A photo with the monster

Remember Ma Anand Sheela ? She was the star of Wild Wild Country , the documentary series about the Indian guru Osho and his cult-town in Oregon in the early 1980s. Released on Netflix in 2018, Wild Wild Country was a phenomenon and turned Sheela, Osho's right-hand woman, into a celebrity. As such, she was invited that same year to a cultural festival in Barcelona . It was a crazy absurdity. At the time, Sheela was accused of fraud and attempted murder , among other crimes recounted in Wild Wild Country . She was found guilty of some of them and served time. By the time she went to Barcelona, ​​she was already a free woman. All right. All good. All bad.

Wild Wild Country wasn't exactly an exculpatory series. Like Breaking Bad or Dexter , it offered us a seductive proposition: that the protagonist of the story wasn't the hero, but the villain . But there was a difference: Wild Wild Country , written and directed by the Maclain brothers and Chapman Way , was a true story. And Ma Anand Sheela was a real person.

At times, Wild Wild Country managed to make us enjoy it as a crazy comedy and see Sheela as a cartoon villain . The idea that reality is always stranger than fiction fits well with the idea that comedy equals tragedy plus time.

However, outside of Wild Wild Country, Ma Anand Sheela was merely a grotesque concept. In the series, Sheela was a charismatic evil lady ; outside of it, transformed into a carnival monkey and self-proclaimed lecturer, she was reduced to a pathetic symbol of a society sick with spectacle and entertainment . That woman was just a bad bug, not a good villain. Worse than that: a normal lady. Sheela was Himmler, not Cruella De Vil.

In the last of three episodes of La caza del Solitario , Carles Porta reminds us of the story of bank robber Jaime Giménez Arbe , known as El Solitario . Porta neither wants nor can turn him into a magnetic criminal. It's simply impossible. Not that he was, El Solitario wasn't even nihilistic, random, and kamikaze-like, like the good Batman villains. Giménez Arbe was just a very badly dressed psychopath . Dangerous as a person, but harmless as a character. Worse than that: incredibly boring as a character. His last words in court were spoken in a language no one could identify. And even then, the guy wasn't funny . In La caza del Solitario, they say that today he moves around the prison wearing sunglasses. Like the celebrities in the AVE (high-speed train) queue: with the attitude, attire, and accessories of a star, maybe someone will consider them to be one and ask for a photo. I'm sure Sheela still gets asked for one.