Building on the Marxist tradition (going back to Marx himself) of viewing vampirism as a metaphor for political and economic oppression and exploitation, David McNally notes that today’s late capitalism is even more monstrous than the capitalism of Marx’s day. It is, he says “a conjuror’s dream of wild money … demonically out of control” (156). But McNally also emphasizes, drawing on Fredric Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, that vampire and other monstrous narratives can perform the utopian function of revealing the monstrosity of capitalism. The 2023 film El Conde, from noted Chilean director Pablo Larraìn, tries to do just that, presenting is with a political satire that draws upon this Marxist tradition of using vampirism as a stand-in for the more monstrous aspects of capitalism to present a powerful (though humorous) critique of the rule of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile with an iron hand from 1973 to 1990, remaining in a position of considerable power as the Commander in Chief of the Chilean military until 1998. El Conde involves minimal special effects (consisting mostly of several oddly balletic shots of vampires flying) and relatively little in the way of graphic and bloody horror. Indeed, the most overt violence is the film is perpetrated against vampires, not by them, though there is one early face-smashing murder-by-hammer by a young Pinochet that helps to establish the murderous nature of the film’s central figure.
El Conde, while completely eschewing the tendency of some post-Twilight films to romanticize vampirism, is also not particularly interested in functioning as a conventional horror film. Instead, it employs the vampire motif to create a sort of Brechtian estrangement effect to critique the excesses of the Pinochet regime, while at the same time broadening this critique by suggesting that this regime was an early (and particularly overt) example of the global political/economic phenomenon of neoliberalism, a special (extreme) version of the late capitalism discussed by Jameson. This estrangement effect, meanwhile, is enhanced by the contrast between the bloody nature of the film’s content and its oddly beautiful black-and-white cinematography (which garnered an Oscar nomination for cinematographer Edward Lachman). This cinematography helps to create a fabric that is sometimes comic, sometimes surreal, and sometimes poetic in the manner of Latin American magic realism.
El Conde means “The Count” in Spanish, thus linking Pinochet all the way back to Count Dracula in the vampire tradition, though the film stipulates that it was also a nickname of which Pinochet himself was fond. It should also be noted that this title could be a reference to Operation Condor, the U.S.-backed campaign of violence and terror through which a number of right-wing South American dictatorships, with the Pinochet regime at the forefront, attempted to extend their power in the region from 1975 to 1983. This operation is not directly mentioned in El Conde, though the film does present an extensive historical narrative that identifies Pinochet as a foundling who was brought up (as Claude Pinoche) in a Parisian orphanage until he joined the French army of King Louis XVI, shortly before the French Revolution. When that revolution breaks out, young Pinoche, though no fan of the revolution itself, deserts the army and pretends to join the revolutionaries, calculating that this course would be the best to preserve his own safety. Then he collects and makes off with the head of Marie Antoinette after her beheading, pausing first to lick her blood off the blade of the guillotine. This segment of the film might thus be considered as a prologue that not only identifies Pinochet’s early origins but also provides an early clue to his gruesome and perfidious tendencies. He then fakes his death and disappears into obscurity for centuries, occasionally taking part in antirevolutionary activity, until eventually re-emerging as a member of the Chilean military in the 1930s, now under the name “Augusto Pinochet.”
The bulk of El Conde is set in the present day of its 2023 release, by which time Pinochet (played by prominent Chilean actor Jaime Vadell) is in hiding, having again faked his death to avoid prosecution for his many crimes. At this point, he longs to die for real but is unknowingly being kept alive by his wife Luciana (Catalina Guerra), who secretly puts blood in his food, hoping to keep him alive long enough to turn her into a vampire as well, something that he has long refused to do. Like the real-world Pinochet, the film’s Pinochet took power in Chile in a U.S.-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the leftist regime of Salvador Allende, the legally elected president of the country[1]. Pinochet then served as the president of Chile until 1990, carrying out a bloody campaign of terror, intimidation, and murder against his political opponents, especially those on the left, who were the chief proponents of resistance to his fascist inclinations. He is remembered as one of the most vicious dictators of the twentieth century, which perhaps makes the vampire motif fit him quite well. However, El Conde focuses less on his violent and autocratic rule and more on his extensive corruption, something for which the real Pinochet (who once proudly touted his moral rectitude) eventually became well known.
