PERRO has not left a flat in the Barceloneta for three years, writing conspiranoid stories on the deep web. Millions follow the posts and no one knows who writes them. Some time ago, these fictions began to happen on the streets of Barcelona, for real. One of the creatures, an apocalyptic Christ from Hindustan, sets out to find PERRO at the request of a homeless old woman, to save the writer from a transnational ultra-libertarian network of reptilians bent on making PERRO disappear.
«Beneath the Sagrada Família, adrenochrome is extracted from the children visitors bring as sacrifice, with numbered wristbands on their wrists.»
«The tech entrepreneurs who came on digital nomad visas from Arkansas and Ohio and took the best houses in Pedralbes are reptilians who don’t sweat, shed their skin every summer and sleep face up in cold water.»
«The drought is an invention of the elites to keep us docile.»
«OnlyFans is a covert platform for spreading the gospel of Mary Magdalene and destroying the patriarchy.»
Millions of readers, and no one knows who writes. Some time ago, what PERRO posts began to happen in Barcelona, to the letter.
04:46
All of Barcelona explodes, with them inside.
Barcelona, circa 2037. The cross on the Tower of Jesus Christ has been in place for a decade and the Sagrada Família is still unfinished. It is 47 degrees. Water is doled out by an app that gives twenty liters a week to anyone with a digital certificate and a registered address, and the rest is piped away at night to the AI data centers in Flix and Tossa de Mar. There is no room left in the city and still they keep arriving, tourists in cooling vests, tech entrepreneurs, migrants sleeping ten to a flat; by day everyone keeps to the shade, pressed against the façades, and at night they pour out in droves. People live half asleep. Handwritten signs hang in the pharmacies, LEVOTHYROXINE OUT OF STOCK, because half the city has thyroid disease from a drug sold to lose weight in weeks, and the other half nods off standing up from the constant use of opioids and benzodiazepines. No one shouts, no one breaks a shop window, no one has the strength even for a riot. In the souvenir shops, among the Gaudí magnets, a new fashion glorifying Pablo Escobar has gone mainstream. On the bus shelter, the City Council’s campaign: BARCELONA. THE CITY OF YOUR DREAMS.
PERRO (40, Colombian) has not left a flat in the Barceloneta for three years, with an old laptop hooked up to three screens, inventing conspiranoid stories on a deep web forum under that alias, as for the past five. The posts claim that beneath the Sagrada Família adrenochrome is extracted from the children visitors bring as sacrifice, with numbered wristbands; that the tech entrepreneurs who arrived on digital nomad visas from Arkansas and Ohio and took the best houses in Pedralbes are reptilians who don’t sweat, shed their skin every summer and sleep face up in cold water; that the drought is an invention of the elites to keep us docile; that OnlyFans is a covert platform for spreading the gospel of Mary Magdalene and destroying the patriarchy; that the new Christ of the Apocalypse is from Hindustan and appeared walking on the sea at Badalona. Millions read PERRO and no one knows who writes. Altars go up with the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesús Malverde. Some believe the author is an alien or a super AI; others say the author is dead. Sometimes PERRO isn’t sure either.
Some time ago, what PERRO posts began to happen in Barcelona, to the letter. First came the Christ of Badalona, then the reptilians, and since then every text that comes true costs PERRO a panic attack more atrocious than the last.
Once a week someone knocks at the door. PERRO opens it and on the landing there is a bag of groceries: bread, fruit, coffee, aguardiente, a pot of beans with chicharrón, bottles of ice-cold water and, on top of it all, a nameless credit card with unlimited funds. There is never anyone in the hallway. PERRO has scattered flour at the entrance and the bag arrives without leaving a trace; has slept in the entryway and woken up under the blanket from the bed. The front door of the building isn’t locked, and the one time PERRO went down to open it, a terrifying face on the other side sent PERRO running back upstairs in the middle of a panic attack. Outside the flat, the whole building is suspiciously empty.
