The Galilean Scream Discussion Questions

In depicting the events of the Chilean coup, Missing faces the challenge of giving a human face to the victims of a regime that received both covert support and overt recognition from the U.S. government. Although thousands of people were killed in the coup, the film focuses intensely and exclusively on just one victim, Charlie Horman, an American writer and journalist who was disappeared by the Chilean military. He is intently watching the scene in front of him, which is visible to the audience as a distant, distorted reflection in the glass of the car window. The tense, ominous music that plays during the scene initially contrasts with the innocuous image of children playing soccer. They focus shifts momentarily,
first to the smiling face of Charlie’s friend Terry, who is also watching the game, then briefly to the children themselves, before we witness the arrival of a truck full of heavily armed soldiers. As the soldiers climb down from the truck and the children disperse, we again see the scene as a reflection in the car window, literally projected onto Charlie in the position of the observer. More than just creative cinematography, these inventive shot establishes a perspective emblematic of that which the film employs our focus is closely trained on Charlie, whom we are invited to read through his reaction to the scene unfolding in front of him. It is only as a consequence of our concern with Charlie that we witness the events of the coup. Like this scene, in which the threat of violence serves primarily as an opportunity to shed light on Charlie’s character though his reactions to the events he witnesses, the film as a whole functions as an extended debate over his identity and, by extension, his legibility as a victim.
At the start of the film, Charlie’s conservative and old fashioned father, Ed, sees his son as irresponsible and lazy, a dissolute liberal who has carelessly gotten himself into trouble in a foreign country. Ed’s doubts about his son are echoed by the numerous U.S. government officials depicted in the film, who suggest both implicitly and explicitly that Charlie is radical and an agitator who deserves his fate. Indeed, at the start of the film, Ed voices many of the same beliefs that a mainstream American audience might hold about a liberal expatriate such as Charlie. It is up to Beth, Charlie’s wife, to provide Ed with a counter narrative of him as an idealist, a childlike dreamer, and a man of
principle. Beth defends the couple’s decision to move to Chile and describes them as ‘two normal, slightly confused people trying to be connected to the whole damn rotten enchilada’ by presenting herself and her husband as idealistic, sincere young people seeking meaning in their lives, Beth refutes the suggestion that their behavior was un-American, and recasts them as engaged in a quintessentially American such for self-actualization. In addition to defending Charlie’s politics or indeed, his redeeming lack thereof the film also draws on familiar class and gender formulas to solidify his standing as an upright American citizen. Ed is depicted as a sober, formal, hat-wearing New York businessman who believes in the value of hard work and personal responsibility. He is disappointed and embarrassed by his son’s choice to be a writer rather than pursue a more traditional career and dismayed than he sees as Charli’s dissolute and idle lifestyle. Ed’s expectations are colored by conservative formulations of upper-class masculinity, but rather than challenge such norms, the film draws on them to defend Charlie’s character. Like his father, Charlie knows the meaning of hard work; he puts in eighteen hour days translating for and editing a small, independent news magazine, a fact which surprises and impresses Ed. Charlie is also a family man and he paid attention to the basics and made a life and a home for himself and his wife in Santiago that Beth remembers as one of the happiest homes they had. And although he may not share Ed’s faith in ‘God, Country, and Wall street,’ Charlie is just as courageous and idealistic as his father. When Ed impulsively attempts to intervene in and stop a violent incident, we are reminded that is son did the same damn dump thing only weeks earlier. By revealing Charlie’s embodiment of the masculine norms his father values, the film emphasizes the filial bond between them and reaffirms Charlie’s status as a citizen and a patriot. Missing successfully constructs Charlie as a victim to the extent that he can be represented as a good man and an upstanding and therefore implicitly rights-bearing U.S.citizen.
but this logic, which allows Charlie to be humanized and reclaimed, necessarily excludes both American radicals and all Chileans from the compass of its recuperative effort. The scenes in which Ed and Beth search for Charlie in hospitals, morgues, and detention centers represent the film’s most sustained engagement with the widespread violence that follows in the wake of the coup and are among the few instances where other victims are visible onscreen. In room after room of bodies, however, Charlie is the only victim who can be brought into focus as an individual. At one point, Beth finds and identifies the body of Frank Teruggi, an American expatriate who was a committed socialist. Although Beth’s discovery, together with the account of Teruggi’s arrest by the military, makes the Chilean government’s responsibility for his death all but certain, Teruggi cannot be film’s primary victim. After a brief close-up of Teruggi’s body, which is marked bullet wounds, our focus returns to Ed and Beth, who insist they will not leave the morgue until they have looked at all the bodies. The camera pans away from them and reveals the magnitude of their task. In addition to the piles of anonymous bodies on the floor around them, the silhouettes of many more, limbs askew, are visible on the other
side of a translucent glass roof above them. All of the bodies must be viewed, the short suggests, before the Hormans will be convinced that Charlie’s body, the one that matters, is not among them. The scene also makes clear that Teruggi is not the only victim who cannot enter into representation in the film; for if Teruggi’s death serves only to advance the plot, the anonymous Chilean victims who populate the morgue in the scene are reduced to mere scenery. There are notably few Chilean characters in missing, and even fewer civilians. The one Chilean radicle they meet turns out to have gone into hiding and is later safely reunited with his pregnant wife in reality a highly unlikely scenario. The film’s selective vision is most poignantly revealed in the scene in which Ed and Beth finally receive permission to search for Charlie in the National Stadium, an improvised prison camp where the military regime detained, tortured, and murdered hundred and perhaps thousands of Chilean civilians in the early days of the coup. When Ed and Beth emerge from a dark tunnel onto the sunny playing field, they are met with a shocking image. As the camera pans across the stands, viewers see they are full of prisoners whose ragged appearance and improvised shelters suggest they have been in captivity for some time. Over the loudspeaker, Beth and Ed identify themselves and address Charlie by name; Ed, lost in his own grief, recalls a cross-country road trip that he and his son took together. Standing on the playing field, they search futilely for Charlie among the crowds in the stands. Ed and Beth occupy the foreground of the scene, and their out sized grief dominates the frame, while the prisoners suffering is depicted in the background, in aggregate and in miniature. Amid the thousands of prisoners, only Ed, Beth, and the absent Charlie are legible as individuals.