Most of the plot of the film involves the efforts of Pinochet’s wife and five grasping children (none of whom are vampires) to get their hands on the vast wealth that he has stashed in a wide variety of forms all over the world. However, a further complication in the plot occurs when the children bring on a French accountant, Carmen (played by Paula Luchsinger), who turns out secretly to be a nun charged with killing the vampire (and also with trying to recover as much of his wealth as possible for the Church, which turns out to be as selfish and venal as the wife and children). Carmen, though, is apparently seduced by Pinochet, who turns her into a vampire in her own right, though we eventually learn that all this was part of her plan to defeat Pinochet and appropriate his wealth for the church. Carmen, though, is killed by Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), Pinochet’s vampire butler, thwarting her plan. Meanwhile, Fyodor also turns Luciana into a vampire, the two forming an alliance to try to seize whatever wealth and power they can.
The plot takes a sudden turn, though, in what is perhaps the most humorous (and possibly the most satirically telling) element of the film: Pinochet’s vampire mother suddenly appears at his remote Chilean refuge, revealing that she abandoned her vampire baby after she was raped (and turned into a vampire) by his father, a Strigoi (a type of spirit from Romanian mythology, thought to be one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s original 1897 Dracula). This mother also announces that she herself is meant to be Pinochet’s true love, vampires (no believers in conventional morality) apparently having no problem with incest. The real kicker, though, is that this mother (played by Scottish actress Stella Gonet) turns out to be none other than Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, who has also faked her own death after falling out of power back in Britain[2]. Thatcher and Pinochet defeat an alliance of Fyodor and Luciana, then eat the hearts of the other vampires—after running them through a blender, which is apparently the favorite feeding method of these modern vampires. This feeding returns them to youth and vigor, Pinochet reverting all the way to boyhood, while Thatcher becomes a young mother so she can care for him. Moreover, despite her lack of regard for South America in general[3], she agrees to remain with Pinochet in Chile, raising her young son there so that he can guard against the future rise of leftists such as Allende, all of whom he regards as “Bolsheviks.”
This depiction of Pinochet’s ongoing anticommunist paranoia seems an accurate depiction of his real-world attitudes. In an interview with Jon Lee Anderson in 1998 (well after the 1991 end of the Cold War), the former dictator lamented that “almost everyone in the world today is a Marxist—even if they don’t know it themselves. They continue to have Marxist ideas.” This attitude seems to hark back to the McCarthyite/John Birch society communist-behind-every-bush paranoia in the US of the early Cold War years—well expressed in Bob Dylan’s satirical song “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” in which the singer, inspired by Birch Society propaganda, becomes convinced that communists are everywhere, even though his frantic searches can’t seem to find any:
Well, I got up in the mornin’ I looked under my bed
I was lookin’ every place for them gol-darned Reds
Looked behind the sink, and under the floor
Looked in the glove compartment of my car
Couldn’t find any.
Look behind the clothes, behind the chair
Lookin’ for them Reds everywhere
I looked way up my chimney hole
Even looked deep inside my toilet bowl
They got away.
