Undone
“It’s all about your emotions, you need to feel them without letting them become you.”
Premiering in 2019, Undone is an immensely captivating story visualizing the inner workings of a 28-year-old Latina-American woman who is grappling with both her own and the concept of reality. The story unfolds through the relationships between Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar) and the people around her, depicting her innate restlessness and rebellion against the threat of routine. Alma struggles with her severely committed partner Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay), the engagement of her pragmatic sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), and her overbearing Mexican mother Camila (Constance Marie). To her, they represent what she considers the ultimate trap: traditional domesticity. The monotony of her life soon becomes disrupted by what will turn out to be the most important relationship in the narrative, if not her life. Her relationship with her deceased father Jacob (Bob Odenkirk).
The series starts off setting up Alma in a car crash so severe she lands in a coma. When she wakes up in a hospital, we see her dead father Jacob by her side. Jacob explains that the reason for his materialization is so that Alma can help him not only find out what had happened the night that he died, but also reverse it. To achieve this mission, he has to teach and train her to bend space-time and reality. Alma and Jacob then journey back and forth through time and space, trying to harness her power and perfect her abilities. Jacob eventually explains that Alma has likely inherited his schizophrenic mother Geraldine’s shamanic abilities. He has specifically come back because he thinks he was murdered due to the research he did on shamanism and how close he subsequently was to discovering the secret mechanisms of the universe. Essentially, we are dealing with a genre-bending murder mystery while going through a journey of family drama, sci-fi, romantic comedy, and psychological thriller.
So far so good, but there was a large problem staring right at me. The series’ thematic and cast made me immediately think that the people behind the scenes must also be Latinx. Or at least, that the creators were. The way the series conjures images, music, and language that implies rootedness in Native American cultures forged this naive expectation in me. So, when I found out that the creators were Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, an inner aversion was awakened in me that made me want to seek out an “evilness” behind the structure. I wanted to focus on the white, privileged evilness of the writers and directors. Point out the capitalist, exploitative evilness that is Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. The name that for a long time we have associated with the American rainforest, home to the largest biodiversity in the world, we now have come to primarily associate with another form of abundance. And this time it’s the perverted, superfluous, exploitative kind.
Firstly, of course, this over-abundance in the shape of an endless variety of products from around the world, all only a mouse-click away from our grasp. Secondly, there is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is the richest man in the world with a net worth of over 116 billion USD at the time of writing. The uncovering that Amazon workers are underpaid and that in 2018 Amazon has paid zero in taxes, are apparent systemic injustices that we cannot just gloss over. This kind of exploitation has to be utterly condemned and boycotted; anyone with any sense of morality should not associate themselves with any of the products by an institution with this kind of track record.
This would be a simple, unproblematic stance for me, except that I have been completely taken in by one Undone. Even though I was not able to look at the series through anything other than The Inevitable White Gaze when I first discovered the origin story of its production, something soon changed my outlook. I came across Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Flights of the Imagination: Rereading/Rewriting Realities,” and applied it to how I felt about Undone. Should I completely dismiss a piece of art because it does not fit into my neat box of a wonderful, wholesome creation made neatly, exclusively by people of colour (POC)? And I wondered, what happens if I allow this discomfort and contradiction to be part of my analysis? What if I refuse to dismiss the series due to its muddled background and instead, accept its place in our reality? What happens if I let go of the idea of an ideal framework, a pristine source?
In the predominantly leftist bubbles in which I tend to find myself, cultural appropriation is called out so often one could almost think that it is one of the greatest evils. The participants of these discourses are well-meaning and, usually, their intention is born out of a desire to topple white mainstream narratives and promote visibility to voices and bodies that were/are mostly marginalized. While this is a movement I’ve been firmly a part of, I cannot help but notice its paradoxical side-effect. In an attempt to exclusively reserve certain cultural practices and heritages to specific cultural groups, we end up essentializing the group itself. We associate certain cultural practices to be inherent aspects of certain people with specific DNA — a process that, at the end of the day, is a manifestation of racism. Of course, this is not a new realization and many have written about the necessity for groups to essentialize themselves for the larger cause of justice and equality. The political motive is something I strongly believe in and support. What I’m pointing to, rather, is an often knee-jerk offended reaction in the face of situations read as cultural appropriation. And while the strategic mobilization of communities can lead to institutional changes, all too often it also brings forth echo chambers of vitriol and divisiveness, especially in this so-called Digital Era.
