Pablo Trapero's 'Gordon' Unpacks Argentina's Dirty War for Netflix

Pablo Trapero's "Gordon," a seven-part psychological action thriller starring "Money Heist" actor Rodrigo de la Serna, premieres on Netflix on Nov. 18 and is shaping up as Argentina's series of the year.

The series reconstructs the real-life Ánibal Gordon, a torturer, psychopath and leader of the Triple A death squads who from May to November 1976 directed Automotores Orletti, one of the Argentine dictatorship's most notorious detention and torture centers. Through him, the show examines the country's 1974-83 Dirty War.

Set over 1970-76 and shot over seven months, "Gordon" was directed by two of Argentina's leading filmmakers: Trapero ("Leonera," "The Clan") and Pablo Fendrik ("The Bronze Garden," "Amongst Men"). Trapero also co-wrote the screenplay with Marcos Osorio Vidal, based on a novel by Marcelo Larraquy — a sign of his artistic investment, and his return to Argentina after eight years working on international series such as "ZeroZeroZero."

A return to 'The Clan' universe

"Gordon" revisits the period and the film noir-melodrama mix of Trapero's 2016 hit "The Clan," a portrait of the Puccio family that kidnapped and murdered associates for money. That film won Trapero a best director Silver Lion at Venice and grossed $20.4 million worldwide, a blockbuster in Argentina.

"With time I understood that 'Gordon' was in a way a revenge, allowing me to return to a similar period, tone and universe, with more time for us and for viewers," Trapero said. "The Clan" was a breakout which made him rethink his career: "I was left with the sensation that I wanted to talk a lot more about this world and that the length of a film wasn't sufficient."

What does the series show of Gordon?

The trailer captures the protagonist crossing the Pampa plain with his wife and infant son, greeting an old man with a cart and horse, taking in a wounded puppy and taking tea with Dora, the widow of a Vice-Admiral. "You look like you have a military bearing. Were you in service?" Dora asks. "No, no, I'm a simple businessman," Gordon answers, visibly flattered.

The charm is a mask. The trailer cuts to Gordon and a gang checking revolvers, a torched getaway car and a heist rowed across a Patagonian lake. Gordon, a dandy, builds a secret passageway in his new home to escape and spy on his own family, in what Trapero describes as the airs of a quietly dashing domestic James Bond.

The historical Gordon joined Argentina's military intelligence services as a secret agent in 1968 and rose through the Triple A death squads. How a car thief scaled the ladder of power in 1970s Argentina is one of the central questions the series seeks to answer.

Why a villain as protagonist?

"Gordon carries the story from beginning to end. He's like a sci-fi portal, opening doors to Argentina's different universes of the time," Trapero said. "The most difficult and highly attractive challenge was to make viewers want to watch more about a villain who becomes ever more villainous."

De la Serna frames his character as the only figure without ideology or doctrine in a Cold War context where Peronism positioned itself as a third option. "Gordon is a mercenary whose only interest was to be able to make money and experience the pleasure of exercising his true psychopathological essence," the actor said. "The national and international context allowed psychopaths of the magnitude of Gordon to reach places of power, make them their own, take off their masks and become the true monsters they are."

Trapero argues the era changed the relationship with violence itself. "For Gordon and almost the period, violence became a commodity, without the gravity and consequences which violence really has," he said. De la Serna traces the shift further back: from the 1955 Navy bombing of the Plaza de Mayo, which killed 400 people and ousted Perón, "the country's rule of law is replaced by the rule of violence."

Genre-shifting structure

Trapero and Osorio Vidal structured each episode as a different genre. Episode 1 plays like a Western, in which a stranger arrives and carves out his place; Episode 2 works as a secret agent investigative thriller; the final episode nears horror. "This renews the series' interest, not only because of Gordon's story but Argentina's," Trapero said.

The director acknowledged the risk: "There's not one character in the series from beginning to end with whom you can feel identified with." He praised De la Serna's performance as extraordinary precisely for keeping viewers following a man with whom they cannot identify.

What does this change for De la Serna?

"This is the darkest role that I've ever had. It's very close to a vampire or a demon, or he really was a demon, the darkest shadow which a people have dreamed," De la Serna said. He described building the character around "an absolute lack of empathy for others, an 'anti-conscience'" — "a compendium of all the perversions I could cover and conceive, like a man who loses what is considered humanity."

"Gordon" is produced by Adrián Suar, the actor, Pol-ka Producciones producer ("Son of the Bride," "Violetta") and former Canal 13 programmer, with Diego Andraznik at their new production house, Preludio Producciones.

For Trapero, the series also carries a civic purpose: fiction can bring younger generations what "might appear fit for history books, so that we don't forget about what happens with violence. Sometimes in slogans or on social media violence seems abstract, but it's beside us all the time and our duty as citizens is to care for others."