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    Yo No Soy Invisible Imaginative Agency

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    Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema Edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham * Boulder * New York ¢ Toronto + Plymouth, UK. Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 44501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 10°Thomnbury Rasd, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No parof this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, ‘without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages ina review. Rocha, Carolina. “Can Children Speak in Brazilian Cinema? Musume and 0 contador de Juistorias" Forthcoming in the Luzo-Brazilian Review. 2014 by the Board of Regents of the Universiy of Wisconsin Sytem, Reproduced courtesy ofthe Univer of Wisconsin ‘An.extend version of chapter 2 was published, in French as “De l'enfant qui meurt& adolescent qui tue. Perception enfantine et mélancolie dans La cignaga et La Reba” in Bulletin Hispanique, Tome 1152-2013: 749-769, Printed with the permission of Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux (PUB). British Library Cataloguing in Publication information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-a-Publiaton Data brary of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data Available 'SBN'978-07301-9951-0 (loth: alk. paper) — ISBN 973073919527 (lectrnic) ©The paper used inthis publication meets the minimum requirements of American ‘National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSUNISO 239.48-1992. Printed inthe United States of America To Philippe Seminet: thank you for your support and patience Georgia To Carlos Rocha in memoriam (1935-2013) Carolina Chapter Four “Yo No Soy Invisible” Imaginative Agency in Las malas intenciones Sarah Thomas Early in Rosario Garcia-Montero’s 2011 film Las malas intenciones, eight- year-old protagonist Cayetana de los Heros (Fétima Buntix) receives news ‘hat will irrevocably alter her life. Cayetana’s mother (Katerina DOnofiio) returns from a long stay teaching abroad—implicitly one of many—to the bourgeois family home in the Peruvian countryside. After unwrapping the disappointing gift from her mother’s journey (a doll she already has), Cayetar na discovers a small article of clothing on the table. Her face lights up as she exclaims “ay, qué lindo, zpara mis muftecas?” (how pretty, for my dolls2]. Her mother informs her it is something even better: she is going to have a baby brother, At this moment, the camera begins a slow zoom into a medium close-up of Cayetana’s face as she absorbs the news. Slightly ominous one- tone music fades in, while the diegetic sound—the family’s two domestic ‘employees congratulating the mother and asking for the due date—becomes muffled, replicating Cayetana’s subjective experience as she processes the news and aligning the viewer with her perspective. Het mother tries to reach out to her, touching her face and asking if she is not happy with the news, when it is patently obvious she is anything but delighted. Cayetana stomps off. Her response to her brother's impending arrival escalates when, alone in her room and speaking aloud her internal monologue, she wonders why her ‘mother and stepfather want a new baby—and what will happen to the old ‘one. She then resolutely states that on the baby's birthday, she will die. Later she repeats these words, elaborating that death is preferable to being dis- carded when her brother is born: “voy a mori.” she vows, “para que no me puedan botar” [I will die, so they cannot throw me away}. While many only children do not intially take well to the news that they will be joined by a 3 st Sarah Thomas younger sibling, Cayetana’s reaction to the news appears at first glance Somewhat exaggerated, or even humorous, in part due to her morose affect and dead seriousness (at one point she wonders if itis not a tumor growing within her mother, clearly preferring this option). At the same time, the viewer can appreciate that Cayetana appears convinced that her death is the only solution. ‘As the broader circumstances of Cayetana’s life surface over the course of the film, this response—and the protagonist's dark side of which it is cemblematio—takes on greater meaning, as a reaction to the overwhelming lack of control Cayetana possesses within various spheres of her life. In her family life, she clearly resents the prolonged absences of her loving but distant mother and stepfather; and although she idolizes her absentee woman- izing father, he has a habit of forgetting to pick her up for weekly visits and has an endless supply of new girlfriends. In a more threatening vein, the protagonist's lack of control extends beyond the high walls of the isolated hhouse with its maids, groundskeepers, and hired hands constructing a brand new swimming pool. Outside, Cayetana lives her daily life in a climate of constant tension and threat of violence from the Shining Path insurgency in early 1980s Peru: bomb threat evacuations interrupt her classes, political raffiti is everywhere, and she learns to recognize the hammer and sickle from fires burning on the hillsides. The polltical instability has clearly infl- trated the child protagonist’s