Once Upon a Time in Buenos Aires: Vengeance, Community and the Urban Western

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 All translations from the Spanish are mine. 2 Las torres jardín, built in the middle of central city blocks and offering security and leisure facilities under the guise of retaining the attractions of the traditional neighbourhood barrio, break up the historic city block by occupying space normally taken up by several buildings. As a consequence, they threaten ‘the traditional homogenising inclusivity of the city grid’ (Silvestri and Gorelik 2000 Silvestri, Graciela and Gorelik, Adrián. 2000. “Ciudad y cultura urbana, 1976–1999: El fin de la expansión”. In Buenos Aires: Historia de cuatro siglos, Edited by: Luis Romero, José and Alberto Romero, Luis. 461–99. Buenos Aires: Altamira. [Google Scholar]: 466). 3 As Ludmila da Silva Catela notes (2001 Da Silva Catela, Ludmila. 2001. No habrá flores en la tumba del pasado, La Plata: Ediciones Al Margen. [Google Scholar]), there is as yet no documented case of a vigilante killing of a person who committed crimes during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship by anyone who suffered at the hands of state repression, directly or indirectly. The ongoing trials of officials, debates over immunity and the legacy of disappearance add a further dimension to the context of revenge and justice in post-dictatorship Argentina. 4 The railings surrounding many of the houses in San Justo – including Natalia's – suggest that the city's inhabitants are drawing themselves behind bars in ways similar to Oso's own incarceration. 5 The film also perpetuates the dominance of the superior male evident in westerns. The chain-smoking, tight T-shirted, muscular, gun-toting Oso (the name itself – Bear – is revealing) persists in this male-dominated city. The powerful masculinity of Oso, Alicia's biological father, is placed in contrast to the utterly ineffective nature of the masculinity of her surrogate father, Sergio: the latter is unemployed while Natalia works as the breadwinner and his failed attempt to stand up to the bookmaker only makes him an effeminate other to Oso. The obvious contrast between the two characters is introduced by Sergio's inability to solve the puzzle that Alicia brings home – only for Oso to solve it successfully within a few seconds. 6 Buenos Aires (the city) is divided between two administrative areas: Capital Federal (‘Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires’), the self-governing centre which has a population of around three million inhabitants, and Gran Buenos Aires, governed as part of the province of Buenos Aires, which has a population of around nine and a half million inhabitants. 7 The point is reinforced by comparing Old Boy to Park Chan-wook's later film, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (), in which there is a clear choice offered between state justice and personal revenge. 8 This idea is partially repeated in The Brave One (dir. Neil Jordan ), essentially a remake of Death Wish except with the significant difference that the protagonist is a woman (played by Jodie Foster) and that, at the end of the film, the vengeful Erica Bain eliminates the men who murdered her partner.