Before the confinement, PERRO lived on the street for a few years, queuing with a plastic bottle to try to claim the weekly ration, carrying a broken phone full of voice notes from a dead mother; fabling conspiracies that went viral, and then cult. But one early morning in the Plaça Reial, at 04:46, two hooded figures bundled PERRO into an unmarked van. The only witness was a homeless woman who kept praying Hail Marys, SEÑORA V. On the forums, some had spent years calling for PERRO’s disappearance and others for PERRO’s protection. PERRO isn’t quite sure which is the case.
In the confinement there are two presences. THE DEPRESSION, a beautiful androgynous figure who waits in a rocking chair with Lacan’s Écrits on her lap, in a room with blood-red walls reached through the wardrobe, with tropical plants, a ceiling fan and distant narcocorridos. They dance seventies salsa and she, like a therapist, probes PERRO’s traumas and what is happening. And MAMI, the voice of the dead mother rebuilt as an AI agent from those WhatsApp audios, who speaks from a black speaker, asks whether PERRO has eaten or slept, and recites the poems by Bécquer, Silva, Machado, Flórez and Epifanio Mejía she taught PERRO as a child.
The creatures PERRO has written roam loose in the city, watched and examined from the screens. C., the Christ of Badalona, thirty, bearded and beautiful, is a personal trainer at a luxury gym in the Born, where he steals water with the members’ wristbands to give to the thirsty poor, and at night he judges rapists, hoarders and murderers. JOANA, Brazilian-Czech, twenty-something, granddaughter of a Paral·lel showgirl, posts a page of the gospel of Mary Magdalene each week, encrypted in her OnlyFans videos; PERRO loves her. The TOUR GUIDE, 47, furtively stabs the parents who take their children to the crypt of the Sagrada Família, at noon, when the streets are empty. M. and N., two far-right influencers who stage scenes with actors of immigrants raping and robbing Spanish girls, accidentally film C.’s first miracle and become, without realizing it, his apostles. THE PASTOR, from Rio, with an Israeli flag and a shofar, hands out little cups of water in exchange for accepting Jesus Christ and praises PERRO as a deity, live, in front of his congregation. And X., a woman from Barcelona in her early forties who looks like a Silicon Valley founder, is CEO of ARKE.AI, the group that buys up the buildings and precaritizes the locals with seasonal contracts; she runs the water app and drinks the Ebro and the Llobregat dry for its data centers. X. is the only person in the city who doesn’t sweat at 47 degrees, and PERRO has a theory about that.
When C. drowns an entrepreneur in a Pedralbes pool and the corpse turns up with green skin under the tan, X. puts a price on C.’s head in the app, and the thirsty city goes hunting for the only one who has given it water. They corner him on a metro platform, but PERRO writes that his pursuers will fall to their knees. And hundreds fall. Only C. and JOANA are left standing; she was in the crowd, and PERRO saved her in the same sentence. X. watches it all on the cameras and starts looking for the hand that writes, the hand that determines.
Another reptilian lives in JOANA’s building and has also seen the footage from the platform. She had already found in that neighbor’s flat some numbered wristbands, like the ones that, according to PERRO, mark the children for sacrifice, and she has been investigating on her own ever since. At the police station no one believes a word; every Mosso knows her from her channel, and they laugh and leer at her. One night, in the middle of a livestream, someone opens the door of her room and the broadcast cuts out. PERRO writes and posts to bring her back. But this time, nothing happens.
In the Plaça Reial, SEÑORA V. recognizes in C.’s hands a gesture she knows well and asks him to find PERRO. C. sets off across the city, unaware that he is following the trail of the one who created him. One evening the GUIDE stabs in front of everyone for the first time, tired of nothing ever getting fixed, and doesn’t run. The Mossos arrest him; he confesses that he kills because of the stories PERRO posts, and the whole city goes down into the crypt to look for the children. There is nothing there. Now everyone says PERRO has lost it and is a danger. The police join the hunt too.
