Zombieland: Dos Caracoles, the Caracazo and Split Screens

George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978)

            What struck me in Jon Beasly-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America was a juxtaposition I made between the discussion on habit and how its both complacent and an instrument of hegemony under Pinochet’s dictatorship yet unpredictably reactionary after Venezuela’s thirty years of democracy. While the zombiesque shoppers traverse the neoliberal mall of Dos Caracoles in Santiago, Chile, unable to congregate in one space and going about their architecturally channeled routine of window shopping comodification, the multitude rises against higher prices in public transportation in the Caracazo uprising in 1989 while Hugo Chávez was sleeping. The effect of posthegemony is almost like an unforeseen metaphorical zombie apocalypse. Out of the numbing effects of capitalist hegemony rises a post-ideological subversiveness unaware of its power. Perhaps Venezuela’s shattered split-screen televisual coup/countercoup 2002 confusion is an augur of what’s to come in Chile as it distances itself from the Pinochet dictatorship – one screen, one perspective, is no longer capable of capturing the complete narrative. Some screens switch to the telenovela in an attempt to censor, others with the protests thinking they are on the right side of history, then within 48 hours it all turns around on itself to the point that the media’s camera does not know where it should be pointing because it is unclear who is actually in control. Hegemony is no longer possible.