In the opening episode of the brilliant new Netflix series One Hundred Years of Solitude (adapted from the eponymous Gabriel García Márquez novel), we meet José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales), cousins who are in love and about to get married. But Úrsula’s mother remembers the consequences of incest in the family; the last time it happened, a child with a pig’s tail was born —an image that haunts Úrsula through a superbly shot vivid nightmare. “She told me he bled out after they cut his tail with a cleaver,” she says, drowning in apprehension but her new husband laughs away her fears.
Readers familiar with the novel, of course, recognize this moment to be one of Shakespearean foreboding. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family, founders of the fictitious Macondo, the setting for the novel. Over time Macondo becomes a kind of microcosm for the entirety of Latin America, reflecting important real-life historical developments. And in the seventh generation of the Buendía family, a child is indeed born with a pig’s tail and other assorted deformities.
Before his passing, Marquez had left a set of instructions that spoke to any future adaptations of his masterpiece. One of those instructions was to shoot the story in Colombia itself, with local Spanish-speaking actors. Netflix has done exactly that and in fact, gone a step beyond by going all in on the production values. Over 150 indigenous and tribal groups were contracted to create incredibly detailed sets, backdrops and props for the show, resulting in a highly realistic, natural look and feel. Colombian viewers from across the globe have affirmed the same; seldom has a Netflix series achieved this level of photorealism and all-round technical accomplishment. Add to that some stellar performances and you have one of the most satisfying Netflix Originals in a while.
Macondo, the city of glass
Marco González’s performance as José Arcadio reaches its pinnacle in the second and third episodes, where we see him determined to work out Macondo’s location in the world, as well as a number of other scientific questions. Earlier, in the first episode we see him dreaming of Macondo as a city of glass, a funhouse of mirrors all the way through. The symbolism around glass is one of Marquez’s versatile metaphors. The reflective properties of glass indicate the same purpose allotted to Macondo, wherein readers see some of the most epoch-marking events in Latin American history. The real-life 1928 ‘Banana Massacre’ of striking plantation workers, for example, is depicted with a similar massacre of civilians at the hands of the Colombian army.
Also read: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez’s magical fever dream limns time, love and memory
But glass also represents fracture and fragility, and the Buendía family certainly has more than its fair share of these things. José Arcadio himself loses his grip on sanity eventually, locking himself up in his workshop all day, speaking only in Latin and muttering about ancient secrets and doomsday prophecies. A word for the cinematography of the series is in order here — whenever a character starts to tread the line between the real world and a dream world, the cinematography shines. Hallucinatory visuals are the show’s strong point and the show uses them sparingly, judiciously. Equally impressive is the way the nimble camera dances and weaves and swoops in and out of the hundreds of huts and settlements that make up Macondo. Whether it’s Ursula making candy in the shapes of animals upon the prodding of a friend, or the outbreak of a mysterious illness across the land, Macondo’s ‘roving eye’ camera method elevates the action to another level.
Melquíades: The man, the myths
One of the momentous occasions in the show is the first meeting between José Arcadio and Melquíades, the leader of a band of gypsies that arrives at Macondo. For me, Melquíades is the most important character in the show that’s not directly related to the Buendías. He is many things, but primarily he is a kind of combination of scientist and magician. One of the points Marquez is making with this character is that in previous centuries, the categories of ‘scientist’ and ‘magician’ did not have the same semantic distance as they do now. To the uneducated or the untrained eye, the workings of a scientific lab may appear not too different from the weird smells and strange powders associated with the magician’s lair. This writerly sleight-of-hand allows Marquez to make Melquíades both an advertisement for and a cautionary tale against the allure of Science.
“This right here is an astrolabe. For centuries, humans have studied the skies to understand Earth. Science is eliminating distance. Soon, man will be able to find out what’s going on anywhere on the Earth, without having to move out of his house.”
Also read: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Why Gabriel García Márquez was wary of film adaptation
These are the words Melquíades says to José Arcadio, as he is selling his vision to the latter. The language is borderline arrogant and simultaneously, hopeful of a brighter, scientifically advanced future. Therein lies the conflict — when ambition becomes drive and drive becomes obsession, the human mind begins to crack and become more unreliable by the day. Sure enough, both men eventually fall into the alchemy trap, alchemy being the disproven pseudo-science that claimed that base metals could be converted into gold via ‘alchemic’ processes.
The curse of eternal recurrence
One of the biggest themes in both the series and the novel is the idea of eternal recurrence, history doomed to repeat itself at the individual and community level. The series does a wonderful job at communicating this idea with the help of colour schema, costuming choices and background music all working in tandem to alert the viewer when they’re witnessing “rhyming events” ie events that signal eternal recurrence (scenes bathed in yellow light, for example, are usually a sign that a major onscreen death is in the offing).
At the individual level, we observe the Buendías repeating the mistakes of their ancestors over and over again. Their in-breeding and self-obsession means that they keep naming the male children either Aureliano or José Arcadio, which adds to the recurrence theme. For one, none of the male children can ever shake off the fatal flaw of machismo. A lot of the life-and-death situations in the show can be boiled down to a member of the Buendía family unable to rein in his machismo. José Arcadio, the founding father himself, fled his village towards the beginning of the story after killing a man who indirectly called him impotent. His son Colonel Aureliano knows that he can see flashes, glimpses of the future in the form of premonition, but during the most high-pressure moments of his life, his machismo usually overrules his belief in these visions.
At the community level, the show presents Macondo as a land doomed to repeat its most self-destructive impulses over and over again. This was Marquez’s design with respect to the novel as well. When we see Macondo falling into political upheaval and anarchy repeatedly, it’s Marquez’s way of communicating the colourful real-life history of Latin American countries.
Writers love to call their own works ‘unfilmable’. David Foster Wallace did it for Infinite JestAlan Moore did it for Watchmen. Marquez, too, thought that One Hundred Years of Solitude was unfilmable, in fact one of his motivations for writing the book was to prove that the written word held greater complexity, greater potential for infinitudes than the moving image. Thankfully, Netflix has proven him wrong.
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