Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film: Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age 149853712X, 9781498537124

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Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film

Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age Mary Hartson

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books Content adapted from Hartson, Mary. “Between Two Loves: Manolo Esobar, Masculinity and a Spanish Transition,” Confluencia, V. 30, n. 2 used with permission. Content adapted from Hartson, Mary. “Voracious Vampires and other Monsters: Masculinity and the Terror Genre in Spanish Cinema of the Transicion,” Romance Notes, Volume 55, Number 1, 2015 used with permission. Content adapted from Hartson, Mary. “Masculinity and Cine de Cruzada: The Crusade Against Self-Indulgence in Early Francoist Cinema,” Hispanófila, v. 170, Jan. 2014 used with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3711-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-3712-4 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Masculinity and Consumerism in Spanish Cinema

vii 1

1

Hegemonic Masculinity under the Dictatorship

27

2 3

Breakdown of the Hegemonic Male Model The New Spain: Desire and the Commodification of the Spanish Body Individualism, Alienation, and Adaptation

75

4

Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author

127 161 185 189 197 205

v

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Oakland University for its generous support of my research as I prepared this manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Filmoteca Española in Madrid for all their help. I admire and appreciate their genuine interest in providing support for projects such as my own. And finally, I am deeply indebted to my parents, Ron and Joanne Hartson, not only for the usual parental sacrifices, but also for providing extensive proofreading and consultation along the way. I would also like to acknowledge the journal Confluencia, Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura for allowing me to reproduce much of an article published as “Between Two Loves: Manolo Escobar, Masculinity and a Spanish Transition,” (v. 30, n. 2, Spring 2015); and to the University of North Carolina’s presses Romance Notes and Hispanófila for the rights to reproduce modifications of my articles “Masculinity and Cine de Cruzada: The Crusade Against Self-Indugence in Early Francoist Cinema,” (Hispanófila v. 170, Jan. 2014): and “Voracious Vampires and other Monsters: Masculinity and the Terror Genre in Spanish Cinema of the Transición” (Romance Notes v. 55, n. 1, 2015). All images in this book are reproduced with the permission of Mercury Divisa Films through the agency Egeda.

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Introduction Masculinity and Consumerism in Spanish Cinema

The year is 1973. Almost forty-year dictator, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde lies agonizing on his deathbed, his designated successor recently assassinated. 1 On screen José Sacristán, the everyman in Spanish film of the “Transition,” obsessively fixates on television advertisements while filling scrapbooks with carefully cut-out magazine images of beautiful women and consumer products. 2 He neglects his wife and scandalizes his colleagues at work as he ricochets back and forth between his identity as buttoned-down, tight-lipped businessman and free-wheeling, sexually promiscuous super-shopper. This popular “Third Way” 3 film, La vida conyugal sana, seems to belie the accepted view that the much commented upon Transición from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was primarily political, emphasizing instead the economic aspect and indicating that its effects were not seamless or easily assimilated by the individual, but rather were quite disruptive and incongruent with dominant values of the past. The term “Transición,” or “Transition,” generally refers to the period of political transformation in which Francisco Franco’s dictatorship gave way to representative democracy, which was installed in 1977. Here, this political transformation will be considered as the background for consumerist changes resulting from social trends as well as specific government policies. Economic changes have always been accompanied by changes in consciousness. Karl Marx, while he was unable to predict what these changes would be, drew attention to the intimate connection between the two. And while humans generally live in their historic moment, immersed in ideology and quite unaware of the tremendous influence socio-economic forces have on their self-conception, or “identity,” it is crucial to examine the effect of these forces if one is to draw nearer to an understanding of human behavior and subjectivity. The twentieth century witnessed an economic transformation quite as dramatic as any that came before—the widespread establishment of consumer capitalism in much of the world. While it is self-evident that such changes occur unevenly across the globe, in most of Europe and the United States this change can be said to have occurred in the twentieth century and, quite concretely in Spain, beginning primarily around the middle of the twentieth century. 1

2

Introduction

By the late 1950s and early 1960s political and social changes occurred in Spain and began to make their appearance on screen as a newly installed Ministry of Opus Dei technocrats replaced the autarky of the Falange Party, seeking to stimulate a stagnant economy and transform the political and economic climate of the country. Along with general growth in the post-World War II Western World, especially the United States which was beginning to prove a source of cultural influence through the incursion of its cinema, advertising, and consumer products in the years following the Pact of Madrid in 1953, 4 these specific policy changes transformed Spain’s economic climate by encouraging investment and economic growth—and urging its citizenry to consume at unprecedented levels. The later Moncloa Pacts of 1977 5 continued the liberalization of Spain’s economy and further defined the country’s consumer capitalist profile. In the cinema, this economic transformation appears frequently in themes related to housing, shopping, employment and tourism, and is accompanied by a seemingly obsessive reworking of the individual’s relationship to wealth and consumption. The purpose of this book is to consider how these changes affected and interacted with cinematic representations of masculinity from 1939, the beginning of the Franco dictatorship, through the present. The concept of “casting” Spanish masculinity is useful in the sense that masculine subject positions are created in film as “forms” or models to which certain viewing individuals relate or aspire. Hegemonic masculinity describes a sort of role within a certain context and for a certain purpose— the sort of masculinity that is considered most functional and comprehensible within that context. The construct of hegemonic masculinity refers more to an ideal than to any particular male individual and can be seen as a kind of sign or guidepost under which societal relationships organize themselves. And as masculinities have been referred to as “socially constructed configurations of gender practice” (Connell, “Change among the Gate Keepers” 1805), it is important to consider masculine representation as part of an active process which can be studied as a way of drawing nearer to an understanding of how gender practice works in society. While it is irrefutable that the death of Franco, the Women’s Movement, immigration, drugs, internationalization, and other forces need to be considered as influences, it is my contention that the primary struggle during the period under study was the struggle to assimilate consumerist ideals into one’s self-identity. I have chosen to approach my subject using the primary tool of the twentieth century for understanding the self and for explaining the reproduction of the patriarchal hierarchy—psychoanalytic theory. Within this system, the son had to reject identification with the mother in favor of his father as a way of assuming his place in the patriarchal hierarchy and thus share in male privilege. In a theoretical framework posited by Freud, civilization, or the peaceful transition of power from fathers to

Introduction

3

sons, was founded upon the idea of prohibition and the mutual renunciation of pleasure. Under Franco the patriarchal family structure served to reproduce and reinforce the hierarchical organization that ensured his power for 40 years. This is a model that can be seen to reflect social organization in the early years of the dictatorship, but which fails to explain changes brought about by the onset of consumerist values in Spain. A sort of breakdown of this model in film in the 1970s led not to the abandonment of the patriarchy, but to the adoption of a new father figure—not one that prohibited enjoyment, but rather one that demanded it. This study traces filmic representations of this transition from the “father of prohibition” to the “anal father of enjoyment” (to use Freud’s terms) as a way of understanding how socioeconomic changes, especially the widespread embrace of consumer capitalism, affected and were assimilated by the male individual in Spain. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Cataclysmic events in Spain such as its bloody Civil War from 1936–1939, long dictatorship, subsequent transition to democracy, and the onset of full-fledged consumerism in the latter half of the twentieth century radically reshaped the process of both individual and collective identity formation. The transition from the Francoist dictatorship, a social order based on prohibition given its promotion of patriarchal fascist Catholic values, to what Todd McGowan calls a society of “commanded enjoyment,” in which the individual is commanded to “enjoy” (through advertising and consumer pressure), refigured a centuries-old masculine ideal. McGowan describes this shift as “the transition from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction)” (End of Dissatisfaction 2). This transition from prohibition to consumption as society’s organizing principle is observed by McGowan to be a pivotal change in the development of Western society. It has special relevance for the study of masculinity given that one of the foundational concepts of traditional patriarchal masculinity in the Western world dating back to Aristotle was the ability of the hegemonic male to renounce personal pleasure in favor of duty, and to master his own desires. Consumer society is founded upon an idea that runs directly counter to this former conceptualization in that it encourages the individual to recognize himself as lacking, or desiring, rather than self-sufficient, and thus in need of the thing that could satisfy and alleviate that lack. In psychoanalytic terms, the superego imperative to forgo personal pleasure for duty is reversed as the subject comes to see his duty as the imperative to enjoy. A consumerist society has been described as one in which “many people formulate their goals in life partly

4

Introduction

through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display. They become enmeshed in the process of acquisition—shopping—and take some of their identity from a procession of new items that they buy and exhibit” (Stearns vii). Two fundamental factors in the conceptualization of oneself in the world, life goals and identity, now orient themselves around the expression of desire. As modern consumerism has established itself as the dominant ethos, so have individuals had to position themselves before this phenomenon. While some consumerist tendencies have existed throughout history—in Spain as elsewhere in the world—they achieved unprecedented institutional and social support in the latter half of the twentieth century. By the 1970s the consumption of consumer goods as well as sex (and its representation), and substances such as drugs and alcohol came to dominate public discourse and social interaction. Whereas the dictatorship consistently enforced a raft of prohibitions, in the Transition the social climate changed dramatically to promote consumption and self-gratification. By 1984 even the mayor of Madrid, Enrique Tierno Galván, addressing a music festival crowd, could say: “¡Rockeros, El que no esté colocado, que se coloque—y al loro!”/“Rockers whoever’s not high, should get high . . . get with it!” 6 (“Enrique Tierno Galván: La Movida Madrileña”) and be received with excitement and enthusiasm by a large segment of the population. The effects of the transition from a model based on prohibition to another based on consumption produced dissonance in the performance of masculinity as represented in Spanish cinema. As Sally Faulkner describes the conflicting influences, “In the social arena, Spaniards experienced the conflicting ideologies of Francoist traditionalism, with its reactionary exaltation of Catholic, patriarchal and Nationalist values, and global capitalism, with its cults of the acquisition of wealth, material possessions and the free circulation of goods beyond national borders” (3). In recent decades, neoliberal economic policies, such as those employed in Spain since 1959, have created a phenomenon which David Harvey describes as a new hegemonic discourse which “has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (A Brief History 3). Masculinity in Spain has had to struggle to adapt itself to this new logic which came into direct conflict with the “common sense” understanding of it up to that time. As Guasch points out, masculinity serves as a sort of “modelo prescrito”/“prescribed model” (Actes 4) for behavior within a certain context. The shifting socioeconomic and political situation in Spain required an adjustment of that model in order to produce the sort of citizen that best served its needs. The dissonance between the two contexts led to a sense of discontinuity and finally a breakdown in the previous representation of the hegemonic male—a disintegration that is especially apparent in films of the early years of the Transition. During this time, patriarchal support of

Introduction

5

hegemonic masculinity from the dictatorship waned, and consumerist pressure increased. The societal transformation following the death of the dictator reflected not only the political reorganization that has often been observed, but more significantly, the reorganization of the masculine ideal under the new hegemony of consumerism and the individual’s selfperception in relation to it. This dramatic shift effected an eventual reorganization of both the individual and society in which personal enjoyment, not the public good, was the highest ideal—resulting in a politically disinterested populace united by the common desire for the satisfaction of consumerist desires. As McGowan describes this phenomenon: “rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment” (The End of Dissatisfaction 2). Ironically, as he points out, as enjoyment itself becomes the new mandate, the exhortation to enjoy ever more precludes the possibility of true enjoyment due to the subject’s requisite state of constant dissatisfaction. As masculinity will never be considered monolithic, the interplay between the apparently favorable or positive version and alternatives, often within the same film, reveals insecurities and pressures that surface in the creation and maintenance of the male ideal. I consider that “masculinity” is a historically relative term and, while it must be kept in mind that masculinities are always plural, indeed infinite in practice, I trace tendencies and repetitions in the performance of masculinity on screen in order to discover the hegemonic model at work as well as the stressors associated with accession to this model. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne define the hegemonic model as “successful ways of being a man” (3) and rightly point out the complexity implicit in this concept which was first used systematically by R. W. Connell in her sociological study of gender “Gender and Power” (1987). 7 Cornwall and Lindisfarne note that the hegemonic ideal is an abstraction that serves the purposes of certain interests but does not actually reflect modes of behavior of the vast majority of men: Hegemonic masculinity is far more complex than the accounts of essences in the masculinity books would suggest. . . . It is rather, a question of how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance. Consequently the culturally exalted form of masculinity, the hegemonic model, may only correspond to the actual characters of a very small number of men despite the fact that large numbers of men are complicit in sustaining the hegemonic model. (19)

Though complex, the concept of hegemonic masculinity still proves a productive way to talk about the power relations that are so important in the formation of masculinity due to the connection between this aspira-

6

Introduction

tional model or ideal, and society’s organization around it. The relatively narrow definition of the hegemonic model in existence during the early part of the dictatorship reflected the concentration of power over society and the media in the hands of a few who adhered closely to values based on Catholicism and fascism, and consistently promoted a specific model. However, it must be kept in mind that hegemonic masculinity is mutable and subject to constant change. Richard Howson reminds us that the hegemonic model is never secure, but based on an ever-evolving set of variables stating, “the theory of practice shows that, even in a dominative situation, structure is never ossified within a simply reproductive cycle. Therefore, no hegemony can be seen as completely stable” (50). As power became diffused and contested in the Transition and beyond, the hegemonic model becomes somewhat more difficult to identify in films. Still, certain trends can be identified, including individualism and the pursuit of personal advancement and enjoyment—underlying goals that are seen to become normative in the later part of the Transition through the present. The rise of consumer culture in Spain dates back to the middle of the twentieth century when a newly appointed government made up largely of Opus Dei “technocrats” 8 instituted capitalist reforms including a plan to increase consumer spending and open Spain to tourism. These changes were directly opposed to economic policies of the Falange and early Francoism and posed a most serious and specific challenge to the way that masculinity had been represented and lived up to that time. It is a transformation that was even more marked in Spain than in other Western countries, given that fascism has been specifically linked with an anticonsumerist ethos and had survived as a dominant ideology longer in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. Peter Stearns comments on the correlation between fascism and an anti-consumerist ethos in Consumerism in World History: the Global Transformation of Desire: “Basic fascist goals, however, were anti-consumerist. For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy,” and he states that in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany “the defeat of fascism discredited the most general effort to stem consumerism and replace it with a more military and collective identity” (72). Franco clearly tried to advance this “military and collective” identity in Spain through the privileged status afforded the military which demanded obligatory service of all young men; and through the Catholic Church which was recognized as the sole educator of the young and whose teaching informed all social and political decisions. These institutions were also promoted in Franco’s public addresses and through the NO-DO newsreels 9 which were obligatorily shown in all Spanish movie theaters. The effort to base identity in these institutions and their ideal of self-sacrifice was so widely promoted and enforced that the dramatic turnaround constituted by the onset of consumer culture

Introduction

7

was particularly jarring. I contend that this change is a primary cause of the widely observed “crisis” in Spanish masculinity in the Transition period—a crisis represented artistically in the Transition through the victimization by one means or another of male characters in many Spanish films, as well as through the emergence of the representation of an abundance of “deviant” sexualities. Like consumerism, many of the forces that had been at work in other developed countries during the twentieth century arrived more abruptly in Spain in the aftermath of the dictatorship, and contributed to a massive reworking of the process of masculine identity formation. Whereas hegemonic masculinity in the dictatorship was promoted as a way of creating an obedient and self-sacrificing populace, the hegemonic model that emerged subsequently appears dedicated to the complicated task of producing a subject capable of maneuvering a consumerist environment dominated by neoliberal capitalist principles and based on the existence of the individual’s primary identity as consumer. This book is organized according to a chronological division of Spain’s political history. The first period encompasses the years from the establishment of the dictatorship in 1939 through the death of Luis Carrero Blanco, designated successor of the ailing Franco, in 1973 which marked the beginning of what was known as the dictablanda in Spain. Following, the Transition period is divided into two parts: the first encompasses those years between Carrero Blanco’s death, and the Socialist Party victory in 1982, and the second includes those years from 1983 through 1992, the year in which Spain established itself as a modern European nation through the hosting of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and World’s Fair in Seville, as well as the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 which led to the formation of the European Economic Union. 10 Finally, the years from 1993 to the present occupy the fourth part in which I indicate current trends in masculine representation as these correspond to and react against the imposition of the consumerist model of masculinity. This chronological approach highlights a shift in societal organization from under what McGowan (citing Freud) called the “father of prohibition” to the “anal father of enjoyment,” or in Slavoj Žižek’s term “Père jouissance.” Freud posited a theoretical framework in Totem and Taboo in which he attempted to envision the moment when civilized life began. His speculative framework was taken up by Jan Jagodzinski in his article “Recuperating the Flaccid Phallus: The Hysteria of Post-Oedipal Masculine Representation and the Return of the Anal Father,” and was further developed by Todd McGowan in his highly suggestive work The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (2004). The crucial concept here concerns the juxtaposition of prohibition and personal enjoyment as fundamental organizing principals. Freud’s theory, described in Totem and Taboo, can be summarized as follows: Before

8

Introduction

the dawn of civilization there was “a violent and jealous Father” who kept all the females for himself and drove away his sons as they matured. One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United by their guilt, they now transformed their sense of remorse into a system of prohibitions that led to the beginnings of cooperative communal life. As Freud states, “The patriarchal horde was replaced in the first instance by the fraternal clan” (Totem 181). As McGowan goes on to describe it, the “anal father of enjoyment” or the “Great Fucker” as Lacan calls him, receded but never disappeared from the collective consciousness. Mutual prohibition led to the creation of a public space in which no individual would take his pleasure, and the Oedipus complex established the orderly transfer of power and its reproduction within the family unit. In the words of Freud, “There were fathers once again, but the social achievements of the fraternal clan had not been abandoned; and the gulf between the new fathers of a family and the unrestricted primal father of the horde was wide enough to guarantee the continuance of the religious craving, the persistence of an unappeased longing for the father” (Totem 185). Distance from the father provided an organizing principle which was mutually respected. Furthermore, as a means of describing desire itself, McGowan links Freud’s postulate with the Lacanian objet petit a, or unattainable object of desire, to further describe the myth: Though this prehistorical enjoyment did not exist, the idea of it nevertheless continues to have a power over the subjects of the social order. Having given up a part of themselves—albeit a part that did not exist until they gave it up—these subjects insofar as they remain in the social order are incomplete or lacking. Bound by this lack, they imagine or fantasize an object that exists in the gap left by their sacrifice. This object is what Lacan calls the “objet petit a.” The “objet a” constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an engine for the desire of the subject and also directs the desire in its circuit. . . . It causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire. (End of Dissatisfaction 16)

Whereas in a society of prohibition, public recognition is the socially accepted form of enjoyment precisely because it involves allowing the symbol—or one’s “good name”—to enjoy in one’s stead, in a society of enjoyment this space is dissolved as individuals are encouraged to enjoy at all times. Suddenly the individual is not rewarded but rather berated for his failure to enjoy, and the individual becomes involved in an incessant quest for the objet petit a—some object that is constantly held up as an apparent satisfaction of the perceived lack. In global consumerism, the shift to an imperative to enjoy becomes more apparent and is accompanied by a radical re-visioning of the concept of duty. As McGowan describes it: “This notion of a duty to be happy radically transforms the

Introduction

9

very concept of duty, which has historically involved limiting rather than maximizing one’s happiness” (End of Dissatisfaction 35). Thus the foundational conceptualization of civic life is reformulated to promote the needs and desires of the individual over those of the collective. In the Franco dictatorship the old model reigned—the dictator himself was represented as a self-disciplined soldier, a hard-working father and regular churchgoer. It was a model that was constantly upheld in the media particularly as seen in the early dictatorship “Cine de cruzada” films. Pleasure-seeking was seen to interfere with the real work of “being a man” and is observed in films of this period to be the realm of women and weak, feminized men. Positive male models reject self-indulgence in favor of self-renunciation and service. Later, starting around the early 1960s, many films began to promote consumerist values which encouraged the individual to seek personal satisfaction and advancement. Jan Jagodzinski and Todd McGowan expanded on the mythic origin of civilization to describe this societal shift away from prohibition and shared sacrifice. For them, the adoption of consumerist values resuscitated the “anal father of enjoyment” as the organizing principle in Western society and the imperative to forgo personal satisfaction gave way to one that demanded that the individual seek it. Though Freud never wrote a formal account of masculinity, psychoanalysis has been employed in various important explorations of the subject (R. W. Connell, Anthony Easthope, Kaja Silverman, Jan Jagodzinsky) and serves as a useful model given its frequent association with the reproduction of the family unit as a tool of capitalist development. Franco drew heavily on the ideological weight of the nuclear family as a mechanism of social organization and control. The patriarchal father figure was held up as the unquestioned authority within each family and was expected to take his place within a rigidly established hierarchical social structure that allowed no room for deviation. Drawing on a psychoanalytical perspective following the work of Lacan, McGowan, and Slavoj Žižek, this study shows how changes in the approach to the oedipal narrative, whose repetition had long ensured patriarchal dominance (but whose subversive potential has been identified), reflect the changing reality of masculine identity formation and yield new insights into masculinity in a consumer age. McGowan applies a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of film in a consumerist context in order to show how the concept of lack, fundamental to Lacan’s theorization, is radically transformed. While Freud presents the castration complex as a psychosexual hurdle, Lacan approaches the phenomenon in regard to the individual’s entry into the symbolic law of language as the primary castrating event. The individual, on becoming a speaking subject, enters into the law of language which forever divides the subject from itself by imposing a layer of mediation between the subject and its “self.” As McGowan says, “The speaking subject must

10

Introduction

separate itself from itself to identify itself” (Psychoanalytic Film Theory 42). In other words, to use language to identify oneself is to invoke the symbolic—which requires the sacrifice of the mythic wholeness posited as the precursor of the speaking subject. Though both genders experience this “castration” or foundational lack which constitutes the individual as a sexed subject in the symbolic order, I contend that lack is constitutive of gender in different ways. While the female child comes to identify with the mother (who is also seen as lacking since she does not possess the phallus or anchoring signifier), she is more accepting of lack as foundational for identity. The male child in a patriarchal society enters into a more complicated process in which, ultimately, he should identify with the father, bearer of the transcendental phallus or symbol of power. However, since the identity is based on the falsified equation of penis to phallus, or rather male sex organ to symbol of power, the male individual is constantly threatened with disintegration of the constructed ego and a sense of his foundational lack. He seeks to “plug the hole” of symbolic castration (Silverman, Male Subjectivity 4) in a variety of ways including fetishism and narcissism, both of which are fed by consumerist advertising which promises fulfillment and an escape from lack. Whereas early dictatorship cinema presented lack as voluntary self-renunciation that actually served to raise the status of the individual, later films represent it as imposed rather than embraced, and individual subjects are forced into the recognition of lack—something that it is understood could and should be avoided through the acquisition of consumer goods and/or increased enjoyment. Psychoanalysis has been invoked in much of the film theory produced since the 1970s and has clearly provided a very rich and fertile theoretical inspiration for interpreting film—which McGowan has referred to as a form of “public dreaming” (Psychoanalytic Film Theory 1). It seems a natural fit given psychoanalysis’s and film criticism’s desire to interpret, understand, and figure out what is “really going on” behind the images we perceive. But it is important to establish the specific concepts and theoreticians that inform this investigation. Early psychoanalytic film theory (also known as “Screen” theory for its association with the eponymous journal in which its early manifestation was worked out) proved an extremely productive line of inquiry, but began to fall out of favor in the early 1990s due to its focus on a misreading of Lacan’s Mirror Stage essay which placed an emphasis on mastery of the visual field. Film theorists associated with Screen theory, like Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, Colin McCabe and others, focused on an Althusserian understanding of film’s relationship to patriarchal power that resonated with an academic public eager to find theoretical grounding in the highly politically charged era of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Women’s Rights, Black Power and other equal rights movements were effecting social and political change. Its emphasis on imaginary identification with the male gaze (Mulvey) and

Introduction

11

the power of the cinematic apparatus of the establishment (Baudry) appealed to a public eager to deconstruct white, heterosexual, male-dominated power structures. But, as McGowan points out, the use Screen theory made of psychoanalytic theory can be called into question on a number of grounds. 11 It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Screen theory began to be seriously questioned in terms of its interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. Joan Copjec’s 1989 essay “The Orthopsychic Subject” posed the first serious critique of the conceptualization of the gaze as employed by Screen theorists. Copjec located the “gaze” within the film itself as a sort of absence which creates our desire—the desire to see. In her formulation the subject emerges through the point of impossibility and, contrary to a sense of mastery or plenitude, the gaze reveals the “real” that is irreducible to any imaginary or symbolic identification. Whereas Screen theorists largely concerned themselves with power and an imaginary mastery of the images on the screen, psychoanalytic theory in Copjec’s essay focused on the traumatic real of desire. Though many rejected or ignored Copjec’s essay, Slavoy Žižek’s insistence on the fundamental nature of desire— and a Lacanian interpretation that focuses on the real—largely redirected psychoanalytic theory since the 1990s. His tremendous output beginning with The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) posited the subject, not as a product of ideology as many Screen theorists had asserted, but as the effect of the failure of ideology to fully represent. Todd McGowan draws heavily on Žižek’s work and a Lacanian understanding of desire as foundational for the subject in his own writing. He sees as fundamental the position a film takes up in relation to desire and in The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment considers the sociological implications of the prohibition of one’s desires versus the encouragement to satisfy desires as experienced in consumer culture. My study follows McGowan’s work in that it analyzes the changing role of desire and masculinity’s relation to it in the context of Spanish film. While this study does not purport to undertake a strict Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of the films included, it does draw on the concepts of lack, the objet a, and the importance of the triad—symbolic, imaginary, real—to speculate on changes in hegemonic masculine representation in Spanish film. Filmic representations can and often do serve an ideological facilitation to the social order through the way in which they manipulate the spectator’s desire, and in the degree to which they “resolve” a sense of lack. Furthermore, cinema acts as a sort of bridge between the public and the private, “an art form that has an active and dynamic relationship with existing models of identity” (Marsh & Nair 2), and as such, facilitates the individual’s incorporation into society as a whole. Since popular as well as artistic or critically successful films are implicated in this process, both bear study regarding their masculine

12

Introduction

representations. Aesthetic judgments of quality are disregarded here in order to focus on films that were widely seen and/or are particularly representative of trends in masculine representation. As Nuria TrianaToribio says of popular film: “Their value is instead diagnostic. The fact that they were seen by so many people means that they were the main medium for those people to imagine themselves” (Spanish National Cinema 11). Silverman claims that the individual does not directly inhabit either the symbolic order or the means of production, but rather is accommodated to his/her “reality” through an ideological facilitation or captation that takes place on an imaginary or fantasy level: “fantasy posits a given object which is considered (but not) capable of restoring wholeness to the subject” (Male Subjectivity 20). Filmic images are especially important within the context of the society of enjoyment because they serve as the imaginary supplement to the individual subject. Film, by its nature as a corporate product, is an artifact that reflects a collective creative experience, while its traditionally public consumption facilitates the reception of its logic within a social setting, encouraging the viewer to directly perceive a sense of commonality with other viewers. While individual directors can exercise a tremendous influence over the creation of their films, the larger political and economic issues, along with the various creative processes involved in the production of a film, are part of the reality of its production and as such reflect the collective imagination—in creation and consumption. I agree with Hopewell that “auteur is an inadequate term and that it is necessary to talk about Xdirector and his/her circumstances” (190). While I do not reject Andrew Higson’s suggestion when discussing national cinema that “the National should be used as much at the site of consumption as at the site of production” (52), this work focuses on films that have been produced and released in Spain. This is not to imply that films from outside Spain are irrelevant to the discussion, but rather that those film projects that are primarily produced and marketed in Spain will reflect ideological concerns both at the point of creation as well as at the point of consumption, and are thus considered doubly relevant as reflectors and propagators of a masculine ideal. Francesc Llinás expressed this dual ideological function: “el cine no es solo un reflejo de la sociedad, sino que, en mayor o menor grado, forma parte de aquella, es uno de tantos elementos que contribuyen a la dinámica social”/“cinema is not only a reflection of society but, to a greater or lesser degree, is part of it; it is one of the various elements that contribute to the social dynamic” (qtd. in Hurtado and Pico 17). Thus it reflects the processes that contribute to its production while also exerting an influence upon its release. Rather than seeking to achieve parity in the representation of regional or minority masculinities, this work focuses on hegemonic models at work, paying attention to how these interact with minority masculinities, women, and children.

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Starting in the 1970s a movement of sexual “openness” began to reflect changing mores in Spanish society and an apparent acceptance of homosexuality and other formerly rejected masculine models. But, within the context of my argument, this apparent openness did not necessarily imply greater freedom overall, nor general societal acceptance. Whereas Silverman considered “perversion” or non-phallic masculinities to be a way out of the oedipal patriarchy and thus a liberation (“Masochism” 23), I propose that this “liberation” was short-lived and ultimately the individual, while he may have gained some freedoms (especially in the realm of sexuality), was now subject to a demanding new master—the “anal father of enjoyment.” Oscar Guasch comments on the new sexual openness that has occurred in Spain since the fall of the dictatorship, indicating that its employment (in Foucaultian terms) is manipulated by the dominant discourse to conform to certain dictates of society: La nueva definición de normalidad sexual, la nueva forma de control social del sexo se organiza de una manera más sutil. Ya no se trata de prohibir y reprimir la actividad sexual . . . Se trata ahora de dar normas para el acceso al placer. La actividad sexual no es prohibida: se recomienda. Pero dentro de un orden. The new definition of sexual normalcy, the new social control of sex is organized in a more subtle way. It is no longer about prohibiting and repressing sexual activity. . . Now it is about providing norms for accessing pleasure. Sexual activity is no longer prohibited; it is recommended, but within an order. (Crisis 80)

So while the concept of freedom has been widely and consistently invoked since the fall of the dictatorship to describe social and political affairs, this “freedom” will be contextualized relative to the new framework of the demands and dictates of consumerism. Developments made by Jan Jagodzinski and Todd McGowan who linked psychoanalytic theory to the consumer context will be especially important for the development of my argument. Jagodzinski notes the shift from the oedipal father to the anal father relating it to the rise of consumerism, “In postmodern consumerism, therefore, the oedipal father is in the midst of disappearing and with him, are disappearing the prohibitions against enjoyment . . . rather than prohibiting enjoyment, this new father commands it, thus unleashing aggressivity in heretofore unimaginable ways” (32). The model of the “society of prohibition” as described by Todd McGowan in The End of Dissatisfaction? is particularly appropriate in the Spanish context as the National-Catholic State headed by Franco sought to dominate the individual. As prohibition gave way to commanded enjoyment, many of the changes he described—increased individualism, political apathy and the endless pursuit of pleasure—are represented in Spanish cinema.

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Introduction

Following Chris Perriam who links a star’s value to a certain place and zeitgeist (Stars and Masculinities 9), and Joseba Gabilondo (and others) who link the male character to a larger political and social context, I consider that male stars and primary male roles represent key movements and conflicts in the development of a collective as well as an individual identity. As Gabilondo states, “the Spanish nation and masculinity come culturally connected at least since the nineteenth century” (“Spanish Masculinity at the Verge of a Very Queer Breakdown” 4). And, clearly the male character’s ability to embody the nation is much older than that and literary/historical figures like the Cid, the famous medieval Spanish knight, have served to crystallize and reinforce collective values and national direction for centuries. Through attention to manifestations of masculinity that are considered hegemonic, as well as to contesting and diverging masculinities in widely viewed films, I demonstrate that societal shifts were accompanied by clear differences in the hegemonic model, most notably in its reorganization around consumption rather than prohibition. The effects of a harsh dictatorship influenced the formation of masculine subjectivity and its resultant gender “confusion,” but other forces, especially economic ones, contributed in creating masculine identity. Beginning around the early 1960s the male subject suffered a new sort of psychological subjugation as the mass media imposed a strong dictate to consume. This mandate became an unattainable goal that led to a ceaseless quest to consume, and caused, according to Jagodzinski “the imposition of a new kind of superego, one that develops from the Anal Father who psychically attacks us for our very failure to enjoy rather than for enjoyment itself as the old superego of the Name-of-the-Father once did” (33). Manifestations of masculinity in these films as well as their popular reception indicate how the imaginary placement of the male figure presents an opportunity for suture or imaginary self-recognition on the part of the spectator and thus the development of new identifications whose hegemonic norms may have less to do with the resolution of the traditional oedipal complex and the re-establishment of a heterosexual norm, and more to do with engaging in a never-ending quest to consume. By observing the ways in which male figures address their lack of traditional power, the ways in which they attempt to compensate, and how these conflicts are ultimately resolved—or not resolved, one can observe the effects of various pressures that contribute to the creation of male subjectivities, but also the coping mechanism that hegemonic masculinity employs to attempt to “stay on top.” A crisis in masculinity has been observed to have occurred in the early Transition period. This change prompted alterations to the hegemonic white male figure including a possible “feminization” which may be read in a variety of ways. It may represent a true adaptation to a more just and egalitarian society as the dictatorship gave way to democracy. Or, as MacKinnon (2003) has

Introduction

15

noted, rather than signaling a move toward a sharing of power, the “softening” in the appearance of hegemonic masculinity may have served as an adaptive mechanism which ensured further hegemonic masculine dominance. 12 However, the abundance of abusive, violent, alienated and/or disconnected masculine characters in films of recent years attests to the challenges men continue to face in acceding to the hegemonic model—and the societal pressure they experience to conform. While in many, many situations men can and do exert their power to further their own aims at a cost to others, and while white males are clearly overrepresented in positions of power in government, religious organizations, and the business world, this study would like to consider that hegemonic masculinity is a complex societal creation demanded by a certain socioeconomic structure which can be quite harmful to both women and men—and in whose creation both men and women are implicated. As Guasch states regarding the patriarchy in Spain in the twenty-first century, “Nuestra sociedad se empeña en hablar del patriarcado como si este fuera un producto creado por los varones con el que las mujeres no tuvieran nada que ver (excepto como víctimas). Hay que desarrollar nuevos puntos de vista sobre todo esto.”/“Our society insists on talking about the patriarchy as if it were a product created by men, and women had nothing to do with it (except as victims). We need to develop new points of view on all of this” (Actes 4). This study is an attempt to develop a new point of view, to move beyond a dualistic model and to try to comprehend through film how hegemonic masculinity “works” in twentieth and twenty-first century Spain. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF MASCULINITY AND SPANISH CINEMA Masculinity studies, now a burgeoning field of inquiry, had a relatively recent origin as an outgrowth of feminist studies in the 1970s. The feminist-inspired spectatorship paradigm sparked by Laura Mulvey’s important but subsequently challenged work on the male gaze served as the backdrop for a feminist inquiry of masculine spectatorship of film. She incorporated Freudian concepts 13 such as the phenomenon of castration anxiety and voyeurism to discuss the male reception of filmic images. Subsequent studies by Pam Cook writing about a group of 1940s melodramas noted that female desire and female point of view are highly contradictory (1982); and Steve Neale (1983) who explored voyeuristic and fetishistic looking in the Western genre of men by men continued to explore these concepts. Mulvey herself continued to revise her ideas especially her 1975 equation of the male with active agent of the gaze and the female with passive object and by 1985 was beginning to rethink the

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whole notion of this dualism. Other studies from the 1970s tried to show how masculinity was socially constructed and learned—and also how it was restrictive to the individual. 14 Important advances in the 1980s were often critical of the first wave’s attention to “sex role paradigms” for its relative lack of attention to the issue of power, questioning instead the very concept of gender and the discourses of power that contributed to their creation. Fundamental contributions were made in the area of masculinity as related to hegemonic power structures by various scholars including Anthony Easthope in What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculinity Myth in Popular Culture (1986) in which he sought to problematize the supposed “universality” of the patriarchal identity and show that masculinity itself is historically relative. Following Freud and Lacan, Easthope discussed the causes for masculine violence, jealousy, and homophobia, linking them to a struggle that the male individual experiences to be masculine. R. W. Connell, in her work, Gender and Power (1987), related masculinity to questions of politics and power using the term “hegemony” to talk about masculine domination. Michel Foucault’s work on the power of discourse within the area of gender was elaborated in his multi-volume work, The History of Sexuality, whose first three volumes appeared before his death in 1984 and which outlined the nature of power exerted through the discourses of psychiatry, the penal system, and medicine in the development of gender identity. His work, along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, formed the basis for the newly developing field of queer studies—a field of inquiry anticipated by Guy Hocquenghem in his important work, Homosexual Desire (1972). Hocquenghem’s rejection of the coherence of “ego” or “self” and his focus on desire itself rather than on the individual’s choice of object was also explored by Deleuze and Guattari who rejected the Oedipus complex as a tool of capitalism and posited man as a “desiring machine” capable of “plugging in” to other such machines in a variety of configurations. Kosofsky Sedgwick was on the cutting edge in the development of cultural studies, using literary criticism to question the dominant discourses of sexuality as well as race and gender. Judith Butler’s important concept of “performativity,” the idea that the repetition of stylized bodily acts or “performances” established the appearance of gender, proposed that the category was neither natural nor stable, but rather the product of an ongoing process of repetition. Her work was influenced by the advent of post-structural theory and rather than accepting the idea of a fixed gender identity, she focused on normativity and performativity in her analyses. Mark Simpson followed Butler’s lead in his work Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (1994) where he reported a “crisis of looking” in which masculinity seeks to prevent the “deflation” of manliness in the face of consumer images that commodify the male body and,

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17

in this way, threaten the stability of the very fraught identification with the oedipal father, as “looking” becomes confused with “looked-at-ness” and thus homosexuality. He also explored glamor and transvestism in relation to castration anxiety. Another important trend in masculinity studies in the 1980s and early 1990s was composed of ethnographic and sociological studies designed to gather information about masculinity as it functioned on a societal level. It arose partly in response to feminist theory and aimed to collect detailed historical or ethnographic case histories. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne’s edited volume Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (1994) adopted an anthropological view using the concept of hegemonic masculinity to engage in a Foucaultian inquiry of masculine power negotiations including an exploration of camp aesthetics. In Masculinities (1995) R. W. Connell continued to advance her theory of hegemony in masculinity and examined the significance of differences among masculinities—a term she insisted must be seen as plural (as did Steven Neale in his 1993 volume Screening the Male), while exploring the importance of economic and institutional structures in the construction of masculinity. Throughout the 1990s more and more interdisciplinary work combining literary, cultural, and media studies contributed to the importance of the representation of masculinity and its larger significance. Althusserian and Lacanian paradigms that had begun to be incorporated in the 1970s lost favor in the 1990s as performativity remained the focus. Among these, Peter Lehman’s Running Scared (1993) is noteworthy for its problematizing of representations of the male body, especially the penis, attempting to show how various art forms have worked to control representations of the male body in order to support the patriarchy. This theme was taken up and explored further by Toby Miller (1995, 2001) who connected the appearance of the penis in popular culture with the commodification of the male subject, noting that man can take the place of either subject or object of visual spectatorship. Masculinity studies in the early 1990s returned to an emphasis on the need to question the harmful effects of masculinity, focusing on the durability of masculine domination despite societal changes that would seem to soften patriarchal models of the past. Susanne Hatty’s Masculinities, Violence and Culture (2000) explores the idea that violence, in the service of the modern self, preserves individuality and forestalls the possibility of fusion with the dangerous “not self.” She included a call to replace independence with the concept of interdependence as a means to creating a more productive, less violent model of masculinity. Pierre Bordieu continued the discussion of male dominance in Masculine Domination (2001) in which he challenged the naturalized and timeless quality of masculinity which reproduces its dominance through the institutions that it has created. Kenneth MacKinnon in Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media(2003) returned to the focus on performativity and the

18

Introduction

instability of masculinity. He explored the use of media representations to allay fear of the loss of identity that results in the Lacanian paradigm from the threat of the restoration of unity with the mother’s body. He considered popular culture as a site of contest in which an apparently softened version of masculinity—now rooted in consumerism—resumes a position of dominance. The Trouble with Men (2004) by Phil Powrie discussed the phenomenon of male hysteria (first proposed by Freud) as a sort of smokescreen under which to seek a realignment of power that allows a modernized version of masculinity to remain dominant. R. W. Connell in her general overview of gender theory (2002) returned to the concept of hegemonic masculinity to discuss its implicit violence and to echo Bordieu’s concern that patriarchal power operates through the routine functioning of societal institutions. While Žižek and McGowan have not attempted to construct a coherent theory of masculinity, their work serves as the basis for my current elaboration. As the emphasis on the social and cultural construction of masculinity in popular culture proved an especially productive area of masculinity studies, Lacanian paradigms such as those put forth by Žižek and McGowan, including the concept of the acceptance of lack as the price one must pay to enter the symbolic order, were the subject of renewed attention. The Freudian postulation about the beginnings of civilization which cited the collective murder of the father of the primal horde as the foundational moment for social life, revived by Žižek, Jagodzinski, and McGowan, serves as a useful model for discussing the relationship of prohibition and desire to masculine subject formation. Žižek expands on Lacanian psychoanalysis dividing reality into the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, emphasizing the real which for him is not a meaningfully ordered totality, but rather points to that uncanny element that resists incorporation into either the symbolic or the imaginary, and thus cannot be assimilated within any system of thought. Jagodzinski suggests that the Freudian model can be used to discuss masculinity in a consumerist age, focusing on the post-oedipal return of the “anal father of enjoyment” who commands enjoyment much as the oedipal father prohibited it. McGowan’s synthesis of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis within the consumerist context attempts to explain how the return of the “anal father of enjoyment” has influenced society and the individual in the age of global capitalism. In the Spanish context relatively little attention was paid to the subject of masculinity before the 1990s, with a few notable exceptions. Two books from the 1980s mapped out a considerable amount of terrain in the area if only through suggestion rather than the development of a theoretical framework. These are El varón español a la búsqueda de su identidad (1986) by Lidia Falcón, creator of the Feminist Party in Spain, and Los usos amorosos de la posguerra (1987) by writer Carmen Martín Gaite. Though neither work purports to provide a comprehensive view of masculinity,

Introduction

19

their very personal styles allow the reader to ascertain a great deal about gender relations from their points of view in the 1980s, including commentary on those historical factors that contributed to their creation. In other areas, ethnographic studies including David Gilmore’s studies of Andalusian social life and aggression (1980, 1987) and the anthology Dislocating Masculinity (1994), along with Stanley Brandes’s Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore (1980), focused on elements of masculinity in Andalusia. Few other book-length studies have been devoted to theorizing masculinity outside of the cultural studies paradigm, with the notable exception of Oscar Guasch whose work encompasses the definition and historical analysis of masculinity studies especially as they relate to questions of homosexuality. He draws heavily on Foucault to explore the ways in which the various discourses such as religion, medicine, psychology and the current “el sexo más seguro”/ “safe sex” in the age of AIDS, have contributed to the creation of masculinities as well as the way in which these interact politically, observing the assimilation and neutralization of the gay movement within popular consumerist culture after the dictatorship. The majority of studies on masculinity in Spain have taken a cultural studies approach in that they consider various manifestations of masculinity in literature, film, and the media in general, and thus many of these will be integrated here in a discussion of research done in cinema. An important current in this area is the work done on the representation of masculinity and political identity. Various scholars have worked in this area including Paul Julian Smith, Chris Perriam, Isolina Ballesteros and Joseba Gabilondo. In Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Writing and Film, 1960–1990 (1992), Paul Julian Smith shows how lesbian and gay identities are inseparable from historical and political questions of national and ethnic identities. He discusses at length the way in which the films of Pedro Almodóvar appropriate popular genres and narratives such as melodrama and romance for the gay imagination. For Smith, the subject is caught at a crossroads between individual identification and cultural determination, and therefore cannot reject the power of the political in the formation of individual identity. Gender transgression and political identity also serve as the basis for Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies (2002) by Tatjana Pavlović, and Placeres ocultos (2010) by Alejandro Melero Salvador in which they discuss the transformation in the representation of formerly marginalized sexualities in the period of the Transition. Perriam’s book Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema (2003) considers the cultural significance of some of the most important male stars of Spanish film, considering that they can be read as “embodying the nation” and especially that masculine stars represent important junctures or crisis moments in Spanish history; and his later Spanish Queer Cinema, focuses on LGBTQ+ cinema attempting to move the focus away from the new “normative” homosexual representation as white, healthy,

20

Introduction

financially successful, and male. Joseba Gabilondo, in various articles dealing with Spanish masculinity in literature and film (1997, 1999, 2001, 2002) is important in terms of his attention to the conflation of masculinity and political identity. He points to the representation of the male figure in film as a site for the embodiment of issues related to nationalism, fundamentalism, sexuality, etc. He contextualizes masculine identity as within, and inseparable from, one’s political identity and explores how they interact, discussing gay culture’s re-appropriation of official culture in the form of camp, as well as the interplay between national and regional Spanish masculine models. Isolina Ballesteros’ 2002 article “Counted Days for the Lone Man: Decentered Masculinity and Ideological Fatigue in El hombre solo (1994) by Bernardo Atxaga, and Días contados (1993) by Imanol Uribe” explores regional masculinity’s marginalization and the de-centering of the male subject to observe that the male character often goes through a masochistic test only to recapture a hegemonic position in the end. Other works that focus on visual culture as a means of exploring larger social, political and economic issues are Marsha Kinder’s “The Children of Franco in the New Spanish Cinema” (1983) which discusses the traumatizing effects of the dictatorship on those who reached adulthood during the Franco years; and Refiguring Spain (1997), an edited volume which continues to explore the impact the dictatorship has had on the Spanish psyche in its aftermath. Other works with a similar focus are Cine vasco de ayer a hoy (1984) by Alberto López Echevarrieta; Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema (1998) edited by Jenaro Talens and Santos Zunzunegui; Cine (Ins)urgente (2001) and Los “Otros” (2001) by Isolina Ballesteros; The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (2005) edited by Alberto Mira; ¿Identidades españolas? (2006) by Cristina Sánchez-Conejero; Spanish Visual Culture (2006) by Paul Julian Smith, and Spanish Cultural Studies (1995), edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi which includes several studies that consider the effects of consumerism on individual subject formation. “Paleto cinema” (2002) by Nathan Richardson shows how “escapist cinema” is complicit with the very culture it supposedly critiques as in the so-called “paleto” or country bumpkin films which use a variety of means to position the audience as consumers. Justin Crumbaugh in “‘Spain is Different’: touring Late-Francoist Cinema with Manolo Escobar” (2002) takes a similar approach by analyzing popular films by the actor Manolo Escobar to show how this actor and star played an important role in the ideological facilitation of the Spanish public to incipient tourism and consumerism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And finally Cristina Moreiras Menor’s Cultura Herida (2002) theorizes a connection between democracy and consumerism in Spain, showing how the postmodern consuming subject suffers from alienation, political apathy, and the lack of a sense of solidarity with others. She shows that pluralism in society does not correspond to solidarity within the consumer context.