Julia Kristeva might have categorized these reactions as a manifestation of a “hate reaction” by those who belong to a “cult of origins.” According to her, this consists of “hatred of those others who do not share my origins and who affront me personally, economically, and culturally.”[1] A compulsive aversion then often arises when a person, considered an other/outsider, appears to adopt cultural signifiers that are not reflective of their supposed heritage/origin. This other/outsider is then imputed to be practicing cultural appropriation. The implication of such a framework, it seems, is that certain groups are the sole proprietors of certain cultural practices/artifacts, and that these boundaries need to be upheld in order to maintain a certain cultural pristineness or purity. While this is a difficult conversation to have and one where there may be no correct answer, I believe it is crucial that we deal with these paradoxes within communities that want equality before the topic becomes steered by entities that have strong motives to discredit these communities.
Perhaps a helpful way to begin the conversation is by referring to Kwame Anthony Kappiah, who holds that culture is not “pristine and pure,” and is instead “messy and muddled.” In his book The Lies that Bind, he made a convincing case that cultures are not clean-cut in their separation from each other — if they are separate at all. It becomes redundant to think about cultural appropriation when we are continually aware, as we should be, that “all cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture” (Kappiah 208). This follows the tradition of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity; how all cultures influence and cannot be separated from each other. It takes a certain level of self-awareness and reflection to be able to accept this and be comfortable with it. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha writes, “It requires a person to step outside of him/herself to actually see what he/she is doing” (Bhabha 4). And this stepping outside oneself is not only what I consider to be the main idea flowing throughout Anzaldúa’s writing, but is what Alma is perpetually pushed into in Undone.
In “Flights of the Imagination,” Anzaldúa introduces us to the concept of Netpantla, the experience of which she defines as:
“Perceiving something from two different angles [which] creates a split in awareness that can lead to the ability to control perception, to balance contemporary society’s worldview with the non-ordinary worldview, and to move between them to a space that simultaneously exists and does not exist.”
And it is through this Nepantla lense that I wish to examine Undone. Doing this, I do not dismiss the aspects of the webseries’ production which I consider problematic, exploitative, or appropriative, but actively incorporate them to explore the possibilities for personal and communal growth. According to AnaLouise Keating, Transformative Studies is when your academic pursuit aims to envision liberation, enact social change, develop new communities, and create transformative knowledge. It is with her idea of Transformative Studies in mind that I undertake this analysis, because we must steadily reexamine shifting structures of power and renegotiate realities in order to reach its aims.
An awareness of one’s own positionality is of absolute importance when we enter these negotiations of reality. I was born to an Indonesian mother and a German father, and have thus grown up with frequent interrogations concerning my national identity and my sense of cultural belonging, not the least because of my ambiguous racial identification. These experiences have shaped who I am and thus my point of view and perception. They have also given me a map to explore the various facets of identity construction. I believe they have also given me access to the feelings of dissonance and fragmentation often expressed in Mestizx narratives, causing those stories to resonate with me deeply. Nevertheless, I write as somebody who owns an EU passport, is light-skinned and is college-educated. These factors give me social and structural privileges that mean I will not experience certain struggles and forms of oppression. These circumstances undoubtedly contribute to and shape my stance in the discourse.
Additionally, as I have already mentioned, I predominantly find myself within circles that are considered left-leaning. I am often around academics of the humanities and attend events organized by activists of color who aim to promote the visibility of various groupings of POC. This socialization, and the confidence that I can illustrate my ideas safely within the context of this forum, is what urges me to critically examine an aspect of identity and reality construction elaborated here.
Admittedly, when I am dealing with people who are visibly and manifestly disturbed by the idea of POCs claiming space, power, and sovereignty, my tone changes drastically. In instances where I notice the rhetoric to be blatantly hateful and condescending towards POC, I reactively become far less nuanced in my approach to discourse and resort back to simplified, reductive identity politics. I have learned to adapt my position depending on whom it is I am dealing with and I acknowledge this inconsistency/unfixedness. With all of these things cleared up, let’s move on to my experience watching the film.
Having found out that the creators were white, I was looking for shibboleths that would betray the White Gaze. I immediately noticed that the one who encouraged protagonist Alma to pursue and master her shamanic abilities was not her Mexican mother Camila (who wants Alma to take supposedly mentally stabilizing medication), but her white father Jacob. For example, in the second episode, Jacob educates Alma that “In indigenous cultures, people who can see visions and that hear voices — they’re the shamans, you know, they’re the wise ones. But in Western culture, these people are locked up or they’re put out in the street.” (“The Hospital” 13:10). I identified this as a large problem; I thought that this plot decision was incredibly telling of the uncritical whiteness of the writers. In my mind, surely the Mexican mother is supposed to be the actual inheritor of this anti-colonial understanding of what reality consists of, and should be the knowledge carrier of shamanic wisdom. Surely the mother is the key to accessing Mestizx consciousness, the one that can help Alma access their ancestors and help her reach her full potential. It must be the typical, self-serving white creative that paints the white family, Jacob and his mother Geraldine, as the key.
