Voting Pinochet Out Was More Than Just A Yes Or 'No'
These days politics and advertising go hand in hand. Mayors stage photo ops. The Bush administration compared the Iraq war to rolling out a new product. And just last year, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent nearly a billion dollars running for president. If you're an American, such wall-to-wall marketing has come to seem a natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy or LeBron James.
Of course, it's not natural. It's as man-made as any building. I've never seen this shown any more clearly than in No, the Oscar-nominated film by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain. Closer in spirit to Argo than to Lincoln, this enjoyable movie centers on Chile's 1988 plebiscite over whether to give its dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who seized power during a 1973 coup, eight more years in office.
Its unheroic hero is a fictionalized young ad man, Rene Saavedra, well played by the charismatic Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Soulful yet politically unengaged, Rene comes up with a marketing campaign designed to get ordinary folks to vote "No" — thereby removing Pinochet. His ideas horrify many in the Vote No camp, who want to use their allotted 15 minutes of nightly TV airtime to chronicle the dictator's many crimes — murders, disappearances, the crushing of unions.
In contrast, Rene insists on going Lite. Using a rainbow logo and a catchy theme song, he sells funny, upbeat images of a future, democratic Chile in the way we've earlier seen him sell soft drinks. Rene's campaign works. It offers brightness and light, not direness, and Chile becomes a freer country.
Smart and skillfully made, No is a sunny companion piece to Roberto Bolano's darkly brilliant novella By Night in Chile, about a critic so corrupted by the dictatorship that he attends literary salons in a mansion where people are being tortured in the basement. This actually happened, by the way.
“ Whatever his background, Larrain wound up simplifying, and therefore misrepresenting, what actually happened. His movie suggests that the No vote won because of Rene's ad campaign, when far more was going on — voter drives that registered millions, trade union activism, articles by suddenly emboldened intellectuals."