Country: Chile
Director: Pablo Larraín
Duration: 1 hour and 58 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Elicits: Notes on persuasion, advertising, and repressive Chilean politics
In October 1988, after fifteen years under General Augusto Pinochet, Chile held a national plebiscite over whether he should continue in office for another eight years. Since the 1973 coup ousting socialist Salvador Allende, Pinochet had curtailed democratic opposition, disappeared and tortured regime “enemies,” and inaugurated a process of economic liberalization inspired by predominant American economic thinking which, depending on your preferred set of stylized facts, unleashed impressive economic growth relative to peer countries or exacerbated longstanding issues surrounding inequality by entrenching a version of crony capitalism—the debate remains more robust than one might think, with economic historians like Niall Ferguson leaning into a certain soft apologism for the regime given its economic track record. Yet, two things remain certain: Pinochet violated human rights with abandon—the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano’s By Night In Chile masterfully excoriated those directly complicit or willfully blind to the regime’s violence and remains perhaps the great work of art addressing the period—and Pinochet remained particularly responsive to pressure from big business which, by the late 1980s, found his regime ever more distasteful. This latter fact partially explains why a public plebiscite on a dictatorial regime could occur in the first place.
Pablo Larraín’s No focuses on the plebiscite itself, highlighting both the strategic work of tireless activists committed to concrete action and, more fundamentally, offering an encomium to persuasion-as-politics in a society riven by opposing coalitions. As with most autocratic regimes, Pinochet was not at all universally unpopular. Joining the “No” campaign, advertising guru René Saavedra, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, helps craft messages supporting the non-extension of Pinochet’s regime past 1990. (Voting “No” did not mean immediate ouster, but instead indicated support for a transition and free elections over the next two years.) According to rules agreed upon with Chilean authorities, each side (“Yes” and “No”) would be allowed fifteen minutes to air their arguments on television during the 27 nights leading up to the vote. Throughout this process, Saavedra emerges the indefatigable coordinator of the “No” campaign’s commercials, all the while prey to regime intimidation and threats. Advertising has come under scathing criticism for its manipulative ability to stoke demand for unnecessary items since, well, the beginning of advertising—withering criticism of the “puff” remained commonplace in the nineteenth century and, in the post-war American context, John Kenneth Gailbraith’s 1958 The Affluent Society inaugurated a set of criticisms deriding pointless material accumulation spurred by private business which, he argued, had the effect of crowding out more productive public investment, an argument since accentuated ad nauseam by myriad critical theorists. In some ways, Larraín’s film upends this critique by showing the ways in which commercial presentation tactics (ostentatious, comedic, frivolous) can be put towards consequential and noble ends. After all, persuasion rarely relies upon the best argument absent reflective considerations of audience. It is at once a banal observation and one often overlooked in heated political moments. For if politics in some sense forever remains the act of building coalitions around specific issues, reaching disparate audiences on their own terms emerges the constructive act par excellence.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Pablo Larraín — Neruda (2016)
Patricio Guzman — The Battle of Chile (1975)