Can the New Man Speak? by Bruno Bosteels

Marxism and psychoanalysis, in two different ways, speak in the name of a kind of memory, a culture of memory, and also speak in two different ways in the name of the requirements of a development. We believe on the contrary that one must speak in the name of a positive force of forgetting, in the name of what is for each individual his own underdevelopment. - Gilles Deleuze, "Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis"

I will start by addressing the way in which the movie itself defines the condition of underdevelopment, as such a definition will immediately allow us to reflect on the work's own structure. For Sergio (played by Sergio Corrieri), underdevelopment has above all an ideological significance, signaling an inability to connect action and intention, parts and whole, the immediate and the long-term duration. "One of the things that really gets me about people is their inability to sustain a feeling, an idea, without falling apart," he comments, thinking about the recent object of his infatuation, Elena (played by Daisy Granados), whom he has picked up on the street and invited into his private apartment: "Elena turned out to be totally inconsistent. It's pure deterioration as Ortega [y Gasset] would say. She doesn't connect one thing with another. That's one of the signs of underdevelopment: the inability to connect things"-an inability whose results include a failure to accumulate experience and, by way of compensation for this failure, a tendency to depend on others to reflect on the meaning of such experience: "People aren't consistent. And they always need somebody to do their thinking for them. "7