But thinking of Kappiah and Bhabha, and their rejection of such essentialization of knowledge, I am reminded that this approach is a mistake. Letting go of this automated anger directed toward the white creatives and realizing the limitations of this way of thinking was when I was able to reach a much more interesting and perhaps productive interpretation of the narrative. Here I want to invite the reader to see the writers of the series, not as simply white people, but as what Anzaldúa calls almas afines. When we allow ourselves to perceive writers Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy as more than self-serving white people, we can take into account that Jacob was not solely a benevolent figure in touch with the shamanic tradition. Instead, in the end, he was revealed as the antihero; the one who is responsible for the mess Alma and all the other characters are in.
Not only did Jacob steal indigenous relics as a result of his patronizing point of view; “The Nahuatl Indians did not realize the power they possessed” (“That Halloween Night” 05:02). At the end of this murder mystery, we find out that Jacob was not murdered, but drove his own car into a cliff and killed himself along with his research assistant Farnaz. He is also exposed to have had conducted many experiments on Alma as an underaged child, experiments his wife Camila did not consent to.
Further, there is a key scene depicting a trip the family took to a holy site in Mexico, where Jacob explains that Alma has indigenous blood through her mother’s lineage. Camila remarks “we are mostly Spanish” (“Alone in This” 02:19), to which Jacob demands that Camila tell the truth about their ancestry and admits that they do have indigenous blood. “Yes, but people are not so nice to Indians, so be careful what you say” (“Alone in This” 02:23). This explains, to an extent, why the mother wanted so much for Alma to be “normal” and not play into Jacob’s ambitions for her to become a shaman.
And although I do not intend to reinforce the idea of the European as the patriarch of the world (this is a destructive notion that has proven to be the source of many ails in the world) I do find it notable that this white father, through his overzealousness/greed in his quest for science/knowledge/power, is the one causing the inner and outer conflict and fragmentation experienced by all other characters. The underlying consequence of the plot’s schematic is that even though it is not fair to the other characters, they still have to come to terms with the father’s mistakes; learn to live, heal and move on.
These thoughtful plot decisions demonstrate to me that the writers were reflective and aware enough to acknowledge the complicated power dynamics and relationships embedded in the positionality of the characters. And this realization made me able to relax and think about the story in less judgmental terms. It allowed me to actually interpret and analyze the series the way I wanted to, as an embodiment of Anzaldúa’s ideas about rereading/rewriting realities and being Nepantleras. I gave myself permission to consider Undone as a manifestation of Mestizx consciousness.
The fact that Alma means “soul” in Spanish gave me the pleasure one gets when connecting hidden dots (although these particular dots are not very hidden for my Spanish speaking friends). I began enjoying Dutch director Hisko Hulsing’s use of rotoscoping, which consists of layering animation on top of live-action footage. The effect is a trance-like visualization of a dream state which a critic Poniewozik has described to be “like turning a dial that lowers the gravity by 25 percent or so. Even in mundane scenes, everything’s a little more buoyant. People move as if they’re living underwater.”[2]
Allowing myself to find useful metaphors in the series, I thought about the effect of revolving the story around a perceived loss of sanity. Alma is, at the end of the day, an unreliable narrator. Even though she is not the one telling the story, we can only see her world through her eyes. This reminded me of another story in the Mestizx consciousness tradition, Signs Preceding the End of the World. In this Mexican novel, novelist Yuri Herrera describes protagonist Makina’s world to us through a third-person speaker. Despite telling the story through a narrator that is traditionally all-seeing, in Signs we can only see what Makina sees and thus we have access to exclusively Makina’s inner world.
What is striking is, in both instances the audience/reader does not feel the itch to get to the bottom of things, not bothered to find out the objective truth. Considering that Undone is at its core a murder mystery, to have this effect on the audience is certainly extraordinary. There is also no traditional form of a timeline, and Alma jumps time and space freely along with the plot. The effect is a gentle suggestion that the actual truth is not as important as the experienced truth — as what Alma sees. Anzaldúa petitioned, “We must redefine the imagination not as a marginal non-reality nor as an altered state but, rather, as another type of reality,” and I argue that the underlying suggestion embedded in Undone is precisely this openness to alternate realities.
