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• 1 2017-05-30T16:17:29-07:00 Inverting Power Dynamics in the Prison 3 plain 2017-06-14T17:20:04-07:00

  As has been mentioned earlier in this project, El secreto de sus ojos is a film that fails in its representation of Argentinian government with its hyper-commercialization and its over-emphasis on a love-plot that adds nothing to the backdrop of the turmoil the country was facing. With very few references to the authoritarian regime, the main plot point that alludes to the corruption in the government is when the man convicted of the rape and murder of Ricardo Morales’ wife goes free as a result of becoming an informant for the new regime. The only redeemable moment in this film is the final scene and its depiction of a prison. Throughout this project we have seen how sites of confinement function as a space in which the government’s power is exercised over the bodies of what they deem the subversive part of the population. The prison space, especially, has always been represented as an extension of the regime. However, in El secreto de sus ojos that dynamic is completely inverted.
  

      Giorgio Agamben in his book The State of Exception, explores how "[in] every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" (40). The political power that a government gains in a state of emergency prompts acts outside of the law and this power can extend far beyond the time period of the state of emergency. Citizens enter into an implicit contract with their government that they support a its sovereignty in exchange for respecting their civil rights. What then happens when that contract is broken? What happens when a murderer goes free because of the corrupt government? The movie provides a solution– Ricardo builds a prison, kidnaps the murderer of his wife Isodoro Gómez, and carries out the lifetime imprisonment he was once sentenced to. Setting aside the argument about whether or not this act was just, as it is a rather large argument to get into for this scope of this project, we would like to focus on the redefinition of space.

      The prison space in this movie is no longer the space where the government enacts its power, it is, instead, the space in which the citizen rights the injustices of the government. Here, the prison space in itself is an act of resistance towards the corruption in the government. It is not an extension of the state’s power but rather the space of reparation for the injustices of the government. This form of reparation is self-sought and comes from the citizenry, supporting Armengou’s argument that when the government doesn’t give reparation it must come from someplace else.