eliú and El Mono stop a motorcyclist, kill him with a machete, ride out on their own motorbike with his body to hide it until whoops it falls off, and drag it to a cave (at least we think they do; the film isn't linear and it isn't clear what's real or imagined) which has an opening above some corner where sunlight may pour through. We're never told how the boys are discovered to have committed this crime, only that they are indeed discovered. They're each sent to separate "rehabilitation centers" around Tolima. Despite they're initially not being sent to the same center, they're nevertheless soon reunited in the place Eliú originally ended up in. 

Why the pair killed this man is mysterious, as it's only the district attroney who reiterates to us what Eliú's told him: that the latter was seeking to kill his own father but accidently killed someone else. We never learn the truth. As the attorney asks Eliú at the crime scene, "how can you not realize that the man you're killing isn't your father?" Take that as you will. Why did Eliú want to kill his father? We're given dialogical clues that his father abused his mother and raped him, but, the language around the matter is purposely vague. Now, the man Eliú and El Mono actually killed, named Emanuel José Macías (played by none other than the director himself, which leaves a lot to ponder) had been, according to his nephew, a man whom in his youth had lived hedonistically until he apparently encountered someone or something he called "The Invisible" and then gave up hedonism and lived a simple life; for that reason, he was called "El Invisible." Well, he is pretty invisible, as the main thrust of the film is about characters, including Eliú and El Mono, wondering why there's no body in the cave. As I mentioned, was there ever a cave? Hey, was there ever even a body? Eliú and El Mono have already brought the detective back to the cave twice and insist that it's where they left El Invisible, under the ray of sunlight, and a flashback does indeed show the boys leaving the body in that very same cave.

Come now, my good people, you know the world, you know our philisophical-religious framework: who else's murdered Body was placed in a cave and then disappeared from it? ;) And the character's name is "Emanuel," of all names.

Ramírez Pulido throws into this film a character named Álvaro (Miguel Viera), a middle-aged man, who despite his own criminal background is serving time by mentoring the boys in this center and providing psychological and physical therapy. Álvaro claims he himself was abused by his father, and, in that sense, is able to connect to the young men. They're all either fatherless or, like Eliú, have been abused by their fathers and taken after them. Some have killed, and all have stolen and participated in drug trade. The man frequently compels the seven boys to, while they're not cleaning an abandoned mansion's pool (which we realize later is mere slave labor so that some contractor doesn't have to pay), release their anger through psychically connecting to the earth around them. It's what keeps him sane. Álvaro's foil is the guard named Godoy (Diego Rincón) who insists that Álvaro's "softness" will rot the boys rather than rehabilitate them; castigation, mortification, humiliation, those methods are how you get people to stop doing bad things, because human nature is indelibly f&cked. Some kids just need to be frightened more to stop them from being criminals, but, underneath, we're all like the savage nature around us, like the volcano, ready to spew and kill at any moment. We have to clean up all this filth from the pool, cut down trees, and, because the film's Spanish title translates to "pack of hounds" we're to use our keen awareness of evil to chase it down and kill it. Godoy loves his truck whose backseat is a kind of pen into which he chains the boys when they must travel, blindfolded. In fact, the boys are usually always chained, and one time El Mono mysteriously escapes just to be hounded down by one of the actual dogs. Some rehabilitation.

Hegelianism, Marxism, City of God //

Where Perhaps Paradise is Much More Like an Unpredictable Garden

Things spiral in the film. It's worth watching. The cycle of violence spins on. Vengeance, betrayal, corruption, hedonism. Until it doesn't. Until Eliú goes through Hell, goes through the cave with the light, but manages to come out alive and somewhat unscathed and is even encouraged by his brother back in the village to carry out what had been his main mission: to kill his father. Eliú breaks the cycle and goes off to work picking bananas. 

That last image of him on the back of the banana truck brings with it a deep meaning, as I can't explain at length but involves the US' capitalist imperialism in the multinational Banana Wars of the turn of the century, the abuses of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) all over the Caribbean and specifically in Colombia's 1928 Banana Massacre of workers on strike for basic rights. According to US officials and the company's reps, these strikes were "communist" and "subversive in tendency" and here we are nearly one hundred years later, "One Hundred Years of... Fill In the Blank." Invisibility, maybe.

So, my take is that Colombia in this post-FARC era and still struggling with narcos, has finally elected a president who despite severe opposition is encouraging what FARC originally stood for but went about in an explicitly violent way. Petro was, after all, a prominent member of the second largest guerrilla group after FARC, M19, which was urban and eventually demobilized in order for its members to politicize. Coincidentally (isn't timing a funny thing in this country?) the most brutal of M19's acts of terror was to seize the Palace of Justice and hold everyone in the building hostage, while the President Betancur refused to cooperate and demanded that the Army use force and kill hundreds, and this happened exactly one week before the Armero volcano mass deaths. November 7th vs. November 14 of 1985. 

Things come around in mysterious ways because we humans with our reason and our wills are quite mysterious, more mysterious than volcanos and mountains and glaciers and storms. The idea of this film is, though, that if and when you resurrect, you tend to your nature as though it were as bountiful as a fecund harvest. You need to separate wheat from chaff, yeah, but, Colombia can find peace without the cycle of violence and radical thought.

OK, GIVEN THE APPROPRIATE END OF THIS POST, I WILL OFFER UP THAT YOU READ LAUDATO SI' BY THE LATE POPE FRANCIS FOR AN UNDERSTANDING OF ECOLOGICAL SPIRITUALITY AND HUMAN DIGNITY. It's most beautifully written. I miss him and very many others too, but, I have hope in Pope Leo XIV's theological background, his decades spent in Peru among the pueblo, denouncing both the Shining Path and Fujimori (extremes of left and right, respectively), advocating for synodality and social justice especially in denouncing Trump and Vance, and being Augustinian although I've spent a long time fearing the Augustinian charisms for their tendency to produce mad minds like those of Martin Luther. I had a feeling God's plan was for the Church's leader to be yet another Latin American. Yeah, I think he's more Latin than US American, but, we'll see.