The Galilean Scream Discussion Questions

In depicting the events of the Chilean coup, Missing faces the challenge of giving a human face to the victims of a regime that received both covert support and overt recognition from the U.S. government. Although thousands of people were killed in the coup, the film focuses intensely and exclusively on just one victim, Charlie Horman, an American writer and journalist who was disappeared by the Chilean military. He is intently watching the scene in front of him, which is visible to the audience as a distant, distorted reflection in the glass of the car window. The tense, ominous music that plays during the scene initially contrasts with the innocuous image of children playing soccer. They focus shifts momentarily,
At the start of the film, Charlie’s conservative and old fashioned father, Ed, sees his son as irresponsible and lazy, a dissolute liberal who has carelessly gotten himself into trouble in a foreign country. Ed’s doubts about his son are echoed by the numerous U.S. government officials depicted in the film, who suggest both implicitly and explicitly that Charlie is radical and an agitator who deserves his fate. Indeed, at the start of the film, Ed voices many of the same beliefs that a mainstream American audience might hold about a liberal expatriate such as Charlie. It is up to Beth, Charlie’s wife, to provide Ed with a counter narrative of him as an idealist, a childlike dreamer, and a man of
but this logic, which allows Charlie to be humanized and reclaimed, necessarily excludes both American radicals and all Chileans from the compass of its recuperative effort. The scenes in which Ed and Beth search for Charlie in hospitals, morgues, and detention centers represent the film’s most sustained engagement with the widespread violence that follows in the wake of the coup and are among the few instances where other victims are visible onscreen. In room after room of bodies, however, Charlie is the only victim who can be brought into focus as an individual. At one point, Beth finds and identifies the body of Frank Teruggi, an American expatriate who was a committed socialist. Although Beth’s discovery, together with the account of Teruggi’s arrest by the military, makes the Chilean government’s responsibility for his death all but certain, Teruggi cannot be film’s primary victim. After a brief close-up of Teruggi’s body, which is marked bullet wounds, our focus returns to Ed and Beth, who insist they will not leave the morgue until they have looked at all the bodies. The camera pans away from them and reveals the magnitude of their task. In addition to the piles of anonymous bodies on the floor around them, the silhouettes of many more, limbs askew, are visible on the other