consciousness despite adults’ efforts to keep it from her, as she and her friends discuss “narcos” (drug traffickers} without knowing what they are and Cayetana and her young aunt imagine the villains of their games to be “terrorists.” Although the children’s play might appear troubling in these cases, in fact the film repeatedly represents Cayetana’s imaginative inner life as a coping ‘mechanism through which she finds fulfillment and agency. As the film progresses, scenes of Cayetana’s imaginative projection become increasingly frequent, and her empowerment begins to spill over into reality as she pro- claims, on two occasions following the dreaded occasion of her brother's birth: “Yo no soy invisible. No soy invisible” [1 am not invisible, I'm not invisible}. Such an affirmation and assertion of self, | argue, would not be possible without Cayetana’s recourse to imagination, which in turn feeds her growing sense of agency. The film's depiction of Cayetana’s imaginative realm—in dreams, fantasies, games, and superstitions—offers a complex and nuanced representation of child subjectivity, presenting a rich inner world standing in marked contrast to the external events that surround the protago- nist in her daily life. The film’s depiction of this imaginative realm serves not only to demonstrate Cayetana’s progressive claiming of agency, but also to align the adult spectator with the child’s perspective, bringing the adult view- er into the child's world rather than the other way around. The film's alter- nate moments of alignment and rupture thus underscore the child's differ- Yo NoSoy Invisible 35 ence, while attempting to preserve a sense of full subjecthood often denied child characters. Understood in light of the young protagonist's lack of con- trol in the personal and political spheres, Cayetana’s determination to die, along with her constant recourse to imagination and fantasy, provide her @ ‘means of claiming agency in the events and circumstances of her own life. ‘THE CHILD'S WORLD: DIFFERENCE AND AGENCY In her work on the child in European film, Emma Wilson discusses the ways in which the child is a limited and timinal subject, due to a “lack of control over its circumstances, its environment, even at times its own body.”"' Wilson is not alone in this observation; many cultural critics writing on the increas- ingly visible topic of childhood discuss the complexities of a subject who is in many ways (often by necessity) not granted full agency or control over his or her own life, As Foucault has demonstrated in analyzing the, school as a disciplinary apparatus in its structuring of children’s time and space, adults frequently determine what children do—as well as when, how, and where they do it? Yet, as Karen Lury aptly explains, children also “want and they aci, and they should therefore be understood as agents as well as subjects,” even if this agency is at times destabilized or erased.’ Recent work on the child across disciplines has attempted to restore forms cof agency to child subjects in a large part by striving to recognize (without fetishizing) children’s difference from adults. As Owain Jones, a prominent theorist of childhood in the field of geography, writes: “We need thus, to first acknowledge the otherness of children and the great asymmetries of body, knowledge, emotion, imagination which exist between adulthood and child- hood, before we can begin to do children justice.”* The “asymmetries” to which Jones refers are agential, as Wilson's comments about a lack of con- trol attest, but also physical and emotional. Yet these differences are also easily essentialized or fetishized to the point of erasing the child’s subject- hood; Amal Treacher has discussed the problematic binary between eliding, children’s difference and reifying it, stating that “{both positions produce their own difficulties. In particular, the complexities of the relationship be- tween childhood and adulthood are elided in each.”* One of these complex- ities, as many theorists of childhood and its representation have addressed, is the fact the child’s is a subject position that all adults have at some point ‘oveupied but no longer do: We have all been “children.” or at least biologically young, so, perhaps tuniquely in this concer for @ form of otherness. we have all been that other ‘once, and may stil contain some form or traces of it... Once childhood is superseded by adult stocks of knowledge, those adult filters ean never be 56 Sarah Thomas removed to get back to earlier states. Adult constructions and memories of ‘what it was to be a child ar inevitably processed through adultmes.© ‘A numberof critics have sought in recent engagements, withthe figure ofthe child, to simultaneously recognize the child’s difference and acknowledge the adult's inability to completely understand it.” This critical position entails, ‘an ongoing oscillation between identification/sympathy and distance/rupture, whereby the adult critic or creator attempts to account for the child’s differ- ence without at the same time falling prey to the same assumptions or essen ing practices that inscribe the child’ lack of control or agency. In filmic representations of childhood, such as the case of Las malas intenciones, the tools at the filmmaker’s disposal involve both what is shown and how it is shown, as Eduardo Ledesma has aptly demonstrated.