At the same time, Pinochet’s 1998 warnings seem to prefigure the recent revival of anticommunist and anti-Marxist rhetoric in right-wing political rhetoric of the 2020s, when the terms “communist” and “Marxist” have been used as labels for anything and everything disliked by the Right—as when Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Defense, absurdly declared in his 2024 book The War on Warriors that allowing gays to serve in the US military was part of a “Marxist agenda.” Meanwhile, if Pinochet warns us of the ever-present threat of communism, the vision of a newly invigorated Pinochet in El Conde actually reminds us more of the ever-present threat of anti-communism, especially in its most virulent (fascist) form, a warning of global relevance given the resurgence of right-wing political movements around the world in the 2020s. In this regard, Thatcher’s presence in the film is particularly important, reminding us that these right-wing movements did not spring up out of nowhere but are the direct result of a neoliberalism that itself is rooted in the Cold War politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, there are ways in which Thatcher, not Pinochet, is actually the central historical figure in El Conde—or at least is a second central figure along with Pinochet, helping to emphasize that Pinochet was not a unique phenomenon but simply an embodiment of right-wing tendencies that have reverberated through history, at least since reactions against the French Revolution became a key element of modern politics[4]. And, if Thatcher’s presence reminds us that these tendencies can come in many forms (some with less extreme packaging than in the cases of Hitler or Pinochet), the film’s specification that Thatcher herself was turned into a vampire even before the French Revolution by a Strigoi who had formerly worked as a slave trader reminds us that the kinds of brutal tendencies that lead to fascism were in existence even before the revolution and have, given the antiquity of slavery, been around virtually as long as human beings have been forming societies.
That Thatcher is, in fact, a very central figure in the film is further emphasized by the fact that she serves throughout as the film’s narrator, though the identity of this narrator is not entirely clear until she appears as a character. As narrator, she plays a key role not only in establishing the almost fable-like texture of the film but in tying together what might otherwise be a rather confusing narrative. Further, Larraìn makes sure to call attention to the importance of the film’s narration by having it presented throughout in English, even in the Spanish-language version of the film—which thus contains an additional source of cognitive estrangement that is not really available in the English-dubbed version
The link between Thatcher and Pinochet is important because it provides a reminder that Pinochet’s brutal authoritarian regime was not a one-of-a-kind case of Latin American autocracy but was, in fact, informed by some of the same energies that have driven the global phenomenon of neoliberalism ever since Pinochet’s day. Thatcher, in particular, has long been associated with the rise of neoliberalism in Britain, driven by her hearty endorsement of market-oriented capitalism, based on her repeated insistence that “there is no alternative”—often referred to as “TINA” by her critics[5]. Indeed, while it is a common association between the rise of neoliberalism and the rule of Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan (beginning in 1981) in the US, the fact is that Pinochet’s regime preceded both of these and pursued some of the same economic policies, if in a more overtly authoritarian way. Meanwhile, the Thatcher regime in the UK was notably chummy with the Pinochet regime in Chile, which provided intelligence and other support to the UK during its 1982 Falklands War with Argentina (at that time also ruled by a military dictatorship, but one that had strained relations with Chile[6]).
Of course, neoliberalism has roots that go all the way back to the 1940s and 1950s, when a group of right-wing economists working at the University of Chicago (led by such noted figures as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek[7], both of whom would ultimately win the Nobel Prize in Economics) developed the theoretical foundations for the rise of neoliberalism, marked by the return of free market policies that had once reigned in nineteenth-century capitalism but had since been largely discredited, especially after the disastrous consequences of free market capitalism led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. One could, in fact, see the overall impetus behind the rise of neoliberalism as a desire to reverse the social and economic policies (such as the “New Deal” in the US) that were put in place to combat the Depression, policies designed to curb the unfettered and unscrupulous pursuit of wealth by capitalist enterprises. In its purest form, though, neoliberalism differs from nineteenth-century-style “free-market” capitalism in that it does not simply advocate a governmental hands-off policy of deregulation but instead argues that a strong government should intervene where necessary to ensure the suppression of any forces in society that might impede the unfettered operation of capitalist markets.
As a result, neoliberalism would become both an economic system and a political philosophy designed to create an environment in which neoliberal economics could thrive, despite the fact that earlier attempts at free-market capitalism had been such dismal failures. Pinochet, in fact, actively sought to create just such an environment, and the use of “neoliberalism” as term in intellectual discourse on politics and economics actually first became widely used in conjunction with Pinochet’s policies. Pinochet’s regime, in fact, drew quite direct inspiration from the University of Chicago economists, and many of Pinochet’s chief economic advisors had been educated at the University of Chicago or at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, whose economics department was saturated with ideas from Chicago. Indeed, the Chilean economists who provided much inspiration to Pinochet came to be known as the “Chicago Boys.”