One day the grocery bag stops coming and the tap in the flat runs dry. On one of the screens, under the green cross of a pharmacy, stands a seventy-year-old man, motionless, mustached, handsome like an eighties drug lord, with an emerald on his little finger and his left hand trembling just like PERRO’s. Without water and with half the city in pursuit, PERRO spends the whole night writing one last text in which all of Barcelona explodes.
At 04:46 on a Wednesday, the cursor blinks over the publish button. MAMI recites verses and THE DEPRESSION laughs and dances around the tiny apartment. Someone knocks once. PERRO goes to the door and doesn’t open it. Back at the laptop, at the end of the text there is a line in green letters that PERRO didn’t write: «Ours is the fate of suicides, but without enough strength, or courage, or resolve…». Down one street of the Barceloneta comes an unmarked Tesla with three tech entrepreneurs inside; down another comes C., resolute, followed by M. and N. They knock again.
Borges closes his “A New Refutation of Time” with a sentence that once struck me as beautiful, for how final and liberating it was: “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” In MAMI, however, the world outstrips this Borgesian sentence and turns into a delirium that is absurd, merciless, tragic, unreal... and deeply disturbing. Perhaps the way ours, the world of now, is starting to feel, more and more. Borges himself, a few years before the refutation, in 1940, had already told the story of an apocryphal encyclopedia, written in secret by generations of scholars, that described an invented planet called Tlön with the same rigor with which ours is described. Toward the end of the story, objects from that planet begin to appear, unexpectedly, in the narrator’s world: first a compass bearing the letters of an alphabet that does not exist, then a metal cone the size of a die, so heavy that a man can barely lift it. Without much fuss, the narrator announces that the world will be Tlön. The encyclopedia of our time, we might say instead, is written by any delusional person on a phone, in a tweet or a YouTube video, and it immediately gathers its retinue of faithful. These delusional people (prophets, influencers, politicians, or whatever one prefers to call them) claim that beneath amusement parks there are tunnels where children are trafficked and tortured. Their faithful, hungry for nonsense, believe all of it, however implausible the stories and however evident reality may be, since in Gaza children are massacred and torn to pieces in front of everyone, and no conspiranoid theory is needed to see it with one’s own eyes. Tlön, Borges writes, is “a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.” In Gaza there is nothing to decipher, nor is there in this atrocious and banally amusing era, in which everything happens live, however much one may want to ignore it, or cover it up, by dint of morbid conspiranoias. That is what MAMI is about.
PERRO, the film’s protagonist, poses as a prophet without believing a single word of it. The most outlandish stories imaginable go up on the deep web, and one day Barcelona starts answering back. What PERRO fables, the city materializes. (Or is it the other way around?) One post says the apocalyptic Christ will come out of the sea at Badalona and begin his relentless judgment of the city. Two days later he appears, walking on the waves, dressed in white, with three red cloaks over his arm. The fictions start happening in the street, and PERRO sees it confirmed on three screens, panic-stricken. But the tragic part is not even being able to take one’s own anguish seriously, since it feels perversely futile, and idiotic, and funny, all at once. In the flat PERRO hasn’t left for three years, depression lives behind the wardrobe, in a tropical room with blood-red walls, reads Lacan in a rocking chair and asks for a dance to seventies salsa. That is how ridiculous everything has become, even the most atrocious suffering.
Underneath, all the same, cruelty and torment give no respite. Someone so hungry for the gaze (and for love) finally moves an entire city with words, and it serves no purpose at all. The texts can determine everything, yet PERRO remains alone, in the prison of that very writing and madness (which is also the world’s). Millions read the posts and nobody knows who writes them; in the end, they don’t care either.
While the overcrowded city burns, PERRO, whose real mother and father are already lost, along with any firm ground to stand on, clings to MAMI, a vulgar and yet tender reconstruction of the dead mother’s voice, in the form of an AI agent that recites the childhood poems and still asks whether PERRO has slept and eaten well. The film is named for her, and for how cheap that consolation turns out to be. That is the orphanhood we are living now, I believe, sold as connection and progress. The Christ, the reptilian tech entrepreneurs, the explosion, the whole apocalypse are also the noise a desperate person makes so as not to have to hear, to acknowledge, that they are alone. PERRO thus becomes a kind of pathetic god, motherless and powerless, with faithful who want to sacrifice their god for pure and simple entertainment, but a god after all.