With the exception of Jacob, all other characters repeatedly implied that Alma was mentally unstable; none of them believed the things Alma claimed to have seen in her visions. For Alma, the healing moment came at the end of the series, when her sister Becca sat next to her all night on the holy site in Mexico. Becca did not contradict Alma’s conviction that Jacob was going to step out of the temple with the sunrise. Alma thought that Jacob’s resurrection would trigger the realignment of the timelines, and they will be living in an alternate reality where Jacob did not commit murder and kill himself. Alma explains to Becca, “This whole reality is going to go away. All we have to do is wait here tonight. Dad is going to come back. Everything will have changed. He’ll have never died. Our family will be normal. We won’t be broken people. So all the stupid shit we’ve done in our lives, it’ll all just go away” (“That Halloween Night” 16:57). To this, Becca simply replied, “That’s nice”(“That Halloween Night” 17:00). And they spent the night in each other’s company, watching the stars and talking, and Alma was calm and felt safe in their understanding, their sisterhood. The interaction hurls to us the incredible power held by the act of listening. It’s a testament to the fact that you cannot really ever convince somebody of a point of view they are not yet ready to accept. People have to learn and see for themselves the truth of their convictions, and everyone will learn their own lesson in their own time. The scene shows that through times where a reality/truth is still being negotiated and manifested, it is crucial to have somebody willing to sit with and not contradict us, no matter how far-fetched one considers the other’s stance. It speaks to how healing it is to be able to share your beliefs and your “insanity” to somebody who is not there to judge or diagnose you. A portraiture of two sisters being Nepantleras for and with each other. A depiction of the coexistence imagined and proposed by Anzaldúa.
“Our oppositional politics has been necessary, but it will never sustain us; while it may give us some temporary gains. . . . it can never ultimately feed that deep place within us: that space of the erotic, that space of the soul, that space of the Divine” – Jacqui Alexander
This is a quote Ana Louise Keating refers to in her text “Risking the Vision, Transforming the Divides.” To me, Undone is a piece of artwork that was able to provide that space of the erotic, the Alma, the Divine. Had I kept my exclusionary, oppositional, rigid mentality I had in which perimeters are based on racial/cultural identities, I would have missed out on the metaphors, the beauty, the meaning.
The metaphor of Jacob, the white father trying to change the course of how history went wrong, forgetting he was the one who brought on his own destruction. All the while, the others are paying for his mistakes. The metaphor of Alma’s supposed insanity as a questioning of our own perceived reality. The beauty of the storytelling through rotoscoping. The meaning behind Becca’s casual, non-judgemental listening. And ultimately, the consideration of it as an outstanding manifestation of Anzaldúa’s imagination of the non-reality, of the possible alternate realities.
By learning about writers who advocate the idea of a less rigid, non-ethnicity-based coexistence, I was given the chance to zoom out and watch with love, not with the fear that often comes around the anxiety of being politically correct. “Reality is too big for any ideological system to contain,” Anzaldúa once wrote. And this has been clearly demonstrated in Undone, both through its plot and its production. The personal is political, and this account of my learning process is what I want to offer as we all construct our realities and societies. As we move forward, we will have to open more dialogue between realities, identities, and the subversion of both.
[1] Kristeva, Julia. Nations Without Nationalism. Columbia UP, 1993.
[2] Poniewozik, James. “Review: In the Entrancing ‘Undone,’ Life Is but a Dream State.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/arts/television/undone-review-amazon.html.
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I am a curator and producer with MSG & Friends Berlin, a monthly event dedicated to carving out a safe space for performance artists of Asian heritage. Having been raised Indonesian-German, I grew up with frequent interrogations concerning my national identity and my ambiguous sense of cultural belonging. This experience has shaped me and continues to influence my work and my research. Persistently seduced by the arts, I am always working to find the intersection between academics, activism, and art.
Good think piece Schreiber, enjoyed both the film and your analysis. I wonder how they’d stretch Season 2. I also realized how much more reading I need to do in order to write.
Thanks Arya! Me too, I’ve been eagerly awaiting what comes next. I’m thinking Jacob will come out of that cave, but I’m not sure in what context (will Alma have succeeded in changing time? will Becca share in Alma’s visions?).
A great show with a similar thematic (sanity/reality/interdimensional travel) is The OA, I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it!
Also, Final Space, which is more like Rick & Morty, but whatever.
Heck yeah I support this ambition to read & write more! Looking forward to read your stuff!