Luis Buenel’s Los Olvidados is one of the pioneers of Neorealism in Mexican and Latin American cinema. The film deals with Child Poverty, crime, loneliness, abuse, and helplessness amidst the slums of struggling Mexico. Unlike Robert Bresson and Vittorio De Sica’s minimalist style, Buenel can visualize and express the misery of poverty with a more surrealistic aptitude. He manages to invoke a sense of anxiety, terror, and pathos distinctively experienced by the characters compared to his contemporaries. The Young and the damned strongly influenced significant films like Pixote, Amores Perros, and City Of God, which dealt with similar issues of children getting trapped in the never-ending cycle of drugs, crime, delinquency, and theft.
The Mexican government did not accept the nihilistic climax as it portrayed them negatively. Buenel created a happier alternative ending to get approved. What makes Los Olvidados (the Forgottens) one of the masterpieces of Latin Cinema is its ability to create a bold, realistic, and empathetic depiction of the plight of poor teens in the slums. The symbolism in the film further differentiates it from movies like The Bicycles Thieves and Mouchette, which have a modest and transparent approach.
Apathy in The Young and the Damned Movie
The film deals with young delinquents playing in packs in the ruins of old Mexico. Some kids are deserted by their families, while some have incompetent parents to take care of. All the life hardships have worn out the empathy in them. They have no mercy for an old blind man and can even kill each other to survive. If someone tries to break this prison of poverty by working hard, others try to pull them down. It’s a never-ending saga. El Jaibo is somewhat the evilest of them all, as he can butcher anyone who comes on his way without any ounce of regret and mercy.
He uses his friends for his benefit and infests them like parasites till they die. Even the elders don’t have much compassion for the street peddlers. They are either dependent or use them to run their household. The young kids have no choice but to oblige them for food and shelter. Some also work as laborers to earn an honest and respectful living for a better living. Their bosses treat them as slaves without considering their age. The innocence of these children gets lost somewhere while facing the harsh world when they should focus on their education, health, and happiness.
Incompetent adults
In Young and the damned, all the adults in the slums are relatively terrible role models for the kids. They use the Youngblood to carry off their financial burden. Some incompetent parents further put their mental and emotional burdens on their kids. All the adults are equivalent in playing the part of vultures who infest the young teens’ future. Most of them are ill, perverted, handicapped, or addicts, except for a few government officials who sincerely try to help and transform street kids into diligent humans with compassion and understanding.
The kids are vulnerable to being molded according to their surroundings and circumstances. The teen rage with a survival instinct to look for themselves pushes them into a fight or flight mode. Some parents abandon their kids, while others are too exhausted to tackle their delinquency and give up on them. The poor blind musician initially appears kind when he offers to help the abandoned kid but soon starts mistreating him. Some drunk fathers depend on their kids for survival, and the kids get mature beyond their age. Pedro tries to change himself for her single mother, who works day and night to feed her children.
El Jaibo : An evil force
In Los Olvidados, El Jaibo represents the darkest side of humanity when it is obligated to survive on scarce resources. The Young and the damned is a gruesome story about poverty and how it turns humans against each other. There is survival of the fittest. El Jaibo is a teen leader of a group of amateur kids who asserts his unfair power and dominance over whoever comes in his line of sight or in between his evil motives. He lurks as an ominous shadow or presence around his peers who dare to go against him and forcibly block their prosperous growth toward a better future.
He finds sadistic pleasure in torturing the less powerful and can go to any length without slight remorse or empathy. Buenel does not indicate whether El Jaibo is a psychopath or just a victim of his circumstances. He is too obnoxious to gather pity or sympathy from the audience or his peers. He doesn’t have plans to improve himself and wants others to stagnate with him. He represents the lower section of society where people pull down each other out of envy and cannot stand anyone making it out of the cycle of poverty.
Symbolism in The Young and the Damned
uenel frequently uses chickens in different forms of eggs and meat around Pedro to signify his current state of karma that may come back to him. The chicken flock around whenever Pedro does or witnesses a cruel act. It even does not leave the dreams of the guilt-driven Pedro. In the Juvenile Rehabilitation School, when Pedro spoils a handful of eggs and kills two chickens, he is cautioned about the consequences of his actions. When Pedro is hiding from Jaibo, a chicken noise tarnishes his plan, and later the chicken walks over his body. Pedro is of his mother’s affection which the meat signifies. His mother always refuses to offer him any meat over his siblings. In the dreams, all his aspirations are about to come true, but El Jaibo acts as an obstacle. His mother offers him a big piece of meat in the dreams.
Interestingly, Buenel does not use this allegorical connection with El Jaibo when he is the most notorious of the gang. Jaibo is compared to a street dog when he dies. He signifies psychological, emotional, and financial cannibalism among the lower classes, who always are in flight or fight mode.
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