Pedro Páramo: Kiss of Ghosts

Ghosts and nightmares surround Pedro Páramo.

The novel Pedro Páramo was published in 1955, and as Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s (1917 – 1986) representative work, it’s also considered ‘one of the pinnacles of Latin American novels’. Its non-linear chronology, ghostly perspectives, and innovative narrative made Susan Sontag proclaim it “not only a masterpiece of the 20th-century, but one of the most influential books of the century”. Gabriel García Márquez also praised it, saying there’d be no One Hundred Years of Solitude without Pedro Páramo.

Using the search for his father as a plot premise, Pedro Páramo tells a nightmarish story. A man named Juan Preciado seeks his father, Pedro Páramo, in a ghost town. Along the way, he encounters a criminal, a priest, as well as his father’s lover, his father’s wife, a cook, and a caregiver. Finally, he realises they are all spirits, and that his father was a landowner who’s also a gangster, a villain, and a criminal all rolled into one.

Although the novel was deemed more suitable to be watched than read, its three adaptations in the history of Mexican cinema (1967, 1977, 1981) proved to be complete disasters.

As such, when Netflix recently purchased the production rights, it set its sights on the famous Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. He’s filmed Barbie (2023), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Frida (2002), Amores perros (2000) amongst many others, and has four Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography under his belt.

However, one has to admit this 2024 version is another flop. Granted, the film has astounding filmography, an epic plot structure, and a vibe that’s faithful to the novel…however, it’s still considered a ghost story that’s lacking in spirit.

It is certainly hard to adapt Pedro Páramo as the story spans 70 years (from the 1850s/60s to 1934), and has over 30 named characters whose storylines are intertwined with the many events in Pedro Páramo’s life. For instance, his romantic entanglements with the 5 women, his countless illegitimate offspring, as well as subplots like avenging his father, rebuilding the town, and supporting the revolutionaries… In short, a film cannot easily portray the density of such plots and emotional weight. Hence, attempting to remember all these names and faces in this faithful 2024 adaption of Pedro Páramo easily drives audiences mad and even those familiar with the story would find themselves lost and the film hard to grasp, for the film has abandoned causality of the plot and the rationale consistency of the characters’ actions.

Yet, when seen from another perspective, this film is an exercise in Jacques Derrida’s ‘phantom philosophy of cinema’. If cinema is the art of phantomachia—bringing ghosts back—then this film's ghostly narrative practices this very concept. The spectropoetic aspect might thus be what makes this film the most fascinating.

Spectral Narratives

The first shot of the film establishes a ghostly, eerie atmosphere as the camera slowly descends from the ground into a dark tomb, with a voiceover of Juan's memories of his mother. In other words, the entire story is essentially a spirit’s self-narration told from the grave, a recollection of his past life. Moreover, the film focuses not on the story, but on the souls of the deceased, the traces of things erased.

The film’s structure is made up of four dialogues:

Juan and his mother Dolores;

Juan and his mother’s best friend Eduviges Dyada, where they revisit memories of young Pedro Páramo, the wedding, and the land;

Juan and Pedro Páramo’s servant Damiana, where they discussed Juan and Dolores being abandoned by Pedro Páramo, and Miguel Páramo’s death and funeral;

Juan and the prostitute pimp Dorotea, where they conversed about Dorotea finding girls for Miguel Parámo, Juan’s death, Pedro Páramo marrying the mad Susana, Susana’s death, and Pedro Páramo being killed.

Various flashbacks to Pedro Páramo’s life accompany these dialogues.

The narrative structure is a loop of ghostly appearances, exits, and re-entrances.

These spirits exist in between life and death, presence and nothingness, the past and present. Though the film’s timeline is non-linear, it always jumps between the past and present, the dead and living through montage. Later on, when Juan is also dead, the two start to converge, implying how the present is consumed by the past, and how the living is obliterated by the dead. Therefore, the spiritual narrative allows for simultaneous viewing of the past, present, and future, as well as the dead and the living.