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Other studies in masculinity in Spanish film include Jo Labanyi’s work on the missionary- and folkloric-themed films of the dictatorship. Recalling work done in spectatorship theory, as she explores the possibility of subversive mis-readings of these popular genres. Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair in their edited volume, Gender and Spanish Cinema (2004) acknowledge cinema and masculinity studies’ debt to psychoanalytic theory as articles in their book explore various aspects of cinematic representations of gender including performance, gender identity related with political identity, marginalized gender identities, and the horror film. David Garland’s 1991 article, “A Ms-take in the Making? Transsexualism Post-Franco, Post-Modern, Post-Haste” bears mentioning as well since it is a relatively early attempt to read transsexualism in relation to consumer culture. He observes, as does Guasch later on, that consumer culture serves as a “resituating, anticarnivalizing force” in the lives of those represented in the documentary films he studies. Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Perriam’s article on post-Almodóvar gay-themed films continues in this vein, debating whether these camp films represent real change in sexual politics or simply an attempt to cash in on Almodóvar’s popular style. Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito’s Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (2007) explores the representation of the masculine body in film considering it as a marked and non-neutral space for the embodiment of political and social issues. They study films from the last three decades in terms of how the bodies of male stars are represented and how these representations mediate the perceptions that different audiences obtain of Spanish masculinity. Their analysis of the phenomenon of “Landismo” (films protagonized by characters played by the comedic actor Alfredo Landa) as well as the success of films by director/ actor Santiago Segura indicate anxieties experienced in the face of social change. Fouz Hernández’s most recent book, Cuerpos de cine: Masculinidades carnales en el cine y la cultura popular contemporáneos (2013) continues to explore representations of the male body in the work of successful Spanish directors and other popular culture sources. Other works on Spanish cinema include the excellent (though now limited by their date of publication) examinations of critically successful films provided by John Hopewell in Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (1987) and Marsha Kinder in Blood Cinema (1993). Hopewell provides an excellent analysis of a large number of films and includes information about their reception while exploring the question of whether psychological dramas represented on film can illuminate political consciousness. Kinder makes a connection between the political and the family, pointing to the importance of the representation of the interaction between family members, and specifically the oedipal conflict, to speak about political issues and historical events that were repressed from open filmic representations in the Franco era. In her assessment, the representation of violent and dysfunctional masculinities in Spanish film can gen-

22

Introduction

erally be linked to a problem with the father figure, and she uses the contrast between primitive sacrifice and modern massacre to discuss the effects of the dictatorial “father” on Spain. However, due to the importance of the oedipal narrative in Western culture, she suggests that marginalized or disadvantaged groups may try to alter the myth as a means of changing the social order and the process of subject formation. The relation between the representation of family relationships and the political subtext is also taken up by Thomas Deveny in Cain on Screen: Contemporary Spanish Cinema (1993). He reflects on the connection between represented conflicts and social and political issues, referring to the fraternal antagonism that has existed historically in the so-called “two Spains” and naming it “cainismo.” In his work, as in the work of Jo Labanyi, Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain (2002), a resurgence within artistic mediums of unresolved conflicts of the past is observed. A chronological approach is taken in several important works on Spanish cinema. Spanish film under the dictatorship is the subject of various studies including Virginia Higginbotham’s Spanish Film under Franco (1988) which discusses how Franco used film as a visual language to impose a mythology of his regime, and also traces how the countermyth or “estética franquista” employed by Carlos Saura and others served to undermine that mythology. Spanish National Cinema (2003) by Nuria Triana-Toribio also explores the concept of national cinema including both popular and art-house cinema in her analyses. Historia del cine español (2004) by Román Gubern et al. provides a detailed sociohistorical chronology, embedding films in their historical moment in terms of the history of Spanish film legislation, viewership, and social and political context. And Vicente Benet’s sweeping El cine español, una historia cultural (2012) traces the entire history of Spanish cinema, interweaving a great number of films with their cultural context, showing how these films reflect major political, social, and cultural movements of their day. Cinema and political and social change of the Transition is the subject of various works including Manuel Trenzado Romero’s Cultura de masas y cambio político (1999) that considers cinema as a place of symbolic confrontation in which relations of power are negotiated; Voces en la niebla (2004) by Javier Hernández Ruiz and Pablo Pérez Rubio which focuses on the cinematic reflection of “pactismo” or consensus politics that existed as the country moved from dictatorship to democracy; and the collection of proceedings from a conference held by the Asociación Española de Historiadores del Cine: El cine español durante la Transición democrática (2005) that examine various aspects of Transition cinema. Another collection of essays, El cine y la transición política [1975–1982] (2011) edited by Manuel Palacio deals directly with the role of audiovisual media in the process of political transition. Though artistic or critically successful films were featured in the majority of works on Spanish cinema until the 1990s, the trend in more

Introduction

23

recent criticism has shifted toward a consideration of popular cinema as the cultural studies movement disregards “quality” as a criteria for study. Among works that focus on popular cinema are various volumes by Terenci Moix that explore film icons especially from the 1940s in Spain and abroad, exploring their power to transport and engage the Spanish viewer with the exotic “Other”; Spanish Popular Cinema (2004) by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Andrew Willis which, through popular cinema, explores the subversive potential of comedy, the influence of consumerism and the power of film in the reworking of history; and Pantalla popular: el cine español durante el gobierno de la derecha (1996–2003) (2006) by José María Caparrós Lera who, though he proposes an analysis of popular cinema, falls back on judgments of quality in his evaluation of these films. Other titles in recent years that deal with the role of popular film during the dictatorship are Del sainete al esperpento (2011) by José Luis Castro de Paz and Josetxo Cerdán, El cine de barrio tardofranquista (2012) by Miguel Ángel Huerta and Por un cine patrio (2013) by Marta García Carrión. Another fertile and growing area of study is genre films, especially horror and exploitation films from the Transition and beyond. Many of these, with their glossy format and enthusiastic descriptions, bridge the gap between fan literature and cultural studies. Among these, titles such as Victor Matellano’s Spanish Horror (2009) and Spanish exploitation: sexo, sangre y balas (2011), and La década de oro del cine de terror español (2012) by Javier Pulido, explore the role these films had in internationalizing tastes and subversively critiquing Spanish culture. More academic critical studies on the topic have begun to emerge in recent years. Spanish Horror Film (2012) by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll provides one of the first in-depth explorations of the genre in Spain focusing on the critical and cultural contexts of reception of these films. And, in Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco (2015) Stephen Thrower makes a bid toward canonization of this extremely popular and prolific “outsider” director who, much reviled and simultaneously loved, fathered the genre of sado-erotic cinema in Spain. SPANISH MASCULINITY AND CONSUMERISM It is revealing that the area of masculinity studies has a relatively recent origin (as an outgrowth of feminist studies in the 1970s) given the importance and influence that gender relations have historically had on almost all aspects of daily life, especially in Spain where violence of gender continues to be a problem despite legislative equality. The “given-ness” or invisibility of masculinity which refused interrogation as part of masculine privilege has now given way to an abundance of suggestive studies. While this study makes no pretense to attempting to resolve violence

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of gender or any other social ill, it does seek to add to the discussion by historicizing masculinity through an observation of its cinematic performance within the larger political and economic context in Spain from 1939 to the present. As Pierre Bordieu points out in his work, Masculine Domination, “Combating these historical forces of dehistoricization must be the most immediate objective of an enterprise of mobilization aimed at putting history in motion again by neutralizing the mechanisms of the neutralizations of history” (viii), and it is the purpose of this study to open discussion on a most important and underrepresented area of investigation—the effect of consumerism on masculine subject formation as represented in Spanish cinema. Recent theorization of a change in the fundamental organizing principle of society—from prohibition to commanded enjoyment—opens the way to an examination of the effect that this radical change has had on masculine subject formation. The relevance of this approach is especially clear in the case of Spain in which this change occurred abruptly and dramatically, and is thus more directly observable than in other countries, such as the United States, in which this change occurred more gradually. Film itself, given its widely-theorized role in the captation and interpellation of the viewer, proves a fertile ground in which to observe this change. This book is divided into five parts. This introduction defines the subject under study, details the methodology used to approach it, defines the scope of the project, and outlines existing scholarship in the field. Chapter 1 considers cinema that appeared during the dictatorship (here defined as the period between 1939 and 1973 with the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco (Franco’s designated successor) especially regarding the promotion of a specific hegemonic model based on self-sacrifice and prohibition. It also considers the ways in which this model was undermined, especially in the latter part of the dictatorship when the promotion of consumerist values began to conflict with it. While “art-house” cinema sought to openly treat the disjuncture caused by economic changes, popular cinema looked for ways to reconcile traditional hegemonic masculinity with the fundamentally antithetical consumerist values, especially by focusing on a sort of hyper-heterosexuality that allowed self-indulgence to coincide with heterosexual virility. The chapter concludes with an in-depth analysis of singer/actor Manolo Escobar who was positioned as a clearly transitional figure given his embeddedness within dictatorship popular culture as well as his characters’ consistent success and adaptation within a consumer environment. Chapter 2 explores the effect on masculinity of this opposition between the traditional patriarchal model based on prohibition and hierarchy, and the consumerist model that promoted self-indulgence and enjoyment. In the early part of the Transition period (1973–1982) the abundant cinematic examples of “broken” or “perverse” (considered within the context of the Oedipus complex) masculinities reveal the incongruity of the two models, as well

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as the pressures exerted on the male individual in the aftermath of the death of the patriarchal father figure, Francisco Franco. This death, while not considered of utmost importance in and of itself, does provide a convenient punctuation marking the end of the psychical reign of the “father of prohibition,” a moment represented in film by the appearance of masculine models that undo the patriarchy and represent the liberalization of desire that was taking place at the time. The discussion of desire and objectification in horror films reveals anxieties that surfaced as the male characters are forced to perceive themselves as objects to be consumed as well. Chapter 3 continues to explore the liberalization of desire as seen in films from 1983 to 1992—a phenomenon that came to be equated with modernity as seen in the widely promoted Almodovarian model of fluid sexuality. Spanish cinema of this period, especially under Miró Law funding that rewarded high-budget “artistic” literary and historical adaptations became homogenized, reflecting consensus politics as masculinities appeared to become softer and masculine bodies were packaged for visual consumption much as female bodies had been in the past. The chapter ends by analyzing the eruption of various “ghosts” of the past—unassimilated bits of Spanish history that embodied themselves in films of the mystery and horror genres as well as those of regional Basque cinema. Chapter 4 provides a brief view of several trends in the representation of masculinity from 1993 to the present. During this period of heightened global consumerism, cinema in Spain reflects a growing emphasis on image over “reality” including the problematic disjuncture that occurs when one’s self-image is discontinuous with one’s physical reality. Individualism increases in importance as films focus on the hedonistic pleasure-seeking individual who disregards the well-being of others. This trend often leads to alienation and violence, though some alternative models promoting connection with others appear at this time as well. The representation of minority and regional masculinities increase in frequency though characters in these films are often relegated to token exoticized roles in continued subordination to white, heterosexual hegemonic representations. NOTES 1. Recently designated Prime Minister, Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated in Madrid by the Basque separatist movement ETA on December 20, 1973. “Operación Ogro” as it was referred to by ETA, consisted of an explosion detonated under the street on which Carrero Blanco customarily drove to church. It sent his car flying 66 feet into the air, killing both Carrero Blanco and his bodyguard and driver. 2. The popular and highly acclaimed United States television series Mad Men echoes this scenario in its opening sequence in which a male character, presumably the series protagonist Don Draper, falls, helpless, through a collage of similar images. 3. “Tercera vía” is a term used to designate those films from the 1970s that sought a middle road between popular and intellectual film. Its primary exponent was pro-

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ducer José Luis Dibildos who sought to make films that were commercially viable, acceptable to the dictatorship, and which began to engage with social changes of the era. They dealt timidly with social issues such as extramarital affairs, abortion, etc. but were relatively conservative in form. 4. José María Jover Zamora et al. refer in España: sociedad, política y civilización (siglos XIX–XX) (2001), to a “nueva filosofía oficial del Estado franquista” that gave rise to a period of economic stabilization (1959–1961) and the institution of neo-capitalist reforms designed to stimulate export, open the country to foreign investment and promote tourism in Spain. Part of this effort included a grand propaganda campaign to reach private citizens. 5. For a summary of the Moncloa Pacts see “El ajuste económico de la transición”/ “Economic Adjustment in the Transition,” by Carles Sudrià in El País, February 13, 2012. http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2012/02/10/actualidad/1328871012_734915. html. 6. All translations are mine. 7. For a more complete discussion of the use of this term see “Hegemonic Masculinity, Rethinking the Concept” by R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt in Gender and Society, Dec. 2005. 8. In 1957 a number of university-trained, Opus Dei-affiliated men were appointed to top government positions in Spain. Among these were López Rodó, Alberto Ullastres, and Mariano Narvarro Rubio. They brought new economic ideas that replaced those of the Falange and early Francoism, leading to neoliberal reforms in government, especially as related to the 1959 “Plan de Estabilización.” 9. NO-DO newsreels served as the official source of government news stories shown at the cinema before each feature film. For a further exploration of the relationship between the NO-DO newsreels and dictatorship culture see Los años del NO-DO: El mundo al alcance de todos los españoles. Rafael Abella and Gabriel Cardona. Barcelona: Destino, 2008. 10. Various dates have been given for this widely recognized period known as “la transición.” A strictly political definition such as that employed by José María Jover Zamora, et. al. in España: sociedad, política y civilización (siglos XIX–XX) (2001) uses the dates 1975–1982, while Teresa Vilarós, considering a cultural transition more in line with my own, considers the years from 1973–1993 in El mono del desencanto—una crítica cultural de la transición española (1998). 11. See McGowan’s Psychoanalytic Film Theory and ‘The Rules of the Game’ for a more complete explanation. 12. For a more extensive analysis of “crisis masculinity” see Fintan Walsh’s Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis, Palgrave, 2010, and On Men: Masculinity and Crisis, Chatto & Windus, 2000, by Anthony Clare. 13. For a history of Freudian concepts related to masculinity studies see R. W. Connell Masculinities. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. 14. See David & Brannon 1976, Farrell 1974, Tolson 1977, Goldberg 1976.

ONE Hegemonic Masculinity under the Dictatorship

In the dictatorship years masculine character positioning in relation to consumption and enjoyment changes dramatically over time. While early dictatorship films represent the officially endorsed vision of masculinity as seen in the so-called “cine de cruzada,” later films call the hegemonic model into question in a variety of ways. In each film the principal male character is juxtaposed with hysterical and unstable elements of “unacceptable” masculinity, and in many of these films hegemonic models are undermined, especially in films made during the later dictatorship. The roles of women and children also interact with and contribute to the establishment of the hegemonic male, generally through contrast, though often these binary dichotomies are difficult to maintain, and masculinity’s fundamental instability becomes apparent. Given that a film’s ideological effect can never be reliably calculated due to differences in identifications and assimilation practices on the part of the viewer, it is important to recognize, simply, that hegemonic models could be undermined by a public who, in the process of appropriation, participated in the act of creating meaning. Negative models and possible “unauthorized” readings serve as an indication of the fears and pitfalls related to accession to the hegemonic model, and are especially important for understanding the process of masculine identity formation in Franco’s dictatorship Spain. Finally, the chapter concludes with an in-depth study of the cultural significance of star singer/actor Manolo Escobar. Represented as conservative media darling, his films can be seen to facilitate the transition to modern consumerist values.

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CINE DE CRUZADA: SELF-SACRIFICE AND INSERTION INTO THE MASCULINE HIERARCHY In Spain, prohibitions were enforced by a brutal and unforgiving regime that sought complete conformity to a hierarchical social structure allowing very little personal freedom to the individual, and brutally punishing transgressions. This phenomenon, coupled with economic devastation and shortages caused by the war, forced the individual to renounce personal pleasure or risk censure, imprisonment, or even death. In exchange for conformity, the individual was granted a place in the social hierarchy. The traditional mechanism of social control in Spain, personal honor, or “a good name,” is seen in post-war films to be more important than personal enjoyment or satisfaction. This tendency is in keeping with the requirements of a society of prohibition which McGowan describes as the need to sacrifice individual, private enjoyment in favor of societal demands and requirements. Sacrifice for the sake of the collective is what grants the individual status and identity within the society. This social identity and public recognition were available, however, only to male individuals who adopted a normative, heterosexual subject positioning which ensured participation in the social hierarchy. This subject positioning centered itself on the transcendental phallus as the anchoring signifier, and equated it with the penis, establishing patriarchal dominance in which “deviance” was punished through ostracism from the public sphere. The war films described in this section illustrate a connection between the renunciation of pleasure and the insertion of the individual into the patriarchal social hierarchy—the greater the renunciation, the more highly esteemed is the individual. In each of these films one or more of the characters struggle with this insertion, and the repetition of the theme reveals the unstable and performative nature of the masculine heterosexual subject positioning. Franco’s immediate concerns after fighting an economically and spiritually exhausting civil war were to legitimize his rebellion, to achieve consensus among the populace, and to ensure that the military hierarchical social structure, with himself clearly at the fore, would be accepted and maintained (Trenzado Romero 56). Though it has been pointed out that the Francoist State never had an unproblematically clear nor coherent plan for the surveillance and reeducation of its citizenry (Lázaro Reboll 40), Franco recognized the ideological power of cinema. His regime attempted to exploit cinema for its purposes starting with a censorship effort even before the end of the war, and developing into a full-fledged national cinema in the 1940s (Spanish National Cinema, Triana-Toribio 17). Though generally the state did not directly produce its own cinema after the war, it controlled and directed cinematic production with clear ideological goals through a system of censorship and subsidies. As Trenzado Romero notes:

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No sorprende que en poco más de un lustro el muy desregulado cine español pasase a estar sometido a una férrea censura (1937), inserto en un sistema proteccionista altamente arbitrario (1941), sometido en todos sus aspectos laborales y crediticios al sindicato único (1942) y con la cinematografía informativa obligatoria monopolizada por el Nuevo Estado (1943). Por este motivo, podemos afirmar—en contra de la historiografía conservadora de Méndez-Leite y otros—que la implantación de un sistema de protección a la cinematografía obedeció más a una estrategia comunicativa global de control que a un verdadero interés por la creación de un tejido industrial sólido. It is not surprising that, almost overnight, the completely unregulated Spanish film industry was suddenly subjected to extreme censorship (1937), inserted into a highly arbitrary protectionist system (1941), subjected to a single syndicate for all labor and credit issues (1942) and had obligatory news releases completely monopolized by the new regime. Because of this we can affirm—in contrast to the conservative historiography of Méndez-Leite and others—that the institution of a protectionist system conformed more to an overall strategy of control rather than to a real interest in creating a solid industry. (134)

The Franco dictatorship recognized that the control of dangerous ideas, and the promotion of desirable values could be obtained by controlling and directing the cinema. In the early dictatorship it was the war film that served as vehicle for dictatorship ideology and self-justification. Franco himself penned a glorified autobiography under the pseudonym “Jaime de Andrade,” representing himself as a war hero. The script was then passed on to the director José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, nephew of the former dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, who came to be considered a “primary exponent of cine cruzada” (Stone 28). The film was released under the title Raza (Race) in 1941. The crusade cinema films produced in the years following the conflict in Spain, which includes the four films discussed in this section, were considered the most important vehicle for the dissemination of the Falange’s extreme nationalism in the early 1940s. “Cine de cruzada” or crusade cinema, a term used for pseudo-historical war-themed films released in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was one of the earliest coherent cinematic manifestations of the dictatorship ethos. These films, produced and released in the early years of the dictatorship, focus on Spain as an embattled nation that needs to defend itself and preserve an essential national character which is being threatened by the infidel. By pitting good versus evil, strong versus weak, “right” versus “wrong,” these films create a fairly consistent vision of dictatorship ideology, especially its concept of heroism. Thus they can be studied as both producers and reflectors of hegemonic masculinity, or rather culturally normative ideal masculine behavior as it existed under the dictatorship.

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Indeed, as Mark Simpson suggests, the war film is specifically concerned with masculinity: “The war film is perhaps the richest of all texts of masculinity. Escape from the feminine, bloody initiation into manhood, male bonding: these are all themes which the traditional war film employs. In a sense, the war/military film is hardly ever about anything other than what it means to be a man and how to become one” (212). A manifesto that appeared in the newly created Falangist film journal Primer Plano makes explicit the connection between the aggressive masculinity represented in these films and Spanishness: “Not a metre more . . . to try and give us melodrama in a lamentable exploitation of tenderness. . . . We want instead a cinema that exalts the deeds and actions of those who fought and gave their lives for the mission and the greatness of their Patria with a spirit and an outlook on life fundamentally Hispanic” (Anon. 1940 n.p. qtd. in Triana-Toribio 44). This cinema contributes to the idea of a revaluation of violence as creative and purifying through the celebration of militarism and martial values (Spanish National Cinema Triana-Toribio 46). As one of only three films in which the State intervened directly in its production (along with Alba de América [Dawn of America] and Franco, ese hombre [Franco, That Man]), Raza may be considered emblematic of the ideology of the regime in its early years. The positioning of masculine characters as well as the interpellated masculine viewer of this and other films of crusade cinema such as Sin novedad en el alcázar (The Siege of the Alcazar; 1940), Harka (1941), and Los últimos de Filipinas (Last Stand in the Philippines; 1945), shows how an ethos of self-sacrifice was solidified as power was centralized in the hands of the State and the Church. The good subject was seen not only to accept, but to embrace prohibition, clearly enjoying service for the sake of his country and religious values. Each of these films uses history as the basis for a non-historical elaboration of the themes of brotherhood, tradition, crusade, obedience, selfsacrifice, and a sort of transcendent experience of masculinity that, even as it finds itself subservient to higher powers, draws the assurance that within the rigid hierarchy in which it is placed, it will be recognized and respected. Historic war films serve as a vehicle for the reworking and propagation of dictatorship values, including a strong emphasis on the primacy of a patriarchal social arrangement. Each film also contains negative male figures, characters that are shown to be undesirable as role models and who fail to triumph, and are thus exposed as clearly inferior to the positive models that embody those values considered important by the State. So what was the image of the successful male that Francoism promoted in the early years of the dictatorship, and what purpose might it have served? How was this model potentially contested in the same films in which it was lauded, and what ramifications did this have for the representation of masculinity later in the dictatorship? In each of the four

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cine de cruzada films considered in this section, a clearly hegemonic model appears with little variation: a physically strong, emotionally reserved character who shuns pleasure in favor of service to God and Country. The principal male character is juxtaposed with characters displaying what could be perceived as stereotypically feminine behaviors such as concern for personal comfort, appearance, and safety. They are motivated by self-interest and pleasure rather than a sense of duty, and the films represent a variety of ways in which non-hegemonic models are condemned. In an effort to reverse those democratizing tendencies that had been cultivated during the years of the Second Republic (1931–1939), the early Francoist dictatorship glorified the concept of the “buen vasallo” or “good vassal,” a model whose maximum expression can be found in “El Cid,” that medieval Spanish hero who renounced self-interest in favor of service to the king. Promotion of this model helped to legitimize and defend a dictatorial hierarchy, a structure that was supported and reflected in its foundational pillars of the military, Catholicism and Fascism. Marsha Kinder indicates the importance of fetishizing and specularizing individual sacrifice in film as a means of transforming modern massacre into a sacrificial ritual, thus justifying it. She states: “I am suggesting that during Spain’s neo-Catholic revival in the 1940s, an analogous situation occurs, where the baroque fetishization of sacrificial death in the popular arts helps to empower both the religious orthodoxy of the church and the absolute power of Franco” (Blood Cinema 142). Thus, recent human destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War was bypassed in favor of the glorification of individual sacrifice. Virginia Higginbotham points out the importance of crusade cinema in the years following the conflict in Spain: “War films exhorting the values and triumph of Franco’s forces served not only to justify the Civil War but also to extend sympathy for the fascist victory into the postwar peace” (18). Higginbotham draws on Barthes’s conception of myth in her groundbreaking work on Spanish cinema during the dictatorship to point out that “History transformed into myth becomes distorted and duplicitous in order to serve not fact or authenticity, or even the demands of the box office, but an intention. Franco’s intention, of course, was to force acceptance of his military dictatorship, and he used film as a visual language to impose the mythology of his regime” (x). Crusade cinema films define the meaning of “Spain” and “Spanishness” through a manipulation of the male character who, while wearing the uniform that represents his country, metonymically represents the Spanish people as self-sacrificing and devoted to the State. The ideological “chain of meanings” (S. Hall 81) in these films links successful masculinity to heroic sacrifice, obviating any inconvenient associations with violent massacre and producing a particular subject position for the viewer. As Stuart Hall states: “ideologies ‘work’ by constructing for their subjects (individual and collective) positions of

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identification and knowledge which allow them to ‘utter’ ideological truths as if they were their authentic authors” (82). The consistently repeated message in crusade cinema worked to reconstruct a Spaniard’s sense of “truth” regarding masculine virtue and success. While the ideas represented in these films were not new, they served an ideological purpose similar to that described by Alan Williams in Film and Nationalism: “If [films] cannot by themselves mobilize nations and give them a new direction, they can, apparently, reflect and keep in circulation values and behaviors associated with a particular nation” (8). By keeping in circulation a particular vision of masculinity, these films propagated a hegemonic model that excluded contesting representations and attempted to cement the male into a role within a strictly hierarchical model in which any satisfaction the subject was allowed to experience was to come from self-abnegation and identification of the self with the needs of society as a whole. In this way the dictatorship fought individualizing, self-serving tendencies that might allow divisive debate regarding the legitimacy of its own projects and interests. The epic model represented in these films provides an exalted framework in which to stage masculinity’s struggle in an adverse and hostile wartime environment. A mythic and timeless basis is established in each of these films either by portraying or making nostalgic reference to Spanish wars of the past; or by staging the action in remote, exotic locations as if to recall Spain’s “glorious” colonial history. In Raza it is through reference to the Almogávares, in Los últimos de Filipinas it is the struggle at a remote outpost in the Philippine islands, and in Harka through the exotic dress and backdrop of the Moroccan desert. This geographical and historical remove acts to limit the possibility of initiating any sort of divisive debate related to present reality, but also provides a sense of inevitability in the implication that the Nationalist triumph over the Republican State is the logical outcome of a universal history. The colonial backdrop for masculinist adventures has been indicated by Richard Dyer in White as a means to justify former colonial possession, noting that the colonizer “sorts out the problems of people who cannot sort things out for themselves” (156) allowing the Spanish viewer to implicitly understand the “superiority” of the masculine figures engaged in such endeavors. And as Benedict Anderson states, “it is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny” (12). The film presents ideals and values which have largely been in circulation in Spain for hundreds of years, played out here in stilted and exaggerated situations. In this way, masculinity is not created anew, but rather, those influences and widely circulating characteristics that served the early dictatorship’s need for social order and obedience are brought to the fore. By using the word “crusade” to describe this cinema, a connection is made to the “holy” wars of the past against the non-Christian infidel which were supposedly won through divine support. The frequent allusions to a divine authority in these films serve to

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support the idea that, in challenging a democratically elected state, the rebels are answering to a higher power and therefore cannot be questioned, nor do they need to justify themselves before earthly judges. In these military films, the hierarchical organization of society is strongly emphasized. In Raza, 1 the family mimics the military hierarchy and reinforces this structure as the basis for all human relations. It is a structurally simple film, with a linear narrative, few principal characters, continuous action, and a thematic unity, all of which make it accessible to the viewer and limits the possibility of misreadings by the public. The concept of suture, first elaborated in relation to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and more recently defended by Slavoj Žižek (Fright of Real Tears 32), provides a framework for interpreting the film given the repetition of specific structural conventions which implicate the viewer, either positively or negatively, in the ideological positions available in these films. The viewer is sutured or “sewn into” a stable identity within the hierarchy through a process of identification motivated by the familiar family structure and an avoidance of perceptual limitation or “castration” which is relieved through the traditional shot/reverse-shot sequence. Raza employs a number of characteristics that facilitate suture on the part of the viewer and thus contribute to the acceptance of the subject position offered by the film. As the falsification of the “I” is necessary in order to solidify the ideological position of the spectator, the spectator needs to understand and feel familiar with the events represented on the screen. In this case the patriarchal family stands in as the easily recognizable socializing unit. The narrative simplicity of the realistic style of Raza coupled with the representation of the nuclear family allows the viewer to enter smoothly into an identification with this well-known hierarchy, an identification more universally acceptable than the military one. These films encourage viewers to identify themselves within a hierarchical structure, with the self-sacrificing male patriarchal military figure as dominant. The play of subservient gazes within the film reinforces this hierarchical arrangement with the somewhat mystical patria clearly at the fore. Servants look to the mother, the mother and children look to the patriarch, or, in his absence at some point in the distance, and the patriarch looks off with his gaze elevated as if seeing some vision in the heavens, as he speaks about duty, responsibility, and sacrifice. Figures within the film may be seen to look directly at their inferiors (the mother to the servant or children, the male child to the female, the father to his children) but this occurs primarily when the dominant figure is engaged in teaching or commanding his/her inferiors. The actual physical placement of characters within the scene also reinforces this hierarchy, with dominant figures being either taller or placed in a higher or more central position than their inferiors. This is notable in two early scenes in Raza which establish the hierarchical importance of the sons. In the first of

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these, the young Pedro races around the table trying to catch his sister. Their mother, Isabel (Blanca de Silos), interrupts the dispute and brings order, disciplining Pedro. The child Isabel leaves the scene immediately, indicating that she is of lesser importance, not even worthy of her mother’s attempts at discipline. Pedro, who will be seen to be morally inferior to his brother José, is placed at a normal child’s height next to his mother and is forced to look up at her as she speaks. This contrasts with the following scene in which an excited José calls to his mother from the top of the stairs with the news that their father will soon return home on leave. Isabel climbs the stairs towards him, but stops short of the top thus causing José to appear taller than she and therefore physically dominant and of superior importance. Although the mother is shown as a primary figure within the nuclear family, she is not seen to have a meaningful presence of her own, but rather reflects exactly the being of her husband. She mouths the patriarchal discourse, repeating and upholding his opinions and is seen as nothing more than an extension of her husband and the social order he represents. In his absence she reminds her sons of their father’s sacrifice and holds him up as an example for them to follow. Female characters in Sin novedad en el Alcázar serve a similar purpose. The film, though made by an Italian director, has been called “the prototype of the Spanish Civil War Epic” (Higginbotham 18) and was inspired by events that supposedly took place in Toledo in the days following the outbreak of the Civil War. Colonel José Moscardó and a group of Nationalist soldiers, on hearing news of the coup d’etat, seized the military academy in Toledo and took possession of the weapons stored there in order to keep them from falling into Republican hands. In order to protect their families from any possible reprisals, the women and children were moved to occupy the cellars of the Alcázar and stayed there during the siege that then took place. The film’s action revolves around the Captain (Fosco Giachetti), whose protagonism and exemplary behavior mark him as the positive male model in the film. He is universally admired by the soldiers, his soldier’s fiancé Conchita, and her friend Carmen (Mireille Balin) who quickly falls in love with him. Although granted a degree of independence and agency in early scenes, Carmen comes to realize that it is through submission to the military project as a nurse in the infirmary that she will achieve happiness and fulfillment. She is ever subject (and happily so) to her true love, the Captain, a man universally praised by his subordinates. A physically unattractive and lesser-ranked soldier who attempts to serve her and satisfy her whims, bringing her a softer pillow and focusing on her comfort, is shown to be a defective male. He is weak, thin, bespectacled, disrespected, and finally, rejected as a suitor. By granting primacy to the concerns of a woman, he abandons the object of heroic masculinity in these films and proves himself unworthy as a man. As Dyer points out: “the white male spirit achieves and maintains empire;

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the white female soul is associated with its demise” (184), and connects women with disturbing “a comfortable pattern of homosociality” (186). On the other hand, the Captain who refuses to consider the demands of the woman and is seen as serving a higher purpose, becomes the focal point for the attention of others within the film, as is reflected in the gaze of his inferiors. In one scene, the besieged receive word that the Nationalist troops have won an important military victory and are advancing on the Alcázar. Those within rejoice and break into patriotic song along with shouts of “¡Viva España!” The Captain is seen from a low angle shot singing energetically with his gaze fixed on some invisible point in the distance. A cut to Carmen’s face reveals that she is singing as well while staring at her beloved with a similarly transfixed expression, thus establishing her submission to him. Another rejected suitor, who will later be shot due to his carelessness, is shown to be looking at Carmen rather than keeping his eyes on the higher goal. He is also portrayed as an inferior sort of male who does not keep his sense of duty in the forefront and is therefore not worthy of marrying Carmen. On his deathbed he seems to recognize his own failure and urges the Captain to claim what he was unable to, Carmen’s hand in marriage, thus demonstrating his submission as well as woman’s status as an object to be exchanged among men. And again a highly stratified hierarchy is conveyed not only by rank, but by gaze. Superiors are respectful of their inferiors, but allow no personal consideration to interfere with the observance of the functioning of their rank. The Captain not only refuses to accommodate an attractive woman by looking for a pillow as the “defective” male did, he requisitions her bed for the infirmary without the least consideration of her feelings. And later, in an exaggerated show of dedication to the larger cause, the Colonel sacrifices his own son. He receives a call from the chief officer of the Republican militia, an overweight, unkempt, ill-mannered leader of the apparently treacherous and unworthy opposition, demanding that they surrender in exchange for the life of the Coronel’s son. The Colonel (Rafael Calvo) immediately decides to sacrifice his son (Carlos Muñoz) telling him “muere como un patriota”/ “die like a patriot.” The son, with extreme calm and submission to the will of his father and military superior, says “Sí, lo haré, papá”/“Yes father, I will do it” as he raises his eyes to heaven and stoically renounces his own existence for the greater good of the “patria.” This eye-raising gaze is used repeatedly within these films as a way of indicating that the character is responding to a higher or divine call or purpose. José Colmeiro refers to this “mirada arrebatada”/“arrested look” in the context of another important early dictatorship film, Alba de América (1951), indicating that it denotes the dream of a mystical-imperial sense of destiny (“El sueño transatlántico” 83). Those characters exercising this gaze remove themselves from earthly reasons or justice and are seen as exempt from it. It is easy to imagine why this gaze and the reason behind it were favored by Franco, who had

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only very recently rebelled against a legally elected government in order to install himself as dictator and “Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios”/“Leader of Spain by the grace of God,” and who now wished to be seen as legitimized by a higher power. Identification with the opposition to the Nationalist troops is prevented through the structuration of the gaze within the film. The vast majority of the action takes place within the Alcázar and from the point of view of the Nationalist soldiers. The opposition forces are seen in battle to be distant, unorganized, and physically unattractive. When they do appear in the shot of the Colonel’s sequestered son, the soldiers again seem an ill-behaved rabble, drinking, smoking, and laughing callously. The camera does not dwell on them as individuals nor adopt their point of view through the camera, but rather presents a wide shot of their headquarters without entering in to engage in the shot/reverse-shot sequences that might promote the process of suturing the viewer into a subject position. In this way the model of masculinity that is represented by opposition to the Nationalist cause is rejected as an option for viewer identification. Real political motives are never attributed to either side, but rather a development of the positive subject identification with the stoic and selfsacrificing nationalists, and the prevention of any identification with the apparently self-indulgent, chaotic opposition troops is achieved. Likewise, in Los últimos de Filipinas, shot several years later, there is an attempt to effect an identification with heroic Spanish troops, besieged in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, while maintaining a distance from any contact with the enemy. The “Tagalogs” who appear only rarely are seen in battle scenes to descend like a horde, without organization or bravery; and except for Tala (Nani Fernández), a Filipino woman who falls in love with a Spanish man, are never considered as individuals or even feeling human beings. Colmeiro interprets this representation as a “vista orientalista que representa negativamente a los filipinos (como traidores, indignos de confianza, sediciosos, crueles) y que afirma la implícita superioridad moral y cultural española”/“orientalist vision that negatively represents Filipinos (as traitors, untrustworthy, rebellious, cruel) and that affirms an implicit moral and Spanish cultural superiority” (“Nostalgia colonial” 300). Tala herself serves as the ultimate representation of the “Other” and foil to the Spanish troops. She is doubly marked as a woman and as a foreigner and her metonymic relationship with the Filipinos further feminizes them. In contrast, the viewer observes the Spanish soldiers receiving mail, experiencing camaraderie and love, laughing, and expressing emotions, allowing an identification to take place. This identification positions viewers (like the soldiers) as servants to a higher cause which is heroically defended without consideration for individual needs which have been sublimated into those of their nation.

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It is interesting that in the second half of this film, while hierarchical authority is still respected, it is the authority of a dead figure-head, the Captain who has been killed in battle. As the highest-ranked living officer, the Lieutenant is ostensibly the leader after the Captain’s death, but throughout the latter part of the film he can be seen “consulting” at the graveside of his deceased superior. The clear hierarchical demarcation between the Captain and the soldiers does not exist between the Lieutenant and his men though he is obviously respected as their leader. As in Raza, the death of the actual father figure is not seen to interfere with or alter the workings of the hierarchical machine. Quite to the contrary, in passing from a real, living male figure to a dead patriarch, the patriarchal father’s power is increased as his remembered words become “natural” and apparently incontrovertible. Characters within the films such as the Captain in this scene, go on to repeat the dead characters’s words that then take on the characteristic of being natural or given. Stuart Hall describes this working of ideological “truths” in the following way: “Ideologies tend to disappear from view into the taken-for-granted ‘naturalised’ world of common sense” (82). The dead man becomes omnipresent in memory as can be seen in the voice-over occurrences of the father figure in both Raza and Los últimos de Filipinas. His voice transcends the individual and exists in the atmosphere as eternal and infallible. Among survivors, a shift in emphasis can be perceived from the hierarchical structure and a focus on “father” as in Sin novedad en el alcázar and the earlier part of Raza, to an emphasis on brotherhood and a sense of camaraderie among self-denying equals in the second half of Raza and in the later film, Los últimos de Filipinas. The renunciation of one’s own pleasure for the sake of a greater cause is a dominant theme in crusade cinema films. Sacrifice is clearly shown to be superior to the pursuit of pleasure, and reckless or extreme self-sacrifice is the highest of male virtues. In Raza the “bad” brother Pedro (José Nieto) not only supports the Republican side, he is portrayed as a sensualist, more interested in his own personal advancement than any political purpose. His inferiority is represented in a scene where, outfitted in a dress-like silk smoking jacket, he approaches his mother to ask for his inheritance. In direct contrast, his brother José (Alfredo Mayo) wears subdued military attire and defends his mother against Pedro’s grasping. The characters’s physical placement and orientation provide a graphic mapping of dictatorship ideology. The mother sits in the middle with the military José on her right, and brother Jaime, a Catholic priest, to her left. The three are seated close to one another and appear as one entity. In contrast, Pedro stands and faces them at a short distance. A connection is made between the visually feminized brother and the pursuit of selfgratification, and he appears at odds with the others. Later, the film clearly condemns this position in its “redemption” of Pedro as he realizes his error, dons a military uniform, and sacrifices his own life for the patria.