Marxist economic geographer David Harvey, amid one of the best general introductions to neoliberalism, has noted the historical importance of the Pinochet regime in Chile, noting that this regime was “the first experiment with neoliberal state formation,” which would provide “helpful evidence to support the subsequent turn to neoliberalism in both Britain … and the United States.” Vincent Bevins, meanwhile, places the rise of neoliberalism within the global context of extremely questionable Cold War policies, noting that Pinochet’s Chile “became the world’s first test case for ‘neoliberal’ economics,” while suggesting that Pinochet’s use of terror, torture, and intimidation was essentially aligned with the American belief that communism had to be opposed by any means necessary, including murder and torture (Jakarta 207). Elsewhere, Bevins provides a brief summation of the crucial role played by Chile in the rise of neoliberalism, calling Pinochet’s Chile a “laboratory” for neoliberal experimentation and noting that “defenders of neoliberal policies have to contend with the uncomfortable fact that their approach was first implemented by a mass-murdering tyrant” (“Make the Economy Scream”).
That Chilean neoliberalism was directly in line with Western Cold War policies is suggested within the El Conde itself, where it is noted that the slimey Fyodor trained at the School of the Americas before being into a vampire by Pinochet in the late 1990s. The School of Americas (renamed in 2001 as the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”) was a Cold War project of the US Defense Department, founded in 1946 and intended to train Latin American personnel to fight against communism. More than 60,000 Latin American police and security personnel had been trained at the institute by the year 2000.
Of course, supporters of neoliberalism have typically dealt with that “uncomfortable fact” of the alignment between Pinochet and neoliberalism by simply ignoring it, aided (especially in the US) by the general ignorance of a population long conditioned to ignore historical events in which the US might come off as a villain. Pinochet and his regime are well remembered in Latin America, but not so much in the US, where the date of September 11 has very different connotations and where South American coups and dictators have become the stuff of jokes and ironic spectacles. The place of this coup in the Cold War thus provides important historical context for the depiction of Pinochet in El Conde.
It should also be noted that Larraìn has focused on Chilean history throughout his career—including a broader focus on the history of the Cold War. His film Neruda (2016), for example, clearly identifies Chile as having been on the forefront of the Cold War against communism from the very beginning. The title refers to prominent leftist Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, before dying under suspicious circumstances shortly after the 1973 coup, widely suspected to have been murdered by agents of Pinochet. The film, however, takes place back in 1948, when Chilean president Gabriel González Videla, elected in 1946 with support of the Chilean Communist Party, turns against the party and orders widespread arrests of communists, including Neruda, then serving as a Chilean senator. The film’s main character, in fact, is the policeman charged with hunting down Neruda, played by Mexican superstar Gael García Bernal. González’s change of heart, meanwhile, is specified in the film to have taken place on orders from his bosses in the American Truman administration, which was then beginning its mobilization for the Cold War. The film thus focuses on the effort to arrest Neruda, who goes into hiding and escapes arrest (and who would eventually escape into Argentina in 1949). Meanwhile, in what amounts to a mere side-note, Neruda gives us a brief glimpse (without any real comment) of a young Pinochet, then beginning his rise to power within the military by serving as the commander of a special prison camp for communists being arrested as part of Gonzàlez’s roundup. We know, meanwhile, that Pinochet himself noted in his memoirs, that he was “was first alerted to the ‘truly diabolical attractions of Marxism’ in 1948, while commanding this prison camp (reported by Coad).
