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It was a not inappropriate coincidence that found me, in the same week that i began reading Jose Saramago’s The Double, watching the film adaptation of Saramago’s Blindness.
I read Blindness about a year ago, and at the time found it somewhat annoying. Saramago’s endless intrusions and digressions got in the way of a perfectly adequate science fictiony story in which a city is blighted by an epidemic of inexplicable blindness. The story was so simple that it almost felt like something was missing.
The Double is guilty of all the same shortcomings i found in Blindness, but i found this book utterly engaging and absorbing. Saramago’s fictions revolve around one slight jump out of normality, and all the implications that come from this. In the case of The Double, a history teacher watches a film and discovers that one of the actors in it is his exact double, in every way.
It is the simplest of plots, but Saramago invests enough psychological terror and uncertainty in his plot to make it quite compelling. The same was very much true of Blindness, i realise now in hindsight.
With such a taut and simple narrative thread, a little relief is needed, and this is exactly what Saramago’s dithering digressions provide. Though they bear only the most tangental relevance to the story around them, they allow him to reflect on the fears and failings of his characters without allowing his stories to become painfully grim.
Although i enjoyed the film Blindness – it is a remarkably close adaptation of the book such as i remember it – what it most lacked was Saramago’s voice. He had been very reluctant to have the book made into a film, and perhaps with good reason. The film dispenses with his wandering intrusions, and in doing so becomes almost completely humourless, and far far bleaker than the novel.
It also probably goes without saying that there is something paradoxical about trying to make a film of Blindness. The book is all black words on a white page, and so of course leaves the reader blind and forced to imagine the unfolding events. The film shows its audience everything; the characters are blind but the cameras can never be.
The Double would be far better suited to adaptation; the terror within the book is precisely a visual, tactile one, with the identical characters interchanging and competing with each other in a seemingly pointless but completely inescapable feud to be the one and only.
After reading (and watching) Blindness i wondered what point Saramago had been trying to make. After The Double i think that is probably the wrong question. Saramago explores the mundane normality of society, but with a single, simple twist adds something new and uncanny, that turns the world upside down. He shows us how people respond and how they survive. There doesn’t need to be an exact point to this, it is enough that, in getting into the heads of his characters, he gets into the heads of everyone.
I’d been in Bolivia less than two weeks when we decided to go and see the new James Bond film, which happens to be set here. Two weeks was enough to know something was very wrong with this depiction.
Portions of the film are set in Haiti, and more substantially in Bolivia. Neither country is among the filming locations. Panama, Mexico and Chile were subbed in instead. It’s pretty clear throughout the film that one Latin American stereotype is as good as another.
The film does touch on plenty of contemporary latin ‘issues’, identifying Haiti and Bolivia as potential hotspots for trouble, mentioning the water crisis in Bolivia, the exploitation of natural resources by foreign powers, American interventionism, military coups, environmental degradation, etc etc etc.
These elements are mashed together and given a high gloss sheen. The film’s heroine, a tall thin green-eyed Bolivian secret service agent, is played by a Ukrainian girl. The coup-plotting generalisimo is a fat, cigar-smoking lecherer that might perhaps resemble Rafael Trujillo (former dictator of the Dominican Republic), but more closely resembles a stereotypical corrupt Latin American general. He is a caricature of a caricature, drawn in crude, broad strokes, satisfying preconceptions.
In a later scene Bond motors out into the desert along a sleek black, well-marked road. After spending almost a week in the Bolivian desert i am no expert, but i know what provincial Bolivian roads look like. Bond should have pulled over every few minutes to change a flat tire or to throw up as the effects of altitude, motion and heat sickness set in.
Sitting with my gringo companions, i felt embarassed and awkward sitting in the cinema, surrounded by Bolivians seeing what my culture thinks of their culture. Perhaps the crowd was happy that some of their struggles – such as the ongoing struggle for clean running water – were being given public attention. Or perhaps they were sick of being tarred with the same old brush. The La Paz of the film was a mix of squalid bars and gleaming hotels. Almost the entirety of life such as i have experienced it in my short time here takes place between these two extremes, without touching upon either of them.
The crowd did finally laugh, when a big, bullying policeman on a dirt bike – the film’s authentic flourish – pulled Bond over and demanded ’su pasaporte, por favor’. It was, i suppose, a moment everyone could relate to on some level. At least the bike was a Bolivian police bike. The film had got something right. Moments later both the policemen were incapacitated though, just as the corrupt general was vanquished, and just as everything else supposedly Bolivian about the film came off second best; victims of the bigger, braver agents and villains of the west.
The film didn’t need Bolivia, it just needed a poor country with a history of strife and corruption, a flimsy pretext for the explosions and gun battles that are the staple of the franchise. Given this very public perception of the country, its not hard to see why Bolivia is now turning away from the West, and seeking to empower itself, and is choosing allies who show an interest in the country itself, and not in empty caricatures of it.
