A lot of odd choices have gone into Rodrigo Prieto’s directorial debut Pedro Paramo being the kind of film that you won’t be able to make up your mind about long after the credits roll. Adapting Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel of the same name was never supposed to be an easy job, considering the dizzyingly nonlinear narrative that’s made all the more disorienting by its magic realism backdrop. And I’m afraid that the cinematographer-turned-director has made it come off frustratingly incoherent in order to communicate a significant theme of the film. Yes, it’s meant to make you feel this woozy. But I’m not sure how the logical justification helps the impression it’s made on you. If I didn’t have to, I probably wouldn’t have even tried to understand the point Prieto was trying to make with Pedro Paramo. But here we are. So let’s see if I can untangle this seemingly impossible mess of narratives for you.
Spoiler Alert
Juan comes to Comala
Juan Preciado didn’t mean to keep the promise he made to his mother on her death bed. He didn’t mean to go to her hometown Comala and compel his father Pedro Paramo to make up for all the years he’d spent not taking care of them. But some dreams he saw told Juan to go to the town in rural Mexico which his mother remembered as a beautiful place. All Juan finds when he arrives are ruins and gloom. Juan doesn’t know anything about his father Pedro. If he’s to believe Abundio, this man that he meets before he walks into the town, Pedro was the picture of licentiousness, a man defined by the resentment that made up almost the entirety of his personality. Even Abundio is the product of one of Pedro’s sexual escapades, which makes him Juan’s half brother. Learning such awful things about his father couldn’t have made Juan too excited about going into Comala and finding Dona Eduviges, the only woman alive in the town that’s been abandoned by everyone. Comala’s supernatural aura first makes itself known through Eduviges, who was best friends with Juan’s mother Doloritas. She claims to have heard a late Doloritas telling her about her son’s arrival in town.
But the supernatural element in Pedro Paramo isn’t as simple as Eduviges being able to communicate with the death. Death is all around Eduviges, and now that Juan’s in Comala, it’s all around him too. Eduviges even hears the ghostly clops of the horse that Miguel used to ride. Miguel was the only son that Pedro Paramo ever really was a father to. But that’s not a good thing really. Miguel and Pedro were a lot alike in their reckless ways. The ghost of Miguel’s horse still runs through Comala looking for his master who died riding that very horse. When Edugives gets lost within herself telling Juan the story of the town and his family, and when she disappears, Juan realizes that even Eduviges is dead. The first time Juan hears the echo of death that’s consumed Comala is when he hears the screams of a man. That’s when he also meets Damiana, another friend of Juan’s mother who held him when he was a wee thing and saw how Pedro abandoned Doloritas and Juan and sent them off to Doloritas’ sister. As Damiana walks Juan through the town that’s practically a purgatory for all the souls that have been trapped their by their miseries, she drops anecdotes from the past and lets Juan in on a lot of awful things about Pedro. He was the cruel landowner of Media Luna, the person responsible for the death of the man whose cries Juan heard upstairs in Eduviges’ tavern. But while Damiana’s seen a lot and knows a lot, it seems like she forgets that she isn’t alive. That’s the only thing that explains her finding out about Juan’s arrival and also the way she disappears at the turn of a lane.
What made Pedro Paramo such a terrible person?
In the flashbacks, a teen Pedro seems like a regular kid who finds work charmless, disappoints his family on a regular basis, and spends time with Susana, the girl he’s in love with. At that point, life was still not done dealing its cards, so Pedro could’ve turned out good or bad. But life had to take away the only person who brought joy into his life. Susana moved away with her father. A heavy-hearted Pedro lost the only thing that lit up his life, and he hardened even further when his father was murdered by someone. Pedro’s family was never good with money. But Pedro’s strong hatred for the town and everyone in it made him a natural at exploiting people. When he was in debt that he had neither the means nor any wish to pay back, he chose to play dirty to keep his grasp strong on Media Luna. No one ever dared question Pedro’s nefarious ways of asserting control, not even his estate administrator Fulgor. In fact, how proud Fulgor was to see Pedro turn into a monster says a lot about what sort of a man Pedro’s father was. Before Pedro was in charge, Fulgor was his father’s right-hand-man. Fulgor’s glee over all the terrible things Pedro was planning to do to maintain his position of power in the town can only mean that this is exactly how Pedro’s dad must’ve wanted him to turn out.