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Their brother-in-law, who shows weakness in longing for home and his family, also comes to the realization that service is more important than his personal gratification. Self-sacrifice reaches heroic proportions in the film when José is arrested for espionage. In court about to be exonerated, he interrupts proceedings to declare his own guilt, thus sacrificing his life before the now inevitable punishment of the firing squad. As seen in Sin novedad en el Alcázar, self-indulgence is clearly represented as a weakness and connected with the feminine. It is Carmen who seeks comfort along with the weak and inferior men who would try to please her (and thus win her favor). Those dominant male figures in the film, the Colonel and the Captain, are shown to completely disregard their own benefit for the sake of the patria: the Colonel in sacrificing his own son, and the Captain in ignoring the desires of a beautiful woman and thus, apparently, foregoing the possibility of gaining access to her sexually. Harka, also clearly connects self-indulgence with the woman and represents her as something to be avoided; the film’s misogynistic representations of women have been described as “dismissive, castration-anxiety trivializations” (Evans 218). In this film an officer stationed in Spanishcontrolled Morocco during the Spanish-Moroccan War longs for the comfort of home and the woman he loves. He discusses this longing with his superior officer who is seen as a sort of super-man who lives to serve. When asked if he ever needs a bit of human warmth, the Captain (Alfredo Mayo) stands up, arrogantly grabs a woman from her dance partner, and dances with her himself: “El mensaje, explícito y tajante, se emite sin vacilaciones: la mujer no tiene sino la categoría de objeto, y como tal, se toma o se deja, se trafica con ella, con o sin contrato matrimonial”/“The message delivered is clear and explicit: woman is nothing but an object, and as such, can be taken, abandoned or traded, with or without the benefit of matrimony” (Gómez 576). Through the Captain’s actions it is implied that if he does need such warmth from time to time he simply takes it without getting emotionally involved since he has dedicated himself to the needs of his country. His attitude reveals the patriarchal moral double standard whereby prostitution was tacitly approved of during the dictatorship while women who participated in it were condemned. The officer leaves the desert for home and in a series of juxtaposed scenes can be shown dancing, dining and enjoying the pleasures of Madrid and his wife, while the campaign in Africa is being fought without him. He finally repents of his lapse into self-indulgence and at the end of the film can be seen, back in Africa, training troops for service. Finally, in Los últimos de Filipinas we see this tendency toward selfsacrifice reach almost ludicrous proportions. The besieged Spanish soldiers obstinately refuse to accept that the war is over even after they are presented with significant evidence to support this conclusion. Led by the Lieutenant, who is now the highest-ranking officer, they happily remain at this far-flung outpost, singing and going about their duties un-

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complainingly. When the opposing Philippine forces offer them the possibility of resupplying their position with food and other necessities, they reply by refusing any assistance, instead sending a bottle of Sherry and some cigars to their enemies. It is a sort of grand gesture that seems the essence of the “gran caballero” or Spanish gentleman of the past; the ideal man will not only serve, but will happily go without, thus proving his superiority to others. As Žižek points out: “fascist ideology is based upon a purely formal imperative: ‘Obey, because you must’ . . . The value of sacrifice lies in its very meaninglessness; true sacrifice is for its own end” (Sublime Object 83). The fetishization of sacrifice obliterates the actual causes and toll of the conflicts represented as Kinder has indicated, and the focus is shifted toward various side plots that display the characters’ ability—or lack thereof—to sacrifice themselves. And once again, woman can be seen as a threat to this ideal as the love-struck Juan seems more dominated by his feelings for Tala than he is for the patria. He clearly disobeys orders on several occasions and when he does offer himself for heroic duty, it is more for her sake than for Spain’s. In exchange for self-sacrifice, the male figures in these films are afforded greater recognition, among their peers certainly, but also in the world. In Los últimos de Filipinas, the Lieutenant who has led his men in their futile resistance, foregoing any sort of material comforts for the sake of duty, even a duty that seems foolhardy and excessive—as his has turned out to be in light of Spain’s official surrender, is afforded the status of hero in the final scene. A long take on his stern face and fixed gaze as he marches in retreat among ranks of the enemy standing at attention, is superimposed by shots of newspaper headlines lauding his resistance, as well as a shot of an applauding crowd and a voice-over proclaiming his status as “héroe en España.” He is a hero not because he has achieved victory (he has not), but because he has (recklessly and obstinately, it can easily be argued) sacrificed himself and his troops for his country. But while the soldiers depicted in these films are seen resisting the self-indulgence of a love relationship with a woman, a high level of intimacy between men is characteristic. Anthony Easthope, commenting on the Vietnam War film The Deer Hunter observes: In the dominant versions of men at war, men are permitted to behave towards each other in ways that would not be allowed elsewhere, caressing and holding each other, comforting and weeping together, admitting their love. The pain of war is the price paid for the way it expresses the male bond. War’s suffering is a kind of punishment for the release of homosexual desire and male femininity that only the war allows. In this special form the male bond is fully legitimated. (66)

There are many instances of intimate, soul-baring discussions between men, as well as scenes of singing, dancing, rough-housing, embracing,

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etc. which contrast sharply in their simple joyfulness and camaraderie with the strained, frequently conflict-ridden relationships with women in the films: “El grado de misoginía es tan marcado que algunas escenas de Harka rayan de algún modo en el homoerotismo al plantear que las necesidades sexuales y afectivas han de ser suplidas por el tipo de camaradería viril propia de la institución militar”/“The degree of misogyny is so apparent that some scenes in Harka verge on the homoerotic in suggesting that sexual and emotional needs might be fulfilled by the type of male camaraderie characteristic of the military institution” (Gómez 576). Furthermore, the film’s soft lighting and lingering close-ups such as that of the two officers bonding in the desert night, engage melodramatic conventions to the effect that the film “astonishingly succeeds in apparently condoning homosexuality” (Evans 219). With women actually and metaphorically “out of the picture,” the purifying sparseness of the desert allows the male bond to come dangerously close to crossing the line, thereby creating an authoritarian film that dramatizes the return of the repressed homosexual desire. However, despite this obvious homosocial element, there invariably appears a strictly masculine element that serves to mitigate any blatant suggestion of homosexuality. War, like football in Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators, provides the ultimate heterosexual mask whose presence serves to prevent any possibility of slippage from the strictly hetero- into the realm of homosexuality. For example, in Los últimos de Filipinas, one of the soldiers—a more physically soft and rounded figure who works as the cook (Manolo Morán)—is playfully attacked on his bed by his companions. The conflict, however, is over a photo of his girlfriend in Spain, and thus heterosexuality is asserted despite possible homosexual undertones that might be perceived in a scene representing such intimate physical contact between men. While heterosexual masculinity is indisputably the only option officially offered in crusade cinema, at times it seems as if it would be a heterosexuality devoid of women. The idea of the inherent superiority of men over women is ubiquitous and manhood takes on a kind of transcendent quality in which the male’s ascendance over the female is seen as natural and is never questioned. Women are perceived to be a direct threat to the performance of one’s duty, and better disregarded completely. This is the case in Raza as the Churruca brother-in-law considers abandoning his post to be reunited with his wife, or in Sin novedad en el Alcázar when the love-distracted soldier allows himself to get shot through carelessness, and most obviously in Harka, as the soldier, Carlos, is forced to leave his post in Africa upon the demand of his wife—thus incurring the disapproval of his beloved Captain Santiago. In this last film the conflict is clearly shown through a series of juxtaposed shots of Carlos enjoying life with his beautiful wife on Madrid’s social scene, with cuts of the Captain waging battle in the African desert. Women are considered to be self-centered and incapable of full citizenship since they are unable to

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subordinate their personal interests and desires to those of the state: “Los protagonistas . . . encuentran sentido a su existencia en la guerra y en la muerte heróica, mientras que las mujeres son presentadas como estorbos para la realización de estos ideales, al no ser capaces de subordinar la causa individual a la nacional”/“Male protagonists gain a sense of purpose in war and heroic death, while women are presented as obstacles to the realization of these ideals since they are not capable of sacrificing personal interest for the nation” (Gómez 576). Peter Evans has also noted that: “As in many other films of the period where they are seen as threats to the male group, women are identified with frivolity and self-indulgence, compromising the masculinity of the virile male” (qtd. in Gómez 576). In a system of the symbolic exchange of one’s pleasure for social recognition in a hyper-Catholic, hierarchically-ordered society like Spain in the 1940s, the male must be wary of the female who might threaten his position and cause his downfall. The only socially sanctioned avenue to affection and repose open to the heterosexual male in these films seems to be found in the company of other men. While an idealized marriage to the “right” woman (usually one far away and mainly dreamed about) may be permitted, a true mutually respectful male-female relationship between equals seems impossible given the social structure in place. As Carmen Martín-Gaite points out, this sort of friendship was expressly discouraged under the dictatorship, and Pilar Primo de Rivera, head of the Sección Femenina (the Falange Party’s female branch), promoted the idea that a woman must strive always to maintain an air of mystery and distance from men (including her husband) while always subordinating herself to them (63). Patriarchal, heterosexual, self-sacrificing masculinity is seen as transcendent in these films and reaches its maximum expression in the figure of the martyred warrior-father, the ultimate signifier that anchors and gives meaning to all other signifiers. As Peter Lehman has pointed out, in a heterosexist, male-dominated patriarchy there is an implicit connection between the phallus, or final symbolic signifier, and the penis, or visible signal of masculinity which is understood to be possessed by male characters. This implied connection is maintained, according to Lehman, not through displaying the penis, but rather by hiding it from view while at the same time presenting male figures as capable, dominant, self-sufficient, and, above all, not “feminine” in any way. The inducement to identify with the patriarchal order and the phallus-penis connection is the promise of relief from castration anxiety. Kaja Silverman discusses the maintenance of this mythic relation and states: “Man comes to believe that he has not been castrated because he (mis-)equates penis with phallus” (Male Subjectivity 43). Crusade cinema promoted a heterosexist, male-dominated social hierarchy in a reflection of Franco’s agenda and these films reflect the maintenance of the justification for the existing unequal state of affairs in post-war Spain. The apparently incontrovert-

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ible support of patriarchal dominance is the dead father figure. Whether it be the Churruca patriarch, the Captain at the Philippine outpost, the dedicated soldier in the Moroccan desert, or God “the Father,” the dead male patriarchal figure serves to order and organize the consciousness and acts of the surviving male soldiers. The words of this figure are remembered in flashbacks and voiceovers in all four of the films mentioned here. Their words mimic ideological dogma promoted by the regime asking for subordination and self-sacrifice: “el deber es tanto más hermoso cuando más sacrificio”/“Duty is ever more magnificent the greater the sacrifice” (Raza). The “ultimate” sacrifice of these male figures serves as a model and guiding principle for those left behind who band together as brothers, renouncing personal satisfaction in order to uphold the social order ordained by the dead patriarch. Already ingrained in the public imagination, the idea of the “Great Absent Hero” who made the ultimate sacrifice had been developed in relation to Falange Party founder and martyr, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 2 and just as in these films, it was invoked as an ideal for which to strive. Later, as the dictatorship became stabilized and as Franco’s power base shifted from the military to the Catholic Church, the offscreen interlocutor tended away from the dead patriarchal warrior father toward the even further removed, ultimate father figure—the Catholic God. As Triana-Toribio notes: “After 1945, as the regime downplayed its fascist connections and past and the Catholic Church took on a more central ideological role, we see a substantial increase in the number of religious narratives among the winners [of the ‘National Interest’ designation]” (Spanish National Cinema 54). One popular film that surely facilitated this ideological shift was Balarrasa (1950) by José Antonio Nieves Conde. Combining the virile warrior model with the ascetic religious figure, this film presents a soldier-turned-priest who proves himself superior both on and off the battlefield. Captain Javier Mendoza or “Balarrasa” (Fernando Fernán Gómez), a Catholic priest, appears at the opening of the film pulling an overloaded sled in the Alaskan tundra, apparently at the point of utter exhaustion. The film takes the form of an extended flashback covering his early life as the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, womanizing Captain Mendoza through his epiphany and transformation into the ultimate figure of self-renunciation—Father Javier Mendoza. But before he can settle into his new life at the monastery he is sent home to resolve old issues with his family, which has fallen into disarray since the death of his mother. Though her portrait still hangs in the family living room, visible in many of the scenes that occur there, she seems to have lost her place as spiritual center of the family. Father Mendoza resolves to restore it and, one by one, he brings the apparently hardened and cynical family members back to recognition of the importance of unity and self-restraint, as they are convinced to give up lives of self-indulgence and debauchery.

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Though both the soldier and the priest are founded on the same ideal of masculine strength, the soldier Mendoza has strayed from the accompanying virtue of self-sacrifice as represented in the war films discussed previously. The film makes much of Father Mendoza’s subsequent embrace of asceticism and renunciation of pleasures except those that may be found in work and service. He embraces his life within the walls of the monastery where he is shown studying for hours on end in his small cell without any of the comforts that he previously enjoyed. In one scene he is caught whistling by his superior who frowns disapprovingly; “Demasiado, ¿no?”/“Too much, isn’t it?” recognizes Mendoza as he continues silently down the corridor. It is as if by sacrificing the pursuit of pleasure as well as material goods, such as the pleasure of whistling, or later, winning a watch in a card game, that the protagonist gains power and respect. He emerges from the monastery vital and strong, but now with an added moral authority. It allows him to reprimand his brother (who has just thrown a punch at him) by saying: “Lo que acabas de hacer no soluciona nada”/“What you just did solves nothing,” though just a short while earlier he would have been the one to turn to violence. The film would put the fraternal conflict aside for a new religious order based not on the law of man, but on that of the divine, thus reflecting the dictatorship’s interest in distancing itself from its violent past. Still, it’s important to recognize that his moral authority is never far removed from the threat of violence as when he advises his weak, bespectacled neighbor to fight

Figure 1.1. Decadence of the soldier’s life represented by drinking, smoking, and gambling. Balarrasa. Dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde, Aspa, 1951.

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for the attentions of the woman he adores. The priest Balarrasa watches from the sidelines with great satisfaction as his protegé knocks the rival to the ground. The concept of “Muscular Christianity,” though elaborated mainly in the context of Victorian England, serves to illustrate the glossing effect that is produced by linking religious masculinity to physical strength, “a central, even defining, characteristic of muscular Christianity [is]: an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself” (D. Hall 7). By maintaining in essence the same masculine virtues embodied in the warriors of earlier films, this film facilitates an adjustment and ideological shift that does not erase the patriarchal order of the past, but rather embeds it more firmly in a sublime order supported by the Catholic religion. As Balarrasa finally succumbs in the frigid wilds of Alaska, it is not the words of his earthly father, a weak and ineffectual man, but rather those of God that inspire him to reach for the same end as his predecessors—the total sacrifice of self as he embraces death at the end of the film and surrenders himself to the divine father: “Tú dirás si esta es la hora . . . Tú dispones de nuestras vidas”/“You will decide the hour . . . Our lives are in Your hands.” The focus throughout on the virile strength of the protagonist works to keep at bay the threats and ambiguities in an impoverished and repressive post-war Spain that might undermine the pervasive model of masculine strength and superiority while directing the individual toward the same end—self-sacrifice and respect for the patriarchal hierarchy. So while an apparent shift in power elevates the Catholic Church in this film, it continues to propagate the fundamental values of the dictatorship—renunciation of the self, masculine domination, a hierarchical social organization and ultimately, violence. NATURALIZATION OF THE MALE GAZE: THE “OTHER” ON DISPLAY However secure one’s position was within the masculine, heterosexist hierarchy as promised in the cine de cruzada or the transitional film Balarrasa, many of the grand CIFESA (Compañía Industrial Film Español, S.A.) productions of the later 1940s with their elaborate sets and beautiful female stars belie an ever-present castration anxiety in their focus on the fetishized female star’s bodies. CIFESA, Spain’s longest running and most powerful film production company during the postwar period, was considered to be the studio that most faithfully collaborated by portraying Franco’s regime as favorable (Higginbotham 4), and it produced large-scale historical epics, usually starring women, such as one of the biggest box office hits during the dictatorship, Locura de amor (Love Crazy; 1948) by Juan de Orduña, as well as La princesa de los Ursinos (The Princess of the Ursinos; 1947), La duquesa de Benamejí (The Duchess of Benamejí; 1949),

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Figure 1.2. Father Javier Mendoza “Balarrasa” (Fernando Fernán Gómez) making the ultimate sacrifice. Balarrasa. Dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde, Aspa, 1951.

Pequeñeces (Trifles; 1950), Agustina de Aragón (1950), La leona de Castilla (The Lioness of Castille; 1951) and Lola la piconera (Lola, the Coalgirl; 1951). De Orduña was also responsible for extremely popular melodramas such as El último cuplé (The Last Torch Song; 1957), another of the largest box office hits in Spain. The creation of visually engrossing super-productions developed throughout the poverty-stricken 1940s and into the early 1950s where historical epics and melodramas, often centering on female stars, were joined by new melodramatic subgenres such as the so-called “cine con cura” (priest-centered films) and “cine con niño” (child-centered films). What many of these films shared in common was a shift in focus from that of crusade cinema with its active, heterosexual male leads—to the woman, the asexual religious figure, or the child, and from historical epic to melodrama. The male stars of the previous decade are no longer the focus in many of these films as the masculine-dominant position is assumed to be “naturalized.” It is not apparently questioned during this period but is represented as a given, or neutral, spectator role. As Pierre Bordieu says, “The strength of the masculine order is seen in the fact that it dispenses with justification: the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and has no need to spell itself out in discourses

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aimed at legitimating it” (9). A dictatorship now firmly entrenched and receiving international recognition as legitimate, as Spain was in the 1950s (due to the resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States and its subsequent entry into the United Nations in 1955), approved for production films which compensated for the real feeling of lack experienced by a poverty-stricken and often unemployed populace by providing them with visual spectacle. The individual’s lack of personal freedom and power was made up for by a privileged viewing-subject position in which all—men, women, and children alike—were encouraged to understand the masculine heterosexual gaze as supreme. Laura Mulvey’s theoretical emphasis on the male gaze in psychoanalytic film theory has been widely rethought since its early and widespread acceptance (including by Mulvey herself), but the explicitly represented dominant male gaze in many of these films serves another function—that of consciously presenting the masculine viewing position as central and thus attempting to avoid the consciousness of masculine lack. By taking the “Other” as the object of contemplation, the represented male heterosexual viewer establishes his superiority and, temporarily at least, relieves his own castration anxiety brought about doubly as, on one hand, he enters into the phallic order and is thus subjugated to a hierarchy in which his status is always unstable, and, on the other, as the Lacanian speaking subject who has sacrificed the “Real” in order to enter into the symbolic order. As Silverman has indicated, by locating lack onto the woman, the little boy is restored to imaginary wholeness. By forcing the identification of the woman with lack, the man causes her to “bear the scar of the castration by which both she and the male subject enter language, granting him the illusion of an as yet intact being. The coherence of the male subject is threatened as much by the distance that separates him from the phallus as by the distance that separates him from the real” (“Acoustic Mirror” 23–24). Thus, the objectified Other in these films serves a compensatory function in the male psyche while allowing society as a whole to recognize the male, heterosexual viewer as subject and the female, effeminate man, or child position as object. The film Locura de amor demonstrates the attempt to normalize a masculine dominant position through the representation of the “hysterical” female as well as a normalized masculine viewing position. This movie was part of a propaganda effort of the Franco regime to erase the Black Legend and to extol the traditional values of the “true” Spain—“true” meaning nationalistic, non-foreign, with the archvillains being the Flemish allies of the King and the Jewish girl played by a very young Sara Montiel. It extols the nobility’s loyalty to the pure Hispanic lineage of Queen Juana (Aurora Bautista), hence to Spain. However, despite the fact that the queen is apparently the protagonist, the story is narrated in a series of flashbacks by Captain Álvaro de Estúñiga (Jorge Mistral) to the future King Carlos V (Ricardo Acero) and thus provides the framework

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for a masculine perception of the events. The captain relates the story of the tragic and obsessive love of Queen Juana for her foreign husband, King Felipe “el Hermoso” of Flanders, a man who does not return her love, but rather seeks sexual satisfaction outside his marriage. The king is presented as a hyper-sexualized being whose love (including exclusive sexual access) is sought obsessively and self-destructively by the Queen who would sacrifice everything to obtain it; she is represented as an irrational and dangerous presence, a sort of “vagina dentata” that threatens to engulf or consume man through sexual passion. By portraying a supposedly strong woman as completely subject to her frenetic desire to possess her husband’s sexuality—presented in a histrionic display of paralyzing emotion—the implied male, heterosexual viewing subject is reassured of the value of the penis, which can be equated with the phallus as Peter Lehman has demonstrated. It has been noted that, “Castration anxiety, indeed the whole oedipal constellation, rests on a cultural exaltation of masculinity and overvaluing of the penis” (Connell 15). In this way the woman serves to allay the castration anxiety of the male in a twofold manner: first by serving as a fetish object to be consumed visually, thus allowing the male to disavow her castration; and secondly by being represented as desirous of the phallus that the man is seen to possess and which is apparently the cause of the queen’s madness. Likewise, in El último cuplé, the strong female lead, a copla singer (Sara Montiel), is also led to self-destruction due to the passionate desire for a man, in this case a young bullfighter who does not clearly return her affections. De Orduña produced this film with his own money, but sold it to CIFESA shortly after its completion, and it bears the marks of the visual spectacle of its predecessor—beautiful female lead, melodramatic situations and acting, dramatic music, and so forth. It seems remarkable for its representation of a strong and unconventional female protagonist in her rise to fame, but María Luján’s power is contained in a variety of ways within the film and ultimately through her transformation into a fetish object that serves to allay masculine fear and disavow castration anxiety. Like Locura de amor, El último cuplé employs a male interlocutor through whom the life story of the protagonist is told. Also, this male point of view on María is one of many represented through the film. The film bounces back and forth between scenes of fascinated subjection and moments of containment. In the first of the musical numbers, a brightly illuminated stage is filled with tall, long-legged female dancers in elaborate and revealing pink and blue dresses. In the foreground are seen the monochrome dark backs of the heads of male viewers. While it seems to establish the quintessential representation of the male gaze— anonymous, watching and visually possessing the brightly illuminated and exposed bodies of the female performers, the engagement on the part of these male spectators proves to be less a voyeuristic gaze and more recognition and identification. As the act draws to a close, many men

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from the audience actually rise to their feet and, apparently involuntarily, dance along with the women on stage. In another scene, the almost exclusively male crowd sings along with the performer on stage, again suggesting a level of identification with her. Later, when Montiel’s character sings “Ven y ven y ven”/“Come and come and come” a man has to be physically restrained as he rises to approach the stage, showing his lack of agency before the spectacle. To counteract the power of fascination exercised over the male audience, an obvious attempt at containment occurs in the scenes in which the protagonist is taken as the object of spectatorial consumption in her many performances, whether she offers herself for this purpose or not. Early in the film, as María dances with her boyfriend she is judged in a beauty contest that she has not entered. As they smoke dispassionately, the older male judges watch and comment on the women assembled, critically assessing the oblivious “contestants.” And, as in Locura de amor, this cool, observing male spectator is contrasted with the passionate object of his gaze. Further containing the power of the female lead as with Queen Juana in Locura de amor, María is shown to be subject above all to her passion for a man who does not return her feelings. She falls in love with a young bullfighter who reminds her of her first love whom she renounced in order to establish her career as a singer. Though a star on the national and international music scene, she is seen as utterly dominated by her desire for this young man who continues to maintain a longtime girlfriend and whose feelings for María are never clearly revealed. Again the implication of sexual infidelity and the desire for exclusive access to the bullfighter’s body convey the female desire for what the man has—his sexuality. This provides assurance to the implied male viewer that the woman, however fascinating and powerful she may seem to be, is ultimately subject to her need for the penis/phallus that he supposedly possesses. The death of María Luján, presumably of a broken heart, further assures that there will be no actual role-reversal in which the female assumes a more powerful position than the male. Her lifelong manager and friend, Juan, announces her death with great emotion, but it is clear that he will continue and prosper, as he has in the years since their professional and sentimental parting, whereas she could never overcome her grand passion for the bullfighter. Finally, the protagonist’s positioning as the glamorous object of visual consumption ensures that she herself becomes a fetish object through which castration anxiety is avoided. The fetishization of the female image is clearly displayed in this film in the many scenes of dancers dressing, cabaret singers revealing flashes of thighs offset by dark garters, long lingering close-ups of its beautiful star in elaborate costumes, and the super-saturated colors, usually red, that appear in costumes and drapery. She seems to possess the power to entrance, to possess the men who

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watch her and thus constitutes a threat. The star’s glamorous presentation heightens the sense of danger associated with her, but also offers a reprieve as Simpson indicates: “Glamour, then is a woman’s ‘magical’ power over man, her power to enchant and allure; and as ever, woman’s power is also a castrating threat to men: glamour is both the fear of lack and the disavowal of it” (178). Thus through transformation into fetish object, Montiel’s body acts as both threat and reassurance. While masculinity is liable to find the threat of castration in the image of a woman’s body, it resolves this threat in two ways according to Easthope: “one is the woman’s body itself, which can appear to have the firmness, solidity and unity of the phallus for which it is a fetishistic substitute. The other is the pleasure of looking, which, with all the techniques of modern color photography has come to seem ever more vivid, substantial and complete” (141). So through her containment as visual object of scopophilic consumption, and later through her passion and death, María Luján is contained and the threat of castration averted. Another significant trend in dictatorship cinema is the popularity of the numerous genre films starring children, such as Pablito Calvo (Marcelino, pan y vino [The Miracle of Marcelino] 1954), Joselito (El pequeño ruiseñor [The Little Nightingale] 1956 and El ruiseñor de las cumbres [The Nightingale in the Mountains] 1958) and Marisol (Un rayo de luz [A Ray of Light] 1960; Ha llegado un ángel [An Angel has Appeared] 1961; and Marisol, rumbo a Río [Marisol, Road to Río] 1963), as well as the so-called “cine con cura” (Stone 39) which portrayed male religious figures in starring roles and included such films as Misión blanca (White Mission; Juan de Orduña 1947), La mies es mucha (The Harvest is Rich; José Luis Sáenz de Heredia 1949) and Balarrasa. This second type can be at least partly attributed to the shift in emphasis from the Falange and its attempt at self-justification through war films, and a subsequent ban in 1943 on using the Civil War as subject matter, toward the Catholic Church as an ideological support and justification for the regime, but a study of these asexual male roles alongside those of the child star and the folclórica reveals a commonly represented viewer subject position—that of the heterosexual male. A film of enduring popularity during the years of the dictatorship, Marcelino, pan y vino, exemplifies many of the characteristics of these genres: adult males in “feminized” care-giving religious roles, a prodigious or precocious orphaned child in a leading role, a process of redemption or salvation, and an engagement with the search for one’s essence or origins. These films avoid any serious examination of social reality, including gender roles and economic conditions in Spain. The frequent song and dance numbers generally observed by a predominantly male audience divert attention away from real problems and instead offer magical or incredible solutions, such as Marcelino’s direct communication with Jesus or Marisol’s bringing thieves to justice in Marisol, rumbo a Río.

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However, despite the fact that cinema under the dictatorship may have been designed to solidify a social order based on the supremacy and dominance of the heterosexual male hierarchy, the regime could not control popular reception and appropriation of these films. As Jo Labanyi has argued (1997), genres like the missionary film and the folkloric film musical, while serving the interests of the regime, also allowed space for subaltern groups to rework dominant discourses. By allowing the viewer into an identification with the point of view of the feminized Other— acted by male as well as female stars—they undermine the patriarchal emphasis of Francoist discourse by revealing the performative nature of gender. Therefore, even CIFESA films, which were obviously favorable to the dictatorship, need to be considered as vehicles for its subversion as well. Despite the fact that a certain vision of the patriarchal male hierarchy was offered, there was no guarantee that the male viewer would in fact fall into the position. Labanyi notes this potential for “mis-identification”: “The audience is thus seduced by the female lead not because it sees her through the desiring male’s gaze, but because it identifies with her position as seductress” (“Race, Gender and Disavowal” 225). She goes on to indicate the continuing nature of these films’ subversive potential: “The early Francoist folklórica has in recent years enjoyed a revival with Spanish gay audiences, because of its camp exposure of the constructedness of gender roles” (230). While it is not my intention to conduct an investigation of the complex relation between reception and consumption practices, it is important to indicate this potential for subversion as well as the ways in which the repetitive production related to these genres reiterate certain tensions and anxieties related to the experience of identification with the hegemonic male model offered by the dictatorship. The very repetition of these “specular” or performance-oriented genres may be an indication of the necessity for the sort of “binding” that Silverman has equated with the protection of oneself from castration anxiety. The scopophilia associated with the explicitly represented male gaze of the visual spectacle within these films reveals the tenuous nature of identification with that implied subject position. The insistence on the male audience/gaze attempts to reassert the power of the masculine point of view. But, as Freud’s young nephew “enjoyed” (assumed by the fact that he repeated the apparently unpleasurable action) the “fort-da” game of throwing away and then recovering a spool of yarn (representing his anxiety over his mother’s absence) so the Spanish male viewer enjoys watching a powerful and sexually threatening female who inspires fear. However ideological binding requires that the spectacle is ultimately brought under control. In films like El último cuplé and Carmen, la de Ronda (A Girl Against Napoleon; 1959) the camera repeatedly pans across uplifted faces of almost exclusively male audiences of Sara Montiel’s musical performances. These crowds do not chat among themselves and

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rarely express any emotion other than total absorption in the spectacle, appearing to be mesmerized by the wet-lipped and sexually dangerous protagonist. It is a danger that is expressed repeatedly in Carmen, la de Ronda, a film set in 1808 in the city of Ronda during the Napoleonic war. First Carmen’s Spanish boyfriend and later her French lover, both soldiers, express their anguish and doubt over whether they possess her exclusively. These strong warrior males do not fear death through battle (both are seen repeatedly and fearlessly risking their lives in this way), but do express excessive anxiety over losing control of Carmen. Thus, by repeating in formulaic narratives the castration threat and its consequent resolution (such as is seen in those films presenting strong female characters who are married, killed off, and/or textually “punished” at the end as a way of controlling them), Spanish cinema of this era served to reinforce gender identifications that may have been threatened with destabilization due to harsh economic and political realities that frequently forced many men into a position of powerlessness and subordination. The constant repetition of these genre films belies the fundamentally unstable nature of gender and its need for reinforcement. TRAUMA AND PSYCHIC CASTRATION DURING THE DICTATORSHIP However glossy a surface was presented in epic and melodramatic films from the 1940s and 1950s, harsh economic and social reality began to break through and make its presence felt in films after the mid-1950s. A growing sense of discontent with contemporary filmmaking conditions, techniques, and styles became evident after the Salamanca talks in 1955 in which the stultification of Spanish cinema was harshly criticized. Following the lead of Italian neorealism, directors such as Juan Antonio Bardem began to give form to strong undercurrents of discontent. Postwar trauma and a sense of psychic and economic castration become evident in several films from the 1950s and 1960s in which “ideological fatigue” reveals an outright breakdown in the performance of the hegemonic masculine model. In Silverman’s analysis, historical trauma can be any historical event that brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are unable to sustain an imaginary relationship with the power of the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Filmic representations of failing protagonists begin to surface—those who are unable to master their surroundings, their women, themselves. While government censors tried to keep subversive representations off Spanish screens, there was a strong push, especially after the Salamanca talks and the influence of Italian neorealist films on Spanish directors, to make films that represented the actual con-

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flicts and stresses that society posed for individuals. Such films include (Surcos [Furrows] Nieves Conde 1951; Muerte de un ciclista [Death of a Cyclist] Bardem 1955; Esa pareja feliz [The Happy Couple] Bardem/Berlanga 1951; Calle mayor [Main Street] Bardem 1956; El verdugo [The Executioner] Berlanga 1963; El pisito [The Little Apartment] Ferreri 1958; El cochecito [The Wheelchair] Ferreri 1960; Los golfos [The Delinquents] Saura 1962). Surcos, the first film directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde, illustrates the pressures that a changing Spanish economy exercised on its citizens. Hoping to discourage rampant emigration from the countryside to the city, the censors not only approved this script but also awarded it the coveted “interés nacional” distinction, though its content can be considered to be highly critical of economic conditions at the time and the moral degradation that was supposed to have accompanied them. The film treats a rural family’s journey to and travails in Madrid as its members try to survive in a situation where the traditional values of honesty and hard work lead not to prosperity but to ruin as, one by one, they see themselves duped, robbed, and confused in an environment they fail to master. In the end, the patriarch declares that they must return to the countryside: “Hay que volver. Pues con vergüenza, hay que volver”/“We must go back. With our shame, we must go back.” The ever-looming threat of emasculation in this environment is especially notable in the experience of the father. Although he maintains enough authority at the end to declare their time in Madrid finished, he does it as if recalling the respect and authority he once enjoyed rather than any he has been afforded in the city. From the beginning of his time in the city, the father is ordered about by his more savvy female relatives. He is given the subservient task of selling snacks in the park and, unlike the warriors of the cine de cruzada whose father-voice echoed in their heads, here the voice-over is that of his female relative reciting the prices of the candy, gum, and cigarettes that are found in his basket. And in contrast to those earlier films, his disregard for money—which he demonstrates by handing out candy to the poor children in the park—leads not to greater respect but to a severe reprimand when he returns home. For his failure, he is demoted to the feminized position of aproned potato peeler, an obvious reference to his inability to earn money, the prime indicator of masculine individual worth in this new environment. And throughout the film Pili, the city girlfriend of the country man, Pepe, urges him to make more money so that she can consider marrying him, saying: “Yo me caso con quien me saque de esto”/“I’ll marry whoever can take me away from all this.” She encourages Pepe to participate in robbing supply trucks rather than continuing with less-profitable honest work. He complies only to be caught and finally killed by his boss, Don Roque, for his failure. Here, masculine figures are either emasculated for conforming to the old values—as is the case of the rural father—or promoted for embodying the new values—

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Figure 1.3. The patriarch (José Prada) reduced to street vendor. Surcos. Dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde, Atenea, 1951.

greed, individualism, and cruel self-interest. The replacement of the “oedipal father of prohibition” with the “anal father of enjoyment” has been observed to mark the transition from a hierarchical, patriarchal society to a consumer society in which honor and self-renunciation is replaced by self-interest and the pursuit of enjoyment. As Jan Jagodzinski describes this change, “the oedipal father is in the midst of disappearing and with him are disappearing the prohibitions against enjoyment . . . rather than prohibiting enjoyment, this new father commands it, thus unleashing aggressivity in heretofore unimaginable ways” (32). Don Roque is the embodiment of this figure who lords his success over others, taking the women that he wants and killing his employees or “sons” as he sees fit, prospering in spite of the conditions that surround him. In spite of its poor performance at the box office, another film worth mentioning for its influence on Spanish cinema in the 1950s is Esa pareja feliz, the first film written and directed by the long-standing and productive partnership between Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis G. Berlanga; it marked the beginning of a new comic style with a critical spirit and an obvious neorealist influence. As Rob Stone has noted, the film self-consciously marks a shift from the epics of the 1940s toward a more realistic representation of Spanishness: It begins with a spoof of CIFESA and its pompous epics: an uproariously stilted conversation between noblemen and the suicide of their

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Finally released two years after completion due to its low classification from censors, it represents a lower middle-class couple, Juan (Fernando Fernán Gómez) and Carmen, in Madrid as they fall in love, marry, and begin their lives in precarious financial times. To improve their economic situation, the husband seeks advancement through dubious schemes and correspondence courses, while the wife enters contests and plays games of chance that ultimately lead to their winning a prize naming them “the happy couple” in a soap contest. Their prize, which ironically arrives during a big fight between them on the day the husband loses his job, is a twenty-four-hour shopping spree. The film closes with them giving away their purchases to the many vagrants sleeping on park benches, and realizing that it is not through material goods that they will find happiness. Juan is presented as an idealistic young man full of modern ideas for advancement, beginning with his enthusiasm for a dubious correspondence course from which he gains little more than hope and a slogan (“¡a la felicidad por la electrónica!”/“Happiness through electronics!”) and through his collaboration with a fast-talking actor who promises to cut him in on a photography scheme (“¡Sentido commercial!”/“Business sense!”) with equally little result. His wife, though doubtful, supports him while continuing to play games of chance in the hopes of improving their lot. The film contains a sharply critical element in its representation of their overcrowded and shabby tenement as well as an obvious reference to class inequality as they go from pretentious upscale restaurant to a park filled with vagrants sleeping on benches. After losing his job in a theater, Juan finally breaks down when he realizes that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot master the economic situation: “¡Esto [his diplomas from the electronics school] no sirve para nada! . . . ¡Ni yo!.”/“These [his diplomas from the electronics school] are good for nothing . . . like me!” He reacts to the realization of his failure by violently lashing out at his wife, blaming her: “Me han despedido—¿no es eso lo que querías?”/ “They fired me—isn’t that what you wanted!” His frustration is not directed at a system that makes him discontent with his lot as an underpaid employee in a film studio or on the fraudulent grasping of others who take advantage of him within this system, but rather at the woman who witnesses his failure and thus calls his masculine mastery into question. El pisito (1958) and El cochecito (1960) both shot by Italian director Marco Ferreri in the beginning of the era of the Spanish economic transformation of the 1960s, repeat the theme of economic subjugation of the traditional male breadwinner. In both films, explicit reference is made to

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America as a land of (consumer) opportunity in El pisito: “Pero no estamos en América”/“But we’re not in America!” [we do not have such opportunities here], and in El cochecito: “la última palabra de la tecnología . . . ultramoderno . . . Americano”/“the latest word in technology, ultramodern, American.” And in both, the male protagonist is distinctly disadvantaged within the system in which he finds himself, to the point of appearing in an infantilized state. In El pisito a bespectacled and browbeaten José Luis López Vázquez as Don Rodolfo shops for comic books and throws temper tantrums, all the while deferring to his discontent and highly critical fiancé. They have been engaged for twelve years and unable to wed because they cannot find an affordable apartment. Rodolfo, at the urging of his fiancé, marries an old woman hoping she will die and leave him her apartment and a chance to live his own life. Ironically, he enjoys and embraces his new role, hovering between husband and son, and clearly interacting more peacefully with the old woman than with his fiancé. He is genuinely distraught upon the old woman’s death and the emptiness of his new life with his longtime girlfriend offers little hope for the future. Driving off to the cemetery at the end of the film, her strident voice echoes as she barks orders and spouts platitudes about their new station in life. Likewise, in El cochecito the ineffectual male protagonist, Don Anselmo, played by Pepe Isbert, reverts to an infantilized state when he finds himself inadequate and unable to master his surroundings. This film provides a social satire of the incipient postwar consumer society and the growing dependence on and desire for foreign (American) goods. Due to the influx of consumer products from the United States, represented by the “cochecito” or motorized wheelchair, Don Anselmo suddenly discovers that he is at a disadvantage next to his physically disabled friends. In a crucial moment he understands himself to be deficient because he is lacking in the latest technology as his friend, indicating his new machine, says: “Mejor que las piernas de verdad!”/“Even better than legs!” Instead of being esteemed for his ability to push his friend’s wheelchair as he was in the past, he is left behind by those who now use the prosthetic support that this new consumer product affords. The disrespect his consumer desires earn him at home with his family are strikingly contrasted with the good treatment he is afforded by the wheelchair salesman: “El señor es mi cliente”/“This gentleman is my customer”—his status as a customer is enough to earn him esteem in this new frame of reference. It is as if to say that simply “being a man” in the sense of possessing physical strength and independence, and contributing, is not sufficient for winning the esteem of one’s peers. Quite to the contrary, he is congratulated for his new purchase and Don Anselmo himself suffers no lack of selfrespect for his grasping and acquisitive behavior—the owning is what is important—so much so that he is willing to poison his family and steal from his son rather than lose the cochecito. His only concern as he finally

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motors off to jail, policemen in tow, is whether or not he will be allowed to keep his wheelchair with him. He has clearly sacrificed the old social order of service for his own private enjoyment. Finally, the cochecito affords him complete independence even from his loved ones and peers, as he focuses on the personal satisfaction of ownership and on keeping his new acquisition. As long as women were thought to esteem and respect male superiority, the fundamental sense of “lack of being” on the part of the male could be masked. However, it becomes increasingly apparent in many of the films from the 1950s and 1960s that this support was no longer a constant. Don Rodolfo’s fiancé, Pili’s girlfriend in Surcos, and Juan’s wife, Carmen, in Esa pareja feliz pose a serious threat to the successful functioning of masculinity of the films’ protagonists. As Silverman points out: “the ‘ideal’ female subject refuses to recognize male lack” and “upholds the male subject in his phallic identity by seeing him with her ‘imagination’ rather than with her eyes” (Male Subjectivity 47). The danger in seeing is, of course, that the functioning of the mechanisms of disavowal of castration and fetishization will be jeopardized, thus endangering the grand illusion that has sustained hegemonic representations of masculinity in the past. Furthermore, while in the cases of Pili and Rodolfo’s fiancé there is a genuine and explicit threat of withholding approval—which leads to infantilization in one case and death in the other—in Esa pareja feliz it is sufficient only that the husband perceives a possible withholding of approval as he shifts his own perspective of himself to that of his wife. His imagined disapproval projected onto her causes him to become enraged and he chases her around the apartment, hurling violent and unfounded accusations about her lack of faith in him. For her part, though consistently looking with benevolence and acceptance on his schemes, she has never stopped playing games of chance—something that he perceives as a lack of confidence in his abilities as the breadwinner of the family. For this reason, the “binding” of the foundational trauma into a coherent narrative in which the male, with the help of the female, repeats the dominant fiction—”man as the breadwinner” in this case—is threatened. As Silverman indicates, “Male mastery rests on an abyss” (Male Subjectivity 7) and must be consolidated through constant repetition of the equation of the penis with the phallus. Collective belief in this equation is necessary to maintain the smooth functioning of traditional masculinity. DESPERATE MEASURES: DEFENSE, CONTAINMENT, AND ASSIMILATION In the 1960s, Spanish cinema gave rise to an abundance of films which seemed designed to reeducate males in the practice of a consumerist form of masculinity, while another cinematic current explored the anxieties

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that social and economic changes produced. The rise of the individual consumer was, at least in part, the result of a conscious strategy conceived in the Francoist regime: “Indeed the creation of a prosperous consumer society, as theorized and promoted by archtechnocrat Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora in his 1961 book, The Twilight of Ideologies, was conceived as a strategy to guarantee political apathy among Spaniards” (qtd. in Vernon and Morris 66). According to Triana-Toribio, the lack of economic growth in the 1950s forced the regime to reassess its attitude toward industrial development and foreign investment. It sought a way to make Spain attractive abroad and the creation of the “Nuevo Cine Español”/“New Spanish Cinema” was part of this project. Given the regime’s interest in producing films with international appeal, certain directors were granted a slightly greater degree of freedom. Carlos Saura, due to his success with Los golfos (1959) and La caza (The Hunt; 1965) along with his alliance with the influential producer Elías Querejeta, managed to create films with a degree of greater intellectual integrity and psychological honesty, though he still employed a complex metaphorical style to disguise his criticism. However, the so-called “Viejo Cine Español”/“Old Spanish Cinema” continued to serve an ideological function at home with the majority of the population, introducing them to social changes and consumerist ways of thinking without abandoning their small-town, nationalistic worldview: “Popular cinemas rely on recognition and identification with the circumstances of the characters and this is aided through the representation of phenomena new to a Spain which was entering the patterns of Western consumer society through the desarollismo [sic]” (Spanish National Cinema, Triana-Toribio 75). However even more mainstream productions such as No desearás al vecino del quinto (Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fifth Floor Neighbor; Ramón Fernández 1970), many films with Manolo Escobar, and “paleto” or country bumpkin cinema in general reveal emerging anxieties through their attempts at containment. Internal contradictions of a society in the process of transformation and uneven development give rise at the same time to a leftist, critical film current appealing to intellectuals and the international artfilm audience. Peppermint Frappé by Carlos Saura won a Silver Bear award in the film festival of Berlin in 1967, and for national audiences of popular cinema the wildly successful first example of the paleto genre, La ciudad no es para mí (City Life Is Not for Me) by Pedro Lazaga appeared just two years earlier in 1965. Despite obvious differences, both films represent ways of being male in reaction to consumerist pressures. In Peppermint Frappé, a repressed, forty-something doctor, Julián, played by José Luis López Vázquez, becomes obsessed with his friend’s beautiful, young, foreign wife, Elena, played by Geraldine Chaplin. After attempts to woo her fail, he kills them both and takes up with his timid secretary whom he has been refashioning in Elena’s image. Julián had been a solitary man, spending his time alone carefully cutting out fetish-

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istic images of women from fashion magazines and hiding away on the weekend at a decrepit country house that can be seen to represent the traditional Spain of the past. When he meets the beautiful and uninhibited Elena it is as if those magazine women have materialized before his eyes. He tries to engage her, urging her to remember some previous meeting at the primitive, drumbeating festival at Calanda—and thus to incorporate her into his imaginary. She denies being there, laughingly telling her husband about Julián’s imaginings. His persistence is met with playful resistance, his earnestness with laughter. He becomes increasingly unable to tolerate their jibes and finally poisons them both, pushing their red sports car, bodies inside, over a cliff. Julián is the embodiment of the repressed and reserved Spanish man of the era, and exposure to the modern images of smiling and sexualized women in magazines seems to threaten him. He manages this threat through scopophillic fetishization—using ruler, pen, and knife to reframe and slice up glossy magazine images which he then arranges in a scrapbook. When he meets Elena he is initially euphoric, thinking he has found the woman of his dreams from Calanda. However, she playfully resists his attempts to capture or confine her, dancing, laughing, and running about freely so that, in his frustration, he unleashes his controlling impulses on his secretary, Ana (also played by Geraldine Chaplin), who

Figure 1.4. Elena (Geraldine Chaplin) embodies the “sueca” or modern foreign woman and object of fascination for Julián (José Luis López Vázquez). Peppermint Frappé. Dir. Carlos Saura, Querejeta, 1967.

