Traumatic flights, imaginary parents and neurotic bourgeoisie

Abstract

Damián Szifrón’s blockbuster Wild Tales came to the box office as a landmark in Argentinian cinema, not only because it reveals a deep gaze on the aggressive nature of a culture that self-repressed its traumas, but also because every Western culture can contemplate ethically its own scars in this collection of anecdotic tales. Only the fact that Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar would want to produce the work of his young Argentinian counterpart says a lot about the necessity to utilize cinema as a chock therapy where the audience confronts its own wild and primitive nature (The Freudian Id), hidden in its deep interior through centuries of accumulated repression. This article focuses on the figure of the imaginary father, as defined by French analyst Jacques Lacan, in order to explore how the chapters of the film form of chain that presents cultural traumas, historical and individual causes, as well as the neurosis surrounding the Argentinian bourgeoisie, usual ruler of social behavior in the majority of Western societies. In line with the recent work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, this research will observe how each chapter of Wild Tales decomposes the ethical symptoms of a society that is aware of its neurotic behaviors to the point that it acknowledges that comic explosions of its wild sides is the most efficient therapy that cinema can offer.