Fulgor jumped right into action when Pedro asked him to kill Toribio so Pedro could add his part of the land to his Media Luna estate. Toribio was killed in that room in Eduviges’ tavern, and his dying screams are what Juan hears in the present. When he was too broke to keep Media Luna, Pedro sent Fulgor to sweep Doloritas off her feet on his behalf. Pedro owed Doloritas’ family a lot of money, and instead of paying her back, he chose to play with her heart and trap her into a faux-marriage instead. He washed his hands of all his responsibilities when he was done keeping up the ruse with Doloritas and banished her and their son Juan to her sister’s place, never to get in touch with them again. In his ever-expanding need to feed his ego and torment women, Pedro fathered many children, one of whom was Miguel. He was trying to give Miguel the freedom to do whatever he wanted when he turned a blind eye to his alarming actions, which included killing town priest Father Renteria’s brother and raping his niece Ana. And when Miguel died, instead of changing his ways, Pedro convinced himself that was paying for his sins. He never had fatherly instincts anyway. Miguel had been the only person whose recklessness reminded Pedro of himself. So if you think about it, the only reason Pedro had even acknowledged Miguel as his son was because he’d hoped that Miguel would continue his legacy of abusive power-grab. When Father Renteria brought in a baby that Pedro had fathered, he didn’t want to take the baby’s responsibility. But it hurt his ego when Father Renteria said that the Paramo family had bad blood. The only reason he even reluctantly agreed to give the practically orphaned child food and lodging was because he needed to prove his spirit of generosity to the town priest.
How does Juan die?
Even though this is Juan’s first time in Comala, the essence of the town runs through his veins. Maybe that’s what makes it so easy for him to comprehend the strange spiritual state of the town. Souls who’ve endured a lot of torment get stuck in this town for an eternity of the same pain and confusion. But even though Juan somewhat understands that, that doesn’t make him any less scared of this place. It’s a place where even the ghosts of the past whisper of his father’s notoriety. By the two spirits walking by, Juan is mistaken for the man who captured women for Don Pedro’s heinous desires. When Pedro was alive, one of his most toxic, destructive goals was to find the killer of his father. He had his goons thrash and kill people for the same. The remnants of Comala’s haunting memories catch Juan off guard when he sees the souls of his father’s goons killing an innocent man. Juan is rescued from that state of terror by two people who seem to be a couple but as he is told by the woman later, they’re actually brothers and sisters. They’re the miserable spirits of two incestuous siblings whose moral transgressions have closed the doors of Heaven. The fact that Juan’s arrival frees the brother’s soul from this purgatory means that they were only stuck in Comala because they couldn’t part ways. The brother hands the responsibility of caring for his sister in Juan’s hands. And when she gets Juan to lie down in her bed, I think it works as a form of salvation. Juan may be the first man other than her brother who’s shared her bed. And when her spirit turns into the mud that she has always felt she’s made of, she takes Juan with her. Yes, I strongly believe that Juan dies drowning in that mud. The Juan that we see crawling out is probably his soul. That’d also explain why he saw the souls of Comala swirling in the sky. He was now one of them. When Juan is joined in the grave by Dorotea, the woman who’s spirit pointed him in the right direction when he was looking for Eduviges’ place.
How did Susana’s death change the fate of the town?
No matter how much violence Pedro stuffed his heart with, he never forgot about Susana. He pined for the love that was there before everything turned terrible in his life. His men were never allowed to stop their search for Susana. Susana and her father came back into Pedro’s life unexpectedly. When Fulgor gave him the news, all Pedro could think about was how life had just given him another chance to be with the person he loved. Susana didn’t love Pedro. And even her father, who very clearly had some incestuous sense of control over his daughter, didn’t want to hand her over to some other man. But turning Pedro down wasn’t an option. Even though she was struggling emotionally and was devastatingly attached to her late husband, Susana had to marry Pedro. Pedro had her father killed off, and Susana being visited by his spirit in her bed pushed her further down into the well of madness. In the flashbacks of her childhood, the well that her father lowered her into to look for gold coins metaphorized and foreshadowed what would happen to her after Pedro came back into her life. Pedro was pained by Susana’s condition. He distracted himself with other women until another loss hit him.