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docilely follows his every instruction and willingly inhabits the fantasy Julián has created. This film reveals the tension created in the individual by the rapid influx of consumer images and products into Spain. Julián’s attempts at control are inadequate to the task and self-preservation finally demands that he eliminate the threat, sending both the flashy sports car and blond embodiment of the “sueca” or modern foreign woman into oblivion. This breaking point reveals the incapability of the Spanish male to psychologically assimilate the rapid changes being imposed upon him in the sixties. In a Spain where all but the very rich had until recently shared a common culture of self-denial based on lack, the Catholic exaltation of poverty, and past ideals of masculinity, the sudden exposure to visual, if not actual, consumption throws the protagonist into a state of confusion. Whereas the Spanish male used to be able to take consolation and even pleasure in the fact that by sacrificing his own enjoyment he was securely inserted into the symbolic order, here the pleasure of others is oppressively near as he watches the couple kissing and dancing, and hears them having sex in the room above. He hides his head under the blanket, but to no avail— he cannot avoid their suffocating pleasure that reminds him of his own lack, his own inability to enjoy as fully as they apparently are. A society of prohibition, in which no one was allowed access to enjoyment, provided a certain respite from the enjoyment of others. As McGowan says, “Though the prohibition of enjoyment does, in one sense deprive the subject of her/his enjoyment, it also frees the subject from the suffocating presence of the Other and the Other’s enjoyment” (End of Dissatisfaction 35). Now, as the old order gives way to the appearance of unrestricted enjoyment as represented by this couple, that distance disappears. In a reactive attempt to control his anxiety and contain the threat of their unrestrained enjoyment, he simply eliminates it (by killing them) and returns to that which he can control—the secretary, Ana, who agrees to participate in his dream rather than demanding her own. Saura’s presentation of consumerist anxiety was juxtaposed against a backdrop of popular cinema that seemed to try to facilitate interpellation of the viewer into consumer culture. Among these, the extremely successful La ciudad no es para mí stands out both for its wide appeal and its adaptation to consumer values. From the very first scene the viewer is placed behind the wheel of a car as the camera uses this vantage point to provide a vision of Madrid while the voice-over describes the city in detail. Though the fast-paced city life is apparently unfavorably compared with that of the small town, a powerful subtext urges the viewer to see the pueblo through the eyes of commodity culture as a nostalgic object of consumption, and to enjoy what the city has to offer. The paleto protagonist played by Paco Martínez Soria employs his commoner’s wisdom to manage life in the big city. Interestingly, Nathan Richardson points to the paleto’s ability to disrespect the patriarchal authority figure’s power and

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Figure 1.5. The enjoyment of others plagues Julián (José Luis López Vázquez). Peppermint Frappé. Dir. Carlos Saura, Querejeta, 1967.

thus open the way to direct satisfaction of one’s desires without the unwanted symbolic father’s imposition of prohibition. The paleto denies his own castration by mocking the authority figures, and thus positions the spectator through identification as open to satisfaction of desires and participation in the consumer lifestyle. Richardson states, “patriarchal authority is just another victim of the radical changes brought about by the all-absorbing triumph of consumer capitalism” (69). This transformation is exactly the step that Todd McGowan describes as a shift in power from the “oedipal father of prohibition” to the “anal father of enjoyment.” Like Julián in Peppermint Frappé, here the viewer is exposed to the expensive goods and perfectly coiffed women that consumer culture holds up for sale and, despite the fact that the protagonist returns to the pueblo, the viewer has learned to see this quaint old character and his small town surroundings as a valuable memory to be stored away. As Richardson has it, “the paleto and his rural idyll became the most coveted and crucial of Spanish commodities” (73). Despite attempts to package change in a digestible fashion, such a radical about-face as occurred in the representation of the desirable male model brought with it confusion and a renegotiation of male sexuality. By moving toward an ideal of self-indulgence and consumption, the male moved dangerously close to what had been considered to be the realm of women. The problem became how to justify adherence to the new consumer dictate without compromising one’s masculinity under the previous system of prohibition as depicted most vividly in those crusade cinema

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Figure 1.6. Julián eliminates the “threat,” pushing a drugged Elena (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband Pablo (Alfredo Mayo) over a cliff. Peppermint Frappé. Dir. Carlos Saura, Querejeta, 1967.

films. Encouraging men to consume as promoted in the explosion of television advertising and other mediums in the 1960s implied a rapid reversal of an age-old prohibition against male self-indulgence and consumption. No desearás al vecino del quinto (1970), an extremely popular film by director Ramón Fernández, exemplifies the renegotiation process. This film reveals a growing unease about the masculine role through a (hysterical) ridiculization of the homosexual and, finally, the reestablishment of a completely heterosexual male model. Pedro (Jean Sorel), a young gynecologist interested in promoting his new theoretical technique of painless childbirth, is identified as a modern man through his longish hair, slightly feminine good looks, and tolerant attitudes. He finds himself unable to build a practice in his small city due to provincial male attitudes forbidding female nudity from being seen by the virile, young doctor. While at a conference in Madrid, Pedro discovers Antón (Alfredo Landa), a supposedly gay fashion designer from his home town at a Madrid nightclub in the company of two beautiful women. Antón reveals that he maintains the homosexual masquerade in the pueblo for the sake of his business but comes to the city to carouse and pick up women. He rather easily convinces Pedro to forget his fiancé and join him in his selfindulgent exploits. In the meantime suspicion in the town grows over the

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nature of Pedro’s relationship with Antón, causing Pedro’s fiancé to come to Madrid where she eventually discovers the truth. Nevertheless they marry and she helps him maintain his homosexual masquerade as their business thrives in the town. One day an excessively macho Italian named Corleone, husband and father of some of Pedro’s patients, also discovers the truth and beats Pedro severely, sending him to the hospital. He recovers and is shown in the end living a fulfilling heterosexual marriage relationship. This film seems to be a reaction to changing attitudes about male roles which led to hysteria and the forced containment of homosexuality. It presents the gamut of homosexual stereotypes—from flamboyant, poodle-carrying, lisping fashion designer, to a mother who fears that her son will “catch” homosexuality from his fifth floor neighbor. It goes to great lengths to prove that, despite appearances, the two protagonists are most definitely not gay—revealing them to be in fact hyper-sexed, scopophillic, heterosexual males who simply put on the guise of homosexuality for professional reasons. In fact, despite its treatment of the theme, the film does not actually contain any gay characters. It is implied that, though the viewer may have heard about homosexuality out there, it does not really exist here in Spain—and if one thinks it is here, there is probably a perfectly good heterosexual explanation for it. The film’s title itself seems like an injunction, Ten Commandments-style, against engaging in such completely unacceptable (though by implication tempting) behavior. The final scene expresses the kind of “near miss” danger that the protagonist has faced as his (now) wife anxiously asks the doctor if her husband has “lost” anything in the attack by Corleone. The doctor quickly reassures her that, despite the psychic trauma, he has avoided the necessity of a “transplant.” The film, like the doctor, has arrived just in time to save its protagonist’s manhood and ensure that he will continue to have a “normal” (i.e. heterosexual) relationship with his wife. However, by highlighting the performative nature of masculinity—hetero- as well as homosexuality—the film allows a queer reading that calls to mind Freud’s insistence on the bisexual nature of each individual and the instability of gender whose complete and permanent resolution is never obtained. THE CASE OF MANOLO ESCOBAR: EASING THE TRANSITION Fisherman, auto mechanic, truck driver, metro train operator, guitar maker, lemon picker . . . the simple, hard-working protagonist, moderate in his habits and disdainful of wealth and self-promotion, is thrust into a modern consumerist culture where he adapts and thrives despite initial reluctance. In Me has hecho perder el juicio (1973), conservative culture

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darling, Escobar, sings heartily of his idealistic disdain for money, but ends on a more pragmatic note: “yo prefiero virtudes y lumbre de luceros sabiendo de antemano que el mundo es del dinero”/“I prefer virtue and starlight’s glow knowing all the while the world is made of money.” The extraordinarily popular Spanish singer/actor Manolo Escobar stars in a series of formulaic musical films from the later part of the Francoist dictatorship and early transition to democracy, and his transformation reflects the struggle that many Spaniards faced as the dictatorship’s fascistCatholic value system waned and was replaced by a more global consumerist culture. Films starring Manolo Escobar offer a privileged vantage point for an analysis of this change, given their popularity and the fact that, in the vast majority of them, his characters’ struggle enacts an accommodation of this same theme, reflecting anxieties related to this transition and facilitating the ideological shift required as the masculine ideal was refashioned in the latter half of the twentieth century. According to Perriam, the representation of these culturally loaded icons “can be identified with as a provisional way of making sense of the world” (Stars and Masculinities 9). Manolo Escobar’s star construct served to ease hegemonic masculinity’s transition from the dictatorship model to that of the consumer culture that later prevailed in Spain. The nascent consumerist ethos posed a serious challenge to the continuation of the established model of masculinity. Western capitalist society’s organization, first around prohibition and later around the pursuit of personal enjoyment, marks a transition which rivals in importance the effects of the political transition in Spain, as contemporary conceptualizations of selfhood begin to revolve around one’s consumerist identity instead of one’s political identity, necessitating a reworking of the concept of masculinity at this transitional time. How did the average Spaniard adapt to these changed circumstances? How was the new value system assimilated? The obsessive reworking of the individual’s relationship to money and consumption in films of the period suggests contemporary anxieties and concerns that required the performance of an exorcism of antiquated attitudes about masculinity, without the incurrence of guilt or imputations of feminization. Escobar’s repetitive performance of the male protagonist’s struggle to maintain his clearly heterosexual masculinity while embracing modern changes in Spanish culture is an indication of the stressors experienced in the adoption of a new masculine ideal. Paul Julian Smith pointed out that Spanish national identity in the twentieth century has been linked to an intense hetero/homosexual binarism (4). Escobar’s performance of masculinity in the films considered here attempts to redefine the terms of this binarism while very carefully preserving its essentially dualistic nature. While ostensibly rejecting the hedonism and self-interest that have been associated with the abject, or externalized other (feminized and/or homosexual) masculinity, the successful heroes played by Escobar modify the terms of the cultural dis-

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course by professing adherence to traditional masculine values yet ultimately thriving in a modern consumerist environment. The cultural valence of the performer Manolo Escobar and the characters played by him reflects how the embodiment of this star can be seen as representational of ideological themes and might be read as reflecting larger issues confronting masculinity at the time. Perriam sought to discover the particularities and peculiarities of certain popular male stars and explore the implications of these. As he states, “it is not the mere fact of the locking in of these stars and their roles to widespread social and imagined paradigms . . . that concerns me so much as the details of the fit, and more importantly, the approximations and occasional lack of true fit” (Stars and Masculinities 14). It is this “lack of true fit” that makes the characters played by Escobar remarkable since they adopt the guise of a time-tested and conservative heterosexual masculinity while carefully attiring themselves in the trappings of consumerist modernity. Unlike his contemporaries such as El Fary and Julio Iglesias, Escobar traversed the gap between popular singer and popular actor, cementing his cultural influence across genres, and was considered perhaps “the single most popular male media star in Spanish history” (Crumbaugh 262). He set himself apart from such comedic actors as Alfredo Landa, José Luis López Vásquez, Andrés Pajares, and Fernando Esteso by avoiding falling into the ridiculous or taking on the role of the gracioso or clown, appearing instead in the role of the galán, or desired male hero and role model, and is thus uniquely positioned as an object of study within the context of transitional Spanish masculinity. Escobar’s much-publicized biography clearly situates him as representative of traditional Spain while also at the center of social and economic changes of his time. Consistently represented as the Spanish “ragsto-riches” success story both on screen and off, he mirrored the country’s own economic takeoff in the 1960s and fit Perriam’s definition of a star in that he was one of a select few actors upon whose name producers relied to launch new projects (Stars and Masculinities 1). Born Manuel García Escobar on October 19, 1931 in El Ejido, Almería, into a family of humble means, his biography evokes the figure of the folkloric, southern gypsy— an image that was actively promoted under Franco as the embodiment of the essential Spanish soul. Rafael Abella and Gabriel Cardona note his unique cultural positioning as representative of lo castizo, or essential Spanishness, in contrast to the singer/songwriters of the newer protest songs who included explicitly political content in their material. In his youth Escobar traveled with two of his nine siblings to Barcelona, joining a massive exodus from the countryside to the industrialized city. There he worked in a metalworking factory and held other odd jobs before being discovered in a contest on Radio Barcelona in 1957. Escobar recorded seventy records over half of which went gold, and appeared in over twenty films in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He was consistently

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represented in the press as the epitome of traditional Spanish masculinity and his Andalusian origins dovetailed nicely with traditional tastes for the folkloric figure and an “authentic” Spain. By popular vote, Radio España named him “el artista más representativo de España”/“the artist most representative of Spain” awarding him a plaque that read “Esto es España, Señores”/“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Spain” (Amorós 217), and in December 2001 he was voted favorite leading man of all time by spectators of “Cine de Barrio,” a nostalgic Spanish television show of folkloric españolada cinema presented by Carmen Sevilla—a fact that suggests his enduring appeal among a large segment of the population (Crumbaugh 265). Nicknamed “Mister Porompompero,” his popular songs and films placed him among the elite of Spanish celebrity and ensured that his presence permeated Spanish society: “Cada vez que canta ‘El Porompompero’—la canción que acabaría convirtiéndose en sintonía obligada de fiestas familiares, reuniones estudiantiles y mítines de meson—el público se contagia”/“Every time he sings ‘El Porompompero’—the song that ended up becoming the obligatory tune of family parties, student meetings and public gatherings—it was contagious” (Ya 37). Even as late as 2007 he was honored by Premios Familia with the “Ola de oro” prize recognizing his professional body of work in the world of cinema, and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas has referred to him as a “National Institution” (153). Escobar’s off-screen persona added weight to his cultural resonance as his filmic representations were considered to be an extension of his true character. Public perception was that he was merely representing himself on screen and this connection was reinforced in the press: “Sin recurrir a tópicos harto manidos, debemos decir que es tal cual se nos presenta en sus actuaciones: un hombre del pueblo, sencillo, cordial sin afectaciones, enamorado de su profesión y feliz con sus circunstancias”/“At the risk of resorting to overused clichés, we have to say that he’s just like he seems in his movies: a simple man from the country, cordial without affectation, enamored of his profession and happy with his circumstances” (Ya 37). Like the characters he played, he was considered to be a man of reserved and formal character, sober in his habits and in control of his passions. Escobar himself promoted this image: “Lo que más me gusta es estar en casa leyendo. Yo no voy casi nunca a cócteles”/“What I enjoy most is to stay home and read. I almost never go out drinking,” and in the same article: “No fumo, no bebo y cuando canto hago una vida muy regular. Nunca trasnocho”/“I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and when I’m singing, I lead a very quiet life. I never stay out late” (Hora 45). As the popular right-leaning newspaper ABC stated, “Una película de Manolo Escobar es, ante todo, él”/“A Manolo Escobar film is, above all, him” (8). His reallife marriage to a blond German tourist, Anita Marx, whom he met at the beach, seemed an extension of such films as Un beso en el puerto (1965)

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where he woos and wins a blond tourist despite vast cultural and economic differences. In his films, Escobar’s characters are cast as representative of desirable Spanish masculinity. He appears to be “anyman” and “everyman,” embedded in his community, popular and charismatic, yet working side by side with his companions—one of a “band of brothers” or comrades as seen in the earlier military-themed films. He is generally positioned as representative of a group of peers—fishermen, auto mechanics, lemonpickers—and many of his films open by emphasizing the universality of the story about to be portrayed. In Un beso en el puerto the establishing shot pans a map of Spain as the voice-over declares “la historia pudiera ocurrir en cualquier lugar de este mapa”/“this story might have occurred anywhere on this map,” going on to mis-quote the famous line from Don Quijote, “un lugar cuyo nombre sí quiero acordarme”/“a place whose name I do want to remember.” Here, Manolo is clearly positioned as just another local negotiating the onslaught of tourists on the Mediterranean coast, reminiscent of the situation facing many Spaniards starting in the mid-1950s. Reference to Don Quijote invokes a common heritage, bypassing the complicated recent historical past and further uniting viewers under this cultural icon. Escobar’s characters generally recall the self-abnegating heroes of the past as seen in crusade cinema. Like them, he often sacrifices his own interests for those of his companions, thus earning him popularity and a “good name,” and reflects McGowan’s statement that “the society of prohibition depends on and constantly reinforces the sense of mutuality through its stress on recognition” (End of Dissatisfaction 26). His courtly manners, self-restraint, and scorn for material wealth consistently set him apart from greedy others around him just as José, the “good” brother in Raza, distinguished himself from Pedro, his self-interested younger sibling. In Mi canción es para ti (Torrado 1965), his character would destroy an expensive necklace from his beloved’s suitor rather than sell it, only pursuing wealth to win her mother’s approval and thereby be allowed to marry. And in Un lugar de la Manga (Ozores 1970) he wonders aloud why anyone would work more than is necessary and directly opposing one of the foundational concepts of consumerism that promotes the acquisition and consumption of non-essentials. The explicit association between Escobar and a masculine, heterosexist tradition is made in the 1967 film Pero . . . ¿en qué país vivimos?. José Luis Sáenz de Heredia (famous for directing Raza the pseudo-autobiographical film about Franco himself) directs Escobar as the singer Antonio Torres, an embodiment of traditional masculinity, juxtaposing him with his frequent co-star Conchita Velasco as “Barbara”—the clearly modern “Yé-yé” girl. 3 Despite his initial lack of interest, he is induced to compete in an “American Idol” style musical contest which is part of an advertising campaign to induce Spaniards to choose between two drinks:

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the traditional Spanish product manzanilla (a dry sherry from Andalusia) represented by the “canción española”/“Spanish song” sung by Torres, and the more modern whiskey represented by the “canción moderna” sung by the female pop star. In this competition the modern is clearly associated with the feminine in a variety of ways and thus in opposition to those values represented by Escobar’s character. The modern and materialistic Barbara (played by Velasco) is easily hired on. In a comic scene she literally jumps at the chance to earn a million pesetas—an offer that Antonio Torres refuses saying he is unwilling to compete with anyone “y menos con una mujer”/“much less with a woman,” despite the large sum of money offered to him. The male character’s reference here to the difference in gender reinforces the idea that he is acting in a “manly” way by not entering into this competition, but it also introduces the idea of a fundamental instability. As Foucault says, “The instability of our ‘selves’ . . . demands an investment in our distinctness, together with a disparaging of that from which we would like to be seen as distinct” (qtd. in MacKinnon 5). In insisting on the difference between his (presumably superior) motivation and that of the woman, he reassures himself and the viewer of the inherent superiority of a traditional masculine approach. His adherence to this non-materialistic form of masculinity is underscored by his song in the next scene: “Besos y flores . . . yo vivo sólo por eso”/“Kisses and flowers . . . I live only for these.” By singing a copla, or ballad, in marked contrast to Barbara’s pop music style, his character is clearly aligned with the traditional song much beloved in the early Franco years. Further highlighting this contrast is a rather odd exchange between two men in a bar that implicitly links masculinity and consumer spending. An argument over musical preference breaks out between an older, formally dressed man and a younger one with longish hair and modern attire. The more conservative, older man is unwilling to listen to the modern music played on the jukebox by the younger and tries to play Escobar’s “El Porompompero.” The younger man defends his right to select the music he likes by saying “Mi duro es tan duro como el suyo”/ “My nickle is as hard as yours”—a play on the double meaning of duro as both “hard” and a five peseta coin. The older man shoots back “algo más blando no?”/“a little softer, don’t you think?” in what could be interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to the masculinity of the other, hardness being the traditionally desirable male characteristic. Thus the spending, long-haired, “effeminate” younger man asserts his masculinity before the older, more conservative male directly through money rather than in spite of it, illustrating the shift in values that equates modern masculinity with consumption. The “modern” man confirms that despite apparently threatening changes to the traditionally accepted form of hegemonic masculinity, the hardness of his duro or phallic, heterosexual masculinity, remains intact.

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In fact, a traditional hard-edged, impermeable, heterosexual masculine being is carefully defended in Escobar’s films. As Susanne Hatty points out, “Women’s bodies, in the West, are often viewed as porous and subject to leakage, and hence are inherently impure” (146). Escobar’s body and/or bodily functions receive very little emphasis in the majority of his films, thus avoiding both the threatening commodification or objectification associated with the feminine, and any suggestion of a porosity of boundaries that might imply a lack of self-control or self-sufficiency. The impermeability of Escobar’s filmic personae recalls McGowan’s society of prohibition in which consumption is considered anathema to the performance of hegemonic masculinity. He rarely eats, drinks, or smokes, and often this is explicitly established within his films. In En un lugar de la Manga, a conniving businessman evaluates ways of persuading Escobar’s character to sell some land: “Ni le interesa el dinero ni el juego, ni la fama, ni bebe ni fuma ni nada”/“He doesn’t care about money, gambling or fame; he doesn’t even drink or smoke.” He is represented as selfsufficient and above the self-indulgent pursuit of consumption. However, Escobar’s embodiment of traditional masculinity undergoes a careful transformation admitting previously unacceptable characteristics. His lean body remains covered in his films, as seen in Pero . . . ¿en qué país vivimos? as his character, Antonio Torres, relaxes at home. Hair slicked down over angular facial features, shirt buttoned smoothly and pants carefully creased, he is ensconced in his manly lair caring for his pet wolves and surrounded by guns and stuffed birds (recalling Franco’s

Figure 1.7. Juan (Manolo Escobar) initially refuses the developer’s (José Luis López Vázquez) offer to sell his father’s coastal property. En un lugar de la Manga. Dir. Mariano Ozores, Arturo González, 1970.

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hobby of hunting). Again he is represented as self-sufficient and selfcontained until his encounter with Barbara. It is only when visited by his potential competitor in the whiskey v. manzanilla campaign that this non-drinker not only pours himself a whiskey, but also agrees to participate in the singing competition that he has thus far refused. Here the compromise constituted by his drinking and agreeing to participate in the contest is protected from collapsing into unmanly self-interest through the invocation of his extreme masculinity—his heterosexual desire for a beautiful woman is the only thing that might induce him to modify his behavior. And instead of signaling a compromise in his traditional code of self-sufficiency, Torres’s agreement to compete serves to reaffirm his scorn for money as he renounces the large monetary prize asking instead that, should he win, he be allowed to cut Barbara’s hair according to his taste. It is an interesting request considering that female hair cutting has been interpreted as the equivalent of female castration (Kinder Blood Cinema 222) and thus a return to traditional values; it is a generalization that seems to hold up as later shots reveal modern-looking women at the competition holding signs that say “No nos cortáis la melena”/ “Don’t cut our hair.” An angry Barbara responds to Antonio’s proposition by saying: “Si pierdes tú ¿qué corto?”/“And if you lose, what do I cut?” and Torres instantly replies: “Yo no tengo nada cortable”/“I don’t have anything to cut”—as if to deny even the possibility of male castration or vulnerability. The contest rages on between the canción española versus the moderna, maintaining the illusion of difference despite the fact that it is now all modern in the sense that it is part of a huge, new advertising campaign. Predictably, the two fall in love before the contest is decided and resolution is achieved when Barbara voluntarily cuts her own hair—providing the comforting illusion of willing submission. The film closes with an apparently sexually satisfied Barbara (seen wearing a robe, her cigarette burning in the ashtray) calling in sick to her secretary, thus confirming the entrance of modern values (sexual permissiveness, financial success, and public visibility) while at the same time reaffirming the virility of Torres who, while appearing to reject compromise of any kind, has fully transitioned into a modern, sexually liberal, and materially successful world, and yet continues to have nothing cortable. Though the implied connection between Torres and the adoption of modern values is clear, the character himself is absent from the scene, thus avoiding an uncomfortable confrontation for the viewer with the hero’s capitulation. In Me has hecho perder el juicio (1973) by director Juan de Orduña, there is a split or double Manolo (the same device appears in the popular Mi canción es para ti) which again works to absolve the hero of guilt for adapting to modern, consumerist values. In keeping with this construct, Manolo the performer has “sold out,” or become commercialized and rich, while our protagonist Manolo remains by contrast authentic and, at

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least initially, poor. In this film there is a further splitting of the male protagonist through the convention of the “buddy” or constant companion, Diego (Andrés Pajares), who is forever on the lookout for ways to promote Manolo and thus get rich. The protagonist is allowed to remain aloof and untainted by the grasping and negotiating conducted on his behalf, responding to his sidekick’s scheming, saying: “Déjame en paz y haced lo que queréis”/“Leave me alone and do whatever you want to do.” He is clearly the more positive of the male models presented, considered more handsome, courageous, honest, and desirable to women. But in not rejecting outright the scheming of his friend, he allows a sort of graft of this more materialistic masculine model onto himself without incurring the guilt of personally chasing after financial gain. Any direct association with consumerism that might undermine his masculine standing within a society of prohibition is avoided. Diego, in his avaricious maneuverings, becomes a figure for ridicule. In contrast to the positive male model presented by Manolo, he appears openly fearful, greedy, lustful, and ridiculous, and in a seduction attempt is poked in the eye in a sort of symbolic castration. His lack of self-restraint effects a “de-manning,” recalling Foucault’s observation of masculinity in Ancient Greece that the man of self-indulgence was considered feminine or non-masculine. Diego convinces Manolo to initiate legal action against a large perfume company that guarantees that the wearer of its product will find love. They decide that Manolo will claim that the product has actually repelled women and thus ruined his chances for love. It is understood that, win or lose, the publicity will be helpful to Manolo’s fledgling musical career. The stern, bespectacled female president of the company hears of the ploy and sends various women, and finally herself, to draw Manolo into a compromising situation and thus discredit his case. As in Pero . . . ¿en qué país vivimos?, the two fall in love and, instead of destroying him, the president transforms herself according to the dictatorship ideal promoted by the Sección Femenina, 4 learning to cook calamari and tortilla de patatas in order to please him. For his part, Manolo renounces the lawsuit in the end admitting the ploy and returning to his honest job as a metro train operator, again maintaining his honor and the “good name” indicated by McGowan as the acceptable form of social enjoyment in a traditional “society of prohibition.” And once again, a grand reconciliation of various themes occurs through the marriage of the two— Manolo has gained publicity for his singing career through the course of the trial, the hard-edged president has been “feminized” and subordinated by love, and the two will live happily ever after in their materially very comfortable future. The synthesizing mechanism of marriage serves here to restore social order based on the traditional patriarchal family and subordinates the strong woman to her husband while integrating Manolo into a modern consumerist success story apparently through no doing of his own.

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Todd McGowan notes that the successful sexual relationship is the central impossible object of desire in what he calls the “cinema of integration.” He discusses the ideological function of the cinema of integration in the following way: “The creation of the romantic couple also functions ideologically in the way that it resolves or obscures other antagonisms that a film presents . . . Films that conclude with the romantic couple highlight it to the exclusion of all other narrative developments, thereby erasing the power of other antagonisms” (Real Gaze 118). Though the characters Escobar plays almost always find that their values clash with those of modern, consumer culture—as contemporary spectators may also feel—the resolution of the romantic relationship provides relief through the deflection of this anxiety onto another issue. As the ad agency secretary exclaims upon hearing of the impending marriage of Torres and Barbara in Pero . . . ¿en qué país vivimos?, “¡Todo arreglado! Ya nos podemos dormir tranquilos”/“All taken care of! Now we can sleep in peace.” But of course in reality the societal issues reflected in the film were not neatly resolved, and anxieties related to the adaptation of the dictatorship model of masculinity to the new economically and sexually liberal environment of the 1960s and 1970s surfaced again and again in Escobar films of the period. A brief analysis of one of his later films reveals how new sexual mores altered the dictatorship model. In Donde hay patrón (Ozores 1978) Escobar stars as a fisherman concerned that the new owner of the boat will sell the vessel and thus deprive her crew of the work that sustains them and their families. Escobar’s character has no family and appears to act out of concern for his companions, reinforcing the self-renouncing hegemonic model of the past in which one disregards his own desires for the good of the whole. His disdain for personal advancement is made explicit when he turns down an opportunity to sing for money in a restaurant. This image is reinforced when he meets Andrea, the beautiful new owner of the boat. In response to his urging to “think of others,” she counters that one must “think of oneself,” again linking self-interest with the modern/feminine and admirable self-renunciation with the traditional/masculine. And, as in previous films, he appears to maintain his chivalrous and reserved attitude toward women, turning away, for example, when he sees Andrea sunbathing nude on an isolated beach. As in Me has hecho perder el juicio, it is Manolo’s companions who scheme and plot to trick the owner in order to save the boat and advance their economic position. However, there are several new twists in this film that point to a new direction for Spanish masculinity and link Escobar’s character to the sexually promiscuous protagonists of the post-censorship sexy comedies of the destape or “uncovering,” in which female nudity played an integral part. There is a “lack of true fit,” to use Perriam’s term, in which the expected scenario in the expected vehicle is altered in a variety of ways admitting the possibility of rewriting traditional mascu-

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linity to include traits previously considered antithetical to it. The opening shot of the film shows a solitary boat on a calm sea and in the next shot Manolo appears singing of his life as a fisherman. Though he is surrounded by his companions, this shot metaphorically positions Manolo as a loner, an individual rather than part of a band of brothers. Subsequent shots show the rest of the crew hard at work, but these do not include Manolo, nor does the crew show any recognition of his performance. And the most notable change: Manolo’s character no longer shows restraint in sexual matters. When an ex-girlfriend lures him into a sexual situation, he tries to defend himself by saying: “Estáte quietecita, que uno no es de piedra”/“Take it easy, I’m not made of stone,” admitting his potential lack of self-control—an un-masculine trait according to the model of masculinity promoted in cine de cruzada and throughout the dictatorship—and soon succumbs to her advances, later deceiving his true love about the affair. It seems like a sequence from the nascent “sexy comedy” genre inserted within the traditional dictatorship musical film. Hopewell observes that the underlying assumption in these later films is that “the Iberian male is horny” (81), a shift that posits desire as a central and defining characteristic of Spanish male identity, but here this shift is carefully mediated by the plot construct of the man serving the needs of his companions. Throughout the film he has courted the owner of the boat, singing of her brown eyes and of love—recalling his earlier films and the “light in a duchess’ eyes,” but when faced with the temptation of sex with his ex-girlfriend, he indulges his impulse in direct contrast to his behavior in earlier films. Despite his indulgence in the affair, the film ends as before on a reassuringly conservative note—he is bound by true love to this modern and wealthy businesswoman and thus becomes a part of her world, his “indiscretion” forgotten. The stretch from the dictatorship model of chivalry and self-restraint to integration through true love seems less plausible by the late 1970s; nevertheless, despite this new transgression, the trajectory is ostensibly the same and serves to incorporate the individual into the new order without apparently compromising his masculinity. CONCLUSION By the final years of the dictatorship, it became obvious that the selfabnegating and restrained masculine model illustrated most clearly in crusade cinema was inconsistent with the rapidly changing consumerist economy in Spain. While the early dictatorship appealed to the traditional masculine model as promoted by Christianity and fascism in its need for justification and approval by the masses, convincing its citizenry that virtue and esteem resided in giving and going without, Spain’s economic takeoff and new consumer-based value system required a radical re-vi-

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Figure 1.8. Manolo (Manolo Escobar) succumbs to temptation. Donde hay patrón. Dir. Mariano Ozores, Arturo González, 2003.

sioning of masculinity. Whereas the early dictatorship model of hegemonic masculinity was based on a hierarchical notion of social organization centered on what the individual could offer and not what he could claim for himself, the late dictatorship/transición period saw an about-face in which not self-renunciation but consumption was seen as the mark of success. The dissonance created by this transfer in power from the “father of prohibition” to the “anal father of enjoyment” in McGowan’s terms, necessitated a cultural shift in the concept of successful masculinity which directly countered prevailing notions of preceding years. While the early dictatorship actively promoted a masculine model based on sacrifice, later social and economic developments reconfigured this model to promote consumerism and the elevation of the concept of self-gratification. As women were also interpellated as individual consumers, they began to question the superiority of those men who did not succeed within this new paradigm. The withdrawal of their adoring gaze, as seen in Surcos, El pisito, Esa pareja feliz, and many other films of the era, reflects the beginnings of a collective loss of belief in the traditional hierarchy with its focus on the self-sacrificing model of masculinity. Following the requirements of a consumer society, individuals—men and women alike—were encouraged to see themselves as fundamentally lacking and

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that, unlike in the past, this lack was not a virtue, but a fault. Thus, in a very short time, and possibly for the first time in the history of Spain, man appeared to be esteemed not for his ability to renounce his own needs and desires, but for his ability to take advantage of consumer opportunities that were suddenly available. This change marked a dramatic shift in the way masculinity had been lived in Spain up to this point and effected a breakdown or crisis in the representation of masculinity in the 1970s that will be evidenced by an abundance of “perverse” or nontraditional masculine figures in cinema. Films starring popular music and film darling Manolo Escobar continued to fulfill an adaptational function by providing a conservative audience with a transitional model, and carefully removing any guilt or stigma from the pursuit of economic success and consumption. NOTES 1. An edited version in which many overt references to fascism were removed was released in 1950 under the title Espíritu de una Raza. Seeking international approval and admission into NATO at the time, the Franco government wished to distance itself from fascism and communism, attempting to limit itself in the film exclusively to anti-communist stance. Caparrós Lera, J. M. Estudios sobre el cine español del franquismo (1941–1964). Valladolid: Fancy Editions, 2000. 21. 2. Son of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera and founder of the Falange Party in Spain. He was executed by the Republican government in 1936. 3. The term yé-yé was employed in Spanish tabloids to refer to a form of pop music originating in France and Spain in the 1960s and usually performed by young female singers. 4. The Sección Femenina, the women’s branch of the Falange party, was founded in 1934 by Pilar Primo de Rivera and finally dissolved in 1977. It concerned itself with the training and indoctrination of women in conservative dictatorship values.

TWO Breakdown of the Hegemonic Male Model

By the final years of the dictatorship, ideological inconsistencies produced by rapid economic development and subsequent changes in social roles made accession to the hegemonic masculine ideal even more problematic. Cinematic representations of desirable masculinity became increasingly ambiguous as representations of men continued to maintain elements of the stoical self-sufficient macho of the past while also attempting to incorporate the fundamentally incongruous consumerist values of the 1960s and 1970s which encouraged the male subject to see himself as desirous and acquisitive—and thus fundamentally lacking. So while hegemonic masculinity of the early dictatorship had been based on an ideal of self-sufficiency, renunciation, and adherence to the patriarchal hierarchy, it was drawn to reorient itself around self-indulgence and a status system based on purchasing and consuming rather than self-sacrifice. The tenuous maintenance of the hierarchical model was further eroded by the death of the patriarchal father figure, Francisco Franco, in 1975, and subsequent social changes in the 1970s and early 1980s that affected traditional roles. Cristina Moreiras Menor describes this shift in the following way: Si el final del período dictatorial dio entrada en la arena política, a la transición a una democracia representativa, en la arena social y cultural da entrada a la instalación abrupta, apenas sin transición, a una modernidad tecnológica, informacional y económica. La transformación se produce de una sociedad que caminaba bajo la hegemonía de un poder estatal totalitario . . . en otra cuyo centro de control va diseminándose apenas imperceptiblemente. La hegemonía estatal se transforma en la hegemonía del mercado.

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Chapter 2 If, in the political arena, the Transition paved the way to representative democracy, in the social and cultural arenas it initiated a sudden transformation into a technological, informational and economic modernity. This transformation made a society that had existed under a totalitarian state hegemony . . . into one whose central power was eroding, sometimes imperceptibly. The hegemony of the State gave way to a hegemony of the market. (67)

As a result, traditional or hegemonic masculinity of the dictatorship as illustrated most clearly in relation to cine de cruzada, experienced a crisis, leading to its breakdown in the 1970s and producing a profusion of new male models marked by failure, deviance, and “perversion.” A sort of masculine hysteria surfaced at this time as political, economic, and social change disturbed the hegemonic model and caused its reworking. This reaction can be observed in the many dysfunctional and problematized male figures presented in film that markedly stray from the powerful, hegemonic, heterosexual norm of the majority of dictatorship films. Male characters seem to suffer at the hands of their mothers and women in general, their fathers, the authorities, their own memories, the mass media, their work, and so forth, and often ultimately fail at or reject traditionally accepted, normative heterosexual relationships, living in isolation or “perversion.” The destabilization of the patriarchal hierarchy in 1970s Spain was accompanied by a deeply ambivalent reaction represented in film through the many profoundly alienated male figures who exist with neither a clear enemy against which to fight nor a hierarchy within which to conform. Fundamental changes in the social paradigm devalued Spain’s traditional masculine hierarchical structure while simultaneously altering almost beyond recognition the nature of the essentially binary opposition that was either opposed to, or in favor of the dictatorship: “Cuando Franco muere, la sociedad española abandona de forma súbita ese discurso político estructurado hasta entonces en modelos de izquierda y derecha y polarizado en torno a la figura de Francisco Franco”/“‘When Franco dies, Spanish society abruptly drops that political discourse structured until then on models of Left and Right and polarized around the figure of Francisco Franco’” (J. C. Mainer qtd. in Esquirol & Fecé 168). Following Teresa Vilarós, I contend that the loss of the forbidden utopia that existed as a kind of prohibited transcendence left a painful absence in the lives of the newly “free” Spaniards—a trend that would later culminate in the 1980s with “pasotismo” or lack of political involvement among the youth. As Vilarós describes: “La utopía fue la droga de adicción de las generaciones que vivieron el franquismo. La muerte de Franco señala la retirada de la utopía y la eclosión de un síndrome de abstinencia, un mono que obedece a un ‘requerimiento inconsciente’ y a una ‘necesidad visceral’ según las palabras de Berlanga.”/“The generations that lived during the Franco years were addicted to the idea of utopia. Franco’s death marks

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the end of that utopian ideal and the emergence of a sort of withdrawal, a craving that obeyed some ‘unconscious requirement’ and a ‘visceral necessity’ in the words of Berlanga” (27). Male figures begin to turn inward at this time, attacking the internalized father figure in a masochistic disavowal of a bankrupt masculine model that cannot be realized given the loss of the grand patriarch and threats to the stability of the hierarchy. Regarding the nature of desire and its satisfaction, Lacanian theorist Todd McGowan helps to demonstrate how desire is fulfilled, not by obtaining its object, but by maintaining the fascination of the barrier to full enjoyment. According to McGowan, “Desire realizes itself when it obtains the object that it seeks, but desire satisfies itself through its failure to realize itself and obtain the object” (Psychoanalytic Film Theory 6). In this sense, the obstacle that desire confronts is more important—and more satisfying—than the object of desire. However, our consciousness fights to align desire’s realization with its satisfaction, or put another way, we struggle to believe that by obtaining the object of desire we really can satisfy that desire. Thus, prohibition had provided the assurance that, even though they may not experience it directly, there was something beyond, or rather a place where enjoyment was possible. This can be seen in a widely held misconception about the movie Gilda. The general public in Spain believed that “Rita Hayworth did not just peel off her long glove to the tune of ‘Put the Blame on Mame,’ but stripped for the cameras completely—and that this sight had been denied them by the censor’s scissors” (Tremlett 195). The sense of an enjoyment that was possible beyond the prohibition was a staple in the lives of Spaniards who lived under a repressive government that closely monitored behavior as well as the media. Censorship played a key role in the maintenance of prohibition as central to the psychical lives of Spaniards during the dictatorship. Though, as stated earlier, the dictatorship never had a coherent policy on censorship, its long alliance with the Catholic Church along with concern for self-justification and social order, had ensured that films that challenged Christian morality and dictatorship values were suppressed. As José Augustín Mahieu states: “No hubo entonces un cine franquista característico salvo por omisión. La censura se encargaba de eliminar críticas o riesgos morales, entusiastamente secundada por otro de los pilares del régimen, la Iglesia.”/“There did not really exist any Francoist cinema as such except through omission. The censors made sure to eliminate criticisms or moral risks, an effort that was enthusiastically supported by another of the Regime’s pillars, the Church” (103). Thus, lacking a proactive program of film production, the dictatorship was primarily concerned with prohibition. It was not until 1963 that the first censorship code was articulated (allowing filmmakers a degree of redress), and until 1976 that censorship of scripts was abolished completely.

