"Remember Me": Memory, Resistance, and Subversion in Coco

Sunday, March 30, 2025

I cry every time I watch Coco. Not because it’s sad, but because it touches something raw, silent, and ancestral in me. It’s not just a story about family or music — it’s a subtle, radical reflection on memory, identity, and survival. A critique, hidden beneath layers of vibrant color and Pixar charm. I don’t think most people see it.

Miguel isn’t just a boy who loves music. He’s a subject in transformation, refusing to accept the version of the world handed down to him. In a family that has violently amputated its link to music — a gesture that symbolizes a deeper rupture with memory, tradition, and self-expression — Miguel dares to practice music in secret. He dares to feel in a world that’s tried to sterilize emotion. He follows a trace. A voice. A vibration. And he gets thrown into the underworld — but not just metaphorically.

The land of the dead is full of presence. The dead are there. With names, faces, gestures, flaws. They’re more alive than the living who repeat empty rituals. When Miguel meets the chaotic, unkempt man — Héctor — he doesn’t know yet that this marginal, forgotten figure is the real source of what he’s been looking for. And when he finally meets the “idol” — the sanitized, rich, beloved celebrity — he realizes it’s all a lie. A simulacrum. A theft. The genius wasn’t visible. He was hidden. Like most real geniuses. Like most women. Like most nonconformists. Like most of us.

In this world, you only die when no one remembers you. That’s the real tragedy. Not death, but erasure. It’s the second death that breaks me — when no one holds your name, your voice, your image. This is what Walter Benjamin was trying to tell us. History is told by the winners, the conquerors, the glossy faces on the ofrendas. The others disappear. Unless someone remembers. Unless someone refuses to forget. Miguel becomes that someone.

The missing photo is the center of everything. As long as Héctor doesn’t have a face, he’s not real. He can’t return. That’s how our world works too. No image, no name, no history — no subjectivity. That’s why Didi-Huberman’s work on surviving images is crucial. Memory isn’t just what we hold — it’s what we choose to show. The photo is not just a document. It’s an act of resistance.

And then there’s the music. Remember Me. Once a spectacle. Then a whisper. First it’s performed on stage, loud and soulless. Then it’s sung softly to Coco — the granddaughter — as a thread of memory, as an act of love. That’s the real art. Not performance, but presence. Not product, but connection. Adorno said it: the culture industry turns everything into a commodity. But here, art becomes affect, legacy, repair. Bell Hooks would call this the power of the intimate. A political act disguised as a lullaby.

Let’s talk about the women. The matriarch, Mamá Imelda, embodies the trauma. Her rejection of music isn’t just stubbornness — it’s grief transformed into discipline. She becomes the enforcer of the wound. But also the one who can undo it. Her healing is not soft. It’s fierce. It takes Miguel’s movement to wake the frozen lineage. There is a feminist reading here, clearly: a family shaped by the absence of a man, forced to become hard to survive. And yet, still full of tenderness. Of rhythm. Of memory.

And the bridge — made of marigold petals — is not just beautiful. It’s a portal. It’s fragile but glowing. Like memory. Like resistance. It reminds me of what Didi-Huberman calls survivance: what persists when everything else fades. The flowers are not alive, but not dead either. They carry the vibration of care. Of reverence.

In the end, Coco is not a cute story. It’s a quiet rebellion. Against patriarchy. Against erasure. Against commodification. It tells us something radical: you don’t need to be famous to matter. You just need to be held in someone’s memory. And maybe, if we refuse to forget — really refuse — we can become something more than what the world expects. A subject. A trace. A spark that survives.