Bardo, a journey to the middle

In Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Academy Award winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu takes us on a surreal journey through the life of Silverio Gamma, a Mexican journalist and filmmaker. We follow Silverio as he reconciles the fracturing of his own identity. While hardly a synopsis, the film layers themes of the human condition, namely legacy, immigration, parenthood and death through the lens of the film’s namesake, the bardo.

What does it mean to be in bardo? Neither here, nor there, it’s a sort of middle. This concept stems from Tibetan Buddhism, considered a liminal state between death and rebirth that lasts forty-nine days. In this state, consciousness disintegrates as the mind and body split, and one must reconcile all of life’s experiences of past, present and future, into a sort of labyrinth of time and space. This stage is thought to be a state of existence between two lives on earth. And while the concept of limbo isn’t foreign, how is this reflected in the human condition and our identity?

First, a little about the human condition. Existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach, emphasizing human existence focused through a person’s subjective experiences. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in “The Denial of Death”, the human condition is the “mainspring of human activity.” Essentially, it is the prominent motivator among humans that give shape to our decisions, experiences, and therefore identity.

In Bardo, the protagonist is divided within his own liminal state, reconciling his experiences as a father, a husband, a Mexican, an immigrant and a successful filmmaker and journalist. The film does this through a sort of visual emotional biography, captured on screen in wonderfully shot surrealist dream states. Silverio finds himself in some form of bardo throughout, perhaps most directly, as a Mexican immigrant. His success in his adopted country, the United States, produces shame and guilt in him exacerbated by his yearning for a Mexico he has lost. Silverio’s shame is also a catalyst, promoting an examination of his life which dives into the very storied history between the United States and Mexico.

In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico, a fact highlighted in the film by a battle reenactment, whereby Mexico ceded one thousand three hundred thousand square kilometers. In exchange, Mexico received $15M USD. Philosopher Emilio Uranga considers the fracturing of the Mexican identity as its own form of bardo, a concept known as Existentialism “a la Mexicana”, or (M)Existentialism. While similar to its European counterpart, (M)Existentialism is distinguished to include lived circumstance as the differentiating factor, not just subjective experience. Namely cultural, historical and social determinations of Mexican identity, and the acceptance of said circumstance.

Historically, those circumstances began much earlier, with an encounter between the new world and old world. In 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés embarked on a violent expedition into Mexico, seeking riches like gold and silver. Traveling from another of Spain’s territories, Cuba, Cortes made advances west eventually arriving at Tenochtitlan, or modern day Mexico City. In that quest, however, the Spaniards and native allies killed thousands of indigenous people, marking the birth of a new, if not traumatic, reality. This collective experience is at the nexus of Mexican identity, the erasure of one culture and history, making room for the next, albeit in this case, as John Charles Chasteen’s book title suggests, “Born in blood and fire”.

In the film, Silverio engages Cortés, seated atop an enormous heap of indigenous bodies, quoting, ironically, famed Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Cortés claims himself to be the most Mexican, for he was both the first, and therefore the father, of all Mexican people. Despite chastising Cortes, Silverio must reconcile his modern Mexican identity, and the evolution of that cultural circumstance, through the historical lens of these traumatic events at the birth of a new experience. Perhaps most significantly, the terms between Mexico and the United States after the war of 1846, when both countries signed the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty in 1848 in an effort to end the war. Even this marker in Mexico’s history has terms determined by a foreign entity, as Cortés and the Spaniards before. This acknowledgement insists then on a sort of fracturing of Silverio’s identity, as a painful history is now further enmeshed with his yearning of Mexico and his own displacement from it.

Just as Mexico was fractured in 1846, so too is Silverio, living the Mexican experience from outside of Mexico. Never fully realized as an American, while also suffering a loss of Mexican identity after twenty years away from his homeland. Many immigrants live this type of bardo everyday. If we consider leaving one’s place of origin as a sort of death, then not being fully realized in that adopted place becomes a sort of rebirth, thereby remaining in a sort of middle. Not quite here, not quite there, but in a state of physical, social and cultural bardo.

In the film, Iñárritu compresses all aspects of a life lived— the good, the bad and the ugly, into a sort of labyrinth, a visual design that combines time, space and experiences. A plenitude of themes erupt and coalesce as Silverio seeks a moment of great clarity. Truly, his examination is a reminder for each and every one of us, to seek what lies beneath our own identity. To relive all experiences is to take a sort of karmic audit between experiences like euphoria and suffering, and everything in between. And so the bardo is not solely an experience to be grappled with after death, as we are able to enter it at any moment of our lives.

What Silverio encounters throughout the film should be a reminder that we can pierce our own identity to find its center, its core, its middle. In reaching this elusive mental and emotional state, we are then able to untether ourselves from ourselves and the identity formed. In this way, as the film suggests, we can each accept the bardo that we truly are.