Perverse Fascinations and Atrocious Acts: An Approach to The Secret in Their Eyes by Juan José Campanella

By focusing on the intersection of recurring universes between Eduardo Sacheri’s La pregunta de sus ojos (The question in their eyes) and its adaption in Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), this paper explores the persistence of certain ideological effects of “perverse fascination” that the film, unlike the book on which it is based, tries to provoke in its audience. It analyses the discursive links with a language marked by a political tension that evidences the failure of a social system that seems to place its community beyond the civilizational boundaries of reason (Agamben 100). Briefly, this article argues that the thriller explored in Campanella’s film serves the Argentine director to spread the idea of new social imaginaries that perpetuate, by a melodramatic imagination, the perception of a current chaotic community with no place for justice and where the rule of law has become unnecessary.