Fulgor was killed by the Mexican revolutionaries when they took up arms against the government and the rich. It didn’t take Pedro long to bribe the revolutionaries with money and men and buy the safety of the power and money he had in his possession. He didn’t even intend to pay them the money that he promised them. And he even had his man Damasio infiltrate the group. Pedro knew how to manipulate the revolution and keep his regime from falling victim to it. But before he could do anything further, fate destroyed him with the worst possible loss he could imagine. Susana’s pain had been eating her up from within. And no matter how much Pedro tried, he couldn’t save the only person he’d ever truly loved. After Susana’s passing, Pedro was a shell of a man. It was torturous for him to hear all the festivities the incessant ringing of the bells had brought into Comala after Susana’s death. It was a haunting mix of grief and celebration that took over the town. And at that point, Pedro cursed the town with his absence. Like he’d abandoned most of his children, he refused to provide for the town that he had taken control of. Comala became uninhabitable, and everyone left looking for better things.
What turned Comala into a ghost town?
From the moment Juan set foot into Comala, it’s come off like a dark place encased in the memories of the all the pain people have felt there. There’s almost this sense that anyone who’s ever been hurt in this town will be stuck in this town in one way or another. Doloritas didn’t die here, but in a way, Juan dying here means that a part of her will always haunt the streets of Comala. Juan’s spirit being at the festivities that followed Susana’s death suggests the presence of a timeloop. Maybe it was always there, or maybe it was created by Juan’s death. Comala only had the people who died there years ago until Juan arrived. And his death might’ve messed with the veil of time and opened up a portal through which Juan could experience the things that preceded his arrival in Comala. The same ground right outside the church where the fiesta had been held was where Dorotea found Juan.
In Pedro Paramo’s ending, that’s where Dorotea lays down to die in the embrace of someone who’s never hurt anyone in the cursed town. Dorotea was never supposed to go to heaven and meet God. Miguel had kept her belly full, and in exchange, Dorotea used to bring him girls. Father Renteria couldn’t find it in his heart to reassure such a sinner. And that’s an example of one of the reason the town’s cursed to be in pain forever. In Comala’s patriarchal, exploitative landscape, where God and the rich control not just the lives of the women and the poor but also their fate in the afterlife, sins are only forgiven for those with fat pockets. Despite hating himself for such morally corrupt actions, Father Renteria blesses Miguel’s soul and prays for him because Pedro sweetens the deal with a donation. The priest doesn’t extend the same kindness to Eduviges’ soul and deems her eternally damned because she committed the sin of suicide. He’s the same kind of cruel to even Susana moments before her death. Because she doesn’t reiterate the horrible prayer the priest has chosen for a sinner like her, she’s condemned to exist in a lonely grave and complain away for all eternity.
The other source of the town’s damnation is Pedro Paramo. He’s taken and taken from Comala until Susana died. He’s exploited, assaulted, raped, and killed until he had no reason to live anymore. He would’ve killed himself if he was brave enough, spiritually and otherwise. But he didn’t have the courage to risk an eternity in Hell. He sat there in his wicker chair and waited for his death. That’s where Abundio’s story comes in. Like Eduviges told Juan, Abundio lost his hearing when a cracker burst too close to his ears in the festivities. If you think about it, Abundio was the first ghost that Juan met on his way to Comala. When Abundio had gone to Pedro begging for some money to bury his wife, Pedro probably didn’t even know that he was his son. Abundio had lost his mind by that point. He stabbed Damiana to death. The fact that Damiana’s spirit doesn’t realize that she’s dead and tries to help Pedro when Abundio stabs him is the first sign that she will always be confused about her state of existence. Pedro had been sitting outside to avoided being suffocated by the ghosts indoors. But as he falls to his death in the presence of Damiana’s spirit, Pedro fails to avoid his worst fear. Like Juan and all of Pedro’s children, the town falls victim to the generational evil perpetuated by the Paramo family.
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