* In his, examination of two very different cinematic representations of childhood (Victor Gaviria’s 190 Rodrigo D: No futuro and Achero Mafias's 2000 EI Bola), Ledesma underscores the importance of focalization in viewer dis/ identification with the child onscreen, He traces three types of focalization that interact with one another in onscreen representations of children, largely achieved through camerawork: minimal focalization, in which a detached camera does not align with any character's point of view; external focal- ization, in which the child character is focalized from without by another character, creating a triangular relationship with the viewer; and internal focalization, where we see through the eyes of the child or from his or her perspective.’ While internal focalization is essential to seeing with the child (rather than the potentially objectifying /ooking at him or her), detached and external focalization can also serve to remind us of children’s difference. At the same time, as Ledesma argues, a number of externally focalized represen- tations of children overstress the child’s lack of agency—as in the case of ET Bola, where we too often watch the protagonist's beatings at the hands of his father rather than see with him during these traurmatie moments. © Emma Wilson, along the same lines, argues for a combination of identifi ceation and distance, and the use of movement and proximity “in their refusal to fix their represented children as images of childhood innocence,” as a way of bringing the adult viewer closer to the represented child.'" Key to under- standing the child’s world, in her formulation, is replicating the child's sense of helplessness—his or her lack of control or agency—in the adult viewer, by “moving the adult, in disarming her through the involuntary seizure of the emotions, in restoring momentarily an awareness of helplessness,” a process in which the adult viewer “involuntarily returns to the child’s state of help- lessness (motor, emotional or political)" At the same time, precisely the “motor helplessness” of children enables them to more astutely see, hear, and understand the adult world than their adult counterparts might expect.'? In this sense representing the child’s lack of control serves as a kind of double- Yo No Soy Invisible” 37 ‘edged sword. On the one hand, it runs the risk of portraying the child as “the clichéd small, fail, and powerless other who demands our protection, our sympathy." On the other, when properly portrayed, this very helplessness can elicit an emotional response from the adult spectator that aligns him ot her with the represented child in a relationship of identification, ‘A key question forall these critics, and for the present essay, is how these contrasting portrayals of children’s helplessness or lack of agency work to inscribe children as subjects—or to relegate them to essentialized or romanti- cized objects. In the case of Las malas intenciones, both positions are present, and work together to create a portrayal of a child protagonist who at times does claim agency and selfhood in the face of helplessness and limited control. By contrasting the normative adult world with the world of the protagonist's imagination, Garcia Montero’s film at times casts its protazo- nist as the frail powerless other (within the adult world) and at other mo- ments demonstrates her potential for agency (within the world of imagina- tion). As the two worlds become increasingly intertwined over the course of the film, the spectator is drawn into Cayetana’s world as much as she is pulled into the realities of the adult sphere. This dual motion, | would argue, functions to involuntarily return the spectator to the child's world of help- lessness, thus inspiring identification and sympathy, while nonetheless high- lighting the child's status as other and denying an easy elision ofthe distance between adult spectator and represented child QUT OF CONTROL: PERSONAL AND POLITICAL At first glance, Cayetana de los Heros does not appear to be a helpless child by any means. She lives a privileged life in 2 bourgeois family, is well cared- for, and attends what appears to be an exclusive private school. She has plenty of food, toys, and clothing, and is driven from one place to another by the family chauffeur Isaac. Cayetana’s life in this sense is a far cry from the child protagonists examined by many of the aforementioned critics; she does not live in abject poverty, nor is she the victim of abuse, human trafficking, ‘or forced prostitution." Despite her comfortable upbringing, however, she exhibits a notable dark side is fixated on death and often makes cruel remarks to those who attempt to reach out to her; as a means of explanation, her grandmother comments, “esta nifia ha pasado mucho tiempo sola” [that girl has spent a lot of time alone]. This solitude lies at the root of Cayetana’s lack of control, which surfaces most overtly in the varyingly benign emotional neglect of both her parents, with whom she shares very little screen time. Her mother is often physically absent for professional reasons, and visibly strug- ales to relate to her brooding and wounded daughter, preferring to