Larraìn also focuses more specifically on Pinochet—or at least the Pinochet era in Chile—in several other of his films. Zornosa, for example, suggests that 2008’s Tony Manero, 2010’s Post Mortem, and 2012’s No comprise an “unintentional trilogy” that traces Pinochet’s dictatorship from the coup through the plebiscite that voted him out of power. Larraín employs a number of effective strategies in these films. In the first of them, Alfredo Castro plays Raúl Peralta, a fifty-two-year-old man in Santiago who is obsessed with Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character from Saturday Night Fever (1977). Peralta spends much of his time trying to perfect his imitation of Manero’s dance moves, while devoting the remainder of his time to violent crimes, petty theft, and meaningless sex. Pinochet himself does not directly play an important role, though it is established at the beginning of the film that the action takes place during Pinochet’s reign (and it later becomes clear that the events of the film are taking place during the Chile-Argentina territorial dispute—commonly referred to as the “Beagle Conflict”—of 1978). The implication is clear: Peralta is a sort of national allegory of Pinochet’s Chile, which thus becomes a desperate US wannabe that is able to muster up only a cheap, second-rate imitation, driven by violence, greed, and a total lack of empathy.
Post Mortem also does not feature Pinochet as a major character, but it is set during the 1973 coup and thus deals directly with his takeover of the country. Castro returns as Mario Cornejo (apparently based on a real person), who lives an empty, monotonous life as a “civil servant,” working as a clerk who records autopsy results in support of pathologist Dr. Castillo (Vadell). Then the coup occurs, and the streets of Santiago suddenly take on an apocalyptic appearance. Cornejo and his co-workers, meanwhile, are overwhelemed when the bodies start to roll into the morgue, and it becomes obvious that the texture of life in Chile has taken a dark turn.
Finally, if Post Mortem deals with the beginning of Pinochet’s reign, No deals with the public relations campaigns related to the 1988 plebiscite that ultimately removed Pinochet from the Chilean presidency, a plebiscite that Pinochet allowed because he was confident that the people would endorse his continuing reign, thus gaining him international legitimacy. He was also confident enough to allow equal air time to his opponents in the campaign. Unfortunately for Pinochet, the “No” campaign to oust the dictator is created by young adman René Saavadra (García Bernal again), a sort of Chilean Don Draper, who adopts a strategy of running a positive, upbeat campaign using typical American-style advertising techniques and emphasizing the utopian potential of a post-Pinochet future. This tactic immediately gains traction, and the pro-Pinochet forces then show their true colors, turning to attack ads, dirty tricks, and outright intimidation to try to regain the upper hand. In the end, though, the Chilean people vote (unlike the American electorate of 2024) to oust their dictator, leading to the end of his reign.
In addition to its specific focus on Chilean history in the Pinochet era, El Conde carefully sets up a much longer historical background to Pinochet’s rule as an example of a centuries-long resistance to political progress. The revolutions opposed by Pinoche/Pinochet are well chosen, including the successful slave rebellion that began in Haiti in 1791 (directly inspired by the French Revolution), the 1917 Russian Revolution (in which a repressive monarchy was overthrown in an attempt to establish socialism in the former Russian Empire), and the anticolonial Algerian Revolution of 1954–1962 (in which Algeria eventually won its independence from French colonial rule). In short, Pinochet spends much of his hundreds of years of life opposing landmark progressive revolutions designed to overcome particularly unjust and dictatorial regimes, clearly setting the stage for his rule in Chile, beginning with the overturning of Allende’s progressive regime, which promised sweeping positive changes in Chilean society.
To place the beginnings of Pinochet’s life in politics in the French Revolution is an excellent choice. For one thing, this revolution was the single most important historical event in the long historical process (sometimes referred to as the “bourgeois cultural revolution”) through which Western (and eventually global) society was transformed from the feudalism of the Middle Ages to the modern practices that we all know today. The other revolutions opposed by Pinochet made important contributions to this process of historical modernization as well, casting him in the role of consistent opponent of progress. Moreover, if the French Revolution was the forerunner of a whole series of progressive movements, opposition to the French Revolution was also the forerunner to conservative opposition to those movements.
