Stephen King never thought Jack Nicholson was the right choice to play the writer who agrees to look after the Overlook Hotel. Torrance, his central character, is also a novelist and a recovering alcoholic, with a loving wife and a small child, and the hotel sits in the frigid mountains of Colorado, closed to the public during the harsh winter. The Shining deals with isolation and with how the ghosts of the mind can gnaw away at a person’s sanity. The film version, directed by a cinema genius —Stanley Kubrick—, is a timeless classic, but King considered it merely “a great Cadillac with no engine.” In the novel, Torrance aroused trust and empathy, and his drift thus proved more surprising and painful; Nicholson, who embodies him on screen, had recently risen to fame with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a mental asylum tale—and consequently audiences were predisposed from the very first moment to guess how it would end: completely mad and chasing his family with an ax. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of King’s plot is that subtle progression whereby the wife and the child notice small yet troubling changes in the man’s behavior. The grim twist can also be read as an allegory about how power encapsulates and alienates, an interpretation explained not only by the hybris syndrome but by other underlying pathologies, and one that perhaps especially punishes leaders who present themselves as messianic and use mystical justifications. Power is a closed palace, a tunnel filled only with echoes, specters, and deceitful voices, and this is a blind spot in the conventional analysis of politics. To confront current Argentine reality rather than evade it, even though these disturbing phenomena of judgment come from outside and far away and threaten any statesman, one would need to refresh a set of words and concepts that have spilled out in recent days from the highest echelons of domestic power: an official calls a governor “Antichrist,” he labels a political movement an “hell,” and refers to dissenting economists as “mummies,” while a head of state is recorded from above and in the dark perhaps to blur his silhouette, revels in turning his residence into a military base, announces the locating and deportation of thirty thousand imaginary terrorists, reveals having survived seven attempts at non-existent coups, and proclaims in Paris —to the astonishment of the French— that the United Nations is a den of pretentious bureaucrats who masturbate (sic). To Le Point magazine he also asserted that all media were “literally corrupt,” and later on social networks he called Maru Duffard a “filthily left” and “tremendously ignorant” and “defender of thieves and murderers” to Jesica Bossi; he continued with his undemocratic hate campaign against journalism, saying that in this newspaper we were “a band of gunmen of the pen” and he accused—without identifying them—two other reporters from this newsroom of having privately insulted two economists who provided positive data in favor of libertarian performance, a ludicrous accusation possibly based on the lies of some lackey. With barely contained violence, the head of state attempted to demeaning the secretary-general of La Nación—a true gentleman of the press—when the latter respectfully interviewed him at the IDEA Colloquium; in the hallways afterward, discussions of the unusual presidential aggression were met with perplexity and grave concern. Pretending to be dim-witted with the power’s own dementia, and allowing outbreaks and outbursts to become normal, is a mistake that is paid for dearly. The President and some of his close circle inspire fear, as in a horror movie, and it is not beyond possibility that this pleases the libertarian Moses and his principal advisor: “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me” (Oderint, dum metuant), as the ancient Roman aphorism goes. He is achieving it, and in spades, just as Torrance did in the empty corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
For a possible second term —“my rival is myself”—, those who value him should prevent Javier Milei from continuing to slide down that endless spiral of “altered states” (another great Ken Russell film), where things lose proportion and one chooses to live ever more in an alternate reality. “I hate reality, but it’s the only place where you can get a good steak,” Woody Allen once said. Another cinematic allegory —to exorcise a bit this esoteric and claustrophobic mood in which local politics stumbles— could be From the Garden, the film based on Jerzy Kosinski’s novel that Francella has staged with great success on Corrientes Avenue, which originally starred Peter Sellers. Milei is not like Chance, a gardener whose wild, naive phrases in Washington were taken as wise metaphors for politics, in a bitter and uproarious misunderstanding where that simple and limited man ends up being seriously consulted as an oracle of our times. Despite lacking experience in macroeconomic management, finance, or exchange-rate policy, the libertarian does not ignore the subject: he is “an expert in growth with and without money,” and at least in theory he knows numbers. But his weakness for being adored always and everywhere, and his biblical grandiosity —he sees himself as a revolutionary prophet with celestial connections— are so powerful that he only nurtures in the palace “believers” who confirm his paranoias, magnify the good data and hide the bad, sow discord against the multiple “enemies,” and above all, take as revealed truth his ramblings of the moment. Which at times become the official narrative. It has transformed into a habitual practice, an addictive contagion and almost uncontrollable, to abuse statistics and trim numbers arbitrarily; something that forces many economists to refute him every week. The President alluded to the negative indexes that circulate and claimed that they are not well measured. There may be defensive cynicism in that stance, though I fear it is something worse, and that he truly believes it, and that denial has at its core a very human reason: the unbearable pain of having erred so many forecasts and having lost reputation because of it, and the revulsion that the Austrian-pole has not produced the promised “green shoots” and (pardon) the “diver’s gas.” The on-the-street data—economic indicators, the gondolas, the shops, the factories, and the construction—must be treated as apocryphal, since dogma cannot fail. Another self-deception, turned into narrative, explains that any action to revive the dead would necessarily be a populist measure, even though it’s known that there are other solutions conceived and formulated by the orthodoxy itself. National and international. There are fanatics, or mere sycophants, who have accepted the libertarian voice as the only possible opinion of liberalism, a liberalism defined precisely by its diversity and intense pragmatism. The great Spanish director José Luis Garci once said that cinema is a substitute life. In politics, however, one plays with things that have no substitute, and we all pay the consequences.
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