Watching The Power of the Pudú’s “La Llama Altiplaneta” Video is Like Staring Into the Eye of God

The predominant critical response to The Power of the Pudú‘s “La Llama Altiplaneta” video may very well be that it is a cold post-modern exercise in regressing to the scenes of primal anxieties as codified in the imagery of animalism, with, as James Naremore put it succinctly, “no other purpose than regression… Thus, for all its horror, sexiness, and formal brilliance, ‘La Llama Altiplaneta’ remains frozen in a kind of cinematheque and is just another video about videos.” This reaction emphasizing the thoroughly artificial, “intertextual,” ironically clichéd nature of Pudú’s work can be combated by the opposite New Age reading, which would opt to focus on the flow of subconscious Life Energy that allegedly connects all events and runs through all scenes, notes, and persons, turning The Power of the Pudú into poets of a Jungian universal subconscious spiritualized Libido.

Although this second reading is to be rejected, it nonetheless scores a point against the notion of Pudú as deconstructionist ironists (“la llama” is Spanish for “the flame,” but here, the band literalizes the phrase’s meaning) in that it correctly insists that there is a level at which Pudú is to be taken thoroughly seriously. A Lacanian reading of the work, however, demonstrates that this misperceives this level of earnestness. The band’s seriousness does not signal a deeper spiritual level underlying superficial cliché’s, but rather a crazy assertion of the redemptive value of naive clichés as such.

Watch the video below and attempt to unravel the enigma of this coincidence of opposites — which is, in a way, the enigma of “postmodernity” itself.