Indeed, negative reactions to the French Revolution have a long history, with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written when the revolution was still in its early stages, providing what might be considered the founding text in the genre. Burke’s horrified reaction to what he saw as the excessive violence of the revolution and the rude treatment of the French king and queen by the revolutionary crowds came well before the 1793–1794 “Reign of Terror.” It also came three years before King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would both die by the guillotine. But later critics of the revolution would focus on these violent events as evidence that the revolution was not a coherent social or political movement so much as an outburst of uncontrolled mob violence and class hatred. Even Thomas Carlyle, whose History of the French Revolution (1837) treats the revolution relatively positively, as a popular revolt and as an important predecessor of British Chartism (to which he was sympathetic), included excessively colorful descriptions of the element of terror associated with the revolution that gave his work an almost novelistic quality. In fact, Carlyle’s descriptions of revolutionary violence provided a crucial inspiration for Charles Dickens’ similar descriptions in the notoriously anti-revolution novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
An excellent survey of reactions to the French Revolution can be found in Eric Hobsbawm’s Echoes of the Marseillaise, which reviews two centuries of reactions to the revolution. Among other things, it is important to note that negative depictions of the revolution, especially in America (where it had largely been viewed positively when it was happening and for some time afterward), became especially prominent in the years of the Cold War, when it became common to depict the revolution as an outbreak of bloody mob violence, while at the same time de-emphasizing its importance in history. This simultaneous condemnation and dismissal of the French Revolution was, however, largely aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution and was part of an effort, in tune with the ideological climate of Cold War America, to denounce that later revolution (and, to an extent, revolutions in general) as offenses against civilization itself[8].
The French Revolution thus figured in the Western Cold War imagination as forerunner to the rise of communism—and thus to the rise of the very forces that Pinochet claimed (with US support) to be opposing in Chile. Indeed, Corey Robin has located Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution as the beginning of a long strain of conservative thought that has stretched through such modern right-wing figures as Richard Nixon (whose administration oversaw the support of the 1973 Chilean coup), Ronald Reagan, and even Donald Trump. And “reaction” is the key word here, because, for Robin, what ties the entire conservative tradition together is that the things that are being conserved are the power and privileges of its adherents, who are reacting to perceived threats to this power and those privileges. In Robin’s view, Burke’s perception of the French Revolution as a threat to civilization as he knew it thus becomes the prototype for all subsequent conservative thought, with thinkers such as Nixon, Reagan, and Trump (who might otherwise appear to be quite distinct from one another) all following very much in this reactionary tradition.
In short, remembering Pinochet is important in the US as well as in Chile and is relevant to the 2020s as well as the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, if covert US support for the Pinochet coup and subsequent regime of fascistic terror suggests the extremes to which the US was willing to go in the Cold War battle against communism, the recent rise of the forces of global fascism suggests the importance of remembering Pinochet’s excesses as forerunners of events underway in the present. As Peter Bradshaw puts it (in a mostly lukewarm review of the film), El Conde shows us how “the undead forces of fascism swoop vampirically through our 21st-century global twilight—the fascists once covertly supported by the western powers as a bulwark against communism, and now proclaiming themselves as a vital bulwark against Islamism, wokeism etc.”
Ultimately, the historical scope of Larraìn’s satire is probably its greatest strength, even if the breadth of that focus does weaken the specific satire of Pinochet. This breadth does, though, help to establish the film’s ongoing relevance in the present day and over a long historical arc, even if it also decreases the power of its depiction of the horrors of Pinochet’s rule in Chile. Indeed, reminders of the bloody political violence of Pinochet’s regime are not just allegorized by the film’s vampire motif but are to some extent replaced by that motif, so that viewers unfamiliar with the details of Pinochet’s real history (which would probably include most viewers outside South America) might remain unfamiliar with that history, even after seeing the film. Of course, it is difficult for any historical allegory to function in the face of historical ignorance. Perhaps, though, films such as El Conde can present an entertaining venue to provide at least the beginnings to a correction of that ignorance.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Jon Lee. “The Dictator.” The New Yorker, 11 October 1998, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/19/the-dictator-2. Accessed 17 December 2024.
Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs, 2020.
Bevins, Vincent. “Make the Economy Scream: The Chicago Boys and the Tragedy of the Chilean Coup.” The Nation, 14 November 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chicago-boys-chile-neoliberalism/. Accessed 14 December 2023.
Bradshaw, Peter. “El Conde Review—Pablo Larraín’s Horror-Satire Pitches Pinochet as a Vampire.” The Guardian, 31 August 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/31/el-conde-review-pablo-Larraìn-chile-pinochet. Accessed 15 December 2024.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Coad, Malcolm. “Obituary: Augusto Pinochet.” The Guardian, 11 December 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/11/chile.pinochet4. Accessed 16 December 2024.
Fischer, Karin. “The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile before, during, and after Pinochet.” The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 305–46.
Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (p. 297). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution. Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Haymarket Books, 2012.
Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Zornosa, Laura. “Pablo Larraín Breaks Down El Conde and Finally Facing Pinochet.” Time, 15 September 2023, https://time.com/631489/el-conde-netflix-history/. Accessed 16 December 2024.
NOTES
[1] It is worth noting that El Conde had a limited theatrical release on September 7, 2023, then first became available to a wide audience when it began streaming on Netflix on September 15, 2023, its debut dates thus bracketing the fiftieth anniversary of this coup.
[2] Director Larraìn is well versed in modern British history, having directed (just prior to El Conde) the much-acclaimed historical drama Spencer (2021), about the travails of Princess Diana Spencer in dealing with the British royal family. That film, incidentally, features Gonet as Queen Elizabeth II, so she seems to be Larraìn’s go-to performer for enactments of British female authority.
[3] The film’s depiction of Thatcher’s haughty, aristocratic, colonialist contempt for the “plebeian” texture of South America is a bit of satire that might be especially meaningful to Larraìn’s South American audience.
[4] Thatcher is, in fact, so important that one is tempted to speculate that the film’s title might also refer as much to her as to Pinochet, in which case “El Conde,” given the French beginnings of both Thatcher’s and Pinochet’s vampirism, might be a play on the French le con, or “The Cunt.” Indeed, in French, one of the most common uses of this obscene term occurs in the phrase “le con de ta mére,” literally “your mother’s cunt,” used in much the same way as the English interjection “fuck you!” One wonders if the film might, among other things, be Larraìn’s way of saying “fuck you” to both Thatcher and Pinochet.
[5] See Fisher for an insightful critique of Thatcher’s policies and for a description of the kind of culture (which he refers to as “capitalist realism”) that is produced under the reign of such policies. Fisher’s description of “capitalist realism” greatly resembles the characterization of postmodernism by Jameson, to which Fisher, in fact, approvingly refers.
[6] In addition, in her interview with Larraìn upon the release of the film, Laura Zornosa notes that “in real life, Thatcher—and former president George H.W. Bush—called upon the British government to release Pinochet from house arrest in London in 1999, arguing that he should be allowed to return to Chile rather than be extradited to Spain. While he was on house arrest, Thatcher sent Pinochet a bottle of fine scotch with a note: ‘Scotch is one British institution that will never let you down.’”
[7] Fischer suggests that the 1980 constitution instituted by Pinochet was named for Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty, published (by the University of Chicago Press) in 1960 (327). Robin, incidentally, notes that Hayek sent a copy of this work to António Salazar, the fascist strongman who had long been in power in Portugal, thinking it might be useful to him (164).
[8] This denunciation of the French Revolution was, meanwhile, partly a rejoinder to Marxist thinkers, who also characterized the French Revolution as a forerunner of the Russian Revolution, but in a positive way, seeing it as the most important event in world history and as a crucial step toward the modernization of Europe. For Marxist historians, the French Revolution became “a bourgeois precedent for the coming triumph of the proletariat” (Hobsbawm 8).