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The reversal of this long-standing practice led to an outpouring of creative as well as libidinous expression in the mid-1970s, but also gave way to a sense of disenchantment as the utopian “beyond” slipped away along with the prohibition that had sustained it. And as McGowan expresses it in relation to the murder of the primal father: The murder of the primal father has the effect of triggering fantasies about the enjoyment that he experienced prior to his death. These fantasies sustain those who have sacrificed their own enjoyment in the collective renunciation that made the murder possible, and they provide the reassurance that, if enjoyment is inaccessible now, at least it once was accessible for someone. (End of Dissatisfaction 15)

Vázquez Montalbán’s statement that: “con(tra) Franco vivimos mejor”/ “against Franco we lived better” (qtd. in Vilarós 66) expresses an idea that Carlos Saura reiterates in his struggle for expression in 1976: “The things that bother me in Spain are less clear than under Franco” (qtd. in Hopewell 141). As the “Law” began to wane during the last years of the dictablanda due to the ill health of Franco, the death of Franco’s designated successor, Carrero Blanco, and the softening of legal constraints, Spanish masculinity lost its moorings, confounding polar positions as either obedient to, or reacting, against a patriarchal father figure or the “father of prohibition”—and sought to reorient itself in a variety of ways. This phenomenon was particularly important for masculine identity formation given the clearly patriarchal power structure in place in dictatorship Spain. As Vilarós points out: “Estamos ante una herencia y por tanto situados claramente ante una economía patriarcal, ante un estado de cosas que se dirime sobre todo entre padres e hijos y no, al menos de momento, entre padres e hijas, o entre madres e hijas aunque ellas también estén implicadas y resultan afectadas.”/“We are facing our legacy, and therefore clearly situated before a patriarchal system, a state in which things need to be settled above all between fathers and sons and not, at the moment, between fathers and daughters or mothers and daughters although they are also implicated in and affected by it” (44). Martín Morán and Marina Díaz López observe that “la transición era por excelencia un espacio político androcéntrico”/“the Transition was, essentially, politically male-centered” (181), and point out that while a dominant theme of films of this period was the construction of identity, it was the masculine identity: “Entre las muchas películas que giran en torno a esta temática son prácticamente nulas las protagonizadas por mujeres”/ “Among the many films on this topic, there are practically none protagonized by women” (182). Because of the importance of the patriarchal hierarchy and the role men played in it, masculine models appear to have been more directly disrupted than feminine ones during this period. The reworking of masculine models is reflected in a shift in film from the

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female lead (in dictatorship films like many CIFESA epics, melodramas, and españoladas) to a renewed focus on male protagonists in the 1970s. This chapter focuses on films of the political transition from the early 1970s until 1982, the year in which the Socialist Party was voted into power in Spain. As previously mentioned, the years leading up to this period were characterized by important social and economic changes that clearly effected a change in the representation of masculine identity. As Peter Evans describes it, “The years between 1960 and 1975 were riddled with contradictions and contrasts. This period saw the most accelerated, deep-seated social, economic, and cultural transformation in Spanish history” (Graham and Labanyi 259). From 1961 to 1973 Spain’s economy grew by 7 percent a year, outpaced in the developed world only by Japan (Tremlett 53). Hopewell has observed that Spain by the 1970s “was a curious mix of Catholicism and consumerism” (47) reflecting on one hand a traditional, hierarchical social arrangement and on the other, a new equalizing force that sought to make all into consumers. Men were caught at a crossroads in which the process of the positive oedipal identification, or rather identification with the father and the hierarchy as a means of social insertion, was threatened by a changing social arrangement and by the disappearance of the strong patriarch. The resolution of the Oedipus complex should lead to a phallic, heterosexual male identity as Peter Hartocollis describes: the little boy’s realization of his father’s opposition to his oedipal wishes prompts his infantile ego to identify with Father and, “borrowing strength from the father,” to repress the Oedipus complex. . . . From a sexual (and aggressive) desire, repressed by the fear of castration, the Oedipus complex becomes now the organizing principle that propels the boy’s psychosexual development from its phallic phase to the latency period and the consolidation of the superego. (325)

Lacan elaborated on Freud’s theory, maintaining the importance of the oedipal complex, but affirming that the process was not biological or developmental, but rather social. Elizabeth Grosz summarizes Lacan’s theory in the following way: This process of social construction is predicated on the necessary renunciation and sacrifice of the child’s access to the maternal body and to the child’s submission to the Law of the Father. The paternal figure serves to separate the child from an all-encompassing engulfing, and potentially lethal relation with the mother. The father intervenes into this imaginary dyad and represents the Law. The Father embodies the power of the phallus and the threat of castration. Accepting this authority and phallic status is the precondition of the child’s having a place within the socio-symbolic order, a name, and a speaking position. (142–43)

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Many films from the 1970s represent the pitfalls of this process: sons become “engulfed” by the castrating mother, some are extremely violent and antisocial, many are unable to identify with an absent father, etc. The resolution of this process rarely seems to reach completion, or rather, many male figures do not identify with their fathers and they do not adopt normative heterosexual patriarchal roles. The first section of this chapter describes the breakdown of the hierarchy and the prohibitions it enforced, focusing on how male characters attempt to master the rapid influx of consumer goods and influences into Spain, an attempt at control that is often transferred onto the man’s relationship with women. It is exemplified perhaps most vividly in the popular “Third Way” film La vida conyugal sana (Happy Married Life; Roberto Bodegas 1974) in which the middle class male protagonist finds himself torn between on one hand strict adherence to the morality and prohibitions of the past, and on the other a complete licentiousness represented by his obsession with female models and his uncontrollable desire to buy. Other films like Ana y los lobos (Ana and the Wolves; Carlos Saura 1972) and Bilbao (Bigas Luna 1978) focus on male protagonists who attempt to dominate and control women as a means of gaining mastery in the one sphere of power that had consistently been granted them under the dictatorship. These attempts to control their surroundings are generally conservative in nature, demonstrating a desire to return masculinity to a position of dominance and supremacy in the face of the burgeoning power of women and the omnipresence of consumer goods. Handicapped or absent fathers, castrating, over-dominant mothers and stunted, often self-destructive children abound in Spanish cinema of the 1970s and represent the disruption brought about by the weakening of dictatorial power as an organizing principle. A number of films from this period exhibit a breakdown in the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the process of maturation of the individual male character. This lack of oedipal resolution leads to an abundance of infantilized or alienated male characters who are unable to assume a functioning, normative, heterosexual adult male role in the patriarchal society, as represented for example in Furtivos (Poachers; Borau 1975), in which a domineering, incestuous mother thwarts her adult son’s attempt to become independent from her through marriage. The third section analyzes the manifestations and implications of subversive or “perverse” representations of masculinity, especially those masochistic or homosexual male figures that can be seen as a collective attempt to exorcise the presence of the father and to erase one’s resemblance to him, but which can also be considered along Slavoj Žižek’s theory as “the perverse by-products [which] far from effectively threatening the system of symbolic domination, are its inherent transgressions, that is, its unacknowledged, obscene support” (7). Among these, films by Eloy de la Iglesia such as Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures; 1977) and El diputado (1978) figure prominently, as family structures

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are reexamined and reconfigurations considered. Early appearances of homosexuality in these films are often markedly political and realistically portrayed. In part four, another film current in the 1970s, the genre films known as “sexy comedies,” represent conservative cinema’s attempt to reconcile heterosexual male power, which was traditionally based on an image of wholeness and self-sufficiency, with consumerism’s model of the male as lacking; the male figure is seen to avidly consume female bodies, thus apparently affirming his heterosexuality while entering firmly into the realm of the consuming subject. Especially prominent within this trend are many films by Alfredo Landa, and those including comedic actors Andrés Pajares and Fernando Esteso. Finally, in part five, I consider the phenomenon of male objectification in relation to horror films, another extremely popular genre of the era. In many of these, the element of horror seems to reside in the in-between-ness of masculine identity as it finds itself both subject and object of consumption. CONSUMER PRESSURE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY Man’s relationship to women constitutes a privileged site for observing the processes of and strains on identity formation. As the traditional mirror, or bearer of the reflected male identity, she is implicated in the difficulties he encounters in the process of subject formation. While mutually supportive, loving relationships between men and women have never been a mainstay of Spanish cinema, the level of dysfunction reaches a new extreme during the 1970s, reflecting both the intense ambivalence that men felt about their own subjectivity as well as a sense of confusion about changing gender roles in a consumer society. As Hopewell points out regarding cinematic relationships in the Transition, “Love for women is replaced in men by fear and resentment. Men fear for their sexual performance; woman is seen as sexually voracious . . . relationships become battles of the sexes” (183). Lidia Falcón, founder of the Feminist Party in Spain, makes a similar observation about men in Spanish society at the time: “En lo que están de acuerdo los expertos es en que, debajo de su máscara, el macho hispano suele esconder un miedo atroz por la mujer, una gran desconfianza producida en buena parte por su ignorancia”/“One thing the experts do agree on is that, under the macho pose, the Spanish male is tremendously frightened by women, and suffers a great lack of trust produced largely by his ignorance” (183). Two of the institutions supportive of Franco’s regime and mentioned in the previous chapter are undoubtedly at least partly to blame: the Catholic Church which cast sexual relations in a consistently negative light, and the Sección Femenina 1 which explicitly discouraged friendship between men and women. 2 Added to these was the patriarchal ideology of the

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dictatorship which encouraged gender divisions based on a male/dominant-female/subordinate dichotomy. Normalized during the dictatorship, gender relations marked by mistrust, the lack of mutual understanding, and violence were incorporated into a general social structure based on hierarchical differences which were widely accepted, with the male generally acknowledged as superior. This hierarchical model provided a degree of power and security to the male no matter how low his overall social standing. But, as the patriarchy weakened and consumerism leveled the social differences between men and women, an intense reaction was played out in Spanish films of the era. As women withdrew their approving gaze, men were forced to see their own weakness and vulnerability and often reacted violently to the change. Several so-called auteur films from the early 1970s exemplify the sense of powerlessness, confusion, and resistance produced in male characters in the face of change. In these films, the male protagonists try to navigate social change, bringing into relief their inability to use tools of the past to cope with the challenges they currently face. Woman is often seen here to embody change and as such, becomes the object of male confusion. Male characters reveal their fear and ambivalence about their own identities by displacing them onto the woman and, like Julián in Peppermint Frappé, try to manage change by controlling female characters seen to embody that threat. In Ana y los lobos, Habla, Mudita (Gutiérrez Aragón 1973), Tamaño natural (Love Doll; Berlanga 1973), and Bilbao, male characters try to manipulate female ones, becoming frustrated when the women do not submit to their will nor see them as they would like to be seen. Other films like the televised short film La cabina (The Telephone Box; Mercero 1972) and the Third Way films El hombre que se quiso matar (The Man Who Wanted to Kill Himself; Gil 1970), and La vida conyugal sana expressly link economic changes with the confusion and paralysis that afflict their protagonists. Meanwhile the popular films of Manolo Escobar continue to provide resolution to the dilemma—reconciling the common man to the new economic and social realities. Carlos Saura, a director who had been granted a somewhat greater degree of artistic freedom under Francoism as seen in chapter 1, continued in the critical vein that had produced such acclaimed films as Peppermint Frappé. In 1972 he released Ana y los lobos, a film that was highly critical of dictatorship institutions, but which Franco is said to have personally viewed and allowed (Hopewell 76). In it a young English nanny, Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), comes to live with a Spanish family at their isolated country estate. The three middle-aged sons, representing the triumvirate of male power under the dictatorship—the military José, the sexual Juan, and the religious Fernando—all try to engage with Ana and draw her into their world. Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin and romantic as well as artistic partner of Carlos Saura, comes to occupy an important niche in the oeuvre of this important director. As a

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foreigner, Chaplin embodies values considered antithetical to Spanish womanhood and thus the “sueca,” as modern foreign women were often referred to (based on the Swedish tourist presence in many beach resorts), could be grappled with. In this film she is eliminated in resistance to the dissonance produced by her presence. She interacts temporarily with each of the three brothers, ultimately rejecting them all. Their physically paralyzed yet emotionally domineering Mamá (their father is dead) encourages her sons in their pursuit, inciting them to compete among themselves for Ana, but ultimately casting negative judgment on her (“Ésta no es como las otras. ¡Es mala mala mala!”/“This one isn’t like the others. She’s bad bad bad!”). Ana’s foreignness is clearly marked throughout the film. She first appears in a long take in which she approaches the house, traversing a barren field, suitcase in hand. She is markedly modern in appearance, hair loose and pants tight, seemingly strangely out of place in the sere, lifeless environment. Shortly after her arrival José grabs her passport and asks her perfunctory questions about her travels just as a border control agent might (“por el bien de todos”/ “for everyone’s safety”), while her tape player blasts foreign pop music in the background. Already dominated by their forceful, opinionated mother (and Juan by his “frigid” wife Luchi), the three men seek understanding from this newcomer, attempting to demonstrate their power before her. After she eventually rejects each of them—ridiculing José’s “murder” of a mechanical bird, confronting Juan about his pornographic love letters, and rejecting Fernando’s attempt to induct her into his monastic community of one by cutting her hair—it becomes clear that she will not be assimilated. She packs her things to leave but is waylaid by the three brothers who act now in concert to subdue her—Juan raping her, Fernando cutting her hair and José shooting her dead. This final attack can be seen as a desperate attempt to turn back the clock and thus contain the changes that threaten their way of life and historical patriarchal privilege. Unable to master the threat of the forces of modernization represented here by their failed attempt to influence and impress Ana, they simply eliminate her, using brute force as their male prerogative has traditionally dictated. However, unlike Julián who reverted to controlling his secretary in Saura’s earlier film, the brothers are now left alone to try to carry on the patriarchy. Their aged mother will die, Luchi has already rejected Juan, their father is long dead, and there are no sons to carry on the family name. They are left isolated and rejected with no hope of a future—the final result of their heinous acts. Another film from the same year, Habla Mudita by director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, uses as its focal point a relationship between an older man and a younger woman. The teacher-pupil dynamic that characterizes their relationship recalls the Pygmalion myth in which the powerful male molds the woman into his ideal and then falls in love with the image he has created. While on vacation in a northern forest in Spain, the

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educated linguist from Madrid, Ramiro (José Luis López Vázquez), “discovers” and tries to teach an attractive deaf-mute girl to speak. Tired of his family and the trappings of his urban life, he ventures off by himself to recover some of his things from a “refugio” higher up in the hills, a symbolic last refuge of traditional masculinity away from the effects of modern society. When he gets lost, the space he enters is marked off as a sort of pre-literate, fairy-tale universe: he awakens from a nap in the woods to a dense fog through which he navigates by following a passing cow. The beast leads him to the home of the “Mudita” (Kitty Manver) who lives with her grandmother, mother, and deaf-mute brother. The “animal” nature of the Mudita is presented through an emphasis on her body—she chews and spits out garlic rather than chopping it, licks her small blackboard clean, and is told by Ramiro that she smells of livestock. She watches all and reacts with animal-like wariness to unexpected movements and situations. The “uncivilized” nature of the place is also emphasized by the existence of an incestuous relationship between her and her deaf-mute brother, a relationship that does not elicit a reaction of shame from her, thus demonstrating her lack of exposure to social mores and prohibitions. Don Ramiro discovers the Mudita (who interestingly, is never given a proper name in the film, denying her this marker of specific identity) and immediately sets out to teach her to speak. To him she is a sort of splendid tabula rasa upon which he can write his name, or rather the “name-ofthe-father,” foundation of the symbolic order as described by Lacan (he repeatedly tries to get her to repeat “Ra-mi-ro”), and his attentions extend to encouraging her to “ser una señorita”/“be a lady.” He would like to position himself as a sort of savior/guru and to become her sole source of information and influence. Though eventually succeeding in getting her to clean herself up and to repeat a few sounds, his experiment goes awry when he finds he cannot control her desires. “Pídeme lo que quieras”/ “Ask me for whatever you want,” he urges her in a tender moment, but when she reaches for his radio he becomes angry and brutally slaps her off her chair. It is as if he wants her to learn, but only from him and not from the radio which would allow in those modern consumer forces that he does not control and from which he now flees. However, despite his efforts to avoid it, Ramiro cannot hold the outside world at bay. After spending a night together in an abandoned bus, the two are surrounded by angry members of their respective worlds—on the one hand those from the village who accuse him of rape, and on the other his wife and family who would try to protect the family’s dignity. In the end he is led off, docile and dejected, to his stern-looking wife, whose features soften into a look of triumph as they silently head back to Madrid. He has been forcefully awakened from a virile fantasy in which he was the omnipotent keeper of knowledge and patriarchal power, and condemned to return to a life of diminishing respect in which his grandson tells him he is

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so old he might as well die, and where his wife solicitously asks him about his bowel movements, emphasizing his infirm and even infantilized nature in modern society. This image recalls the earlier film, Surcos, which established a tension between traditional patriarchal values represented by the countryside, against the forces of modernization and consumerism which serve to emasculate the individual male figure who fails to dominate them. Like the patriarch in Surcos, Ramiro’s masculine power seems to function only away from the city, or rather away from the environment in which patriarchal power has become confused and obfuscated by a value system that represents the forces of modernization. The struggle to reconcile traditional masculinity with social and economic changes of the 1970s represented by the control of women is again played out in Luis Berlanga’s Tamaño natural. Written by Rafael Azcona, this film, set in Paris, was originally released in French (interior shots were done in Madrid) and because of censorship, appeared in France several years earlier than its 1978 release in Spain; however, its wellknown Spanish director and screenwriter situate it within the corpus of Spanish cinema. It is an interesting attempt to reconcile commodity culture, the exoticism of the foreign woman, and traditional masculinity—an attempt that utterly fails in the end. In the film a dentist named Michel (Michel Piccoli) receives a life-size polyurethane sex doll that he has ordered from Japan. In this way he exercises his consumer power, but, ironically, as a way to recreate gender relations of the past. He proceeds to treat the doll as if it were a real woman: courting, talking to, having sex with, “marrying,” and ultimately growing jealous of and “killing” it. Meanwhile, his real wife, who appears very liberal and modern in her attitudes about relationships, makes an attempt to convert herself into a doll-like creature in a desperate attempt to save her marriage. The attempt quickly fails when her husband shuts her in a closet (as he often does to the “real” doll) and rejects her when she begins to cry—a lack of emotion being precisely one of the doll’s valued qualities. The doll is seen not as a supplement or addition to his fantasy life, but rather as a replacement for his wife whom he feels is too complicated. Unlike his wife who argues, expresses emotion, and generally confuses him (as in an argument over whether she objects to his going out without her and he says: “Dices sal y queda”/“You tell me to go and then to stay”), the doll cooperates unconditionally with his every whim and fantasy, making no demands (“Otras quieren un yate.”/“Other women want a yacht.”) and reflecting himself back as he would like to be seen. As Silverman has pointed out, “The ‘ideal’ female subject refuses to recognize male lack, and disavowal and fetishism provide important mechanisms for effecting this refusal” (Male Subjectivity 47). The doll becomes the ultimate fetishized woman’s body; the many closeups and partial shots that dismember its “integral being” along with its lack of volition, position it as the ideal protection against the recognition of castration. Throughout the film he

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maintains a “dialogue” with the doll in which she apparently assents to the many questions he asks her. Additionally, the doll is granted a false visual position of agency as, for example, when Michel speaks the words “Eres muy guapo”/“You’re very handsome” while the camera delivers a closeup of the doll’s face as if she were the speaker. The protagonist reinforces his own identity through the doll which is seen to be complicit and agreeable in every aspect of his psychological drama; he continually asks and affirmatively answers questions as if she were responding. He is able to pose and dress the doll according to his whim—a propensity that is reiterated in a sequence in which after first receiving the doll, pinching her nipple and serving her a drink, the camera shifts from a close-up of the doll’s mouth to the mouth of a young girl in his office upon whom he is fitting braces. This juxtaposition suggests his desire to mold or form the female as he likes. This shot is immediately followed by one of the doll, now in the little girl’s place in the dentist’s chair, thus reinforcing the equation of the “malleable” little girl with the doll. Interestingly, his aging mother seems to prefer the inanimate doll to his real wife as well. Dressing it in her old clothes and using it to hold yarn while she knits, she points out that she has been able to spend more peaceful time with the doll than she was ever able to with his busy, modern wife. The idyll comes to an end, however, when he discovers that

Figure 2.1. Michel (Michel Piccoli) shares a drink with his new companion. Tamaño natural. Luis García Berlanga, Films 66, 1973.

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Figure 2.2. Michel (Michel Piccoli) fits braces to his young patient. Tamaño natural. Luis García Berlanga, Films 66, 1973.

the doll has been “unfaithful” to him—or rather that the doorman has been using it for his own sexual pleasure. Michel becomes enraged and, like the three brothers in Ana y los lobos, he “kills” the uncontrollable “female” by brutally and repeatedly stabbing it, thus eliminating the threat. Whereas in Saura’s film the men were allowed to live on with their anachronistic patriarchal values and agonize in their own seclusion outside of society (albeit apparently destined for extinction), Michel is actually killed off in the film—his car going over a bridge and into the Seine. As a last (bitter?) irony, the doll’s body floats to the surface as if in a final act of insubordination. As Hopewell has observed about films of the Transition, “The traumatized love seen in Spanish films goes beyond the repression of women. It often entails their disavowal, a complete obliviousness to their independent existence which, if challenged, may prompt the woman’s sublimation, and her total annihilation” (170). Michel represents a version of masculinity so extremely destabilized and vulnerable that it cannot tolerate any perceived recognition of its own weakness. The “murder” of the doll represents Michel’s inability to assimilate changing gender roles in a modern society. One of the most fascinating—and disturbing—Spanish films of the 1970s repeats the theme of the male who prefers his own imaginary to the company of a real woman: José Juan Bigas Luna’s Bilbao. In this film Leo

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(Ángel Jové), a maladjusted and solitary young man, tries to throw off the control of his older caretaker/lover/mother figure and enter into a relationship with Bilbao (Isabel Pisano), a stripper/prostitute and the object of his scopophilic obsession. Presented at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1978, it generated considerable interest and was the subject of lively debate and scandal in some circles. The film received the “S” classification in Spain for its sexual content and, while many went to see it out of an interest in its alleged eroticism, it has been highly praised by critics as well. Juan Bulfill described Bilbao as “perhaps the first film to tackle in earnest the use of the urban landscape and the description of what we would call ‘modern life’” (qtd. in Spanish National Cinema, Triana-Toribio 121), and the entire film is suffused with a suffocating materialism reflecting consumer culture. In the words of Bigas Luna, “ÁngelLeo se encuentra perdido en un mundo de objetos, consumista. En el fondo de la película también hay una simbología grande de lo que es el consumo por el consumo, que en aquel momento estaba comenzando.”/ “Ángel-Leo finds himself lost in a world of objects, a consumerist world. At the heart of the film there’s a representation of what consumption for consumption’s sake is, which in that moment was just starting to take off” (Pisano 79). Extreme close-ups of Bilbao’s glossy red lips and bouncing breasts in garish neon lights as well as a fish photographed with a sausage hanging out of its mouth are interspersed with a multitude of the fetishistically close shots of consumer gadgets and products that are seen to form an integral part of both the psychic and physical routine of the protagonist. The film has been described as “un largo plano detalle en el que se nos narran las peculiares relaciones de Leo con los objetos”/“A long close-up shot that narrates Leo’s relationship to the objects around him” (Pisano 20). The material reality of products and images, indeed of pleasure itself in the close-ups of strippers and prostitutes, represents the breakdown of the symbolic distance that had been enforced in the society of prohibition. Here Leo, who often appears in the film in the role of the spoiled and petulant child, has access to whatever he wants, including Bilbao’s body, both for visual consumption and sexual pleasure. The representation of this immediacy is consonant with what Jean Baudrillard calls “the ecstasy of communication” and describes in the following way: “There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication” (Ecstasy 12). The onset of a media-centered existence brings with it the disintegration of the distinction between public and private space. This destruction is accompanied by the disappearance of the symbolic benefit of alienation, or rather the loss of the ability to separate subject from object, self from Other. McGowan, discussing Baudrillard, goes on to explain how this immanence removes any sense of transcendence that the subject was afforded in a society of prohibition—a society that marked off a public space where enjoyment was not to be

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taken. This lack is felt as a constant pressure to seek self-satisfaction as is reflected in Leo’s interior monologue. In a voice-over representing his interior monologue he continually asks himself if he is happy, considering relationships with others, especially his caretaker/lover, María. His focus on his own happiness and satisfaction represents a consumerist state of mind consistent with the constant exposure of the average individual to the many advertising media and campaigns of the day. Leo tries to manage this immediacy in a strikingly similar way to that of Julián in Peppermint Frappé—by cutting out and pasting into scrapbooks advertisements for consumer products (“anuncios y recortes que quiero ordenar”/“ads and articles that I want to organize”), as well as reminders and photographs of Bilbao of whom he would like to gain control (“Quiero apoderarme de Bilbao, apoderarme de todas sus cosas”/ “I want power over Bilbao, power over all her things”). For Leo, Bilbao is just one more object to add to his collection. As Bigas Luna says: “Lo [Bilbao’s body] ve como un objeto que quiere tener para él del mismo modo que un niño quiere tener un juguete para jugar con él”/“He sees it [Bilbao’s body] as an object that he’d like to have for himself—in the same way that a child wants a doll to play with” (Pisano 29). This is in keeping with McGowan’s description of human relations in a society of commanded enjoyment: “All enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing ‘consideration’ for the Other” (End of Dissatisfaction 14). As described previously, Freud postulated the murder of the primal father and the prohibition of incest as the foundational acts for social order, after which “the sons recognize that, if they are to live together in relative peace, they must agree to a collective renunciation of enjoyment. Without this collective renunciation, no one can have any feeling of security, because there is nothing to mediate a lifeand-death struggle for enjoyment” (End of Dissatisfaction 15). Leo has no sense of self-restraint and does not consider at any time what Bilbao desires, much less her boyfriend/pimp, but rather sees her as a means to fulfill his own desires—even to the point of causing her death. Nevertheless, Leo seems to sense that there is something threatening about this ever-present, palpable existence of the material world. He first tries to manage it by attempting to contain it in his scrapbook, and later by his willful desire to strip away the immanence of Bilbao’s body. He seeks to return her to a sort of spiritual/symbolic plane by realizing his vision of seeing her body appear to float, and finally, photographing her in this position—thus creating yet another level of distance. Bigas Luna himself has related this floating state to a sort of non-materialism: “tiene siempre esa obsesión de las cosas flotando, que yo la tengo también. Las cosas suspendidas en el aire me parecen algo místico”/“he always has this obsession with things floating—I do too. Things suspended in the air seem somehow mystical” (Pisano 96). In various moments throughout the film he repeats the words “Quiero verla flotando”/“I want to see her

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floating,” and he develops an elaborate plan to achieve this goal. Kidnapping and rendering her unconscious with chloroform, he elevates her body by tying her limbs with cords attached to the ceiling, and finally taking a photograph of her floating body which he will later put in his scrapbook. Her body seems to resist his attempt to make it “float” or escape the bounds of the material world, both when a leg comes untied and flops to the floor, and also when, in being dragged from one place to another, her head drops sharply to the floor, causing her death. Finally, after achieving his goal and then shaving her pubis (symbolic castration), he positions her in a chair next to his own, clasping her hand and watching a pornographic film next to her unconscious, naked body. It is as if he would like to recreate a chaste dating rite of the past—like an adolescent attending the cinema with his beloved. The fact that “they” enjoy by viewing a screen adds another layer of remove and inaccessibility to the fantasy. In this way he attempts to contain threatening changes and recapture gender relations of the past that revolved largely around prohibition and inaccessibility. These relations are now shown to be irretrievably lost due to changes in himself and society—a world in which pleasure’s accessibility is an ever present reality. Like Michel in Tamaño natural, Leo rejects the possibility of a real relationship in the modern world in favor of an idealized vision. But ultimately, his is a vision that can only take place in the absence of an actual partner—first chloroformed into unconsciousness, and then, finally, dead. It is the impossibility of the relation that must be maintained. Like Michel’s, his solipsistic vision needs to be protected from another consciousness that would contradict and complicate it by expressing its own desires. The only way he can realize his dream is by obviating completely the consciousness of the other and thus containing the potential threat reflected back through a woman’s desire. Perhaps Bigas Luna himself does something similar by converting Bilbao’s body into a symbol— after death her body is consigned to a sausage factory where she will presumably be ground up and turned out in a new form. The woman’s body will take the form of the sausage or penis, a visual representation of the phallus and ultimate protection against castration anxiety. Economic changes which problematize the individual males’s relationship to employment, the business world, and consumerism are directly addressed in various films of the early 1970s. Among them El hombre que se quiso matar, La cabina and La vida conyugal sana are three that are particularly interesting in terms of the relationship of the male protagonist to his surroundings. All three of them represent a character who is confused and unable to successfully manage his life, making specific reference to the work world and mastery within it. Rafael Gil’s El hombre que se quiso matar, a 1970 remake of a 1942 film by the same name and director, presents economic limitations as a cause for suicide. The male protagonist, a Latin teacher at a boys school, is unable to advance financially

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and decides to kill himself—but not until after he has had a chance to enjoy several days of the complete freedom that the decision affords him. The press catches wind of his situation and for a short time he is treated as a hero, a figure of interest to all for his “devil-may-care” attitude and the anticipated spectacle of his suicide. He finds, however, that in the end he no longer wants to die because now he has fallen in love. So with cameras rolling, he escapes with his beloved, realizing that now he is very much attached to life. The temporal contextualization is emphasized in this version of the film as newspaper headlines shown over the opening credits announce happenings of the day: a case of patricide, violence against a vacationing “sueca,” an advertisement for career training in accounting and finally, shots of the first moonwalk in 1969. The protagonist, a clumsy and repressed Walter Mitty-type, frequently falls into reveries in which he sees himself triumphing in a way that he never does in real life: getting the raise from his boss, rebuking the bully, winning the girl. He is disrespected by his girlfriend and bullied by physically superior men who eject him from his seat on the train and harass him in public. He even fails ridiculously in several suicide attempts. Like Julián from Peppermint Frappé, he seems oppressed by the sound of the enjoyment of others. Sounds of a young couple laughing or a happy family interacting in the room above prove irritating to this lone individual in his isolated existence. After losing his job, Latin being deemed an anachronistic subject by his boss, and unable to wed his long-time fiancé, he wonders: “¿El amor se puede regir por la ley del comercio?”/“Can love be ruled by the laws of commerce?” He understands, painfully, that in the modern context he has nothing if he does not have economic success, decides that “la vida es un asco”/“life is disgusting,” and that he must end it. Even his death will be affected by the consumerist environment as he is paid to agree to name a particular brand of flan, on camera, before shooting himself. In the end, love and the promise of employment bring him back from the brink—a “happy ending” to an otherwise painfully honest film. The pursuit of romantic love has been seen to represent a sort of decoy issue in a consumerist culture. Anna Kornbluh discusses this phenomenon in regard to the American film, Family Man (2000): “The ideological work of the film lies in the direct translation of alienation into a need for love, which is also to say the erection of a decoy alienation” (124). The protagonist’s sense of desperation and alienation—feelings that were common to many in periods of high unemployment and dramatic economic change—are seen to be alleviated by a preoccupation with love, the answer to all our problems in, as Kornbluh calls it, the “Oedipus industrial complex.” La cabina by director Antonio Mercero is a powerful representation of victimization of the working man. In this short film, the protagonist, a middle-aged businessman (José Luis López Vázquez), gets inexplicably trapped in a phone booth that has been newly erected in the middle of his

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nondescript housing development, like one of the many erected in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. He enters the booth to make a call but after several failed attempts, he discovers that he can no longer open the door to leave. Confusion turns to panic and finally despair when a series of male passers-by are unable to help him escape. In the end, he and the entire booth are carted away to a sort of graveyard for trapped working men in various stages of decay—all entombed in the now-abandoned phone booths. This curious film ends with a shiny new booth being deposited in the center of the housing development once again, doors opened in wait. López Vázquez once again reprises his role as the ineffectual victim of changes he does not understand. His wide eyes and balding pate reflect an air of the duped middle-aged man/boy who is victim of a situation he cannot master. That he serves as a representative of working men in general is made clear by the many workingman stereotypes who pass by and sympathize with his situation—the macho man, furniture movers, briefcase carriers, policemen, firemen, and so forth— who, like him, try and fail to open the door. As in slapstick comedy, the muscular and serious macho man strains at the door handle—tumbling to the ground when it detaches. The crowd shouts and whistles in derisive amusement. The protagonist, along with this cast of masculine figures, is ridiculed and mocked in a public stripping of his dignity. The point is made even more forcefully as the flatbed truck that now transports the booth and trapped protagonist stops at a funeral procession. Close-ups of the mourners’ faces as they regard the casket encased in glass emphasize the parallel between the actual physical death of a human being with the “death” of the man in a dehumanizing, modern society. Poignantly, members of a traveling circus—two juggler clowns and a person of short stature holding a ship in a bottle—return the protagonist’s gaze in mournful solidarity as he is carried past. These circus “freaks” more closely identifying with him than the onlookers, indicating his anachronistic or marginal status in a changing society. In this film man himself seems to be deemed anachronistic as he is victimized by forces of modernity—represented by the shiny new phone booth in the center of a generic, brand-new subdivision. The booth is whisked off to a factory, placed on a conveyor belt and finally deposited amidst a seemingly infinite number of booths containing dead and decaying men and skeletons dressed in business suits. Subscribing to the new vision of success has been a great deception and a trap, a move that leads nowhere, except eventually to death. In La vida conyugal sana by director Roberto Bodegas, a now unavoidable deluge of advertising and pressure to consume effect a sort of outright breakdown in the protagonist. This film, representative of the Third Way cinema that flourished in Spain in the early 1970s, enacts the stresses and anxieties that affected the life of the average Spaniard. Steering a middle path between the complex, high-brow, metaphoric style of au-

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teur’s such as Saura, Victor Erice and others on one hand, and popular farce on the other, these films sought to appeal to the growing middle class: “Una producción que no indignase al público jóven, urbano y relativamente más culturado”/“The sort of film that wouldn’t upset a younger, urban, and relatively more cultured public” (Monterde 21), and attempted to express the concerns and interests of the growing middle class. Enrique, played by José Sacristán, the “everyman” of Third Way cinema, is a traditional, conservative businessman whose marriage and personal life seem staid and predictable. But like Julián in Peppermint Frappé and Leo in Bilbao, he is obsessed with cutting out glossy advertising images and pasting them in elaborate scrapbooks. As in these other films, it is as if through this activity he is attempting to gain some control or mastery over the changes surrounding him—changes that are emphasized through the many shots of billboard advertisements and consumer products. These advertisements signal the shift to a society of commanded enjoyment, as McGowan describes: “The omnipresent advertisements calling us to enjoy ourselves attest to the anal father’s reign. . . . Whereas the old father ruled as a present absence, the new father’s presence is suffocating; we can never get away from sensing his enjoyment, even when he is physically absent” (End of Dissatisfaction 50). The constant barrage of advertisements represent others enjoying the car, the beverage, the vacation, etc. that the viewer longs for. Enrique either abstains from all pleasure or indiscriminately conforms to consumer dictates—as when he buys his wife some twenty-three bras due to a particularly convincing ad campaign, or fills his cupboard with a particular brand of soap he has seen advertised on television. His attempts to reconcile his hobby/obsession with his public persona utterly fail as he ricochets back and forth between uptight, sexually-repressed, traditional businessman and freewheeling, sexually liberated, modern consumer. The break between the two personalities occurs suddenly and unpredictably, most often when he is looking at advertisements. This break is explicitly linked to the violation of prohibition and passage into a new world as is seen in a collage sequence representing one of his “episodes” in which he imagines Marilyn Monroe, the word “Prohibition,” footage of the demolition of the Diario Madrid building (a newspaper that had become increasingly critical of government actions and which had been ordered closed by Franco in 1971), and the birth of a newborn baby—a sequence signaling his inner conflict and final rebirth into a new order: the order of consumption rather than prohibition. Despite attempts to package change in a digestible fashion as Third Way cinema tried to do, such a radical about-face in the representation of the desirable male model brought with it confusion and a renegotiation of masculine identity. We see shades of the masculine ideal of the past now tinged with consumerism as Enrique and his friend compete to see who can magnanimously offer the more “American” of cigarettes to the

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other, thus subverting the self-sacrificing model of the past as the male characters try at once to be the most giving as well as the most “having” of American tobacco, the desirable consumer product. It is especially telling as tobacco’s connection with masculinity has been explicitly noted: “back in the 1940s . . . [tobacco consumption] was seen as an indisputable sign of masculine power” (Sassatelli 114). Enrique’s sense of masculine self is clearly affected by advertising, and upon watching an automobile advertisement featuring a beautiful female model and a soundtrack of Richard Wagner’s heroic “Ride of the Valkyries,” he lies to his wife in order to purchase it. The idea of heroism, evoked here by the well-known musical piece, is clearly subverted from its earlier connection with selfsacrifice, as now is directly linked to acquisition and self-gratification—in direct contrast to the hegemonic “crusade cinema” model as seen in Los últimos de Filipinas and other films of the early dictatorship. LACK OF OEDIPAL RESOLUTION: INFANTILIZED AND ALIENATED MALES It is hardly possible, when employing a psychoanalytic perspective as this work does, to leave out a discussion of the oedipal family and how changes in its representation reflect changes in society. As the “primary vehicle of insertion in the ‘dominant fiction’” (Silverman Male Subjectivity 2), the positive Oedipus complex whose resolution requires that the male child pass from desire for his more powerful father to identification with him, functions in a patriarchal society to reproduce the basic social unit or father-headed, nuclear family, which in turn assures continuation of the society as a whole. As Kinder says, “From a poststructuralist perspective the story of Oedipus is one of the powerful master narratives in Western Civilization because, through its successful proliferation and compulsive repetition, it helps the dominant patriarchal culture reproduce itself” (Blood Cinema 197). In the 1970s Spain suffered a social breakdown such that many feared disintegration and the possibility of another civil war. In the Spanish context of this time it would appear that oedipal resolution was not smoothly achieved as we see the frequent repetition and reworking of the son’s relationship with his family—usually his mother who has assumed the patriarchal function in the father’s absence. This obsessive return to the oedipal drama implies a lack of resolution. Freud describes this return in the following way: “a neurotic on the other hand invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He either failed to get free from the psycho-sexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them—two possibilities that may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression” (Totem and Taboo 22). The abundance of films that return to the theme of the dysfunctional family context reflects a lack of resolution of this fundamental

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issue. This lack of oedipal resolution in twentieth-century Spain has been observed by Kinder to be the direct result of the Spanish Civil War which left those brutally dominated children, the “Children of Franco,” unable to reach mature adulthood. As she describes it: “Being forced perpetually into the role of Franco’s children was undoubtedly emasculating. In these movies childlike men all have sexual conflicts related to incest, homosexuality, or pedophilia. None of them ever becomes a father” (“Children of Franco” 75). However, as Silverman points out regarding Rebecca West’s study of shellshock and male trauma, though the war may serve as an easily identifiable initial traumatic event, traditional masculinity itself is built on a series of traumatic pressures and “glosses” of reality such that the delicate process of identification with the father and patriarchal privilege is always precarious since the threat of castration is never wholly overcome and maintenance of the heterosexual normative sex role must be constantly reinforced. She states, regarding war and English masculinity, “the war is not the trauma itself, but marks the breakdown of the defenses of masculinity against the actual trauma, the knowledge of its own constructedness” (“Men in [Shell] Shock” 162). As long as a strong central government and powerful dictator propagated a patriarchal system based on masculine strength and rewarded conforming men with a place in the hierarchy, the illusion of masculine dominance could be maintained, but the disintegration of the system led to a collective encounter with trauma. In the early 1970s the end of Franco’s regime coupled with rapid social change tipped the scales such that, now lacking the ultimate anchoring patriarchal signifier of the dictatorship, oedipal resolution was deeply destabilized. Whereas during the dictatorship a semblance of male mastery and superiority—the patriarchy in general—had been reproduced with relatively minor changes, in the 1970s, seismic events revealed the deep fissures that had been forming in the Spanish male psyche for many years. With the promise of the patriarchal inheritance in jeopardy, many men seemed to fail to take the final step in the oedipal process—that of renouncing their desire for the father in favor of an identification with him. Teresa Vilarós reiterates this failure: “En la historia reciente española no ha habido resolución edípica. Los hijos, los ciudadanos, no mataron al padre ni se quedaron con la madre . . . la narrativa edípica española es totalmente insatisfactoria”/“In Spain’s recent history oedipal resolution has not taken place. The sons, the citizens, did not kill the father nor did they obtain the mother . . . the Spanish oedipal narrative is completely unresolved” (152). In film, the male character’s failure to assume the parental role indicates a lack of maturity within this patriarchal context. The Spanish oedipal narrative as represented in 1970s cinema replays a specific pattern—an absent, alienated, or dead father; a patriarchal mother onto whom repressive tendencies have shifted; and sons who

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refuse/are unable to assume an independent, heterosexual, patriarchal masculine role. The representation of a family structure is virtually omnipresent in cinema of the period and examples of films containing one or more of the above mentioned elements abound, indicating the importance of this unit to the psychological reality and development of the individual as well as society. José Enrique Monterde expresses this importance of the family as a privileged representational site in Spanish cinema: Más allá de su posible naturalidad como forma de agrupamiento social, la familia, ese tótem del franquismo, se nos ofrece multifuncional: como lugar de expresión del poder, como reducto de esencias en decadencia, como metáfora de agrupamientos político-sociales más amplios, como célula económica de producción y reproducción, como ámbito de neurosis y obsesiones, como territorio de sometimiento y transgresión . . . como refugio emanado del pasado o como campo de batalla para múltiples emancipaciones, como marco de la maduración e iniciación al sexo, como escenario de la confrontación de viejas y nuevas costumbres sociales, etc. Beyond its possible naturalness as a form of social grouping, the family, that totemic construct of the Francoist dictatorship, serves multiple purposes: as a vehicle to express power, as a stronghold of meaning in decline, as a metaphor for larger social groupings, as an economic unit dedicated to production and reproduction, as a field of neuroses and obsessions, as a site of subjugation and transgression . . . as a refuge from the past or as a battlefield where various struggles for freedom play out, as a sign of maturity and initiation into sexuality, as the scene of confrontation between old and new social norms, etc. (25)

It follows then that the family would be the site of the expression and reworking of masculine identity formation. The death of the grand patriarch, Franco, coupled with a shift away from the repressive order of the dictatorship, effectively removed from the Spanish imaginary the powerful, dominating father figure at this time, thus destabilizing the entire patriarchal family structure. The internalization and normalization of his rule are represented in the figure of the mother who wishes to propagate a system in which she herself has been elevated to a position of considerable influence and power. In the 1970s the psychological effects of a system that no longer guaranteed the patriarchal reward or privilege while still claiming its sacrifice in terms of self-renunciation and the appearance of masculine strength became apparent. While the model of hegemonic masculinity—in cinema represented by the powerful patriarch—dissolves, the mechanism that has propagated this system—the patriarchal mother and repressive family structure—is exposed. The oedipal narrative does not progress to the point at which the son identifies with his father, trusting that he will inherit the patriarchal privilege in exchange for his sacrifice. Rather, left

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fatherless, he lives out his life in a state of arrested development— trapped in infantile narcissism and/or a sort of pre-symbolic lack of separation from the mother who assumes grotesque and overpowering proportions. The mother, linked to dictatorship values, occupies a disproportionately large and potentially overpowering position in regard to her fatherless sons. As a representation of the Francoist patriarchy, she threatens to engulf her sons who no longer assume the mantle of patriarchal power due to the destabilization of the hierarchy. As María José Gómez Fuentes writes, “cuando la madre aparece no sólo se está hablando de una madre sino del franquismo”/“When the mother appears, we are not only talking about a mother but about Francoism itself” (Lozano Aguilar 146), and along with Maria Van Liew, recognizes the peculiarly overpowering relationship of the mother to her sons. Van Liew analyzes the mother role in Ana y los lobos, Camada negra (Black Litter), Mamá cumple cien años, and Furtivos in order to show how it evokes the “mythical memory of their dead father” (430). However, the sons produced by the dead father and this overpowering mother prove to be sterile, or rather, unable/unwilling to reproduce those sons that would carry on the patriarchy. Interestingly it is through commerce with a modern outside world that escape seems to be possible. In each of the four films mentioned above, a “non-traditional” female character enters but must be rejected or killed in order to preserve the order of the past. The mother, or patriarchal system, cannot harbor rivals who, like the foreign Ana in Ana y los lobos, Milagros in Furtivos, or the single mother, Rosita, in Camada negra, must be suppressed. Camada negra, written by José Luis Borau and Manuel Gutierrez Aragón, depicts a group of fascist “incontrolados” or ultra-right wing resisters during the Transition period. It focuses on the process of maturation and entry into the group of the young Tatín whose mother is the spiritual leader and primary motivator of the group. Declaring that she considers the group as her sons, she houses them and coaches them in hatred and in acts of destruction of the liberalization attempts taking place around them. Tatín is required to undergo a series of tests proving his allegiance and dedication, the final one being the sacrifice of the woman he loves—whose head he smashes with a rock while chanting “¡España! ¡España! ¡España!” The familial structure represents a typical arrangement of films of the period—a powerful mother, Blanca, who embodies dictatorship values and who seems overly close to her “sons”—kissing them on the mouth, seeing them undress, and living closely with them. They are submissive to her will and, though adult men, do not seem to have partners or children. And though an actual father is present in the film, he is an ineffectual, decrepit old man whose fumbling sexual advances are dismissed by Blanca. His sexuality is fundamentally opposed to the ascetic lifestyle pursued by the others and he seems ever out of place. It is understood that the real father figure is the

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deceased dictator and it is dictatorship values that are being propagated within the “family.” The dichotomy between modern life and the life within this family revolves around the concept of self-denial. Hopewell has commented regarding this film that this dichotomy is emblematic, and that this film implies that, “denial of pleasure is at the core of the fascist value system” (194). Though much of the action occurs within the confines of the compound, Tatín’s pursuit of Rosa (Ángela Molina), a waitress and single mother, presents the possibility of escape. He is shown to be genuinely tender and affectionate with her and her son. However, the demands of the “father of prohibition,” here embodied by Blanca, require that he sacrifice the thing he desires most as a test of allegiance to dictatorship fascist values. Self-indulgence is seen to be inimical to the fundamental nature of this “family,” and must be eliminated. As a child-man, obedient to Blanca and dictatorship values, Tatín is not allowed to make choices for himself but lives as an obedient member of the hierarchy. The infantilization of the male protagonist is strikingly apparent in early Transition cinema. From popular to art-house cinema, an abundance of films represent unmature men—at times for comic effect as can be seen in Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos (Smut Starts at the Pyrrenees;

Figure 2.3. The young Tatín (José Luis Alonso) pledges his loyalty to a group of right-wing extremists. Camada negra. Dir. Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Imán, 1977.

