Rerun: Revisiting "No"
My favorite election movie, four years later
Amid all the haunting historical comparisons being made right now, I think many Americans are possibly missing an obvious and relevant one: the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 80s. I’m no expert on either, but the art made during and about them that I’ve read and watched has been bubbling back up into my consciousness recently. That includes the movie No, which is about the (ad) campaign to end the Pinochet dictatorship, and which I wrote about here just before the 2020 election.
Every time I’ve watched No, different pieces of it have jumped out to me and wedged themselves in my mind for years. Last time, in 2020, it was the inherent conflict between telling a good story and telling a true story, and which one is more politically valuable. Now I’m dwelling not on the end of the dictatorship, but on No’s representation of how possible a normal life was during it—so long as you didn’t look too closely, think too hard, or speak too loudly. How the violence and cruelty were overtly directed at some people and projected, repressed, normalized, and managed by everyone else. How the possibility of a normal life did so much of the repressing on its own. How far you can end up from what you thought “normal” meant without really noticing.
I’m sharing my previous essay on No again today, even though I’d write something different now (and maybe I will, eventually). I hope it encourages you to watch the movie, which, despite my ruminating, is wildly entertaining and absolutely NOT a history homework slog. And if you have recommendations for art about life under Latin American dictatorships, reply to this email! I suddenly find myself eager for more.
My favorite election movie
First published October 25, 2020
No, directed by Pablo Larraín and released in the U.S. in 2013, is a movie about the 1988 plebiscite in Chile, in which people could vote “yes” or “no” to continue the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who had taken power in the military coup of 1973. It stars Gael García Bernal as René Saavedra, an advertising creative who is back in Santiago after living in exile due to his father’s unspecified resistance activities. René himself isn’t particularly politically engaged, despite being family friends with high profile opposition figures and having an ex-wife, with whom he is still very much in love, who is routinely beaten and arrested at protests. Their young son lives with René, whose aggressively conventional life disgusts the radical Verónica but offers an undeniable degree of comfort and safety.
As part of the plebiscite, which is intended to legitimize the Pinochet regime abroad, the Yes and No campaigns are both granted 15 minutes of television time every night for about a month leading up to the vote. This is the first time the opposition has had the chance to present their case in a public, official way. One of his father’s friends comes to René and asks him to run the No advertising campaign, which he agrees to do mostly to impress Verónica. The movie uses the real ads from the two campaigns, and the rest of the film’s distinctly retro aesthetic makes the archival footage blend in to an uncanny degree. (It is not, however, a documentary; my analysis of the movie is decidedly not an analysis of actual history.)
The Yes campaign has Pinochet’s neoliberal economic success backing it up, and the specter of Cold War communism to scare people with. A consultant brought in from Argentina to work on the Yes campaign says, in a line that has haunted me every day since I first heard it, “You have a system in which anyone can be rich. Not everyone. Anyone. You can’t lose when everyone is betting on being that anyone.” Their slogan is “Por un país ganador”—“For a winning country.”
Meanwhile, René immediately finds himself at odds with the leaders of the 17 (!) opposition parties that fall under the No umbrella, and with the approach they want for the campaign. Convinced the election is rigged and that they will never be allowed to win, they want to use their 15 minutes to tell the truth about what has happened in and to their country—the murders, the exiles, the disappearances, the torture, the violent repression of dissent. They want to inscribe their pain, and their country’s pain, in the official record while they have the chance. After René—whom they call “the advertising comrade”—sees an early cut of one of their spots, featuring tanks rolling through the streets of Santiago and protesters being hauled away to who knows where, he asks point blank, “Do you think this is going to win?” And they tell him, no, of course not. Winning isn’t the point.
But René wants to win, thanks in part to his political naiveté. He has no need rewrite official history and force it to contend with his suffering. René spends his days creating ad campaigns for sodas and soap operas and this new thing called a microwave. He knows what sells and how to sell it. He knows the No campaign can’t be a painful slog through the suffering of the past. It can’t offer merely a traumatic vision of what to vote against. It has to give people something to vote for, and that something has to be stronger than fear. No can’t be a rejection, but an embrace—an embrace of a feeling, transubstantiated into a product.
To René, there’s nothing different about the craft of selling a microwave and selling the end of a military dictatorship. There can’t be, if the campaign is going to succeed at selling anything at all. So while his boss at the ad agency works for the Yes campaign, René recruits his co-workers to not-so-secretly design a logo, film a commercial, and write a jingle—not an anthem or a folksong, he insists, but a jingle. The resulting No campaign packages and sells joy itself. In the real-life central ad, there are picnics and horseback rides and mimes. There’s the wildly catchy jingle, with an earworm of a melody and a rhyming slogan: “Chile, la alegría ya viene.” (Chile, happiness is on the way.) By the end of the movie, even Verónica’s boyfriend is wearing a No sweatshirt—and René’s own happiness and comfort have been threatened to the point that he takes their son to live with her.
No combines two of my favorite kinds of movies: those about a regular person playing a small role in an important event, and those about craftspeople meticulously exercising their crafts. René is absolutely right about advertising, how to tell stories, and how to manipulate people on a massive scale. He’s right about the centrality of emotions in our decisions and in what we consider to be possible. He also fights with everything he has against putting anything painful on screen, including the mothers of the disappeared. He’s overruled on that one, but not on his larger vision of branding the future with literal rainbows and thus, to a certain extent, continuing to repress the trauma of the past—but now willingly, with a smile and a catchy slogan, instead of with a gun pointed at your head. And (here’s the history spoiler) it works. No wins. Chile votes a dictator out of power.
No the movie is as meticulously crafted as the No campaign itself. It has an impeccable narrative arc, a distinctive aesthetic, and appealing characters (even René’s boss is sympathetic). It’s funny. It’s heart-warming. It’s a great story. And, I think, it’s deeply ambivalent about the power that comes with being those things. A great story can be empty. Maybe the person who writes that great story, who can see its outlines when everyone else is too mired in the muck of reality, has to be the emptiest person in the room. Once No wins, René essentially disappears, walking out of the campaign headquarters in bewildered exhaustion. And then, in the last scene of the movie, he’s back in the same office as before, alongside the same boss as always, manipulating reality once again—this time to sell a soap opera.