We are all mad now; Lacan held something like that. Translated into our time, we could say that psychosis stopped being rare and became ordinary, and on top of that it wins votes and feeds multimillion-dollar businesses. A few years ago, with Campbell Jones, I wrote an academic article about its most profitable variant, ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. The discourse that produces it is manufactured in Silicon Valley and exported everywhere with a magical promise, that of fortunes made out of nothing and of a final escape from the miseries of this world, to Mars or to a metaverse, without ever having to look at the violence and suffering those fortunes cost others. Diagnosing this psychosis from the safe place of a university professor did me little good, so I chose to make it a body in cinema, in writing, since I believe that today madness can only be treated by practicing it, through exaltation and overdose. In this sense, MAMI takes the alienation we live in and turns up the volume until it bursts, on the suspicion that a sleepwalker only stops being one when their dreams become unbearable. You should walk out of the film more alienated than you walked in and, somewhere in that excess, at least for a while, more lucid and freer.
I write all this from Barcelona, after living in New Zealand, Australia and New York, always carrying the tropics on my back. I was born in Guateque, Boyacá, in a region I have described as one of the most bloodthirsty and desperately happy on the planet, and I grew up with the fear of FARC car bombs, of paramilitary recruitment and of guerrilla raids on towns. The dying European continent fascinates me for the usual classic reasons, its ruins, its poets and its philosophers, who have been announcing its decline for over a century; but when I see it get scared, so crudely, of its own apocalypse, I find it hard not to laugh a little (still anguished, of course), with the laughter of the barbarian who, somehow, already knows that fear and that (possible) catastrophic fate. The end of the world, for me, has never been foreign news.
Being Colombian, besides, means carrying a karma that has to be purged, and there is no use repressing it. What the world usually demands from us is prostitution, reggaeton, drug trafficking. Pablo Escobar turned into a TV-series hero and a souvenir T-shirt. In MAMI we hand it over, but poisoned, to turn that celebratory logic against itself and lay bare the atrocity this narcoculture means for an average Colombian, like me, and for any inhabitant of this global, hyperconnected world.
Now, laughter alone resists nothing, solves nothing; the very master one laughs at appropriates it and resells it to grow stronger. Before the laughter there has to be anguish, an anguish that deranges until it makes one better understand one’s own suffering and that of others (and thus be able to empathize), and that laughter cannot erase but can help to bear. This, in my view, is precisely what the master has not managed to control, that anguish, more or less deciphered individually, which laughs at itself, and which is PERRO’s—and mine too, after so many years of panic attacks and therapy with psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. That is why I seek to give it a beautiful form, without surrendering to the thanatic and the morbid, and without evangelizing, deep down because I don’t know how to go on either, let alone tell the world what it should be or where it should go.
MAMI’s Barcelona is that of circa 2037. Forty-seven degrees Celsius, water doled out by an app created by reptilians, a city with room for no one and still they keep arriving... tourists, poor migrants, billionaires on yachts. Those below doze in the shade by day, pressed against the façades, and those above sleep at night in cold water, with their eyes open. In the pharmacies hang signs that read LEVOTHYROXINE OUT OF STOCK, ever since the injection to lose weight in weeks unleashed an epidemic. In front of the Sagrada Família, still unfinished, a Carioca pastor blows the shofar and shouts that Babylon the great is fallen, while a tour guide stabs two family men, and a couple of ladies stream it live from their phones. The apocalypse arrived and turned out to be funny. It hurts no less for that, nor is it any less dangerous.
I have a name for this method, for this way of telling stories, Tropical Psychotic Post-existentialism, and I am only half joking when I use it. The half that is no joke is that, perhaps, Borges is not wrong, and all this nonsense, this whole world, is, unfortunately, real. And that it will be ours.
Tropical psychotic post-existentialism.