Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 7
Repeating History
In addition to the similarities between Northern Ireland and Chile, Good Vibrations and No were produced and released in the wake of political shifts to the right in the leadership of both governments. A coalition government led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was established in the UK in 2010, replacing the Labour leadership held since 1997. In Chile also in 2010, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera was elected President, replacing the now dissolved Concertación, or Coalition of Parties for Democracy, voted in after the 1989 general election. While the Conservative government remains in power due to the UK’s firmer shift to the right after the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, Michelle Bachelet of the Chilean Socialist Party, was returned as President in 2014, only for the billionaire Piñera to be re-elected in 2018 (Chilean Presidents understandably cannot hold office for consecutive terms). On the island of Ireland specifically, the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland has consistently held majority power in the region’s legislative assembly since its initiation after the 1998 peace agreement referendum, although its majority has decreased in recent years. The Dáil Éireann in the Republic of Ireland has had fairly consistent liberal conservative leadership since its establishment in 1922.
The swings to the right and left in Chile and the UK during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are indicative of unsettled, insecure, divided and unconvinced electorates. While culture and cultural production may not be able to hold politics or politicians to account exactly, they can and do provide talking points around which consumers of culture may engage more critically with society on local, regional, national and global levels – activity which could lead to the empowerment of some through the opening of exchanges between groups. Such work in comparative audience reception studies of post-conflict imaginaries that draws together affective connections between viewers, experiencers, rememberers, forgetters and learners is ongoing, with a legacy of my work spurring off in the Screening Violence project led by Newcastle University. If all culture can do is be a vector of empathy, then we must do what we can to ensure it plays on and circulates.
That is not to say, though, that No and Good Vibrations are themselves exempt from criticism. As much as I love these films and as important as they are in their contributions to forming a cultural resistance to ‘official’ forgetting, they uphold the typical privilege of white middle-class male stories and narratives under the guise of critique of this identity. Particularly with Hooley, I certainly always have to check that hardwired ‘boys will be boys’ response to antics that adversely affected the women and young people in his (real) life. As a fictional character, Saavedra more overtly embodies a critical take on the No campaign. In both films, there are signifiers of homophobia emerging from figures of state authority (the RUC officer singling out a young woman coded visually as queer-punk) and upholders of conservative values (Lucho Guzmán of the Yes campaign making homophobic and racist remarks about Mapuches) with the implication that those with more socialist values who are themselves heteronormative do not have such feelings. We’re dealing with different times, of course, but it is important to remember that their silence does not equate to active inclusion or acceptance.
The same goes for racial diversity. An attempt at this is at least made in Good Vibrations with a British Army officer played by Mark Asante in one scene. Even the archives are full of white people, and while any person of colour has been in a minority, especially in the 1970s and 1980s compared to now in Northern Ireland, it is not the case that there were none as the archives and fiction films, and even history books, would imply by way of absence, or perhaps even active exclusion. In No the side-lining of Mapuches (who make up around 85% of Chile’s indigenous population) by both of the plebiscite campaigns is implied in subtle aspects of the décor in some scenes and in discussions had by leaders of Yes. Meanwhile, archival footage of the Rapa Nui (the Polynesian people of Easter Island), specifically tearful children singing traditional songs for General Pinochet, is included in the Yes videos to demonstrate El Presidente’s love of all his peoples, even the natives who are so clearly devoted to him. No under René’s instruction instead opts for that middle-class, white-centric, able-bodied, almost European-inspired (there’s an argument over baguettes as props), heteronormative vision of happiness that wins out. Eight years after the film’s release, the global left needing a reminder to have a word with itself has never been more prescient or urgent.
In looking back to the recent past of the previous century, No especially complicates the notion of the twenty-first-century film in the age of post-cinema (in contemporary film criticism at least) given its use of archival materials and period U-matic cameras, film and narrow aspect ratio to capture the authentic televisual look. Both films collapse analogue with digital, cinema with television, the past with the present, and the real with the fictional, even fantastical. The resulting aesthetics are important for conveying meaning and making political statements that, rather than living in their future as René repeatedly claims of Chile to his stakeholders, Chile and Northern Ireland both remain tethered to their difficult pasts – difficult pasts from which the political left has not saved them, and which these films defiantly refuse to forget. A word of caution, though, is that these films are only two demonstrations of the ways that mediatized memory easily becomes assimilated as collective cultural memory. As audiences we are too susceptible to taking biopics and historical fictions and dramatizations as fact. To make real change and break the repeating cycles of history, the onus is on us to approach cultural artefacts and political messaging with healthy scepticism.
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