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Escrivá 1973) in which the curious yet deeply inhibited protagonist sneaks across the French border to view forbidden films and try to overcome his fear of women—but more often as tragic representatives of a generation that is at ease neither in the patriarchal society of the past, nor in the more liberated consumer society that is rapidly coming to dominate Spain. Successful and critically acclaimed films like La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica; Saura 1973) and Furtivos repeat the representation of the stunted, fatherless son who struggles to escape the traumatic and repressive constraints of his youth. This theme can also be seen in the lesserviewed but extremely powerful films Bilbao, El desencanto (The Disenchantement; Chávarri 1976) and Arrebato (Rapture; Zulueta 1979). Often self-destructive or extremely violent, they struggle to manage change as do the male protagonists in El espíritu de la colmena (Erice 1973), Pascual Duarte (Franco 1975) and Camada negra (Gutiérrez Aragón 1977). The disjuncture that was the Transition interrupted the smooth passage from youth to adulthood and the male protagonists in the above-mentioned films represent this tumultuous moment in Spanish history. Spanish comedic cinema which was usually aimed at the broader, general public often seemed to enact social pressures of the day in a lighthearted way while also ultimately providing resolution through a restoration of order, perhaps slightly modified, but generally conservative in its essence. In Pero¿ . . . en qué país vivimos? and Me has hecho perder el juicio with singer/actor Manolo Escobar, and in Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos, it is through marriage to the seemingly untamable woman that order is restored. Serafín (José Luis López Vázquez) is a bachelor who lives a sexually repressed existence in the home of his prudish maiden aunt. He longs to get close to a woman but is unable to bear it psychologically as he experiences “temblores y palpitaciones”/“trembling and palpitations” due to some trauma in his past which causes him to suddenly see beards appear on women to whom he is attracted. The trauma is explicitly related through flashback to punishment he received at the hands of his father and the parish priest for watching a little girl urinate. The beard is a reflection of a painting he saw in church during the punishment: “La mujer barbuda” by José de Ribera. This traumatic memory plagues him and prevents his assuming an adult heterosexual role; meanwhile his maiden aunt intervenes in the present to ensure that he experiences no erotic pleasure as, for example, when her strident voice interrupts his daydreams of a sensual foreign woman. Though clearly playing with the Freudian notion of some originary trauma, it is interesting to note the nature of the horror. It could be assumed that corporal punishment was a usual recourse of conservative parents during the dictatorship and thus not the traumatic element. The horror is thus related not to the spanking, but rather to the gender-bending image that accompanies it. Serafin’s psychologist recommends that in order to resolve this issue he chant constantly that man is the king of creation and woman nothing but an

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inferior being. In this way he establishes a clear dichotomy that is apparently in no way clear at this time (given the need for repetition). As is often the case in films of this period, the idea that others are enjoying themselves haunts the virginal existence of Serafín as he looks at a friend’s sexy postcard from abroad and discusses the X-rated cinema on display in Biarritz, just across the border in France. Finally, Serafín and two friends set out on their own adventure to Biarritz, playfully singing: “Tenemos un defecto”/“We have a defect” (thus accepting the sort of “defective” masculinity that embraces self-indulgence), as they cross the border and begin glutting themselves on forbidden films and the sight of women in bikinis (whose fetishistically shot forms are served up for the audience’s visual consumption as well). After a few disillusioning days in France in which they are rebuffed and ignored by the exotic women they pursue, Serafín falls in love with a Spanish hotel maid and, inexplicably, overcomes his anxiety as no beard appears when they kiss. The police show up at Serafín’s apartment and order his return to Spain, but he returns now happily with his future bride in the socially sanctioned, “correct,” and regulated relationship. The film seems to provide the assurance that, while a small dose of foreign-style liberalization may serve a certain purpose, it is essentially with the age-old institution of marriage (i.e., the Church and the traditional Spanish social order including a strict gender division) that true happiness can be found. The happy ending resolves antagonisms in the film and erases contradictions that might create dissatisfaction in the viewer, thus fulfilling a conservative ideological role during a tumultuous time. The struggle for maturity is a fundamental theme of many films from the 1970s. As mentioned earlier, overpowering mothers are unwilling to cede power to their sons. Mamá in Mamá cumple cien años (Mama Turns 100) refuses to sell her estate to benefit her sons, Blanca of Camada negra supports her son Tatín’s murder of his girlfriend, and in Furtivos Martina must be physically dragged out of her bed (a bed it is understood she shared with her son) to be replaced by her son’s young wife, a woman she will later murder in an attempt to restore her incestuous relationship with him. In others like La prima Angélica, Bilbao, and later in El desencanto and Arrebato (discussed in chapter 3), the male protagonists live out their lives in the absence of a father, unable to reach maturity nor to assume a place within the patriarchy. Stagnation and sterility permeate these works whether it be Luis in La prima Angélica who is psychologically frozen by an infantile trauma which prevents his loving his adult cousin, Angélica; Leo in Bilbao who cannot extricate himself from a sexual relationship with his older surrogate mother; the Panero sons in El desencanto who fall into substance abuse and madness while trying to negotiate the aftermath of their father’s death; or Pedro in Arrebato who is seen in his aunt’s old house, addicted to heroin, continuing to be fascinated by childhood toys and books, and super-8 films. It is apparent that these figures

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are experiencing a crisis in the process of entry into a mature adult role and the abundance of such figures reflects a crisis in the smooth functioning of a process which was relatively well-defined during the dictatorship—the path to adult masculinity within a patriarchal hierarchy. In Saura’s sequel to Ana y los lobos, Mamá cumple cien años (1979), as in so many Spanish films from this period, the family unit is the focus and the action takes place in and around the family home, again used symbolically to represent Spain. The blood relatives find themselves locked into difficult relationships with one another from which they are not able to break away, and again, in the absence of a family patriarch, the sons form an unusually close relationship with their domineering mother. Mamá is about to turn 100 and her two remaining sons (like Franco, the military José from the previous film is now dead), along with the wife of one of them, plot her murder, in the hopes of finally taking financial control of the estate, or as Pérez Perucha describes it, they are driven by “mercantile interests to abandon the principles of a tyrannical philosophy” (71) which clearly positions the traditional patriarchy in opposition to incipient economic attitudes. Two visitors arrive and become involved in the workings of the family. However, the two are marked as outsiders as indicated by their nationality—Ana, the English nanny who returns for a visit after many years, and her husband, Antonio, who is marked as foreign by the nationality of the actor (Norman Briski of Argentina). Even more than in Ana y los lobos, the ponderous figure of the matriarch is an unavoidable physical and psychological presence within the home and even outside, as she now seems to have the mysterious ability to overhear conversations between her children from a great distance. Although unable to walk, she seems to be constantly in motion—waving her hands, moving her feet, shrieking, singing or talking constantly. This madre castrante/ madre patriarcal who stands in for the father thus denying his responsibility for violence against mothers and children, and more importantly, protecting the sons from blame for desiring to be like the father (Kinder Blood Cinema 232), seems to dominate and control all. Still her children plot her death so that they can sell some of the house’s property and build a housing development, thus participating in the economic modernization of Spain in the 1970s. But this transfer of power is constantly denied to them as Mamá recovers repeatedly from her epilepsy-like fits, reflecting perhaps Franco’s prolonged dictatorship as well as the psychological colonization that continued to be felt. Furthermore, none of the three has fathered male progeny—an indication that the family name or “name of the father” will end with them. Again, Mamá’s three sons represent various stereotypical ways of “being a man” in Spain. One is the sadistic macho military man José, who, like Franco, has died prior to the beginning of the film, but who is seen through flashbacks to be ridiculous and cruel. José is extremely interested in collecting and wearing military uniforms and prone to

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senseless violence. The second, Juan, is the typical “mujeriego” (womanizer), a married man who manipulates women of lesser power into sexual relations. He is unable to stimulate his “frigid” wife, Luchi, but finds a sense of mastery in his illicit affairs. The third is the sensitive “niño faldero” or “mama’s boy,” Fernando, who remains unmarried and in an unusually close relationship with his mother even into his older age and with whom he communicates telepathically. He is unable to triumph in the world outside and even within his house seems almost completely impotent as he repeatedly fails in his attempts to fly with a glider (He repeats: “No lo conseguiré nunca”/“I’ll never make it”), and also fails to win the love of Ana with whom he wishes desperately to establish a closer relationship. But in spite of the fact that traditional modes of power (military, sexual and scientific) fail, Fernando also possesses some sort of telepathic ability whose nature is never fully explained. In one manifestation it is seen as a special sort of communication with his mother. Without moving his lips he expresses his thoughts to her and she is able to mysteriously “speak” to him in reply. This lack of separation from the mother has been observed to indicate a failure to master the Oedipus complex and take up the patriarchal role: A tendency toward regression to narcissistic “blissful oneness” with the mother, a sense of omnipotence based on the failure to separate from this dyad, is postulated as the chief obstacle to “personhood” for a boy. In other words, he has to leave the womb-like warmth of the home and strike out into the world to perform some “test” that will set up an autonomous identification. (Simpson 213)

The test of flying his homemade glider proves an ongoing source of humiliation and failure. He is unable to fly (unable to pass “the test” that represents mastery in the world) and unable to leave the sphere of influence of his mother. In this film the family unit is contrasted with the foreigners who, though they are drawn in to the workings of the family, seem to be ultimately safe from its destructive and paralyzing effect. Ana is English and has no personal interest in the economic doings that seem to dominate the lives of the others. Antonio, whose origin is not specified, is also marked as foreign by the actor’s Argentine accent. Furthermore, his introduction of marijuana into this traditional household points to his connection with those forces of modernity affecting Spain—in this case the influx of foreigners and drugs into the previously isolated country. In a fetishistically shot close-up sequence, Antonio is seen rolling a joint which can be seen to represent his possession of some external phallic power, the shape of the joint recalling the phallus and the imported drug symbolizing a power from outside, unrelated to and unmediated by the dictatorship. It is a power that allows him access to the granddaughter of

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Mamá—first sharing the joint and later having sex with her. His power and relative psychological, emotional, and physical freedom within the house contrasts dramatically with the impotence of the Spanish sons who are unable to overcome Mama’s power and establish adult maturity. DEVIANCE AND SUBVERSION: UNDOING THE FATHER The abundance of films portraying male figures that refuse or are unable to assume a place in the masculine hierarchy, or rather males whose behavior does not conform to the hegemonic model, can be seen to represent a masochistic disavowal of traditional patriarchal power—a move that represents both a reaction to trauma as well as an escape from the narrowness of the bounds of the imposed model. I analyze here two manifestations of this movement, masochism and homosexuality, and speculate on how these ultimately represent an attempt to reconfigure male subjectivity during the Transition. And so, in addition to their function as a representational device for traumas and stresses expressed in the dictatorship and post-dictatorship period, deviant male characters represent an attempt to liberate the individual from the patriarchal inheritance. As Vilarós notes, “la explosión pública sexual de los primeros años del posfranquismo no busca una identidad, sino, por el contrario, despojarse de ella, ‘salirse’ de ella”/“the public sexual explosion of the

Figure 2.4. Foreign born Antonio (Norman Briski) shares a joint with Mama’s hippie granddaughter (Amparo Muñoz). Mamá cumple 100 años. Dir. Carlos Saura, Elías Querejeta, 1979.

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first years after the dictatorship was not a search for an identity, but on the contrary a way to get rid of one” (191). Deviance was a reaction to the death of the “father of prohibition”—both a reaction against those prohibitions of the past as well as a collective exorcism of the father within oneself—the effects of being the “Children of Franco.” In Jagodzinsky’s schema: “this moment can be seen as the transition away from the demands of that system which promoted prohibition, a historical juncture when questioning the Name-of-the-Father means opening the door to perversity and sexual enjoyment which has been ‘traditionally’ barred by the Law” (29). It signals the embrace of sexual exploration and a hedonistic enjoyment of sexuality previously prohibited through the Catholic tradition and dictatorship law. Masochism, while generally not explicitly framed as such in the films discussed here, is a useful trope for analyzing the function of the outpouring of representations of “broken” males in the 1970s. The abundant display of male characters as “defective” in regard to hegemonic male models of the dictatorship points toward the liberation of the individual from prohibitions of the past. Gilles Deleuze’s description of the nature of masochism helps to illuminate the process by which an oppressive and bankrupt model of the past is undone: Sadism involves a relationship of domination, while masochism is the necessary first step toward liberation. When we are subjected to a power mechanism, this subjection is always and by definition sustained by some libidinal investment: the subjection itself generates a surplus enjoyment of its own. This subjection is embodied in a network of “material” bodily practices, and, for this reason, we cannot get rid of our own subjection through a merely intellectual reflection. Our liberation has to be staged in some kind of bodily performance and, furthermore, the performance has to be of an apparently “masochistic” nature; it has to stage the painful process of hitting back at oneself. (183)

Spanish filmic representations of men in the 1970s provide the staging for a masochistic liberation from the dictatorial father of prohibition. As Silverman expresses it, “Masochism works insistently to negate paternal power and privilege,” and goes on to cite Deleuze as saying, “The masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part” (Male Subjectivity 211). Thus the many films that have at their center the torture, denigration and destruction of the male protagonist can be seen as part of this process of annihilation of the patriarchal father, the force now internalized that stands between the individual and his enjoyment. Films like El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and later, El sur (1983), both by director Victor Erice, portray the alienated son of an absent but still powerful patriarchal father who haunts the present of a man who can neither take pride in his role as inheritor of patriarchal privilege nor reject it completely. In the earlier of these films the adult son, Fernan-

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do (Fernando Fernán Gómez), is visually and audially linked to the Frankenstein monster through the juxtaposition of shots of him and the monster, and remains a specter in his own home. Like the bees in his apiary which he subdues with smoke, he seems lethargic, unable to feel, a connection that is echoed in a letter written by his wife in which she says, “Tantas cosas destruidas . . . Se fue con ellas nuestra capacidad para sentir la vida”/“So many things destroyed . . . and with them went our ability to feel alive.” Alienated from his daughters and his wife, he paces restlessly in their isolated farmhouse, the unsettling sound of his footsteps heard from the room above. In Pascual Duarte, set in Extremadura in the years preceding the civil war, the protagonist, who has been raised in a violent and dysfunctional home, employs indiscriminate violence as a way of expressing his pain and alienation. After stabbing to death a mule and later shooting his devoted dog, Pascual kills his sister’s lover/pimp and then his mother and is finally garrotted by the Spanish Civil Guard for his crimes. Franco’s cameraman on this film, Luis Cuadrado, emphasizes the violence with long, unflinching takes of the knife strokes as they penetrate the belly of the animal. The personal nature of the violence through close takes, long shots, and realistic color and lighting, leave the viewer with the uncomfortable experience of participating in the violence themselves. Due to the pathetic nature of Pascual, with whom the viewer is drawn into an uneasy identification, the viewer is further implicated. The overwhelming sense is that of the inevitability of violence for this alienated male figure who, without wife, education, love or family support, will never master his environment. The effects, manifested in the son, of a violent and abusive patriarchal family, are punished. Violence and self-destruction can also be seen in many of the homosexual-themed films from the period where protagonists risk their own safety to live outside the demands of a patriarchal, heterosexist society. These representations often assume a distinctly political element and it has been observed that homosexuality in Spanish film is often linked to larger questions of freedom and one’s political identity (Carlos Alfeo Álvarez 2005; Melero Salvador 2005; Gabilondo 2002; P. J. Smith 1992). The great popularity of homosexual-themed films at a time when the vast majority of Spanish society still opposed homosexual liberation (“New Sexual Politics,” Melero Salvador 89) may reflect not so much changing attitudes about homosexuality, as the desire to represent personal liberty that exists outside the traditional patriarchal social structure. As Alfeo Álvarez states: Ni siquiera las películas más centradas en la temática homosexual, como son las que pertenecen a este período, profundizan realmente en las realidades homosexuales. . . . La circunstancia del personaje homosexual se convierte así en espejo de identificación, un espejo que, por

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Chapter 2 ser ajeno, resulta más tolerable para el espectador común; una metáfora que resuelve la amenaza que, en el imaginario colectivo, planea sobre una libertad recién estrenada. Not even the films most focused on homosexual themes, as in the case of those from this period, really explore the reality of homosexuality. . . . The appearance of a homosexual character becomes a mirror in which to identify oneself, a mirror that, by reflecting someone outside oneself, proves more tolerable for the average viewer; a metaphor that diffuses the threat which, in the collective unconscious, haunts the newfound sense of freedom. (204)

Representations of homosexuality, which first appeared overtly on the Spanish screen in the 1970s, can be considered to be part of a movement that rejects the traditional patriarchal order. If it is considered that the positive Oedipus complex in men was intimately related to the reproduction of the basic social unit—the family—and that it had as its outcome the creation of a heterosexual male who would eventually assume his role within the hierarchy, then representations of masculinity that resisted that subject positioning (i.e., homosexual, transvestite, transsexual, etc.) must be considered as subversive. As Guy Hocquenghem explains in his landmark work on homosexuality Homosexual Desire, “The direct manifestation of homosexual desire stands in contrast to the relations of identity, the necessary roles imposed by the Oedipus complex in order to ensure the reproduction of society” (106). Mark Simpson echoes this thought in reference to homophobia which was seen in chapter 1 in the destabilized male roles in No desearás al vecino del quinto: “Explicit homosexuality represents a threat to the maintenance of the very fraught identification with/impersonation of the father, and thus their whole sense of self” (13). The relaxation and then disappearance of censorship in the 1970s is a concrete manifestation of a larger trend that has been discussed here, and that is the waning of the very real power of prohibition along with a liberalization of desire, first promoted in a consumer context, but which later extended to the sphere of sexuality. So, while the violence and self-destruction characterizing so many films of the period served to undo the father, homosexual-themed films indicated an escape route— one undeniably fraught with danger but one which offered an alternative to accepting the patriarchy or accepting death. Early Spanish films with a marked homosexual theme were often expressly political in focus as well, at least in part because a homosexual identity was necessarily fraught with subversive political implications in a strongly Catholic and paternalistic country as Spain was at the time. Directors such as Eloy de la Iglesia, one of the first to include homosexuality in mass-market cinema, used the climate of sexual openness immediately following the dictator’s death to explore the theme, and as Alejandro Melero Salvador points out: “De la Iglesia used sex and destape to

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drag Spanish audiences into his political agenda” (“New Sexual Politics” 96). De la Iglesia was interested in legitimizing a politically marginalized identity and in ensuring that post-dictatorship openness extended to sexuality. Homosexual-themed films of the 1970s were concerned with issues of acceptance and discrimination and dealt directly with the initially violent reaction that faced those who dared live, even clandestinely, as homosexuals. Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures) and El diputado (De la Iglesia 1977, 1978), A un dios desconocido (To an Unknown God; Chavarri 1977), Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño (A Man Called Autumn Flower; Olea 1978), Ocaña: retrat intermitent (Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait; Pons 1978), and Arrebato represent male characters who reject traditional gender roles, in most cases at their own peril. Of these, two films that are particularly illustrative of the connection between homosexuality and the theme of personal freedom, El diputado and Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño, serve to exemplify the rejection of the father of prohibition as well as the consequences this may incur. El diputado presents the violence that ensues when an individual tries to throw off the confines of the patriarchy as a way of gaining individual freedom apart from traditional masculinity as propagated under the dictatorship. José Sacristán plays the Communist Party politician, Roberto, who is elected to office in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorship. His political opponents attempt to discredit him by exposing his homosexuality. This exposure, though ostensibly undertaken to discredit him politically, quickly moves its focus to his sexual, rather than political identity. The opening shot of the stone genitalia of the marble statue, Michelangelo’s “David,” immediately makes reference to, and simultaneously calls into question the patriarchal power which, as Peter Lehman has pointed out, relies on the hiding of the physical member that supposedly links individual males to phallic power. Other shots within the film, including those of male nudity indicate this film’s openness to questioning the phallocentric hierarchy. In recruiting thugs to challenge Communist Party proceedings, the secret police try to appeal to disaffected youth by promising full participation in the patriarchy, “Vas a convertirte en un hombre de verdad. Estarás protegido. Incluso tendrás armas”/“You will become a real man. You will be protected. You’ll even have guns!” The promise is that these male youths will be able to take refuge in the hierarchical power structure and the male prerogative to use violence—as men supposedly were in the past. De la Iglesia comments on the changing values of youth in the new consumerist society for whom the patriarchy itself is unimportant—provided that they are paid for their services, they are willing to do anything. The politician’s young prostitute/lover, Juanito (José Luis Alonso) ultimately betrays the older man saying, “A ti te resultó fácil comprarme . . . pues a ellos también.”/“It was easy for you to buy me . . . well it was for them too.” The brutal murder of this young lover by right-wing extremists reflects the patriarchy’s unwillingness to

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cede its power—and the price that will be exacted for trying to escape the system. In Pedro Olea’s Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño the Transition’s most representative actor, José Sacristán, plays a lawyer, Lluis, who leads a secret existence as a transvestite nightclub singer. Set in Barcelona in the 1920s during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, an opening statement appears on screen stating that this is a true story, establishing its seriousness and contemporary political relevance. An establishing shot pans down from the steeple of a large church to the steps below where a congregation is gathering for Mass. Lluis helps his mother (his father is dead) out of the car and up the steps. This scene along with the next, representing an afternoon lunch with his extended family, establishes his place in society as a lawyer in a conservative, upper-class family. However, through a discussion of a recent bombing and the murder of a supposed anarchist, Lluis’s political leanings are revealed to differ substantially from those of his family. Their conservative and staid attitudes, reflected in clothing of black and white, contrast sharply with those of the characters in the next scene in which a man in a bright orange robe brings coffee to Lluis and his male lover in bed. In striking visual contrast to the earlier scene with his family, Lluis dons a purple robe, takes the cup and begins preparing for his drag show as the cabaret singer “Flor de Otoño.” That he contemplates simultaneously a plot to assassinate the dictator and a plan to reveal his “true” identity to his beloved mother, reflects the film’s double preoccupation with politics and personal identity. The parallel presentation equates asserting his “perverse” identity with the death of the patriarchal father. In fact, he directly employs his subversive identity as a transvestite in the execution of the plot, as he pretends to be a woman under attack as a ploy to distract a guard of the railroad tracks he plans to destroy. Lluis is picked up by the police and interrogated regarding the murder of another singer at the cabaret and the police eventually detain him and his friends before their plot is fully executed. The film’s preoccupation with the question of liberty in general is made explicit in a conversation between Lluis and a member of the sindicalistas in which he states that he is not interested in compromise but rather seeks liberty for all—to be homosexual, and to be free in all aspects of life. In this film men are seen to be either supportive of the status quo or subversive and hidden as they struggle for the relief that the color and lights of the nightclub provide. Their existence is far from frivolous, however, as Lluis and his friends risk their lives to effect political change. Upon hearing that Lluis was involved in a homosexual relationship, the police chief remonstrates with him for not living up to his illustrious surname—a reference to his lack of respect for the traditional patriarchy and the importance of a good name within it. His concern is that Lluis’s dead father (and thus the patriarchy) is being dishonored by his homosexual behavior. However, the truly revolutionary nature of Lluis’s iden-

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tity clearly exceeds his homosexual desire. In a dream that Lluis recounts in great detail, he repeats a line that is playing on a phonograph in the background, “la propiedad es un robo, la propiedad es un robo . . .”/ “Private property is robbery, private property is robbery . . .” Since it is part of a larger dream in which his conservative family disappears, it can be seen as a desire to alter the fundamental structure of existing society— both sexual and economic. As Paul Julian Smith citing the work of Hocquenghem, and Deleuze and Guattari, has noted in his important work on homosexuality in Spanish literature and cinema, the homosexual identity has been employed as a means of subverting the bourgeois ideology of familial and reproductive sexuality and male dominance. Specifically he discusses anal desire and its potential to erase the division between public and private on which society is based, “to lose control of the anus is to risk the loss of individual identity because that control stakes out the boundary between self and other” (Laws of Desire 57). Homosexuality poses a distinct challenge to the oedipal maturation of the individual as Hocquenqhem points out: “Homosexual desire challenges anality-sublimation because it restores the desiring use of the anus” (98), and he goes on to say, “To reinvest the anus collectively and libidinally would involve a proportional weakening of the great phallic signifier, which dominates us constantly both in the small-scale hierarchies of the family and in the great social hierarchies” (102). In Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño the performance of the protagonist’s homosexual identity coincides with his radical political identity. His undoing of the personal and dictatorship patriarchy and the conservative capitalist interests that are supported by those fathers who respect the law and tradition, is demonstrated as much by his assassination attempt as by his refusal to accept his position in the hierarchy by living up to his “name”—a direct affront to the patriarchy and an attempt to open the individual to living his desire. CONSUMING BODIES: “SEXY” COMEDIES AND THE LIBERALIZATION OF DESIRE While art-house cinema and homosexuality-themed films had no compunction about demonstrating the weakness and breakdown of the traditional patriarchy, popular film struggled to accommodate changing social mores without endangering heterosexist notions of masculinity. By moving toward an ideal of self-indulgence and consumption, the male character moved dangerously close to that which had been thought to be the realm of women. The problem became how to justify adherence to the new consumer dictate without compromising one’s masculinity as developed under the previous system of prohibition, depicted most vividly in crusade cinema. Encouraging men to consume, as promoted in the explosion of television advertising and other media in the 1960s and 1970s,

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implied a rapid reversal of an age-old prohibition against male self-indulgence and consumption. In film after film of the so-called “sexy Spanish comedy” the solution to this dilemma seems to be a focus on the consumption of female bodies as “obvious” assurance that the protagonist, no matter what his interest in material goods and self-indulgence, is most definitely heterosexual. The destape or uncovering of the nude body (almost exclusively the female nude body) in the 1970s provided a comic way to present a fundamental shift in values—from a society of prohibition and the model of masculinity based on it, to a society of consumption and “commanded enjoyment” and the model of masculinity associated with that. The incredible popularity of sexually-oriented films is evidenced by the fact that in 1978 five out of the top ten box office movie successes were sex-themed (McNair 92). Though homosexuality provided a direct and obvious alternative to the traditional patriarchy as seen in the previous section, cinematic representations of homosexuality in the 1970s, while accepted in some films for their metaphoric content, did not reflect the level of acceptance of homosexuality in society. Therefore, since homosexuality continued to be considered undesirable by a vast portion of society, a distinction needed to be made between those supposedly effeminate and self-indulgent men that male homosexuals were often perceived to be, and the “macho ibérico” who, though raised on prohibition, now needed to embrace consumption. In these films according to Hopewell, “the Iberian male is horny” (81), and these films are filled with double entendres designed to draw the audience into a knowing relationship with the apparently highly (hetero)sexed protagonists. The actors most associated with these generally low-budget sexy comedies were Alfredo Landa, whose name lent itself to the movement “Landismo” in films that portrayed this actor as the comedic, sex-starved, “typical” Spaniard, and two other comedians who often paired up, Andrés Pajares and Fernando Esteso. Of these, I will discuss here a figure introduced earlier in the discussion of the Manolo Escobar film, Me has hecho perder el juicio—Andrés Pajares. As the grasping and scheming sidekick of the more admirable Manolo, he introduces a character type that will become increasingly sexual, but never more sophisticated, as sexual restrictions on Spanish films relax. The 1981 film by director Mariano Ozores ¡Qué gozada de divorcio! presents the typical Pajares role of the period. He plays a fast-talking “regular guy,” only moderately attractive and a bit slovenly, but inexplicably able to seduce a series of attractive women—three within the first ten minutes of the film. Like Alfredo Landa’s character in No desearás al vecino del quinto, Pajares doubles as a gay fashion designer—affecting the stereotypical mannerisms and voice expected by the general public and thus playing with the possibility of a homosexual identity. He quickly undoes any “taint” of homosexuality, however, by heading to an Asian massage parlor where he fondles and

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grabs at the women he encounters, including his estranged wife from whom he is seeking a divorce under newly adopted legislation legalizing the practice. 3 The film presents women’s bodies in a highly specularized and fragmented fashion, displaying female nudes in quick succession and, with the exception of his wife, providing little or no character development of any of them. The effect is to present them as objects for consumption—both by the protagonist as well as by the spectator—and thereby promote consumption as an eminently heterosexual activity. Thus the male character’s heterosexual masculinity remains apparently uncompromised despite the underlying anxiety that is revealed through the double nature of the protagonist who works as a gay man, but tries to assert his heterosexuality through his many female conquests. The male viewer is eased into a subject position that is clearly centered on consumption, but by its association with the consumption of female bodies, it avoids drawing too close to what might have been considered “unmanly” behavior under the dictatorship which prized self-renunciation rather than self-gratification. THE FASCINATION OF ABJECTION: HORROR’S TRANSGRESSIVE POWER Vampires, werewolves, and other monstrous beings abound in Spanish cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s. Though they appear almost exclusively in what has been marginalized as a fringe “sexploitation” genre, horror films constitute a significant contribution to the Spanish cinematic tradition. They represent a face and a voice that has often been neglected in discussions of Spanish cinema of the highly politically and socially volatile years of the late Francoist dictatorship and transition to democracy. Rife with images of sexism and violence—and often made quickly on very small budgets—horror genre films have been lauded for their ability to speak that which cannot otherwise be spoken and in turn to set about “blasting open the continuum of history” (Lowenstein 16). These genre films were relatively unregulated and, according to Andrew Willis, they “offered a space for directors to find a way of articulating challenges to the dominant ideas and beliefs of Francoist cinema and its celebration of family values” (167). Along these lines, Robin Wood states that “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized, as in our nightmares” (4). Like dreams, they contain images unsettling to behold yet fruitful to contemplate for their insistent and problematic focus on gender relations, consumption, and identity. By placing three representative films of this genre, La noche de Walpurgis (Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman; León Klimovsky 1971), El retorno de Walpurgis (Curse of the Devil; Carlos Aured 1974) and La semana del

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asesino (Cannibal Man; Eloy de la Iglesia 1972), within their larger cultural context, this section demonstrates how recurrent themes, motifs, and symbols link them despite their disparate styles, and indicate a profound ambivalence over the phenomenon of consumption—an ambivalence from which monsters emerge. Through representation of the most prevalent monsters that appear during this period, the werewolf, the vampire and the cannibal, these films blur the line between human and beast, and this ambiguity can be seen to represent anxieties produced as the body was caught within a web of both consuming and being consumed during the period of Spain’s rapid modernization. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed dramatic economic and social changes in Spain causing a radical change in attitudes and behavior; migration to cities, the encounter with foreign tourists, and the rise of television advertising “estimulaba a los españoles al consumo y al bienestar, identificado con automóviles, vacaciones al sol, viajes, electrodomésticos, aperitivos internationales y perfumería de lujo”/“stimulated Spaniards to consume and promoted a well-being associated with cars, beach vacations, trips, appliances, foreign liquors and expensive perfume” (Jover Zamora et al. 755). Suddenly driven to an encounter with that which had been forbidden during much of the dictatorship for economic or cultural reasons such as consumer products, sexuality on display, and omnipresent advertising—the individual finds her/himself subject to an order in which s/ he is posited as a consumer of ads, products, sexuality etc., as well as an object for consumption oneself in which one’s “consumer power” is required and exploited by the system, and one’s body, male or female, is presented as an object for visual consumption. It is within this changing order that anxieties, or that which Spanish civilization “represses or oppresses” surfaced, as the viewer confronted her/his role in the new consumer context. Jean Baudrillard defines “consummativity” as “an indefinite calculus of growth rooted in the abstraction of needs,” and describes how the individual, who considers himself an autonomous consumer exercising his power of choice, becomes caught up in a system which compels him to consume: “there is a compulsion to need and a compulsion to consume” (For a Critique 82–83). Regarding this point, Rob Latham observes: The ability of the socioeconomic system to instill consumer demand, and to delude consumers into conceiving these demands as their own autonomous expression, is the very motor of contemporary capitalism, the new source of its self-valorization. . . . This consumer “was no longer simply the slave as labor power,” subjected to the factory’s machines, but rather “a new kind of serf: the individual as consumption power,” subjected to the general mechanisms of consumer society: advertising, product design, the fashion system. (7)

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The blurring of the distinction between consumer and consumed in Spanish society in the late dictatorship and transición was especially disruptive for masculine identity at the time, as the male subject was forced to recognize himself in the traditionally feminized role of object for consumption. Despite the fact that gender identifications here are considered fluid and plural, Steven Neale points out that the filmic repetition of gender roles does serve a purpose—that of attempting to fix or channel socially acceptable behaviors: “there is constant work to channel and regulate identification in relation to sexual division, in relation to the orders of gender, sexuality, and social identity and authority marking patriarchal society. Every film tends both to assume and actively work to renew those orders, that division” (11). This section focuses on the way these films express anxiety over the instability of the identity of consumer/consumed through the monstrous figures that made their frequent appearance in Spanish films of the period and show how they work to deflect attention from that dynamic. An analysis of these figures in three of the more successful films of this genre shows how films’ focus on indiscriminate appetite and the jouissance, implicit in unrestrained consumption, poses a threat to the stability of the unified masculine subject who finds himself compelled to consume yet horrified by perceiving himself as the object of consumption. Long accustomed to being cast as objects and as consumers, women in these films are shown to more easily adapt to—and even enjoy—their roles, whereas men struggle continuously. Perhaps the horror attendant upon this condition appears more disruptive to men in the Spanish context given that the Francoist dictatorship had long propagated the illusion that men were immune to objectification through their patriarchal dominance in the home and workplace. The female vampires, seductresses and Satan worshippers in these films appear to enjoy and embrace their roles—most probably due to their existence as fantasies of the almost exclusively male writers and directors—while the werewolves and serial killer are tormented beings who struggle with their identity, resisting their subjugated position. Of course, it is important to recognize that gender representations within a film cannot determine reception by either gender, and this study does not purport to do so, but rather it engages in an analysis of the nature of those horrific elements represented on screen as they affect the transformation of the male protagonists. The three monsters discussed here are defined by the duality of their subjectivity: the werewolf, agonizingly conscious of his nocturnal transformations yet powerless to escape the cycle; the vampire who was once human but must roam constantly seeking the life force she receives through the blood of her victims; and the serial killer/cannibal who engages in the most taboo of human behaviors, thus placing himself at the limit of behavior between human and beast. Chantal Bourgault du Coudray points out that the werewolf, in Žižek’s schema, “is an expression of the overflow, surplus or excess that escapes attempts to contain reality

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(or produce unity)” (60), and that, the werewolf has often been considered as a site of struggle between nature and culture (Bourgault 3). But rather than considering a unified subject who is the site of struggle between two competing influences, I consider the nature of that subjectivity itself to be in question. Rather than existing as a fossilized remnant of a deterministic process, the subjectivity that emerges here is eternally in flux, consumed and consuming, a condition that can end only in death. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit elaborate on the multiplicity of the subject: “the multiplication of the individual’s positionality in the universe is, necessarily, a lessening or even a loss of individuality. We are not as distinct subjectivities but rather as that which gives appearances to different modes or functions of being” (5). Indeed, the effect of the horror film monster has been seen to arise from its borderline identity, something that Noël Carroll calls the “interstitial” identity. He goes on to describe these horrific monsters as “the mixture of what is normally distinct,” referring to this quality as the source of their “un-natural” essence relative to culture’s conceptual scheme of nature (33). The three creatures discussed here represent not a single mode of being, but rather a state that is fundamentally and eternally defined and undone by another. Francoism, through the closely allied paternalistic discourses of Church and military State, had attempted to promote a unified and transcendent subject position informed by an ethos of self-abnegation and submission to duty. Nascent consumerism forced a reconceptualization of the self as both consumer and consumerism’s product, constantly interpellated anew by the omnipresence of advertising and consumer opportunities. As Bersani and Dutoit point out: “to lose the father’s absence, or the paternal function at once dependent upon and incommensurable with any real father, is to lose the Law that governs and stabilizes the attributing of identities” (102). With the waning of dictatorship power and the discrediting of the patriarchy as it existed, identity was unmoored and horror films represent this fluidity in the many characters that transform, reoccur, die, and are reborn in an endless cycle. The rise of the horror genre in Spain coincided with, and is in some ways the product of, the onset of consumerism and the softening of dictatorship mores, and thus is uniquely positioned to represent the traumatic or unspoken byproduct of rapid cultural and socioeconomic change. In the early 1960s the strict control exercised by the dictatorship through subsidies and censorship began to ease with the appointment of Manuel Fraga to the position of Minister of Information and Tourism. A cautious liberal, he appointed José García Escudero to be Director General of Cinema in 1962 and under him “the rigid system of censorship began to mellow slightly” (Tohill and Tombs 63), and new laws were created to help support films made in Spain. This change, along with the upsurge in tourism, increasingly exposed Spaniards to images and adver-

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tising that promoted consumerism and more open sexual mores. Despite a temporary setback in the late 1960s with the removal of Fraga from his post and a rolling back of liberalizing legislation, the dictablanda or softening dictatorship years of the early 1970s continued to see a significant outpouring of genre films including horror. A system of coproduction with other countries, especially France, Italy, and Germany allowed this movement to exist and thrive, and in 1971–1973 alone eighty cheap genre films of various types were produced (Matellano 20). Ironically, the horror genre’s eventual decline occurred with the elimination of censorship in 1977 as many of the directors and producers who had created these films moved toward more hardcore pornography in which the story and effects took a backseat to extended sex scenes. And finally, an extreme drop in the number of films produced overall occurred with the enacting of the “Miró Law” which politically and economically favored “quality” cinema. 4 Regarding the situation in which horror films emerged, Victor Matellano states: “es de lamentar que, primero la censura franquista y posteriormente unas leyes cinematográficas estatales, hechas entre amigos para amigos, yugularan un movimiento tan peculiar y valioso”/“It is lamentable that, first Francoist censorship and later some film industry laws, made among friends for their friends, strangled such a peculiar and valuable movement” (22). Still, the movement did flourish for a time and, interestingly, has achieved long-lasting popularity with some audiences. Many of these films are now available on DVD and have achieved a sort of cult status, continuing to influence filmmakers today. 5 One of the most successful films of the genre, Klimovsky’s La noche de Walpurgis, ranks number fourteen in highest box office sales ever among horror films in Spain. It was “a big hit in Spain and overseas, and effectively launched the Spanish horror boom of the early 1970s” (Tohill, Tombs 72). 6 In the film, graduate students Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and Genevieve (Bárbara Capell) travel to the countryside to research the life of a notorious sixteenth-century Hungarian countess known for practicing satanic rituals. There they encounter the reclusive Waldemar Daninsky and, while staying at his house, are pursued by the revived countess/ vampire. In a second plotline, Daninsky turns into a werewolf on nights of a full moon and ravages the countryside. The film makes much of Daninsky’s anguish over his transformations, indicating anxiety over a fundamental contradiction experienced by the protagonist—the nature of his own identity as subject and master of his own fate, or victim/object of forces he does not control. He does all he can to prevent the sliding of his identity, moving to an isolated spot and chaining himself up to prevent wreaking havoc at the time of the full moon. The scenes depicting his transformation are protracted and he moans and lurches about as his fangs emerge and hair sprouts. But he is powerless to stop the transformation or the violence that ensues—appearing as much victim as victimizer. As Bourgault du Coudray says: the “werewolf’s eternal anguish is

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constitutive of an inherently contradictory subjectivity” (110). The werewolf is clearly neither “this” nor “that,” but rather an amalgamation of the two, and in his human embodiment engages in a doomed struggle to achieve a unified identity. Though the transformations in Walpurgis are apparently linked to the phases of the moon, the situations in which Daninsky transforms indicate that the phenomenon is not simply a reaction to lunar phenomenon, but can be seen rather as a reaction to the male protagonist’s objectification. The coincidence of the objectification of the male body in these films with the appearance of the full moon serves to deflect and depersonalize what can be read as the more immediate source of disquiet on the part of the male protagonist—his own objectification. Film critic Francisco Montaner complained in his review of a similar scene in another Naschy vehicle (Dr. Jekyll y el hombre lobo, 1972): “there is no need to waste any film reel explaining for the umpteenth time that the lycanthrope metamorphoses on nights of a full moon, that he can only be killed with a silver bullet and blah, blah, blah . . . a veiled allusion to the myth should suffice to situate the non-initiated” (qtd. in Lázaro-Reboll 174). But Montaner overlooks the crucial fact that it is the transformation itself that serves as the focus of horror, and that the monster myth is needed to mask the dynamic of objectification of the male character. The very repetition of the conventions of this scene invites reflection on the source of its fascination. It is through the “in-between-ness” of the male character’s identity that horror is generated, with the lunar phenomenon becoming a sort of irrefutable, impersonal cause. It is the cosmos that creates a ferocious monster rather than, for example, a woman’s agency or a doctor’s scalpel creating an objectified human body. In this way the horror generated is perceived to be the result of the visible representation of monstrosity composed of hair and fangs rather than that which is produced through an encounter with weakness and vulnerability on the part of the male protagonist. In Walpurgis’ opening scene Daninsky appears as a lifeless body in the morgue. Two doctors chat amiably and joke about rumors that he is a werewolf while one forcefully jabs a scalpel into his chest to perform an autopsy. The cold white light and metal table create a clinical ambiance in which the pale inert body is matter-of-factly discussed and dissected. The doctors extract three silver bullets from his chest and then casually retire to smoke. Formulaic cross-cuts to the moon foreshadow the threat and build anticipation for the imminent transformation. Suddenly, a hairy hand on the doctor’s shoulder dramatically reverses the subject-object dynamic and the two doctors cower in fear as their faces are slashed open by the werewolf. The werewolf/Daninsky runs out and quickly dispatches a lone woman in a miniskirt who is walking in the woods. As is customary in these films, he exposes her naked breast in the struggle and the camera lingers on it as blood gushes down her chest; in this way the film further shifts the focus of objectification from the male protagonist to