In the film, the town becomes a kind of summoning altar. Juan’s appearance indicates the ‘present’, Pedro Páramo’s life is the ‘past’, and the ‘future’ is a dead silence of nothingness where everything’s gone. The ‘present’ Juan’s in is always set in the night – dark, terrifying, and haunted by ghosts – while Pedro Páramo's past is always set in the day – bright, sunny, and picturesque. This implies how Mexico is currently plagued by too many ghosts of the past, unable to move forward. The ghosts in this sense embody the history of collective memory: the system of large estates, dictatorship and patriarchy, rape and violence, and so on. Because the dead cannot die once more, in order to save the forgotten and the victims, the dead must first be resurrected through their memories using imaging technology before they can truly die. Thus, the reappearances of these spirits become a long and ongoing mourning process.

The spectral narrative conveys a strong sense of loneliness. The abundant descriptions of landscapes, omnipresent noises, and constantly changing scenes in the novel are translated in the film as a historical reenactment of ghostly clamour and a desolate landscape filled with abandoned children and women.

These so-called ‘spirits’ are actually the embodiment of the psyche. The town in the film is haunted by ghosts, implying a loveless world brimming with violence. Everyone is like a restless spirit, and no one in the film has a deep, lasting, or loving relationship. All relationships between the characters are based on rape, violence, lies, or incest.

Pedro Páramo, in essence, is the manifestation of desire and loneliness. His illegitimate children yearn for his fatherly love; women crave his affection; the priest and revolutionaries seek his money. Pinning all these myths and hopes on one person is one of the reasons for the frequent emergence of dictators in Latin America. Even though Pedro Páramo seems wealthy and powerful, he is in fact, empty. He has never received the love he desperately yearned for throughout his life, so when his love dies, he too, becomes a spirit wandering the ruins.

Pedro Páramo can be regarded as Juan’s journey home, it’s also a journey about embracing death. Just as the Mexican author Octavio Paz said, the Mexican frequently talks about death. “He thinks of it as…his most lasting love.” The Aztecs also believed the souls of sinners are doomed to wander Earth, unable to ascend to heaven. Yet ‘ghosts’ are a deconstruction of death. The appearance of spirits suggests how they’ve never left, and absolute death is thus deconstructed as a relative existence.

“Seeking the father and abandoning the child” is an eternal theme in Latin American art. Although the ending of Pedro Páramo involves patricide, it’s different from Freud’s concept of patricide. The latter refers to the continuous evolution of each generation surpassing the previous one, but in Pedro Páramo, patricide represents a hatred toward one's source of life and a rejection of life itself. It all stems from a mysterious father.

A Father’s Kiss of Death

Apart from the narrative, the 2024 film adaptation of Pedro Páramo has a major breakthrough in crafting its characters. For instance, in previous adaptations, the majority of the main characters are white and young. In this one however, the main characters are middle-aged, Juan is a dark-skinned mixed-blood, and Juan’s mother and the priest are also black; both the servant Damiana and Dorotea also have obvious Indian characteristics.

1967 version

1977 version

2024 version

In contrast, Pedro Páramo is the only white male, and his skin colour becomes a footnote to his authority.

Pedro Páramo is a symbol of patriarchy. He has unlimited mating rights, symbolising the patriarchy and colonialism lingering on this land. He made this land into one filled with abandoned children without fathers and resentful wives without husbands. He himself is a fatherless son, a loveless widower.

There are two other fathers in the film. One is the priest, who’s kind and sensitive, but at the same time also weak and selfish – he becomes Pedro Páramo’s accomplice simply for money. Another is Susana’s father. If Pedro Páramo is a father of flawed humans, the priest a weak father of faith, then Susana’s father is a beastly father – he rapes, controls and exploits his own daughter. In contrast, the women in the film, though kind and forgiving, are overly weak, powerless and resigned to fate – no different from being an accomplice. And being the only living human in the film, Juan experiences a kiss of death from his father’s world, eventually turning into a soulless spirit.

It's precisely these three kinds of fathers who caused the land to be filled with abandoned, raped, and controlled spirits. The result is the degradation of humans and society. In the film, the transformation from prosperity to a desolate land haunted by ghosts is a concrete manifestation of this degeneration.

In fact, spectral narratives are a common technique in magical realism. In One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad), the ghost of the gypsy returns to the human realm and writes a parchment that prophecies the family's fate. In the Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate, 1992), the mother, though dead, continues to haunt the living. Similarly, in the Chilean novel The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus), the world is also haunted by ghosts, for the true concern of spectral narratives is the question: "How should one live?"