The perfection of form: a gaze upon Wakolda

Abstract

As well as the language is constituted by a system of options inside a myriad of possibilities, every society has its own conceptions of the body. As it happens with the language, this conception is submitted to a social administration, where what is public and what is private, overlap. The body as a social-and-historical symbolic representation is the result of a collective construction which obeys to rules, interaction rites and ordinary re-creations. At the same time, the body contains certain anomalies relatives to its own rules. This article proposes an analysis of the film Wakolda (Lucía Puenzo, 2013), considered through the metaphoric use of the body, as reflected from the main character, whose controlled body is set up as a reference to a society that defines it through the creation of a model-man and the resulting repression and amendment of an historical-man, according to an ideally constructed pattern. The system of historically established conventions which defines this society, forms a 'different’, which allows the configuration of its identity, setting the boundary between a confronted ‘otherness’ and ‘sameness’. The idealization of the ‘normal’ subject, which tends to the perfection of the shape, establishes that the outside determined the inside. Just like the dolls, the main character is victim of the ‘standardization’ which occurs within a medicalized society.