“Bardo, or the Mexican digital diaspora”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades/Bardo False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022) raises important questions about the nature of national film culture in the age to global film commerce. The product of a collaboration between the Mexican filmmaker and Netflix, the US-based global streaming service, Bardo crystalizes long-simmering concerns about digital technologies that have shaped film production and distribution and their impact on contemporary Mexican movie-going audiences. The film’s narrative rhetoric is directed to ‘Greater Mexico’, a cultural community beyond traditional territorial borders. With the objective of calling into question the effects of digitally-driven globalization, the film focuses on the crisis of conscience of creative artist Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), whose symbolic cross-border journey has blurred the lines between the Mexican identity instilled in him by cultural tradition and politics and the post-national environment which, through globalized mass media flows, has since reshaped his outlook. This odyssey to his intimate past eventually leads Silverio to recognize the falseness of his assumption of his own Mexicanness and to acknowledge the progressive evolution of an emerging Mexican culture forged in the borderless, unbounded spaces formed by transnational commerce.