The Trope of the Dogs: Queer Phantasmagoric Realism in Memoria (2021, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Resumen

The film Memoria (2021) is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first work filmed outside of Thailand, in Colombia. The narrative follows Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a woman with a syndrome that leads to insomnia and gradual forgetting. The film explores themes of memory, forgetting, and the relationship between the past and the future. The work is analyzed through the perspective of ‘queer phantasmagoric realism,’ a concept that combines elements of realism and fantastic to address political and social issues. The presence of a spaceship in the Colombian jungle is an example of this, symbolizing an immemorial past and an uncertain future. The text also highlights Tilda Swinton’s performance, whose queer gestuality and characterization is central to the movie. The analysis addresses the complexity of constructing reality in the film, inspired by André Bazin’s aesthetics, and how Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses art to question binaries and explore themes such as gender, sexuality, and memory. The trope of dogs in the narrative is also explored, relating it to ‘spectral realism’ in contemporary Latin American literature.