Unclaimed Experience and the Implicated Subject in Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem

Abstract

The Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made three films on the era of dictatorship (1973–1990) following the death of President Salvador Allende during a CIA-backed coup on September 11th, 1973: Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012). This chapter focuses on Post Mortem to propose that the film retrieves for the nation an aspect of traumatic, ‘unclaimed experience’ (Cathy Caruth 1996) on a collective rather than individual level. Drawing on the theories of Michael Rothberg (2013), it further posits that the experience left unclaimed in Chile, and addressed by the film, is that of the implicated subject, neither direct perpetrator nor direct victim but something in between. The victim-perpetrator binary drives much of Chilean cinema on the dictatorship but, in choosing a real but obscure figure in Allende’s autopsy as his protagonist (Mario Cornejo), Larraín privileges that which has been unclaimed in national cinema and, more broadly, in the public sphere of national life. Released a year before the exhumation of Allende’s corpse, the film emerged at a time when mystery still shrouded the circumstances of Allende’s death, especially the question of whether he committed suicide or was killed. Deploying formal tropes of washing and numbness, Post Mortem not only reclaims this experience but also critiques it, especially in the final scene, which is evocative of Mario’s conformism and thus his implication in wider processes related to global capital. The chapter argues that the film is a vital counterweight to post-dictatorship attempts to establish a separation of past and present, wound and scar, a pact of silence designed to relegate trauma (as wound) to history, and to deny its immediacy (as scar) in a country that is still divided on the legacy of Pinochet.