focus her attention on Cayetana’s stepfather and their soon-to-be-born son. Cayetana’s, 8 Sarah Thomas father, whom she clearly idolizes, is in the picture (and the cinematic frame) even less frequently, as he has the unfortunate habit of forgetting to pick Cayetana up for their supposedly weekly visits. When he does remember to show up, it is with his girlfriend di jour, prompting Cayetana to ask him pointedly in front of his date if she really has to learn all the girlfriends names if they last for so little time, The family member Cayetana has the closest relationship with is undoubtedly her young aunt Jimena (more like a cousin, as she is only a few years her senior), who suffers from an unmen- tioned illness causing frequent fainting spells; she eventually becomes grave~ ly ill and is hospitalized, leaving Cayetana largely to her own devices. Jime- na’s illness mirrors Cayetana’s own—she suffers from asthma—and the two girls are often told by their parents not to overexert themselves as they run the risk of bodily harm, Cayetana’s ailment and its restrictions are mentioned frequently and clearly ever-present in her mind: when Cayetana initially learns of her brother's birth, she asks herself aloud why her mother and stepfather want another baby: “Quieren un bebé nuevo. {Por qué? {Qué pasa con el viejo [bebé]? zQue no sirve porque tiene asma?” [They want a new baby. Why? What's wrong with the old one? Is it no good because it has asthma?]. In this sense physical infirmity compounds the vulnerability of childhood as both girls are portrayed as at best limited—and at worst utterly defenseless, in Jimena’s case—due to their physical constraints. Given that the events of the film take place in 1982-1983, set against the backdrop of the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency, outside the family sphere, things don’t look much better: uncertainty looms and the threat of violence seethes beneath the veneer of normalcy. Although the bourgeois characters attempt to go on with their lives as normal, the threat of violence is perva- sive, evidenced by the bomb drills that interrupt Cayetana’s school days, the burning hammer and sickle on a hillside she passes with her driver one day, and graffiti on the walls ofthe city (and eventually, as a result of Cayetana’s actions, the family home as well). The external political and personal circumstances of Cayetana’s life mirror one another in that they both plunge her into situations beyond her control; this parallel becomes explicit in one scene toward the end of the film, as Cayetana’s grandmother takes her to the hospital to meet her much-dreaded baby brother. As they drive through the streets of Lima, Cayetana stares out the window, refusing to talk about the baby, and we see in point of view shots dead dogs hanging from lampposts ‘with warnings against “revisionists.” These culminate in a shot through the windshield, perfectly framing a particular piece of graffiti on which the cam- era lingers: “LLEGO LA HORA” [THE TIME HAS COME]. The shot dis- solves into one of a baby in a hospital bassinet, thus eliding the rest of the journey. While the graffiti's message obviously refers to the Shining Path’s hopes for worldwide revolution and not the birth of Cayetana’s brother, the film’s, "Yoo Soy Invisible” 9 juxtaposition of the two reminds the viewer that her sense of helplessness in the face of both is approaching a fever pitch, Just before the car passes by the ominous message, the grandmother rebukes Cayetana: “no puedes pretender que no esta pasando nada” [you cannot pretend nothing is going on]. Coming as they do against the backdrop of the graffiti, these words also take on a double meaning for the viewer, as Cayetana is not the only one “pretending nothing is going on.” The adults around her also frequently pretend they are not unsettled by the current political situation, downplaying it in front of the children, However, the film makes clear that their attempts are in vain, as the adults cannot shield the children from the escalating tensions rocking the nation. Graffiti is the most visible example of this—in another scene Cayeta- nna sounds out the spray-painted messages she sees on her way to school, stumbling over unfamiliar phrases such as “triunfo Maoista” [Maoist tri- ‘umph]—but the children are exposed in more subtle ways as well. It is clear that the child characters are all too aware of what is going on, as at various ‘moments in their imaginative play, Cayetana, Jimena, and other young girls, cast the villains in their games as “terrorists”; even though they may not understand fully the meaning of the term, they have evidently heard ita great deal.” The film frequently aligns the spectator with the child’s position, as, wwe predominantly only have access to the country’s ongoing violence in these oblique instances mediated by the child’s perspective, in a sense “endowfing] the spectator with the perceptive powers of the child,” to use Laura Podalsky's phrase.'