Streaming Macondo
Bringing One Hundred Years of Solitude to the screen.
The act of reading is not a passive process of absorption of information but an active engagement where the printed text becomes a springboard for the imagination. This has been articulated by Virginia Woolf in How to Read a Book, as well as Michel de Certeau, who in The Practice of Everyday Life referred to the act of creatively filling the blanks of a text as “poaching”.
My memory of my first reading of Cien Años de Soledad (in a cheap but nice reprint, a hardcover edition by a small publisher named Orbis that was for sale in supermarket checkout counters in Mexico in the 1980s) certainly involved “poaching” and it colored a period of my teenage years. I clearly remember the places, circumstances and even the time of day where I was reading the book (on rainy summer afternoons in my bedroom), but mostly the vivid images that it generated in my mind. I pictured the garden where José Arcadio Buendía was tied to a tree as similar to the garden of our own house; the house of the Buendía family resembled in some ways in my mind the large house in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, where at least six generations of my father’s side of the family lived. The image of Ursula Iguarán shrinking in old age and being placed in a little pen or cage made me imagine her in something akin to a birdcage hanging in the hallway of my grandmother’s apartment in colonia Condesa; and the images of yellow butterflies following the character of Mauricio Babilonia wherever he went are indelible in my mind, as am sure are to millions of readers of this book. I imagined the Buendía house as having an old-fashioned light yellow-tile flooring known as “mosaico calcáreo” (calcareous mosaic), typical of 19th century houses in Mexico, the color likely influenced by those yellow butterflies in the novel.
All that potential richness of imagination came to an end on December 11, 2024, courtesy of Netflix, as result of García Márquez’s heirs deciding to sell the rights to the streaming services giant in 2019, going against their father’s wishes.
The series has become the latest scandal du jour among Latin American cultural circles. There are those who think that opposing such adaptations is a ridiculous and conservative position, kept by retrograde and old-fashioned purists. There are those who are truly offended by the idea that an American franchise would take on a classic Latin American novel and bastardize the narrative and the language (even if it has been produced in Spanish), theoretically ruining the book for future generations. There are those who have started watching the series and think it is beautiful and well-made. And there are those who are simply fed up with the debate in the first place and that it matters to anyone.
The primary two questions regarding the Netflix series are, first, whether one should respect the artist’s wishes regarding the future of an art work, and then whether a film adaptation brings more benefits (like wider dissemination, raised awareness of the source work, as it happened with Jane Austen in the 90s after all the English adaptations of her novels) than negative effects (loss of nuance, the inevitable compression and editing out of key components that only a novel can contain).
I have been following the back and forth with curiosity and, being no film expert (Latin American or otherwise), I asked the opinion of a couple of my friends who are: the Mexican author and critic Naief Yehya and the Venezuelan curator Gabriela Rangel.
First, there is a general consensus in that a film adaptation of a book is not necessarily an automatic recipe for disaster. Many of the most famous films of all time (The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, and The Silence of the Lambs, to name a few) are based on books that, had a film not been made after them, would have had at best a modest, but not culture-altering, critical impact. In this regard, Naief told me, “there is bad literature that turns into good film, like Starship Troopers, by Heinlein, and there is literature that I admire and appreciate but that is improved by film, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick which was the basis of Blade Runner, as well as Dune by Herbert. Adaptations are leaps into the void: The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James is an unreadable (although very popular) novel, but the film is extraordinary. And the list is interminable. I can’t find a correct formula, nor could I imagine there might be an algorithm that might be able to explain it. Maybe I am wrong and A.I. will be able to crack this one open.”
García Márquez was famously adamant against selling the credits of Cien Años de Soledad to Hollywood, which often offered him large sums of money to make a film adaptation of the novel. His position was that the concrete visual representation of the story breaks the complexity of the narrative and curtails the ability of the reader to conjure up their own versions of the images of the novel. In a way, I think, he saw it like affixing that yellow butterfly in a vitrine. In a radio interview once García Márquez said:
"The reason why I don't want One Hundred Years of Solitude to be made into a film is because the novel, unlike film, leaves the reader a margin for creation that allows him to imagine the characters, the environments and the situations like they believe it is [...] in cinema that is not possible. Because in cinema the fact is the face that you are seeing, the image sets in such an imposing way that you have no escape, it does not leave you the slightest possibility of creation."
As to the question of the artist’s wishes and intent for their works after their death, it is significant that the series has launched after the passing of the two biggest protectors of García Márquez’s legacy. His literary agent, the hugely powerful Carmen Balcells, passed away in 2015, and his widow, Mercedes Barcha, died in 2020 (while the sale for rights was made a year before Barcha died, we don’t have public information of how she must have felt about that decision). In addition, the decision by the sons to publish García Marquez’s posthumous novel, “En Agosto nos vemos”, which the author didn’t feel was ready for publication, was criticized and the work was met with mixed reviews.
At the same time, the notion of preserving the author’s wishes does come with significant gray areas, such as when we retroactively consider the publication of an unfinished work that the artist wanted to destroy, and opens a very valid debate as to how to weigh the public interest in the work versus the opinion of the artist. Had external actors not intervened in some instances, we would not have the works of Kafka, or Dickinson, nor some of Witttgenstein’s (who destroyed much of his early work but in his last years was convinced not to destroy key parts of his Philosophical Investigations by friends and students).