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the sexualized body of the dead woman. A final shot of the werewolf’s face, mouth dripping with blood, clearly establishes who is biting whom. The film definitively establishes this point at the dramatic conclusion when the werewolf/Daninsky, who by now has fallen in love with Elvira, kills the countess. Her dead body immediately becomes food for maggots, the ultimate object, and the camera lingers on her corpse as if to solidify the image for the viewer and thus dispel the tension that her agency has created. In the second of the two films, Daninsky returns as a man who is turned into a werewolf by a band of gypsies seeking revenge for acts of violence committed on their kinsmen centuries before by Daninsky’s ancestor. Daninsky the younger, initially unaware that he is a werewolf, falls in love with the daughter of a visiting doctor. Later he becomes aware of his identity and discloses it to his love who, coached by Daninsky’s old servant, resolutely stabs him in the heart with a silver cross in order to set his soul free. In this film the werewolf’s transformation occurs after the younger sister of Daninsky’s beloved seduces him. She tricks him into meeting her in an isolated spot and, when he refuses her initial advances, removes her clothes and insistently approaches him until he submits and they have sex. As in Walpurgis, shots of the moon foretell the change that is about to take place—and provide the mask or excuse for the growing tension the scene presents for the viewer. In the sex act he begins the diagetically inevitable transformation into a werewolf and bites her on the neck. Again, the camera focuses on the blood pouring out of her wound onto her naked objectified body as the protagonist flees the scene—thus reestablishing his position as subject despite temporary sexual objectification. Interestingly, in the werewolf’s attacks on men, the victims’ bodies are shown only briefly, never undressed, and the camera does not linger over these scenes but rapidly moves on to the next plot point. Carol Clover observes the same regarding horror films in general since the 1970s: “even in films in which males and females are killed in roughly even numbers, the lingering images are of the latter. . . . The death of a male is moreover more likely than the death of a female to be viewed from a distance, or viewed only dimly” (35). In Walpurgis, a townsman/slave of the countess has his throat ripped out by the werewolf but, in contrast to the earlier scene of the female victim’s partial disrobing and murder—which was well-lit and prolonged—this one is brief and occurs at night, foreclosing the possible contemplation of the male victim’s body. Also, after this attack, the werewolf actually spits out a mouthful of flesh after the attack indicating the unthinkablility of consumption of a male by a male. The torment of the male characters in these films is juxtaposed with the certainty, self-assuredness, and pleasure of the female leads. In Walpurgis the laughter and unrestrained bloodlust of the vampires are horrific due to the indiscriminate nature of the violence/consumption of the

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vampire/lesbian women. The vampires, once initiated, do not drink each other’s blood but seek endlessly for new victims whom they drain and cast aside, preferring each other’s company socially and sexually. Jeffrey Weinstock draws attention to the consumptive function as he observes of the vampire, “driven by their sexualised thirst, they absorb and devour the life-force of their partners” (8). Men are reduced to food; in a world of mass production/consumption, men are also consumed. David Pirie argues that “the function of the vampire movie is precisely to incarnate the most hostile aspects of sexuality in a concrete form” (100). In a society of rapidly changing sexual mores, the threat of being consumed, just as women had been for ages, becomes the source of horror for the viewer. It is interesting to remember at this juncture that female homosexuality in film was equated with “una nueva frontera”/“a new frontier” (Placeres ocultos Melero Salvador 92), though most films proved to be conservative in that these subversive characters are ultimately killed off proving that, far from celebrating women’s desire, they are more bent on containment. The ultimate horror is the threat that they will consume a man without regard for his subjectivity, their sexuality representing the forces of modernity that threaten the male character’s subject position. As in Walpurgis, lesbian sex scenes often seem to occur in a separate universe, forming a sort of narrative break; in this case the vampire seductions occur in gauzy, slow motion that both draws in and excludes the spectator. Rick Altman points to this stylistic contrast as an indicator of a problematic or alternative logic to that of the film’s overall narrative: “Unmotivated events, rhythmic montage, highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles— these are the excesses in the classical narrative system that alert us to the existence of a competing logic, a second voice” (345–46). Here, it is the logic of unrestrained enjoyment that the laughing, sexually promiscuous vampire/women embody. It is an enjoyment that threatens to overturn a long-held repressive, patriarchal norm. The very specularity of the lesbian vampire performance enacts the double-bind situation of the male viewer—consuming the images of formerly prohibited female flesh, yet drawn to identify with their victims who fall prey to their attraction. Most explicitly demonstrating the monstrous ambivalence of consuming and being consumed, La semana del asesino pointedly presents the male character’s struggle with these two forces. It differs from the Walpurgis films in that stylistically it could be considered realism, even naturalism, for its gritty representation of the life of the protagonist. Marcos (Vicente Parra) works at an abattoir and lives in the poorer outskirts of Madrid. His economic struggle and marginal existence are made explicit through panning shots of his rundown concrete block house filled with cheap consumer products such as a small portable radio, and gaudy mass-market decor. A large pinup poster of a beautiful woman hovers over the sofa upon which he lounges and smokes, the image appearing more as vigilant and oppressive observer than as a source of visual pleas-

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ure for the man. Throughout the film he is further objectified by his voyeuristic neighbor who spies on him through a telescope from his high-rise apartment. Anxiety builds throughout the film—as much for the murders as for the unrelenting sense that the protagonist is being watched. After a dispute with a taxi driver, the protagonist commits murder—the first of many necessitated by the subsequent cover-up. He hatches a plan to dismember the bodies with a cleaver (mimicking an earlier scene in the abattoir), and gradually carry them to work to mix with the beef that is being processed there. By reducing people to a sack of fragmented body parts and, ultimately, food, the protagonist appears to regain agency, albeit at an extreme cost. Despite some obvious stylistic differences, this film shares many similarities with the other two: a protagonist who appears sympathetic yet commits heinous murders, a focus on blood, women who assertively pursue their own pleasure, and the torment of the male protagonist. But whereas consumption in the werewolf films takes the unrealistic form of bloodlust driven by the force of the moon, here the compulsion to consume and the objectification of the protagonist are made explicit. Throughout the film the character is shown engaged in a seemingly constant state of consumption. He smokes, eats, and drinks incessantly, also watching television and listening to a blaring radio—yet appears to derive no pleasure from these activities. The compulsive nature of these pursuits implies that by consuming, he might avoid becoming an object for consumption himself. Just as the pinup posters double as heterosexist objects for consumption as well as a sort of taunt or provocation as they loom above the anxiety-ridden protagonist, Marcos does not simply consume, but rather finds himself consumed in his daily life—by his job, his marginal economic status, his consumerist tendencies, his voyeuristic neighbor, and by a sexually assertive woman. Interestingly, in the single instance where he is seen to actually eat human flesh (unbeknownst to him he is served soup made with potentially tainted meat from his own company), he is sickened as if in reaction to becoming the unknowing and passive recipient of a process he does not control. The primary seduction scene of the film vividly represents the subjectobject struggle through the play of camera angles. The scene itself is remarkably similar to the one described earlier from Retorno, and again, it ends in the murder of the seductress. A local married waitress appears unexpectedly at the killer’s house, enters, and seduces him. Camera angles and character positioning in this scene are crucial for establishing the subject-object dynamic. On top of him, the woman actively seduces the male protagonist, the camera alternating between overhead shots sharing her point of view looking down at his body and side angle shots encompassing the entire scene. Shortly after, agency is reversed as the protagonist, fearing that his secret will be discovered, turns on the woman to stab her. As she realizes his intention, the camera, in a slight downward angle

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mimicking the killer’s point of view, lingers unflinchingly on her horrified visage as he moves in for the kill. Again, the objectification Marcos experiences at the hands of the woman and in the perspective of the camera is dramatically overturned through violence. Rather than appearing as an object for consumption (sexually by the woman, or visually by the camera) the male protagonist assumes the active position of killer and subject of the camera’s point of view, thus adamantly rejecting this temporary objectification. After he kills his seducer, Marcos absentmindedly picks up some bread and begins eating. Following, a cut to a street scene shows him, still dazed, walking along a busy street. Disorienting shots of shop windows display men’s clothing with price tags clearly visible, while mini-skirted women pass by, a metaphoric denouement that clearly implies that the struggle is not over. Each murder seems to require another as the protagonist struggles to maintain control of each situation. The acceleration of the cycle increases his anxiety as he is unable to carry off the inert, objectified bodies as quickly as they accumulate in his flyridden house. Further complicating the subject position of the male protagonists in these films is the choice of actors in each. Paul Naschy’s physical representation in the Walpurgis films embodies the nature of the ambivalence

Figure 2.5. Marco (Vicente Parra) is seduced by Rosa (Vicky Lagos) in the home where he has decaying corpses. La semana del asesino. Dir. Eloy de la Iglesia, Atlas International Films, 1973.

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surrounding the masculine identity. Noteworthy for his muscular physique, Naschy, a weightlifting competitor in the 1950s and 1960s, became one of the first Spanish actors to be displayed for his physicality. As Antonio Lázaro-Reboll observes of Naschy films: “such displays of the muscular male body were uncommon in Spanish cinema, setting him apart from representations of the average male Spaniard in other popular film traditions” (76). Naschy’s films mark a transition in Spain toward the male protagonist as object for visual consumption. His tight clothing and appearance in various states of undress emphasize his presentation as consumer object, playing with the idea of man as object, but then dramatically and, perhaps for many, gratifyingly attempting to overturn that representation. And likewise, in La semana del asesino, lead actor Vicente Parra has been referred to as “a well-known actor whose roles shaped specific constructions of contemporary ideas of the masculine in the second half of the 1950s and during the 1960s” (Lázaro-Reboll 149), and was often cast as the “galán” or handsome male lead. As Lázaro-Reboll points out: “The script [of La semana del asesino] knowingly plays up his constructed masculinity, and self-consciously offers an ironic, distanced, critical account of the cinematic and social construction of the actor’s normative masculinity” (150). Thus the earnest representation of matinee-idol is transformed into a meditation on a certain style of hegemonic masculine representation. Parra has moved from conquistador to a sort of terrorized victim of his circumstances. The popularity and persistence of horror genre films in Transition-era Spain attest to their vitality and resonance for the Spanish audience of the time. Linda Williams links the popularity of “gross” body genre films with the rapid destabilization of gender relations, stating that they “thrive . . . on the persistence of the problems they address; but . . . also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems” (12). The fraught struggle of these films’ main male characters to maintain or regain agency demonstrates the fascination and horror implied by the loss of this agency and attempt to recast the terms of the struggle. Desperately unwilling to cede the position of subject, they murder in order to deflect the tension that accrues through their positioning as object. While the female “monsters,” lesbian vampires, and even the various human seductresses appear comfortable in their roles, the male characters are tormented and seek escape from their objectification. By focusing on their function as monster or murderer, the films discussed here deflect attention away from the most immediate cause of unease in the protagonists—their own objectification at the hands of science, sexually assertive women and, perhaps most importantly, the consumerist ethos itself which was blossoming in Spain at the time. The very nature of masculinity as defined by active agency was being refashioned at the time and these films represent that horror along with the imaginary pleasure to be found in overturning that new logic in a darkened cinema.

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Figure 2.6. Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) contemplates the mark of the beast on his well-muscled chest. El retorno de Walpurgis. Dir. Carlos Aured, Lotus Films, 1974.

CONCLUSION Dramatic social change brought about by the abrupt shift from a society of prohibition under the dictatorship, to a society of commanded enjoyment which rose up powerfully in its aftermath, led to a crisis in masculine subject formation. Economic changes dating back to the 1959 dictatorship plan to stimulate economic recovery through neoliberal reforms, including the promotion of consumerism, and the widespread appearance of electronic media used to diffuse advertising, promoted new models of behavior that contradicted the essence of the hegemonic model as represented in early dictatorship film. From a clear promotion of prohibition, self-renunciation and personal sacrifice, the message changed to encourage individuals to indulge themselves and to consume as they pleased. Ironically, “el régimen nacido para restaurar la religión católica frente al ateísmo y al materialismo modernos haría de España un país secularizado, en el que una visión tradicional y cristiana de la vida iba a ser gradualmente sustituida por una nueva concepción basada en el placer, la permisividad y el consumismo”/“the regime created to preserve the Catholic faith against atheism and modern materialism would make of Spain a secularized nation, in which a traditional and Christian worldview would give way, gradually replaced by a new conceptualization

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based on pleasure, permissiveness, and consumption” (Jover Zamora et al. 754). Filmic representations of men from the 1970s reflect the confusion that this change effected in masculine subject formation with the result that male characters are often seen as self-destructive, confused, violent or “un-manly” as they struggle (and fail) to master their environments. This period reflects a collective impulse to exorcise the Father and to throw off the restrictions he imposed. The consequences of this action continued to be felt throughout the decade as cinema explored a variety of reactions to the loss of the hegemonic masculine model of the past as well as possibilities for the future. A closer look at the horror genre indicates that a primary struggle and source of masculine terror revolves around the phenomenon of consuming and being consumed—sparked by the fundamental consumer change occurring in Spanish society at this time. NOTES 1. The female branch of the Falange Party. It was led by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It became an official institution in the Francoist dictatorship and was charged with socializing women into their role as wives and mothers. 2. Following is a list of recommendations for married women according to the Sección Feminina posted on Oct. 16, 2010, by Asociacion Cultural Luna Nueva de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia de la Universidad Complutense (https://asociacion lunanueva.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/extractos-de-la-seccion-femenina-de-falange/). Extractos de Sección Femenina de la Falange Española y de las JONS -Editado en 1958. Preparación de la mujer al matrimonio. 20 Principios a no olvidar. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ten preparada una comida deliciosa para cuando él regrese del trabajo. Ofrécete a quitarle los zapatos. Habla en tono bajo, relajado y placentero. Prepárate: retoca tu maquillaje, coloca una cinta en tu cabello. Su duro día de trabajo quizá necesite de un poco de ánimo y uno de tus deberes es proporcionárselo. Durante los días más fríos debéis preparar un fuego en la chimenea para que se relaje frente a él. Preocuparte por su comodidad te proporcionará una satisfacción personal inmensa. Minimiza cualquier ruido. Salúdale con una cálida sonrisa y demuéstrale tu deseo por complacerle. Escúchale, déjale hablar primero; recuerda que sus temas de conversación son más importantes que los tuyos. Nunca te quejes si llega tarde, o si sale a cenar o a otros lugares de diversión sin ti. Haz que se sienta a gusto, que repose en un sillón cómodo. Ten preparada una bebida fría o caliente para él. No le pidas explicaciones acerca de sus acciones o cuestiones su juicio o integridad. Recuerda que es el amo de la casa.

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Chapter 2 15. Anima a tu marido a poner en práctica sus aficiones e intereses y sírvele de apoyo sin ser excesivamente insistente. 16. Si tú tienes alguna afición, intenta no aburrirle hablándole de ésta, ya que los intereses de las mujeres son triviales comparados con los de los hombres. 17. Al final de la tarde, limpia la casa para que esté limpia de nuevo en la mañana. 18. Cuando os retiréis a la habitación, prepárate para la cama lo antes posible, teniendo en cuenta que, aunque la higiene femenina es de máxima importancia, tu marido no quiere esperar para ir al baño. 19. Recuerda que debes tener un aspecto inmejorable a la hora e ir a la cama . . . ; si debes aplicarte crema facial o rulos para el cabello, espera hasta que él esté dormido, ya que eso podría resultarle chocante a un hombre a última hora de la noche. 20. En cuanto respecta a la posibilidad de relaciones íntimas con tu marido, es importante recordar tus obligaciones matrimoniales: • Si él siente la necesidad de dormir, que sea así, no le presiones o estimules la intimidad. • Si tu marido sugiere la unión, entonces accede humildemente, teniendo siempre en cuenta que su satisfacción es más importante que la de una mujer. • Cuando alcance el momento culminante, un pequeño gemido por tu parte es suficiente para indicar cualquier goce que hayas podido experimentar. • Si tu marido te pidiera prácticas sexuales inusuales, sé obediente y no te quejes. • Cuando tu marido caiga en un sueño profundo, acomódate la ropa, refréscate y aplícate crema facial para la noche y tus productos para el cabello. Puedes entonces ajustar el despertador para levantarte un poco antes que él por la mañana. Esto te permitirá tener lista una taza de té para cuando despierte. Preparation of a woman for marriage. 20 Rules to Keep in Mind. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Have a delicious meal ready when he comes home from work. Offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a quiet, relaxed, and pleasant manner. Prepare yourself: touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair. After his hard day at work, he will, perhaps, require a little encouragement, and it’s your job to provide it. When the days are cold you should make a fire in the fireplace, so that he can relax in front of it. Worrying about his comfort will provide you with a great amount of personal satisfaction. Minimize the noise in your surroundings. Greet him with a warm smile and show your desire to please him. Listen to him, let him speak first; remember that his topics of conversation are more important than yours. Never complain if he comes home late, or if he goes out to eat, or to other places of amusement, without you. Have him sit where he likes, so that he can rest in a comfortable chair. Have a cold or hot drink ready for him. Don’t ask for explanations about his actions, or question his judgement or integrity. Remember that he is the master of the house. Encourage him to pursue his hobbies and interests and support him, without being too pushy.

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16. If you have a hobby, try not to bore him by talking about it, since women’s interests are trivial in comparison with those of men. 17. At the end of the evening, clean the house so that it will be clean in the morning. 18. When you retire to the bedroom, prepare yourself for bed as soon as possible, keeping in mind that, although feminine hygiene is of major importance, your husband does not want to wait to get into the bathroom. 19. Remember that you should have an impeccable appearance at bedtime; if you must apply face cream or curlers in your hair, wait until he is asleep, since it could shock a man at the end of the evening. 20. Regarding the possibility of intimate relations with your husband, it is important to remember your marital obligations: • If he feels the need to sleep, so be it; do not pressure him or stimulate intimacy. • If your husband suggests union, then agree humbly, always keeping in mind his satisfaction is more important than that of a woman. • When the moment of culmination is reached, a small moan on your part is sufficient to indicate whatever enjoyment you might have been able to experience. • If your husband asks you for unusual sexual practices, be obedient and do not complain. • When your husband falls into a deep sleep, fix your clothing, refresh yourself, and apply facial cream for the night, along with your hair products. You can then set the alarm clock in order to get up a little earlier than he does in the morning. This will allow you to have a cup of tea ready for when he wakes up. 3. La ley del divorcio, adopted in 1981. 4. Newly elected Socialist Party president, Felipe Gonzáles, appointed Pilar Miró to be Director General of Cinema in 1982. In an effort to revamp and revive the cinema industry in Spain, she initiated what came to be known as La Ley Miró which concentrated government subsidies on fewer films that were considered to be of artistic or social merit. 5. Quentin Tarantino borrowed music from the Jess Franco film Vampiros Lesbos (1971) for Jackie Brown, and Pedro Almodóvar reports that images from the title sequence of Matador (1998) come from a Franco film as well (Strauss 102). Also, clearly, the deranged doctor/scientist in La piel que habito (Almodóvar 2011) who murders in an attempt to repair a violated daughter draws heavily on plot conventions that appeared in Franco’s popular Dr. Orloff films. The Spanish horror genre itself continues to have a strong following in Spain and abroad with highly successful films like El orfanato (Bayona 2007), Los otros (Amenábar 2001), and El laberinto del fauno (Del Toro 2006). 6. Along with El retorno de Walpurgis, a spinoff of the first, it was among the twelve werewolf portrayals by supreme Spanish horror actor/director Paul Naschy as Waldemar Daninsky/the werewolf who protagonized more werewolf films than any other actor—including Lon Chaney Jr. who appeared in seven.

THREE The New Spain Desire and the Commodification of the Spanish Body

The dramatic political and social upheaval that characterized Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 was accompanied by an abundance of wideranging representations of masculinity in film. They run the gamut from those damaged “Children of Franco” (as seen in chapter 2) represented in the art films directed by José Luis Borau, Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, and others through the mainstream Third Way characters in films like La vida conyugal sana (Bodegas 1973) which often embodied middle-class concerns and values, to the free-wheeling, sexually “liberated” regular guys represented by the actors Afredo Landa, Andrés Pajares, Fernando Esteso, and others. They also include the sexually marginalized and often politically involved male figures in films by Eloy de la Iglesia, as well as the male leads in horror genre films and the budding pornography industry. This variety of masculine models bears witness to the state of flux in which Spanish society found itself in the second half of the decade and during which no masculine model could be said to be clearly hegemonic. The contrast between cinematic production in this ebullient, albeit shortlived period, and the more consistent output of the 1980s is striking. Javier Hernández Ruiz and Pablo Pérez Rubio describe the movement toward the homogenization of film production of Spain in this period in the following way: Vista casi tres décadas después, la producción cinematográfica de la Transición aparece como un cuerpo vivo, una suerte de primavera de cien flores inmediatamente anterior a la entrada en juego de un proceso de homogeneización—y homologación con el conjunto del celuloide liberal europeo—que no ha hecho sino incrementarse hasta hoy . . . Películas que actualmente son excepcionales por escapar de los 127

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Chapter 3 márgenes institucionalizados, abundaban en aquel efímero período en virtud del particular e irrepetible contexto que entonces se vivía en España. Looking back three decades later, cinematic production from the Transition seems like a living thing, a sort of “spring of a hundred flowers” right before the onset of a process of homogenization—and standardization—according to liberal European cinematic norms, a trend that has not stopped increasing up to the present day . . . Such exceptional films that escape institutionalized confines are rare today, but they abounded in that short lived, unique, and unrepeatable historical moment that Spain was living at that time. (14)

After a brief chaotic period, Spanish cinema, as Spanish society itself, strived for consensus in the 1980s—politically as well as artistically—and masculine representations reflected this change. Two events from the early 1980s marked the definitive transition from the old political regime to the new, and serve here as a sort of punctuation between a rather brief period of political uncertainty after the fall of the dictatorship and the consolidation of a new order. These landmark events are the thwarted coup attempt by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero who on February 23, 1981, held the Congress of Deputies hostage at gunpoint (an event that both horrified and mesmerized the Spanish public as it unfolded), and the victory of the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the 1982 general elections. The early 1980s marked a time of crisis and great change in the Spanish film industry as well. Cinema attendance was down significantly from earlier years due to a generally precarious economic situation (according to Hopewell, by 1983 2.2 million, or 17.7 percent, of Spaniards were jobless), major incursions of television into Spanish households, the aftereffects of a flood of previously banned foreign films, and a lack of protection of the domestic film industry. Despite the fact that per capita film attendance was still relatively high compared to other European countries, Spanish film-going suffered a sharp decline, falling from 331 million in 1970 to 101 million in 1985, with Spanish films holding only 17.5 percent of the diminishing home market, as opposed to 30 percent in 1970 (Kinder “Pleasure” 33). The crisis in the industry led to an increase in the production of low-budget films, especially “soft-core” pornography. The home market itself was increasingly dominated by sexual-themed films and the so-called cinemas “S,” or “sexy films,” reached 40 percent of the total number of cinemas in 1982 (Trenzado Romero 169). The pornography market continued to grow and increase in explicitness and 1984 saw the creation of “Salas X” or cinemas that were exclusively dedicated to showing hard-core pornography. The Spanish film industry was in a state of disrepair and considered to be in need of renovation if it was to survive.

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In this chapter, I examine the redirection of the floundering industry and trends in masculine representation by analyzing films released in Spain from 1982 through 1992. Four events in 1992 marked Spain’s full integration into the international community: Madrid’s designation as a European capital of culture, the Barcelona Olympics, the World’s Fair in Seville, and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty which changed the European Community into the European Union, an act that signaled Spain’s full participation in the European political and economic community. The first three sections deal with expressions of the consolidation of desire and its satisfaction as the organizing principle in 1980s Spanish society, while the fourth reveals the traumatic “leftovers” that cannot be digested and neatly incorporated into the glossy vision of a progressive and open Spain. The films of the early 1980s largely avoid engaging in explicit debate about social and political problems of the day in favor of stylistically sleek, large productions that seek a “re-vision” of Spanish history, packaging it in such a way that the experiences of trauma and lack seem to be eliminated. Rather than prohibition or limitation we see films that, at least visually, represent plenitude as larger budgets allow for more elaborate sets and better production values. It is a period generally dominated by consensus and the satisfaction of desires, not respect for the hierarchy. The first section contains an expanded discussion of the repackaging of Spanish history as a way of disavowing trauma through historical fetishism in the early 1980s. The films Volver a empezar (To Begin Again; Garci 1982), Los santos inocentes (The Holy Innocents; Camus 1984), Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence; Aranda 1986), Las bicicletas son para el verano (Bicycles are for the Summer; Chávarri 1983) and La vaquilla (The Heifer; Berlanga 1985) used various mechanisms to normalize a universalizing vision of Spanish history and masculinity. The creation of a uniformly polished surface through high production values in the many historical and literary films released during this period serves to equalize events of the past, and their visual plenitude stands in to mask the presence of trauma—an important step in the process of building consensus and allowing the economy to progress. Masculinity in these films is supposed to reflect historical verisimilitude, or to be firmly based on the plot of some earlier work. Like the politics contained in them, masculine representations appear to surge up out of a neutral space: some past historical moment or originary text. The films tend to promote prosperity and an international masculine model while vilifying provincialism and poverty. In section two, I consider how the films of Pedro Almodóvar came to represent the ethos of this period that unapologetically embraced “lack” and opened the individual subject to desire—a phenomenon that is especially important given the historical development of masculinity from highly self-sufficient to fundamentally desirous. The section focuses on representations of masculinity in Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Pas-

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sion; 1982) and La ley del deseo (Law of Desire; 1987) and these films protagonists’s relation to desire and lack. The third section examines how the “repackaging” of the Spanish nation led to a commodification of desire that privileged pleasure above all else and was often accompanied by a reconsolidation of heterosexual masculine power, especially in the films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a power based not in hierarchy and prohibition as before, but rather in the individual and his search for pleasure and personal satisfaction. In films like Amantes (Lovers: A True Story; Aranda 1991) and Belle Epoque (Trueba 1992) the interplay between love and sex highlights the importance of the sexual gratification of the individual—which mirrors the consumerist mentality of the time. Justification of the pursuit of pleasure and personal advancement become signifiers for a modern, global Spanish identity replacing those models related to the society of prohibition under Franco, now considered antiquated by the Transition period. Cristina Moreiras Menor described this transformation in the following way: El intento masivo que viven los españoles de cancelar un pasado que los sitúa en una posición de inferioridad respecto al resto del mundo se constituye como una necesidad primordial de ir en busca de nuevas señas de identidad que den entrada y permitan un proceso de identificación no demasiado doloroso ni demasiado problemático . . . la identidad total con el mundo del consumo y el espectáculo los desidentifica por y para siempre con ese pasado de represión, silencio, homogeneidad al que habían estado sometidos durante las últimas décadas. The widespread attempt on the part of Spaniards to disavow a past that placed them in a position of inferiority with respect to the rest of the world became a fundamental need to discover a new identity that opened the door to a process of identification that was neither too painful nor too problematic. . . . The total identification with the world of consumption and spectacle de-identified them once and for all from that silent, repressive, and totalitarian past to which they had been subjected in the previous decades. (75)

Though male figures take on a decidedly “softened” appearance, they remain the focus and serve as sympathetic models for an identification that increasingly elevates the individual and diminishes the importance of the collective. The films are often primarily concerned with the representation of the removal of obstacles to the male character’s personal satisfaction—and apparently to that of the viewer who is now invited to appropriate both male and female bodies as objects of visual consumption. Finally, part four will speculate on the implications of several films that represent the undigestible “real,” in the Lacanian sense, that threatens to disrupt the smooth functioning of Spain’s “miraculous” Transition narrative and shift to modern European nation. This surging up of that

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which is dark, mysterious, unsettling, and unknowable in the lives of male protagonists who are traumatized and/or held captive by events of the past, calls to mind the ghosts discussed by Jo Labanyi in her article “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past?” who notes that ghostly appearances in film and fiction are the traces of those who were not allowed to leave a trace—those who were silenced or ignored so that the fictionalized narrative could be told as truth. They are the leftovers of a narrative process that was too neat, orderly, and contrived to encompass the actual experience of many who had lived through the horrors of war and the dictatorship only to discover that society now seemed inclined to “let bygones be bygones” and to leave the past dead and buried—a phenomenon that is overturned as violent deeds from the past resurface to haunt the present. Basque films such as La muerte de Mikel (The Death of Mikel; Uribe 1984) which continued to focus on the long-standing practice of violence of the state upon the individual, as well as horror films like Tras el cristal (In a Glass Cage; Villaronga 1985) and detective films like Beltenebros (Miró 1991) reveal the fissures and ellipses in the process of building political and social consensus over Spain’s traumatic and divisive past RE-VISIONING THE PAST: CONSENSUS POLITICS AND MASCULINITY The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), perhaps even more than the dictatorship, recognized the value of cinema in the formation and consolidation of support for the new political order and the image of a new Spain abroad. This was evidenced by the power that was entrusted to Pilar Miró, who in 1982 was named Directora General de Cinematografía; and by the public money that was invested into specific projects deemed to be of value. During the four years that she occupied the post, the number of films produced in Spain was reduced to a third of what it had been, and the so-called Miró Law was enacted. 1 This law established a controversial system of advanced subsidies that went to films as a percentage of anticipated box office returns and tended to encourage big-budget productions considered to be of high artistic merit. Films that benefitted from this law were often referred to (sometimes disparagingly) as “cine de calidad” or quality cinema. The measure led to the homogenization of film production and was accused of favoring those films whose “look” was more European and less idiosyncratic: “lo cierto es que la legislación socialista de los años 80 . . . tuvo unos resultados claros: se eclipsó casi por completo el cine que no se adecuaba a los criterios del cine de arte o de qualité”/ “What is certain is that Socialist legislation of the 80s . . . had clear results: it almost completely eclipsed that cinema that did not live up to the standards of art or ‘quality’” (Trenzado Romero 36). Spanish society and

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history were being packaged in such a way as to present the country as a modern European nation and future member of the European Community. There was an overall reduction in the variety of production as Trenzado Romero explains, “[la] reducción del número de películas españolas y la práctica desaparición de las películas de géneros comerciales populares (comedia gruesa, acción, erotismo) hizo que los nuevos filmes de la época posterior a la transición política tuvieran que satisfacer simultaneamente diversos gustos del nuevo público urbano de clase media”/“The reduction in the overall number of Spanish films and the practical disappearance of popular commercial genre films (broad comedy, action, erotic), made it so that new films of the period after the political transition had to simultaneously satisfy all the various tastes of the new middleclass urban public” (32). Ironically, given the opportunity presented by the new democracy for greater exploration and freedom of artistic expression, many critics have pointed out how films of the 1980s show an improved technical quality but a surprising lack of creative or innovative use of the medium. José Luis Borau, at the inaugural address of the Ninth Congress of the Association of Film Historians held in Valencia in 2001, criticized the period’s filmmaking for “su escaso afán por encontrar nuevas fórmulas expresivas, su desinterés por romper moldes propios o ajenos. A la postre, su docilidad creativa”/“its minimal enthusiasm for discovering new expressive forms, its lack of interest in breaking its own mold or that of others. In the end, its lack of creativity” (qtd in Lozano Aguilar et al. 29), a sentiment echoed by others at the conference. It was an era marked by big-budget literary adaptations and period historical films with rather uniformly polished surfaces and high production values—large projects that often bombed at the box office because they did not connect with the public (Hopewell 240). Many of these films came into being not as an outgrowth of public taste, but of an administrative desire to develop a certain kind of cinema. The Miró Law films can be seen as a tool for refashioning the Spanish identity and have been described as “exercising a nostalgic depoliticisation of historical memory, reflecting and promoting consensus politics of 1980s Spain” (Monterde 89). Political consensus of the period was that Spain’s economic advancement was of utmost concern, and the administration’s eye was always fixed on entry into the European Union. As Hernández Ruiz and Pérez Rubio state, “Y con la reforma triunfaba, también el consenso: una palabra convertida en tótem (y en ocasiones, lugar común) que designaba la ‘reforma pactada’ entre diferentes sectores ideológicos para integrar el legado del franquismo en la incipiente democracia que proyectaba un nuevo modelo de Estado”/“Along with the reform, there was also a triumph of el consenso or consensus, a word that was converted into a totem (and at times a cliché) that designated the agreement reached among those of different ideological backgrounds to incorporate the legacy of Francoism into the emerging democracy that was projecting a new model of the

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country” (22). Thus Spanish film of the 1980s packaged history—and itself—for consumption by the international community at a time when the fledgling government was seeking international integration. Desire itself became legitimized as a motivator for male protagonists’s actions, and heterosexual masculinity, albeit in an apparently softened form that now centered on a more international or less “Spanish” model, was ultimately repositioned for continued dominance. This masculinity, however, was increasingly oriented toward pleasure and the right of the individual to have it—a step toward the consolidation of the “society of commanded enjoyment” as described by Todd McGowan. Spanish film in the early 1980s was concerned with creating a collective history and a consensus about the divisive past. As Trenzado Romero reminds us, behind the heterogeneous political and cultural practices of the decade lay a preoccupation with the Spanish identity (31), and Triana-Toribio observes: “from 1982 the democratic national cinema concentrated above all on the reconstruction, re-location and re-presentation of the past” (Spanish National Cinema 115). Films favored with Miró Law funding tended to represent Spanish history with resignation in a blameless or uncontroversial way, almost as a grave misfortune rather than an intentional movement propagated by specific historical actors. These Miró Law films took as their subject matter literary works of the recent past and seemed to avoid the purposefully controversial stances that had been seen in such films from the 1970s as La prima Angélica, El diputado, Furtivos and Camada negra. Films such as Volver a empezar, Las bicicletas son para el verano, Los santos inocentes, Tiempo de silencio, and La vaquilla tended to avoid explicitly exploring political questions, but rather focused in a general way on the effects that adversity had on the (usually male) individual. Though these films often deal with difficult and often traumatic events, they do so with a comforting conservativeness of technique that includes traditional modes of characterization, generally linear narratives, filmic realism, gentle humor, and high production values. The “package” itself served as the viewer’s defense against the representation of the traumatic events represented within it. Whereas many films of the 1970s left gaps, incongruities, ellipses, and traumatic reminders in plot (La prima Angélica, Arrebato), technique (lack of “shot-reverse-shot” in El desencanto, Arrebato), and budget (“sexy” comedies and horror), films from the early 1980s tended to mitigate and reduce the anxiety produced in the spectator. As Carlos Heredero observes, “Contra todo lo que hubiera podido pensarse, la consolidación de la democracia no ha producido un cine más vivo, despierto, pluralista o peleón, sino que ha generado una producción conservadora, llena de guiños reconocibles, y donde la libertad de llamar a las cosas por su nombre apenas ha sido utilizado de manera productiva”/“Contrary to what might have been expected, the establishment of democracy has not produced a more active, engaging, inclusive, or combative cinema, but instead has generated a conservative

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output full of clichés, and where the freedom to tell the truth has rarely been utilized in any productive way.” (qtd. in Trenzado Romero 324). Cinema of this period was not designed to incite, but rather to diffuse tensions as the “dos Españas,” or two politically divided sides of the Spanish populace, were being melded into one. None of the films analyzed here tackled the “taboo” subjects according to Trenzado Romero, “no cuestionar el sistema socioeconómico, no pedir responsabilidades por hechos anteriores al pacto, y no lanzarse a la polémica Monarquía/ República”/“not to question the socioeconomic system, or demand accountability for things that happened before the pact; and they didn’t tackle the question of Monarchy/Republic” (89), nor did they break ground stylistically or technically and thus can be considered politically conservative in nature. Miró-era films did not generally question directly the political or social status of Spain in the present, but rather often expressed a sort of bittersweet nostalgia mixed with a sense of loss for that which could never be regained—one’s innocence, one’s youth, and oftentimes, a gender system with clearly delineated differences between men and women. Two successful films from the early 1980s that take as their primary theme the loss of childhood innocence due to the events of the Civil War are Volver a empezar and Las bicicletas son para el verano. Garcí’s Volver a empezar represents an older man, Antonio, who after many years of exile in the United States, comes back to Spain to revisit the places and people he loved before he was sent to a concentration camp in 1938, during the war. He reflects on what his life has been, and not been, during the intervening years, and then returns to his comfortable situation as a professor at an American university. Hopewell comments on this thematic trend in the concerns of Spanish directors in post-dictatorship cinema who returned to the post-war period for their subject matter: “Their concrete complaints also testify to the less visible legacy of the dictatorship: a frustrated desire for regeneration, a continued sense of loss of liberty, an inveterate feeling of solitude” (180). While it is true that Antonio’s youth has been lost and he is terminally ill (though there are no visible signs of this except for the pills he regularly takes), the viewer observes and, due to Antonio’s centrality to the plot and point of view, is induced to identify with a distinguished older gentleman who has prospered since the war (as evidenced by his secure post at an American university and his large home and domestic help), and has gained international recognition as a result of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. A marked contrast is made between the provincial and stereotypically servile hotel manager, Gervasio, who in the old style of hegemonic masculinity as discussed in films like Los últimos de Filipinas, bombards Antonio with typical Spanish gifts such as Tío Pepe sherry and oranges. Like the besieged captain in that older film who recklessly sends sherry and cigars to his enemies in a show of bravado, Gervasio

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impractically fills Antonio’s room with flowers and other gifts in order to impress him with Spanish graciousness. In contrast to the quiet dignity and apparent humility of the internationalized protagonist, Gervasio brags, boasts, and demonstrates those qualities typically attributed to the Spanish provincial—an exaggeratedly servile attitude with social superiors, ignorance, and an inflated sense of self-importance. He officiously and capriciously orders his employees about while playing the sycophant to his urbane and ironical guest. The manager is clearly set up as a figure of ridicule, presented as a familiar stereotype and designed to elicit a knowing sense of recognition—but not identification—on the part of the spectator. He is presented as an outdated and undesirable masculine model—at once recognizable but clearly obsolete in his excessive observance of the social hierarchy and reckless generosity. A younger and more handsome (i.e., desirable) male employee at the hotel consistently shows disregard for the hierarchy and traditional masculinity’s self-sufficiency through his casual attitude with Antonio, smoking (pursuing pleasure) and taking money from this important guest. His presence further highlights the anachronistic nature of his boss’s behavior. At no point in the film does the protagonist or any other character directly criticize the war or the political order, either past or contemporary. Rather, the nature of Antonio’s trauma is universalized as the loss of the true love of one’s youth, and it is left to the individual to make sense of past events as best he can—and to console himself with success in the present moment. The fact that this film won prizes in New York, Montreal, and Madrid, as well as winning the 1983 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film demonstrates its wide appeal. Though it is understood that the situation represented is tragic, the pain is expressed as a gentle sadness, not a cause for recrimination or rebellion. To further comfort the viewer, the film is filled with sensuous images of Spain’s northern beaches and countryside observed in lingering, long takes that are understood to represent the loving gaze of the protagonist. The shots of a pristine natural world promote the commonality of appreciation for Spain’s apparently unspoiled beauty. The musical score of the film consists of the gentle and familiar Pachelbel’s Canon in D which recurs at regular intervals. Throughout, its soothing chords are reminiscent of a lullaby—a tranquil sound which both opens and closes the film, allowing the triumph of sentimentality over historical memory. Thus calmed, the viewer is left perhaps with a feeling of melancholy or regret, but clearly not anger or a compelling sense of injustice over events of Spain’s history. Las bicicletas son para el verano, a film adaptation of a play by Fernando Fernán Gómez, examines the effects of the Civil War on a young man’s life as well, but in this case rather than centering on an old man reflecting on his past, this film traces the life of the young man while events of the war are going on. As in Volver a empezar, a youthful romance is thwarted by the exigencies of the war which thrusts responsibility upon the fresh-

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faced youngster (Diego Gabino). The bicycle is a symbol of that which has been lost—a young man’s romantic innocence—during the war. Early in the film the protagonist begs his father to buy him a bicycle so that he can accompany the girl he likes on rides in the park. His father refuses due to his son’s poor grades, but later tells him he is to receive one to perform his new job as a messenger—an occupation he must now follow instead of continuing his studies. The young girl becomes unimportant as hunger and the practical necessities of life supersede poetry and romance, thus equating the tragedy of war not with suffering and death, but rather with the sacrifice of one’s pleasure and romance. Unlike films of the 1970s in which the father figure was almost wholly absent or corrupt, here we see a very involved father who seems a crossover figure between the “father of prohibition” and the “anal father of enjoyment.” Though he does deny his son the bicycle, he is also seen to be quite liberal in his attitudes about sex as was the father in Belle Epoque. He approves of his daughter’s desire to go into the theater despite the “undesirables” with whom she might come into contact. When his wife becomes upset about her son’s sexual dalliance with the maid, the father defends it saying: “Es natural,” and “Estamos aquí para gozar”/“It’s natural,” and “We’re here to enjoy life.” He is seen to be wise, strong, and philosophical—characteristics not seen since the father figures of the early dictatorship, but now also humorous, fun-loving, and liberal in his attitudes about sexuality—social mores that reflect those of the Transition and which are consonant with a liberal consumerist society. Two other films that are stylistically very similar to each other and which typify Miró Law recipients in their style, content, and literary origin are Los santos inocentes and Tiempo de silencio. As seen in Volver a empezar, these films avoid any explicit criticism of the dictatorship or any particular political policy. Rather, they set up a historically removed dichotomy between rich and poor, antiquated and modern. In Los santos inocentes Mario Camus adapts to the screen the highly successful novel of the same name by Miguel Delibes. The film centers on the lives of a poor family serving on an estate in Extremadura during the postwar Franco years. Seen through flash-backs, it portrays the inequalities and injustices of the feudal system by exposing the hypocrisy and abuse involved in the concept of noblesse oblige. “Pepe el Bajo” (Alfredo Landa) faithfully serves the “Señorito” Ivan as his assistant in bird hunting, while his wife, son, daughter, and mentally handicapped brother-in-law toil on Ivan’s family estate. The “Niña-chica,” the severely handicapped youngest daughter, screams throughout the film as if to heighten the horror of their poverty. In this film there are no positive models of masculinity, with the possible exception of the son, Quirce, who loosely serves as the narrative focal point of the movie, but who is unable to do more than withdraw from this world and hope for a better future in Madrid. The sons of the landowning marquesa prove to be cruel, selfish, and unfeeling. Pepe reveals

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the same extreme level of servility as Gervasio in Volver a empezar though he is not seen as ridiculous, but rather as a pathetic remainder from a corrupt and antiquated system that is seen to prevent the individual from reaching his or her potential. Like the film previously discussed, Los santos inocentes employs a highly aestheticized vision of poverty and degradation. It portrays the barrenness and difficulty of this family’s existence through a visually rich and at times, extremely picturesque vision of the countryside. Muted sepia tones are employed to reflect the poverty of the environment, but they also beautifully highlight the surfaces of the walls of the family’s shack, filmed in chiaroscuro as light cast by candle or oil lamp creates dramatic shadowing and highlighting effects. The result is that while the family’s poverty and suffering are apparent, the viewer is distanced from the sordidness of it by the cinematography. Instead of a direct experience of the ugliness of the characters’s lives, the viewer is drawn into an identification with the marquesa’s daughter whose beautiful but horrified face, upon briefly seeing the “Niña-chica” (the viewer is spared the supposedly horrendous sight), reflects the viewer’s own reaction—shock, and relief that this world is not hers. Rather than promoting any particular vision of masculinity, this film presents all the traditional models in the feudal system as negative and implies that the only hope for the young son is escape to the city and the search for a better life in the future. A similar dichotomy is set up in Tiempo de silencio, which was based on the novel by Luis Martín-Santos, in which a doctor/researcher, Pedro (Imanol Arias), is drawn into the sordid world of the chabolas, or slums, outside Madrid in the 1940s. He goes there to obtain guinea pigs which have been stolen from the lab by his assistant, Amador, and bred by Muecas, a relative of Amador. There he makes the acquaintance of Muecas’ wife and daughters and awakens feelings of envy and jealousy in “El Cartucho,” the would-be boyfriend of Muecas’s daughter Florita. One night, after an evening of carousing with his clearly well-off friend Matías, Pedro is called to the chabola to attend to Florita, upon whom her father has performed a botched abortion of his own child, the product of their incestuous union. Pedro is blamed for the death of the girl and it is only through the persistence of his fiancé, Dorita, and the intercession of Muecas’ wife at the police station, that he is finally cleared. Meanwhile, El Cartucho becomes enraged and out of revenge, stabs and kills Dorita. The final scene has Pedro back in his laboratory pondering the fate of his girlfriend. A long close-up of his face is accompanied by a fairly extensive voice-over monologue of himself considering his reaction to the two women’s death. His discussion is ostensibly about the aftermath of the death of the women, but given the film’s release in 1986, it sounds as if it could also apply to the aftermath of the end of the dictatorship, “Por qué no puedo separar las muertes de las dos mujeres? Tanta autópsia para