* In a scene where the television newscast men- tions a terrorist attack, for example, we only see and hear the aspects of it that Cayetana does—before her stepfather begins speaking to her—demonstrat- ing the ever-presence of violence and the child’s partial understanding there~ of. MAGICAL THINKING Within the encroaching constellation of real-world events and circumstances beyond her control, the protagonist of Las malas intenciones turns to the imaginative realm to negotiate alternative forms of agency. One of the first such practices we observe in the film is what might be called Cayetana’s recourse to magical thinking, wherein she makes conditional pronounce- ments regarding a particular situation. When, for example, she fist sees her mother at the film's outset following her return from abroad, Cayetana is notably withdrawn, The moment is fraught with tension as Cayetana at first hides from her mother, Inés. Cayetana approaches with hesitation and sits on her mother's lap; stroking Cayetana’s cheek, Inés tells her that she had night- mares that she'd forgotten her daughter's face, and wishes she could bring Cayetana in her suitcase next time. A close-up shows Cayetana, who has yet co Sarah Thomas to speak to her mother aloud, gazing pensively at her face and stroking it with her hands; then, in voice over she states slowly and deliberately: “si me reflejo en sus ojos, ella s6lo tiene ojos para mt” [if] am reflected in her eyes, she only has eyes for me]. While she speaks the phrase, the camera moves to an extreme close-up, in Cayetana’s point of view, of her mother’s eyes; the ‘camera holds their gaze until the intimate moment is ruptured by Cayetana's stepfather calling her to claim the present they have brought her. ‘The scene simultaneously approximates the viewer to the child’s perspe tive—in camerawork showing her point of view as well as voice over speak ing her thoughts—while only allowing us to share her subject position for a fleeting moment. Thematically, as well as technically, her imaginative practice invites viewer identification with the child's perspective while maintaining a sense of her difference, given that such magical thinking is more common in childhood but not entirely foreign to adults, In this moment, Cayetana’s magical thinking serves as an instance in which an adult can recall childhood experience as a means of bridging the difference between the adult viewer and child viewed; as geographer Chris Philo has written: Indeed, while being alert to the prablem of “childhood amnesia.” I think it ‘worth repeating the banal but important fact that chronologically all adults Ihave atv calir time in ther lives besn chien, We have all “been there” in ‘one way or another, creating the potential for some small measure of empa- thy—some sense of recognition, sharing and mutual understanding, even if slight-—with the ehildren whom we encounter in our adult lives. In this moment, Cayetana's magical thinking invites this “sense of recogni- tion, sharing and mutual understanding, even if slight” on the part of the viewer. The sequence draws attention to the child protagonist's nonadult view of the world while also inviting identification with it, audiovisually reminding the adult spectator of the child’s perspective—one that he or she also once held. In this alternation between identification and distance, the scene works at acknowledging the child's different perspective while valoriz~ ing it and drawing the adult into recall of his or her own childhood prac- tices.2 ‘Another scene of magical thinking—which likewise touches upon Caye- tana’s desire for an affective connection, this time with her father—more explicitly illustrates the film’s navigation of viewer identification and dis- tance, as it alternately aligns us with Cayetana’s subjective perspective and depicts her status as a “smalll, frail, and powerless other who demands cour sympathy."2! Here, Cayetana stands in the dirt road outside her mother's ‘country house, waiting for her father to pick her up for a weekend visit. The low-angle long shot of her from behind emphasizes her small stature and solitude among the tall trees and barrier wall as she clutches a child-size suitcase that seems almost to0 large for her. Again, in voice over, we hear as “Yo No Soy Ivisible” 6 she makes a bargain with the universe: “si cuento hasta tres, mi papd va a parecer” [if | count to three, my dad will appear). The camera then shifts to ‘a medium close-up of Cayetana from the front, eyes closed and slowly count- ing to three. The change in camera angle alters the spectator’s perception of her size and relation to the space around her to a less vulnerable position, seeing her head-on and from a closer, child's eye-level camera angle. In the following frame we move to a point-of-view shot of the long, dusty road where her father’s car has yet to appear, seeing with the child protagonist rather than looking ar her Vulnerable status as at the sequence’s outset. In & reverse shot we return to the medium eye-level close-up of Cayetana, who sighs and walks out of frame. The whole sequence, which lasts less than half minute, demonstrates the complex oscillation of identification with and rupture from the perspective of the child protagonist; the film does not let the adult spectator forget they are watching a child’s experience, but at times lets us see with the child rather than merely look at her, in these moments of magical thinking, ‘The film’s repeated recourse to this imaginative practice also allows Cay- etana to claim a form of agency, in that the practitioner