Further, as the adaptation question is concerned, a case could be made about why the idea of making a film version of Cien Años might not have been, at some point, completely out of the question for the author himself. Gabo had a particular fascination for film as well as a deep investment in that art form. He once remarked that “in the beginning, I wanted to be a film director and the only thing I really ever studied was film.” He studied film in Rome in 1955 at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Experimental Center of Cinematography). He did write screenplays, and participate in various films made after his own books including Eréndira (1983), and he also collaborated with Carlos Fuentes to write the screenplay for El Gallo de Oro, a novel by Juan Rulfo. In 1965, he also participated as actor in a film based on his own short story, En este pueblo no hay ladrones (There Are No Thieves in This Town”), directed by Alberto Isaac, where Luis Buñuel, Juan Rulfo and Carlos Monsivais also performed. Most importantly, in 1986 he founded the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de Los Baños, in Cuba. He dedicated ample time and funds (from his own pocket) to support film production and the careers of young film students from all over Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Another important detail to know in order to understand the Netflix production is that both of Gabo’s sons and heirs have deep professional ties to the film industry. Rodrigo García is a prominent filmmaker who directed "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" (2000) and "Nine Lives" (2005), and also directed episodes from The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Big Love. Gonzalo García Barcha is involved in film production and design and worked in many productions such as in Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002).
As to Gabriela Rangel, who I also approached to get her thoughts, she shared that she actually attended García Márquez’s film school in Cuba in the late 80s and knew him personally (“I danced with him once”, she told me). She has been watching the series. “It has an air to the novel, but it is not Cien Años”, she said. “Macondo is there, as are the characters, but the barroquismo (baroque style) isn’t there, the town is not the complex framework of relationships that you have in the novel.”
She continued: “It is a foundational novel, a Caribbean mythology, a labyrinthine creeper of the rainforest that is not transparent. The series is not the worst thing that has ever happened. But the movie is not for us, it is for others; it is very diluted.”
I reflected on Gabriela’s words afterwards, realizing that they carried a kind of wise acceptance that I was having a hard time embracing. Adaptations happen sooner or later, whether we like it or not. Also, to an extent, and if we could put aside the enormous financial incentive in it (and I am sure not everyone will agree with me) I can see how Gabo’s sons might have decided that they wanted to have influence in that process, and perhaps it will be a way to get younger audiences to read the novel.
But as Gabriela also says, those audiences do not include those of us who grew up with the novel. I will likely watch the series at some point, with the hopes that I am also able to retain the personal images that I created of the novel for myself, which by the way, are not really “Latin American”: the power of the book, which has been translated into 46 languages, lies, in a way, in its universality, in the construction of everlasting archetypes of the human experience that transcend time and place.
A perhaps more interesting approach to honoring the legacy and aesthetics of a writer (also involving a writer’s son) can be seen in the case of Juan Rulfo. Rulfo’s 1955 masterpiece, Pedro Páramo, is a novel that García Márquez cited as the inspiration to Cien Años de Soledad (and which happens to also have been adapted into film this year by Netflix, receiving rather poor reviews). Rulfo’s son, the filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo, did not attempt to adapt Pedro Páramo to the screen, but instead created a docu-drama in 1999 titled Del olvido al no me acuerdo (From Forgetfulness to I Can’t Recall), where he travels to the towns in Los Altos de Jalisco where his father grew up ( and incidentally the region where my aforementioned ancestral family home is) to interview those who knew him and documenting the life of the landscape that inspired his writing. By doing so, Rulfo emulates the plot of Pedro Páramo itself (which is about a man who travels to a town to learn about his father, a certain Pedro Páramo). And, kind of like in the novel, a world of phantasmagoria, fragmented conversations, the wind pushing through rugged landscapes, and moments of silence that speak volumes slowly emerges. What we witness in the film is rather the source material for the novel, not the contrived staging of a fictional tale: its old townsfolk talking, sitting around, remembering stories, existing in an intangible time warp. It is a film that communicates a state of mind.
Another example of a successful alternate approach to the adaptation problem is Alain Resnais’ 1961 Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet which is, in the view of many scholars, inspired in the novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares, La invención de Morel.
Which is to me the best way in which we might resolve the problem of translation into another medium: not by attempting an adaptation, not by permanently pinning that yellow butterfly in a museum collection, but by creating another art work.
My favorite book of all time, too. I’ve hesitated to watch the series for the reasons you articulated. No way to stop the experience of watching the film from impinging on my personal relationship to the novel. While reading your essay, I was also thinking about the film, The Shining. King hated the film at first because it didn’t have much to do with his novel, but as time passed, he came to appreciate it as a good scary movie. I liked the Shining novel but watch the film once a year or so around Halloween. It’s Kubrick at his best, as was Coppola on The Godfather. Maybe that’s the difference. Takes a great artist to make something new based on the work of another great artist. If you watch Cien Anos, I hope you write about it.
I for one, couldn't wait to see this. We are enjoying it immensely. We only watch one episode each evening, therefore preserving the sense of suspense that a true story should impart. It's been years since I read all of that amazing book. I own two copies but rarely have the free brain space to devote myself fully to the reading experience.