of magical thinking, can believe that such thinking influences circumstances beyond his ot her control (although, as in the previous scene, she is often disappointed). Much later inthe film, as Jimena lies almost comatose in her hospital bed, Cayetana climbs the beachside hill the two used to climb together while her playmate ‘was in better health, As she ascends the sandy slope, Cayetana declares “si Hego a la punta, Jimena va a estar bien” [if | make it to the top, Jimena will be ok]. It is worth noting that the circumstances in this case are much more ddire—rather than seeking the attention of her distant parents, Cayetana is struggling to cope with the potential permanent loss of Jimena, her closest ‘companion.2? In her magical thinking inthis instance, the protagonist strives for control in a life-or-death circumstance where her powerlessness is abso- lute, In this sense, such an imaginative claiming of agency has clear limita- tions given its fleeting nature; Cayetana can believe, for a moment, that her bargains withthe universe will succeed, but more often that not she opens her eyes to discover that her father hasn't arrived, and Jimena still ies motionless in her hospital bed. ‘Along the same lines, Cayetana’s repeated conviction to die on the day her brother is born could be seen as a kind of extension of her magical thinking, though in this case its darker side, as Cayetana convinces herself that her brother's arrival into the world necessitates her departure from it. In this sense Cayetana’s wish illustrates an almost literal juxtaposition of eras and thanatos, where her newly born brother represents the desire for life and reproduction, which she counters in a drive toward death and annihitation.2* Yet this death drive also shares with her magical thinking its capacity to endow Cayetana with control over an area of her life where she has none; she a Sarah Thomas feels overwhelmed and threatened by her brother's impending birth and therefore takes the vow to die as a means of claiming agency in the situation. ‘Morbid as the impulse may be, her determination to die (though never expli citly to take her own life) could be interpreted as a sort of absolute claiming, ‘of control given that it removes her from circumstances in which she does not wish to participate. Moreover, it makes dying an active, rather than a passive stance, given that Cayetana believes only one child can exist in the family: “I will die, so they cannot throw me away.” IMAGINING AGENCY This desire to die is clearly colored by Cayetana’s fascination with the libera- tors of Latin America and revolutionary heroes of Peru (Simén Bolivar and José de San Martin as well as José Olaya, Miguel Grau, and Tiipac Amaru), whose glorious deaths she repeats time and again in her imaginative play, inspired by her collection of historical /aminas and school lessons. The im= portance for Cayetana of these figures—and their glorious heroic deaths—is established in the film's opening sequence, a material reconstruction of Cay- cetana’s inner life as she plays with her school Ldminas [illustrated sheets with cutout figures] and reenacts the violent martyrdoms of various préceres [founding fathers]. While the film depicts several forms of Cayetana’s imagi- native practice, itis her engagement with the heroism of Latin America's political heroes that provides her the greatest access to empowerment and enables her to cope with difficult situations in her daily life. The protago- nist’s recourse to these heroic figures of the past serves a compensatory function in both the political and personal spheres. Politically, they provide her with a straightforward narrative of heroism and glory, appealing in the context of the contemporary instability. Personally, because her own padres [parents] frequently disappoint her, she turns to the padres de la patria [founding fathers} as surrogate parents and friends—whom she can idealize ‘and glorify while her real parents seem always to come up short. Scenes of the préceres always occur just after a scene in which Cayetana suffers an emotional setback, for example after she learns of her brother's birth, after her father tells her they won't have a visit anytime soon, and after she sees imena lying dazed and unresponsive in her hospital bed, to name a few ‘The appeal of the revolutionary heroes for Cayetana—whose surname, significantly, is de los Heros—stems from their resilience and strength in the face of danger and death, and their willingness to die for their ideals. She clearly admires the préceres and seeks to emulate them, in one scene asking them what one has to do to become a hero and whether death is painful; iis clear that her fixation with death stems at least in part from her admiration of, these historical figures. At one point in the film, after she loses hope that her Yo No Say Invisible” 6 father will arrive for a visit, Cayetana stands over a small waterfall and whispers “si me caigo, moriré como un héroe” [if | fall | will die like a hero}, demonstrating that her idea of heroic death serves as an imagined meaningful escape from the difficulties and disappointments of her daily tife.2 The seenes she imagines throughout the film—battles, stoic resistance, noble

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