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qué si no ven nada. Estamos en el tiempo de la anastesia. Es agradable a pesar de estar castrado tomar el aire y el sol”/“Why can’t I separate the deaths of the two women? What does it serve to do a postmortem analysis if you can’t see anything? We’re living in a time of anaesthesia. It’s pleasant, in spite of one’s powerlessness, to feel the breeze and the sun.” Reference to the two deaths and to the futility of going back to try to explain them, seems a reference to the Civil War and the supposed pointlessness of investigating the crimes which, like the deaths of the women, have occurred and cannot be undone. The “castrated” male figure is aware that he has suffered a loss, but feels that it is useless to try to redress a crime already committed. Like a society struggling to achieve consensus over events of the past, Pedro decides to move forward, rejecting further analysis of his loss—a necessary step in the consolidation of the new political order: “uno de los cimientos del consenso político en torno al que se contruyó la transición fue el olvido de las responsabilidades históricas por la Guerra Civil y la represión franquista”/“One of the ties that bound the political consensus together and upon which the transition was built was the forgetting of historical responsibility for the Civil War and Francoist repression” (Trenzado Romero 307). Thus the film’s conclusion, though painful, seems to advocate acceptance and assimilation of painful events rather than investigation into their causes. Further, it is through learning to take pleasure in life that the painful events can be forgotten. As in Volver a empezar the loss of love stands in for any more explicit political commentary. The grand villain of this film seems to be poverty itself rather than the political or economic system that may have produced it. Many of the chabola dwellers seem deeply corrupt and threatening, like Muecas, who is capable of fathering a child by his own daughter, attempting to abort it, and finally shifting blame onto the one man who tries to help; or El Cartucho, who is taunted by his hag-like mother for supposedly being cuckolded, and then urged by her to seek revenge against the doctor. Pedro, the obvious point of identification in this film, along with his friend Matías, are the only fairly honest and honorable male characters in this film. Pedro is lied to and manipulated by his assistant Amador (who makes a profit on black market trade in lab animals), his landlady (who arranges to tempt him into a relationship with her granddaughter), and Muecas (who accuses him of causing his daughter’s death), but still he tries to relieve the suffering of others. Matías, who is shown to be quite eccentric, spouting poetry and pursuing an obsessive relationship with a prostitute who looks exactly like his mother (the two are played by the same actress), proves to be a dedicated friend in Pedro’s time of need. Through his fleshiness of body and wonton pursuit of pleasure, Matías could be characterized as feminine and as such, not an obviously desirable male model. However, he does hide Pedro in a house of prostitutes while attempting to clear his name and is undoubtedly

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preferable to the poor outcasts who model more traditional and patriarchal ways of behaving. Thus evil is clearly linked with the poverty that supposedly leads to the degradation and corruption of the individual. Pedro’s return to work despite his feelings of confusion and loss indicate a direction for the spectator. It is as if to propose that, given the futility of investigating the remains of the past, one must move forward and take what pleasure one can. One must forget that which cannot be changed, and rather, appreciate what one has, always working to avoid the ultimate misfortune which is poverty. Again, as in Volver a empezar, which concludes with Antonio sitting at his writing table in the sun, it is a gentle coda to a traumatic story, an assimilation of painful events. La vaquilla, one of the most widely successful but controversial films in Spain from the 1980s, by perennially popular director Luis Berlanga goes even further toward promoting consensus in the period. Once again in collaboration with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, Berlanga employs a large cast including two of the most famous actors of the Transition, Alfredo Landa as a sergeant and José Sacristán as his lieutenant on the Republican side, to represent life in the trenches during a period of relative calm. When the rebel forces announce a party over a loudspeaker as part of a plan to weaken Republican resolve, several soldiers decide to steal the young bull prepared for the celebration and thus undermine the event. Wearing fake rebel uniforms assembled by the flamboyantly gay tailor, they cross over to the other side only to bumble their way through the plan with the result being that the bull escapes to die a natural death and be eaten by vultures in the end. The film goes to great lengths to erase differences between men on the two sides of the conflict. As always, Berlanga uses dark humor and a masterful sense of regionalisms and dialects in representing the foibles of his characters. By showing that the motives and desires of men on the two sides are essentially the same, he undermines the antagonisms behind the war and attempts to prove that all men are fundamentally the same—interested in smoking, good food, and sex, and that each side has more to gain through commerce with the other than through fighting. Alfredo Landa’s character establishes the basic premise of the film—that the men are more interested in pleasure than in ideology—early in the film when he tries to suppress reports of a dance being held at the celebration. He fears that if they hear about it the soldiers “se ponen cachondos”/“will get all worked up” and will forget about the war. The lack of difference between the two sides is demonstrated repeatedly. In one instance, representatives from each side come together to exchange tobacco for smoking paper—a mutually beneficial trade that has apparently been going on for some time. Another soldier, shocked by the practice, remarks, “Pero coño, ¿no sabes que hay dos Españas?”/“C’mon, don’t you know there are two Spains?” The implication is obvious—if this needs to be pointed out then it must not be a very compelling truth in the lives of these individuals who are

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more interested in having a good smoke than in any particular ideology. The two soldiers involved in the exchange discover that each has a girlfriend on the other side and they discuss making an exchange so each can visit his beloved, a parallelism that further erases the boundaries between the two. The film represents no actual fighting, nor any explicit politics, and instead shows both sides as interested in engaging in the same noncombat activities. In one scene several Republican soldiers sneak to a swimming hole behind enemy lines. As they enjoy the pond, the infiltrators are surprised by rebel forces who jump in with them. Alfredo Landa’s character remarks on the lack of difference between them in their naked and playful state, “¡Aquí en pelotas ni enemigos ni nada!”/“Here, buck naked, there are no enemies!” Events and observances such as these abound in the film which seems to take pains to erase differences between the two sides. Republicans mix with rebels, the lieutenant mixes casually with his men, and all are shown to be equal “en pelotas” or in their skin. The film even goes so far as to show the lieutenant’s flaccid penis as he jumps into the water—a specific erasure of the mystique of the power of the phallus as explained by Peter Lehman. As he indicates in Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body the maintenance of phallic power depends on keeping the penis hidden in order to main-

Figure 3.1. Lieutenant Broseta (José Sacristán) joins his soldiers for a swim during a break in the fighting. La vaquilla. Dir. Luis Berlanga, In-Cine, 1985.

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tain the imaginary connection between the male organ and this power. “Our patriarchal culture keeps the male body—and especially male genitals—out of sight.” This practice, argues Peter Lehman, maintains the “male mystique” and preserves the power of the phallus: “the silence surrounding the sexual representation of the male body is itself totally in the service of the traditional patriarchy” (4). Thus, by exposing the penis of the highest-ranking officer present, Berlanga seems to be demystifying male power and the hierarchy, and to be reinforcing the Transition’s consumerist message—the pursuit of pleasure rather than submission to any hierarchy or ideology. EL DESEO S.A. The great exception to the homogenizing trend of the 1980s in terms of thematic and cinematic originality (though not in terms of packaging and the centrality of desire) is, of course, Pedro Almodóvar. The self-trained, ex-Telefónica employee directed his first widely seen feature-length film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap; 1980) on a shoe-string budget, using friends in the acting roles and often interrupting shooting when funds ran short. Pedro Almodóvar goes further than any other in his presentation of man as subject to desire. Born in 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small village near Ciudad Real, Almodóvar grew up an imaginative child with a close relationship to his mother and to the cinema of both Spain and Hollywood. After receiving the typical religious education of his time, at age seventeen he moved to Madrid and found work at Telefónica, the national telephone company. He became a productive member of Madrid’s blossoming underground artistic movement that became known as “La Movida,” participating actively in avant-garde theater, comic-strip and fiction writing, musical performance, and recording, and cinema. At a time when Spanish cinema was experiencing its most serious economic crisis, Almodóvar’s early low-budget films achieved at least modest success both at home and abroad. Though a receiver of Miró Law funds in several of his early films, Almodóvar formed his own production company, El Deseo S.A. in 1987, a step that further ensured his artistic independence and financial success. Though highly innovative in style and content, Almodóvar’s films can be said to promote a certain version of consensus politics in and of themselves. His large ensemble casts run the gamut of “types”—homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, heterosexual, old, young, drug-addicts, nuns, police, lawyers, and so forth—a cast of characters that as Kinder observes, “refuse to be ghettoized into divisive subcultures because they are figured as part of the ‘new Spanish mentality’—a fast-paced revolt that relentlessly pursues pleasure rather than power, and a post-modern era-

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sure of all repressive boundaries and taboos associated with Spain’s medieval, fascist, and modernist heritage” (Pleasure 34). The trend that was inaugurated in the late 1960s and 1970s—that of the expression of desire and its satisfaction rather than hierarchical obedience, reaches its culmination in the work of Almodóvar who elevates desire to the status of primary defining characteristic of all human beings (as well as the name of his production company). His work seeks not to exclude or reorganize the patriarchal hierarchy, but rather to create a society in which that hierarchy is irrelevant. As Rob Stone expresses it, Almodóvar’s aim is “not to antagonize authorities, but to ask them to join his party” (126). His male characters do not seek the sort of dominance or self-mastery that Foucault observed to be positive masculine qualities in Ancient Greece and which have been noted here to correspond to the hegemonic model under the dictatorship. Rather, in their self-abandon and pursuit of pleasure, Almodóvar’s male protagonists correspond more closely to the opposite of the previous ideal. As Foucault states regarding Ancient Greece, “For a man, excess and passivity were the two main forms of immorality in the practice of aphrodesia” (47), and the self-indulgent man was considered inferior in moral quality. These values were clearly adopted by the early Francoist dictatorship and reached their highest expression in crusade cinema as discussed, but Almodóvar’s men often represent the exact opposite of the hegemonic model of the past: seeking pleasure unapologetically and to an extreme, even if it ends in death—as it does in La ley del deseo (Law of Desire) and Matador. Rather than showing obedience, self-restraint, or respect for prohibition and societal norms, Almodóvar’s characters seek pleasure with abandon, breaking every dictatorship taboo in its pursuit. It is a masculinity that embraces “lack” as a liberating principle and is not afraid to say, as Antonio Banderas’ character does in La ley del deseo, “Fóllame”/“Fuck me”—indicating the protagonist’s embrace of the passive role, long considered the domain of women. Almodóvar has been quoted as saying that he makes films as if the dictatorship had never existed. Though clearly an impossibility, he consciously attempts to throw off the mantle of prohibition which is the legacy of the dictatorship and of hegemonic masculinity as it had been handed down to him. Again, in the words of Kinder commenting on Laberinto de pasiones, “The tortuously complex plot follows young Madrileños trying to escape the crippling influences of repressive fathers in order to pursue their own pleasure,” (Pleasure 34), and can therefore be seen as the antithesis of the hierarchy and the old order under the “father of prohibition.” Almodóvar himself has commented on this resistance to restrictions of any kind: “Si existe un tema común en mis películas es una lucha por la absoluta libertad individual llevada al extremo”/“If there is a common thread in my films it’s the fight for absolute personal freedom carried to the extreme” (qtd. in Trenzado Romero 322–23). Included in this concept

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of personal liberty is the right to put on and take off any gender identification at will. Almodóvar’s dramatic casting off of prohibition can be seen as part of a process of a radical re-visioning of sexuality and the body that was taking place in this commodity culture. While many considered the liberation of the body and the liberalization of sexual desire to be signs of freedom, it is important to remember, as Foucault points out, that the question is not whether a people is repressed in terms of sexual behavior, but rather how the discourses of sexuality work. In the aftermath of the dictatorship, liberal sexuality was promoted as a sign of modernization in Spain. Foucault emphasizes that sexuality is an especially dense transfer point for relations of power and that power generally exerts an influence in this area: “Sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden” (vol. 1 84). While the dictatorship focused on the limitations and strict control of sex, capitalism and the resultant consumer culture produced sexuality as a product to be sought and consumed in conformity with a larger ethos of liberalism. David Garland discusses this movement in Spain during the Transition and quotes Stephen Heath in The Sexual Fix to describe the Spanish situation after Franco, “The much-vaunted ‘liberation’ of sexuality, our triumphant emergence from the ‘dark ages’ is thus not a liberation but a myth, an ideology, the definition of a new mode of conformity that can be understood, moreover, in relation to the capitalist system, the production of commodity ‘sexuality’” (95), and Garland argues that sexuality in contemporary Western society has been constructed to conform to and perpetuate consumer capitalism. Spanish feminist pioneer Lidia Falcón also noted the relation between sexuality and the commodity: “La explosión sexual vivida en España en los últimos tiempos ha hecho creer a la gente que el sexo es algo-en-sí, separado de todo otro contexto . . . [una] relación cosificada”/“The sexual revolution Spain is experiencing in recent years has made people think that sex is a thing in itself, cut off from any other context . . . an objectified relation” (138). Thus, the liberation of sexual desires becomes part of an overall zeitgeist that promotes pleasure-seeking and consumption in general as the duty of the citizenry after Franco. As Kinder states, “Pleasure is the ‘new Spanish morality’ in the 80s” (qtd. in Smith 203). Changes in legislation such as the rescinding in 1978 of the Ley de la Peligrosidad Social which had outlawed homosexuality, and the adoption of the Ley de Divorcio in 1981, along with general support provided to the sexually liberated and culturally modern “Movida” by President Felipe González, Madrid mayor Enrique Tierno Galván and others, promoted a radical refiguring of sexual mores in the 1970s and 1980s in Spain. Liberal sexuality became very closely linked to the modernization of Spain and it exerted a force upon the individual, a force that was often met with ambivalence. As Movida icon and “chica Almodóvar” Carmen

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Maura mused in an interview: “Do I want sex, or don’t I? If I don’t, does that mean I am not moderna? Am I political or aren’t I? Right or left?” (qtd. in Tremlett 198). The individual was now confronted with a new social and even political pressure—that of using one’s body in conformity with the reigning ethos of the day which cast an active sexuality in a positive light. Pleasure-seeking in sexuality was part of a broader social, and perhaps more importantly, economic trend. Dennis Altman points out that, “as Western countries become societies of high consumption, rapid credit, and rapid technological development, it was not surprising that the dominant sexual ideology of restraint and repression came under attack” (qtd. in Forest 103). Consumerism and its promotion in Spain necessarily affected the sexual identity of the individual and began to exert a pressure not wholly unlike prohibition under the dictatorship. As McGowan reminds us, “Unlike the public law which prohibits enjoyment, the superego commands it. According to Lacan, ‘Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego’” (End of Dissatisfaction 30). Thus in the society of commanded enjoyment we observe a shift in the source of the pressure on the individual, but not a substantial change in the mechanism itself. Žižek scholar Tony Myers states: “Constantly bombarded with images of, and invitations to indulge in sexual enjoyment, it can no longer be claimed that sexual pleasure is in any way prohibited. On the contrary, for Žižek, sensual gratification has been elevated to the status of an official ideology. This compunction—the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’—marks the return of the superego” (53). While the imperative arose from a completely different source, the effect on the individual was similar—pressure to conform to a certain mode of behavior. Ideally situating himself at the forefront of the cultural revolution that was overtaking Spain in the aftermath of the dictatorship, Almodóvar’s artistic endeavors are marked by excess and the liberation of the individual from the taboos imposed by the dictatorship. He embraced that which was forbidden and his characters act without regard for rules or limitations imposed from without. Pedro Almodóvar’s work perfectly represents the casting off of the old society of prohibition and the embracing of an ethos pertaining instead to a society of enjoyment. His films reflected the apolitical spirit of the times and promoted pleasure as the new mandate. As he states, “The characters in my films utterly break with the past which is to say that most of them, for example, are apolitical. Pleasure must be grasped immediately, hedonistically; that is almost the main leitmotif of their lives” (qtd. in Kinder “Pleasure” 34). Thus the apparently apolitical stance that Almodóvar self-consciously inserts into his work, especially in the form of a camp recycling of the past, reflects further the resistance to prohibition and its influence on the individual. As Alejandro Yarza points out in Un caníbal en Madrid, Almodóvar’s camp aesthetic, while appearing apolitical can be seen as an attempt to

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salvage history, divesting it of its politicized taint. Yarza states, “la única manera legítima de volver a entrar en contacto con esta herencia sin repetir las poco fructíferas dicotomías del pasado era mediante su transformación irónica. Esto es, rescatarla de la manipulación de la derecha y de paso burlarse de la grave seriedad y del puritanismo estético de la izquierda”/“the only legitimate way to go back and deal with this inheritance without repeating the unproductive dichotomies of the past was through its ironic transformation. That is, rescue it from manipulation by the Right and, in the process, make fun of the grave seriousness and aesthetic Puritanism of the Left” (30). By rejecting any final anchoring signifier in favor of a focus on the ever-mobile surface, he removes power from the transcendental phallus in a patriarchal society. Again citing Yarza, the importance of this shift away from “truth” of the past (as is seen in camp) can be observed: “El camp . . . a través del énfasis en la textura, la superficie y la textualidad, produce una liberación del significante que, en última instancia, sabotea la idea de un significado transcendental, de un punto de apoyo externo al discurso que sirve para estabilizar el significado, para fijar la verdad”/“Camp . . . by emphasizing texture, surface, and textuality produces a liberation of the signifier which, in the final analysis, undermines the idea of transcendental meaning, of an external support for that discourse that attempts to stabilize meaning in order to establish the truth” (31). Thus Almodóvar’s refusal to engage directly with political themes as they have been presented to him can be seen as a rejection of a transcendental truth that would limit the play of possibilities and thus introduce prohibition into his cinematic world. Almodóvar tried to represent the new Spanish mentality in his films and more than any other, his vision came to represent the modern Spanish identity to the world. As Mark Allinson comments, “No other Spanish cultural product has been as instrumental in the 1980s and 1990s in shaping the world’s impressions of Spanish national identity” (25). The Spain he packaged and presented to the world was full of color and kinetic energy and was fully bent on pursuing the object of one’s desire, even unto death. For Almodóvar the limitations of the past are irrelevant and Spain is immersed in the present reality of its desire. He described the fundamental shift in the Spanish mentality in an interview with Marsha Kinder in the following way: I believe the new Spanish mentality is less dramatic—although I demonstrate the contrary in my films. We have consciously left behind many prejudices, and we have humanized our problems. We have lost our fear of earthly power (the police) and of celestial power (the church), and we have also lost our provincial certainty that we are superior to the rest of the world—the typical Latin prepotency. And we have recuperated the inclination toward sensuality, something typically Mediterranean. We have become more skeptical, without losing the joy of living. We don’t have confidence in the future, but we are con-

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The loss of fear of those patriarchal powers of the police and the Church that once reigned supreme in Spain is an indication of the erasure of the hierarchy that was typical of the society of prohibition. Almodóvar observes and represents an inclination toward sensuality without boundaries that he sees as a fundamental element of the Spanish character. His lack of respect for patriarchal power extends to the construction of a new present that marks a deep rupture with the past. The Spanish public and the world embraced his vision of broken taboos and fluid identities as he became the most important Spanish director of his time—setting records in viewership and winning prizes at home and abroad. The sort of fluidity and resistance to limitations represented in Almodóvar’s films that became emblematic of the new Spanish ideal was perhaps best represented by the young, somewhat androgynous Antonio Banderas who starred in many of his early films: “Almodóvar’s deployment of Banderas’ energy and magnetism was so successful that it established a mobile sexuality as the new cultural stereotype for a hyperliberated Socialist Spain” (Stone 86). Through changes of costume, employment, familial relations, gender identification, physical abilities and attributes, place of residence, and religious and national affiliations, his characters share a common goal: the pursuit of that thing that they most desire. His vision of fluidity of identity is antithetical to the Freudian model based on the Oedipus complex in which an individual passed through, or got stuck in, various stages on his way to sexual maturity. This tendency has been observed by Paul Julian Smith, whose book Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar traces the Almodovarian model of “libidinal economy” where the psychic and the commercial meet: “In his hostility to fixed positions of all kinds, Almodóvar anticipates that critique of identity and essence that was later to become so familiar in academic feminist, minority, and queer theory” (3). By maintaining an undefined subject position for his characters, Almodóvar resists psychoanalysis’ regulatory power which is, as R. W. Connell describes it, “a modern technology of surveillance and conformity, acting as a gender police and bulwark of conservative gender ideology” (11). For Almodóvar, identity is fixed only by desire and it is the single constant in the lives of many of his characters. In La ley del deseo, Tina the transsexual female played by Carmen Maura has changed her sex from male to female at the urging of her father who was her lover. She continues to consider him the most important figure in her life despite the physical changes of her body. In a similar way, her homosexual brother passionately loves one man and then desires another (who will kill the first) seamlessly and almost without distinction, continuing to compose the letters that he desires to receive from a lover. Marsh and Nair have de-

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scribed Almodóvar’s attention to desire in his films: “Although for his hostile observers, his spectacular espousal of gender fluidity obscures a dilettante attitude to politics, for his invariably unconditional admirers, Almodóvar’s cinema—with its emphasis upon ‘desire’ and ‘id’—has been delightfully seized upon precisely because, while self-consciously proclaiming its own radicality, it eschews more meaningful engagement” (53). It is precisely this fluidity that has invited speculation on the possibility of a potentially real liberation from the oedipal model. Other contemporaries of Almodóvar such as Guy Hocquenghem, Jacques Deleuze and Felix Guattari, discussed the liberating potential of desire as a truly radical force. In Homosexual Desire, Guy Hocquenghem discusses the connection between homosexuality, which he considered a fundamentally fluid and amorphous sexual identification, and the undermining of the patriarchal order: “So when homosexuals as a group publicly reject their labels, they are in fact rejecting Oedipus, rejecting the artificial entrapment of desire, rejecting sexuality focused on the Phallus” (39). It is important to understand the way Hocquenghem defines sexuality in order to understand the relevance it has for Almodóvar’s characters’ pansexuality. In essence they both reject the idea that desire is locked into a fixed relationship to its object. Hocquenghem writes: Homosexual desire—the expression is meaningless. There is no subdivision of desire into homosexual and heterosexual. Properly speaking, desire is no more homosexual than heterosexual. Desire emerges in a multiple form whose components are only divisible a posteriori, according to how we manipulated it. Just like heterosexual desire, homosexual desire is an arbitrarily frozen frame in an unbroken and polyvocal flux. (49)

Almodóvar adopts this anti-oedipal vision of sexuality that was further described by Deleuze and Guattari, and which was truly revolutionary in the sense that it made Oedipus irrelevant, little more than the butt of a joke as it turns out to be in Laberinto de pasiones. In this film Sexi’s selfprofessed “Lacanian” psychoanalyst helps her to create a prototypical origin narrative in which her promiscuity is seen to be the direct result of her father’s rejection one day on the beach when she was a child. The explicit references, obvious symbols, and cinematically conventional flashback technique undermine any power a psychoanalytical analysis might have. Almodóvar’s vision of desire reflects not so much desire-aslack, as we have seen in the Freudian context, but rather desire-as-productive-force which was proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Their rejection of the Oedipal family and its repression of desires is reflected in Almodóvar’s characters who operate within a system of “deterritorialized” desires or rather desire that is apart from a rigidly imposed, hierarchical context and

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that is not directly linked to a particular object. For Deleuze and Guattari the psychoanalytic model reproduces the patterns of the repression of desire in accord with the needs of the capitalist machine: “Hence, instead of participating in and undertaking that which will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all” (211). Thus the anti-oedipal model is more closely suited to analysis of Almodóvar’s work in the 1980s and explains why lack is not seen as negative in his films. Almodóvar goes further than any other Spanish director in rejecting the representation of the Oedipus complex in the creation of his characters. His rejection of the nuclear, patriarchal family can be seen in his second widely released feature film, Laberinto de pasiones. This camp melodrama/comedy has a large cast and follows various protagonists— Sexilia (Cecilia Roth) a supposed nymphomaniac, Sadec (Antonio Banderas), a gay Islamic terrorist, Riza (Imanol Arias) the son of the emperor of Tiran, and Queti, the daughter of a dry-cleaner. When Riza discovers that Sadec and his colleagues are after him, he disguises himself as a punk rocker, and after a couple of gay trysts (including one with Sadec who falls deeply in love with him) falls in love with Sexilia, his first straight relationship. Meanwhile, Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan,” escapes her home where her demented father has been mistaking her for her mother and raping her regularly, and undergoes plastic surgery to become an exact copy of Sexilia whose place she assumes, including beginning a would-be incestuous relationship with Sexi’s previously sexually frigid father who shows no signs of knowing that he is not in bed with his own daughter. In this film the patriarchal family is undone through the representation of incestuous, unnecessary or obsessive fathers, absent or destructive mothers, and children who are either victims of their parents or resigned witnesses to their progenitors’ foibles. Liberation comes from escape as the final scene shows Sexi and Riza leaving on a comically phallic-shaped airplane as it heads for a tropical island. Their orgasm is heard off screen as their friends and relatives left behind in the airport look on in wonder. This film, seemingly methodically, violates every taboo with its largest victim being the patriarchy. Characters in the film refuse to adopt a specific role within their family or their social environment, changing identities and sexual partners with ease. Sexuality is seen as something that can be played with, altered, tried-on or cast off, picked up in an open-air market or at the corner bar. The opening scene shows Sexi walking through an open shopping area in Madrid’s Rastro flea market while her gaze along with the camera’s shifts from one man’s crotch to another as if she were window shopping. Riza is seen to do the same and engages Almodóvar collaborator Fabio McNamara for a sexual meeting after sending over a drink and casually exchanging a few introductory com-

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ments. Sexuality is specifically linked with consumerism in various instances in the film. In the case of Queti and her confused father, his “deviant” behavior is thought to be the result of a drug. He regularly takes some sort of medication designed to increase sexual vitality, just as she attempts to counteract the effects of this drug with yet another, surreptitiously added to his coffee. She pronounces the name of the product “Vitapens” and reads the recommendations, trusting that the proper blend of pharmaceuticals can solve her problem. In another scene the character played by Fabio McNamara is seen in a photo shoot for a graphic novel “enjoying” the violence of a power drill, which is captured for sale. Though these two scenes ironically mock consumerism, they make sense because the audience has become fully familiar with the logic of consumer discourse as it has become part of their reality. So, while offering a liberatory moment of laughter, the new regime of the predominance of desire is felt. The themes observed in these films—apparent apoliticality, identity mobility, absence or ridiculization of the hierarchy, and the pursuit of one’s desire as a valid purpose in life—all mark Almodóvar as the quintessentially relevant director of Spain’s transition from a hierarchical, patriarchal past to a hedonistic, self-indulgent future. By recognizing desire and its expression as the fundamental difference between the dictatorship model of masculinity and the more liberal democratic model, Almodóvar did more than any other director to represent and promote the “modern” Spanish identity to Spaniards and to the world. His work addresses the issue on its most basic level—that of the fundamental construction of identity based on desire rather than prohibition. “MODERN” NATION AND THE “FEMINIZED” MALE As the Transition wore on, figures in film from the later 1980s and early 1990s pursue pleasure and individual advancement without regard for society as a whole, a trend that reflected McGowan’s assessment of a society of commanded enjoyment in which individuals seek to establish private enclaves of enjoyment and considered others as competitors for their potential enjoyment. Under the Socialist Party, booming economic growth during the latter half of the 1980s elevated in visibility what was referred to as “la cultura del dinero”/“the culture of money” (Jover Zamora et al. 824) as economic neoliberalism came to dominate. It was a time when wealthy bankers and businessmen and their doings—both professional and personal—became the subject of great interest and dissemination in Spanish society at large. It was a movement that elevated personal advancement and can be seen as damaging to the collective: “La cultura de enriquecimiento, el glamour del dinero y del éxito, dañó sutilmente, sin embargo, la ética y provocó al tiempo admiración y rechazo

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social”/“The culture of wealth, the glamorization of money and success, subtly damaged the ethical sense and created, simultaneously, admiration and social rejection” (Jover Zamora et al. 825). It was a trend that gave rise to a culture of corruption and personal gain among the Socialist Party—a fact that contributed ultimately to their election loss in 1996 to the Partido Popular. In the films studied in this section personal satisfaction, economic and sexual, is seen as the prime motivator for human behavior and takes center stage in the plots of many films in the late 1980s and 1990s. Politics are almost wholly absent from many of the most-watched films of the era as a reflection of the waning interest of young people in the topic, as “pasotismo,” or the disdain for politics, becomes firmly embedded at this time. Male protagonists in many of the films of this era appear to accept and embrace female sexuality as well as their own more “feminine” side, but there is generally a consolidation of male power at the end that reestablishes the white, male heterosexist prerogative. Subaltern groups including foreign, gay, and effeminate men appear in a number of Spanish films of the 1980s and early 1990s, but they are generally relegated to a peripheral or subordinated position, while highly specularized heterosexual male bodies dominate, now as points of identification as well as objects of consumption. The individual’s personal sexual satisfaction is seen to trump all other needs and considerations and many films from the period are characterized by disintegrating or unstable personal relationships. Vicente Aranda’s successful and critically acclaimed film Amantes serves as an example of the “feminization” of the male through his subjection by desire, but in which, finally, desire is merged with a hypermasculine form of heterosexuality that triumphs in the end. In this film Paco (Jorge Sanz) is established as the product of a religious-military background in the opening scene, a church ceremony marking the end of his service in the “Mili” (obligatory military service under Franco). He is portrayed at the moment when he is transitioning out of the lifestyle represented by these disciplines and into the civilian world. Rather than return to his family in Segovia, he stays in Madrid finding lodgings in the home of an attractive widow, Luisa (Victoria Abril), with whom he soon becomes sexually involved, though still maintaining his relationship with his virginal girlfriend, Trini (Maribel Verdú). He is presented initially in a feminized position—seduced by an older woman, specularized by a camera that dwells on his body rather than hers, even “violated” by the pink handkerchief that his lover inserts into his anus during sex. Passion soon becomes linked with corruption and personal gain as Paco, at Luisa’s urging, participates in a scam to swindle a farmer. He is completely dominated by his passion for Luisa and only reluctantly returns to Trini to celebrate Christmas Eve as was their custom. The cigar that she offers him as the “señor de la casa” symbolizes the role prepared for him in the

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patriarchal hierarchy as she promises to serve him as his wife and partner in the small business she would like to open with him. However, the patriarchal hierarchy and the deferred benefits it implies pales in comparison to the immediate gratification and jouissance available to him with Luisa. He feels driven to return to his sexual relationship with her despite the fact that he is risking all—future, reputation, personal safety, economic stability—to do so. McGowan comments on this movement away from a society that respected the symbolic distance implicit in the society of prohibition: “As the symbolic recedes we are forced to confront the obscene, primal father who commands jouissance rather than a symbolic father who prohibits it” (xxiv). Rather than choosing the sexually conservative Trini who constantly rejects his sexual advances, he chooses Luisa and immediate gratification. Eventually, in her desperation, Trini tries to convert herself into the passionate lover she thinks Paco desires, but rather than having the desired effect, the change empowers him to reject her as “the scheming female.” Eventually the temptation of easy money and sex with Luisa proves too much and he returns to her, but now it is he who dominates the situation through his distant attitude as each becomes jealous of the other. Finally, when Luisa needs money to pay an old debt, Paco proves capable of murdering Trini and handing her life savings over to Luisa. It is as if in stealing the money he rejects again the future of the patriarchal, hierarchical family role that

Figure 3.2. The specularized Paco (Jorge Sanz) prepares to murder his fiancé. Amantes. Dir. Vicente Aranda, Pedro Costa, 1991.

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is laid out for him and opts instead for a self-absorbed individualism which is fueled by sex and easy money. The self-centered protagonist takes center stage and unlike older films like Surcos in which Don Roque, “el Chamberlain” the blackmarketeer, a conniving, two-timing murderer, played a peripheral and obviously evil character, Paco is very much the center of identification for the viewer. As a handsome youth, he is shown to be neither wholly evil nor particularly unappealing in any way. To the contrary, his dilemma seems reasonable given the circumstances, and his decision does not apparently provoke excessive anguish in him. Jorge Sanz plays a similar character in the Academy Award-winning film Belle Epoque by Fernando Trueba—an appealing if somewhat confused young man who struggles with a sexual dilemma. The film’s French title hints at a certain European orientation and the Edenic home represents only an idealized resemblance to Spanish society between the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931. Again the protagonist is in the process of shedding his military existence for the world of pleasure and self-indulgence. In this film Fernando escapes from the Republican army and virtually falls into the midst of four beautiful and sexually liberated sisters from whom he can apparently choose and alternate without recriminations or repercussions. The film ostensibly highlights the joyful coexistence of the contented sisters who play with the bewildered Fernando and, in allowing the female characters to express their sexual desire, presents a façade of egalitarianism between the sexes. But, as this film demonstrates, a temporary “feminization” of the male protagonist does not ultimately result in a loss of power. As Kenneth MacKinnon suggests: “The softening of masculinity may have little to do with female emancipation or empowerment. The most cynical interpretation would be that, in order for masculinity to remain hegemonic, it must admit the feminine at certain historical moments” (15). Like Paco in Amantes who becomes the specularized object of the film, it is ultimately he who gains mastery in the situation by ultimately retaining the male prerogative, or rather the power to choose among the women. Ultimately the male protagonist’s thematic importance and narrative focus along with the specularity of the images of those beautiful women presented as part of the idyllic background, serves to propagate one more male fantasy. Perriam has noted that Jorge Sanz’s roles in these two films, “are by no means free of pornographic male fantasies” (31) and, regarding the earlier film discussed here, by Aranda, goes on to describe the triumph of male heterosexism: “The extreme eroticization of Sanz in Aranda’s movie is underpinned—safeguarded—by the twin contexts of Aranda’s gruffly unreconstructed male oeuvre and, we can see with hindsight, by other performances by Sanz which are emphatically heterosexist in their assumptions. In this sense virility resurfaces unscathed from the melodrama of extreme passion and

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objectification” (31). Despite the appearance of egalitarianism, Sanz’s character never gives up his male prerogative. The atmosphere of carnival that suffuses Belle Epoque and is explicitly represented in the film serves as a metaphor for the gender play at work in this film that ultimately proves very little subversive. The concept of festival itself has been indicated to have a connection with a liberal consumerist attitude as outlined by French social historian Bartolomé Bennassar: “For festival is simultaneously the absence of work, defiance of the spirit of saving and foresight, and a paroxysm of consumption” (qtd. in Garland 98). Thus the openness to self-indulgence and freedom are symptomatic of a consumerist society which elevates the idea of the importance of one’s personal satisfaction. Furthermore Robert Stam’s work with the Bahktinian category of carnival cautions that the apparent freedom and role-reversal can be merely a temporary masquerade and that the category itself is “most susceptible to co-optation” (Garland 99). Further, David Garland explains how what Andrew Ross characterizes as “libertine fantasies of mobility” are ultimately premised on male power and privilege (99). The male is freed to adopt the feminine role as yet another means of taking pleasure. Rather than being truly subjugated, he plays with the “dominated” subject position in order to extract the pleasure that may be attained from such a move. Jagodzinsky points out that the representation of feminized masculine bodies “enables patriarchal masculinity to reposition itself so as to occupy the conventional place of the feminine, effectively colonizing it” (30). Thus while Fernando is feminized to the extent that he cooks, serves at table, and is the apparent sexual plaything of the sisters, it is he who ultimately chooses among them and regains, through marriage, the patriarchal dominant position. The film’s function as a vehicle of (especially male) wish-fulfillment and the representation of the house as a sort of garden of Eden has been discussed by Colmeiro in “Paradise Found? Ana/chronic Nostalgia in Belle Epoque” in which he compares Trueba’s house to García Lorca’s famous house in La casa de Bernarda Alba. The contrast between the two houses illustrates the contrast between the formerly prohibitive and religious Spain and the open, liberal, consumerist Spain. As Colmeiro describes it: “Against the painful austerity, the law of silence, and the delirious obsession with the cleanliness of honor, virginity, and the ‘virtues’ of the old and intolerant Catholic Spain so well represented in Bernarda Alba, Belle Epoque represents the exuberance, the unleashing of repressed voices of joy, laughter, and pleasure, and the new virtues [italics mine] of tolerance and permissiveness, where sexuality is not only not forbidden but triumphantly celebrated” (137). Rather than locking her daughters behind closed doors, the mother in Belle Epoque encourages her daughters to enjoy themselves—serving as example by openly maintaining both a husband and a lover. Whereas “Pepe el romano” was denied access to the sisters locked within the house, here Fernando is allowed to come and go

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at will and to engage in sexual relations with all of the four sisters. Thus Trueba’s film represents the dominant morality of his times just as Lorca’s play did his. The striking shift toward pleasure in this film shows no negative consequences, but rather promotes the equation of self-indulgence with happiness—the highest value in a consumerist society. Thus, in the two films discussed here the heterosexual gender norm is played with but not undone. In these films the obfuscation is very important in that masculinity seems, without actually being, substantially altered. The final scene has Fernando, married to the youngest sister, receiving a parting kiss on the mouth from his ex-lover/sister-in-law indicating again that his masculine patriarchal prerogative of sexual freedom remains intact. The Transition and its concomitant liberalization in the economic and sexual sphere opened the field to new ways of playing with and exploring the topic of sexuality, but the heterosexual masculine dominant ideal is reestablished in these films albeit now focused on the pursuit of pleasure. UNRULY GHOSTS OF THE PAST Despite wide-spread propagation, the “miraculous” story of Spain’s transition from a dictatorship to a modern democratic nation with a common set of goals and motivations is subverted in various films of the period by the appearance of unresolved trauma that takes the form of a haunting from the past. Films from the mystery and horror genres as well as films from the periphery, most notably the Basque region, strayed markedly from the models represented earlier in this chapter. While the majority of films from the latter half of the Transition period employed realism and high production values to narrate self-contained stories as seen in the many literary adaptations and historical-themed films, another, darker current brought the experience of trauma to the fore and resisted easy assimilation and resolution. The “miracle” of Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy was, of course, never seamless or comprehensive and this is clearly evidenced in the three films discussed here—La muerte de Mikel, Tras el cristal, and Beltenebros—in which the protagonists struggle with the effects of events from the past that clearly continue to drive their present in mysterious and unexplainable ways. Labanyi’s elaboration of the concept of “hauntology” in its Spanish context helps to elucidate the nature of these traumatic masculinities that are unable to “look forward” and to easily adopt society’s glossing of history in its pursuit of a neater, cleaner future. In her article, “History or Hauntology?” Labanyi likens the artist to the historian who Walter Benjamin describes as a bricoleur who “rummages around in the debris or litter left by the past, and reassembles the fragments in a new ‘constellation’ that permits the articulation of that which has been left unvoiced” (69). In all three of the films

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discussed here the male protagonist is haunted by a past that needs to be addressed and understood despite the fact that comprehension and resolution remain outside his grasp. Because suppression of the Basque identity had been especially fierce during the dictatorship and its legacy has been carried over into the new democracy, films from this region do not tend to end in resolution or blameless melancholy as many of those produced in Madrid. While attention to resolving regional issues was a concern of the Adolfo Suarez government from the beginning, acceptance of a central authority located in Madrid continued to be highly problematic, especially in the Basque region. Unlike Cataluña which demonstrated a willingness to engage in dialogue and had a general desire to see the new democracy work, the Basque region’s situation was much more complicated. Tensions between Basque separatists, especially ETA, and the central government remained high throughout the transition period, aggravated by such events as the death in February 1981 by police abuse of an incarcerated member of ETA, reports of torture that surfaced in relation to the group GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación), and other state violence; while ETA in its turn continued to use violence and terror instead of political dialogue to address its concerns. It is not surprising then that films created in the Basque region in the 1980s often presented a much more sober and deeply traumatized vision of masculinity than did those coming out of Madrid at the time. In films like La muerte de Mikel, political violence continues to play a primary role in the lives of the individuals represented. The economic prosperity that served as focus or backdrop to many films from the 1980s was absent or treated with a degree of contempt in many Basque films, while the struggle for mastery and self-identity makes this film more closely resemble many of those from the 1970s in which reconciliation with the past did not often occur. In La muerte de Mikel Imanol Uribe, the first recipient of Basque film subsidies for his 1981 film Fuga de Segovia, continued to explore the political and sexual identity of the individual faced with a hostile environment. Mikel Miranda (Imanol Arias) struggles to come to terms with his own homosexuality, his disintegrating marriage, and accusations about his past Basque nationalist political involvement. His marital problems reveal his unease with the forces that formed him—family, church, and political environment—and recognition of their failure set him on a path to seek the truth. When his modern and newly “Europeanized” wife returns from a long holiday abroad, he finds he is unable to desire her. One night after coming home drunk and initiating sexual relations, their encounter turns violent when he apparently bites or otherwise severely injures his wife while performing oral sex. Soon after, he begins an affair with a transvestite night club performer and as a result, is dismissed from consideration as a political candidate by his Abertzale political party. Shortly thereafter he is picked up by the police for his alleged past associ-

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ation with ETA, and interrogated. The end of the film depicts his funeral, his death remaining unexplained in the film. His strongly religious and homophobic mother’s enigmatic expression leads the viewer to believe that it could be she, last representative of the old dictatorship order (even the priest calls for respect of Mikel’s choice), who kills her own son. She is motivated by a desire to avoid the scandal that might be associated with his increasingly public lifestyle. The trauma is left unexplained and thus unassimilated in direct contrast to many contemporary films like Tiempo de silencio that sought to arrive at some sense of closure and leave difficult issues in the past. As in El diputado and Flor de Otoño, from early in La muerte de Mikel the connection between sexuality and politics is established. The arguing couple, Mikel and his wife, is juxtaposed with another passing couple which is assassinated by the police who shoot at them and drive their car off the road almost immediately after the chance crossing. Mikel and his wife at this moment are discussing the need to cast off the masks of the past and finally tell the truth to one another. The ensuing politically motivated violence can clearly be considered a commentary on the need for honesty in the public sphere as well. Under duress, Mikel refuses to sign a police document confessing his guilt for some past offense, but rather endures torture for the sake of truth. In his personal life as well he comes to realize that his comfortable bourgeois lifestyle with his wife is a lie in itself, and he casts it off to embrace the freedom of expression that his newly accepted homosexuality affords him. Unlike productions appearing out of Madrid, this film explicitly addresses the contemporary political and social situation and its continuing violence upon the individual. His conservative patriarchal madre castrante stands in, as in so many earlier films from the 1970s, as the representative of dictatorship values which continue to haunt the individual. Even his supposedly more liberal political associates reveal a reluctance to seek total honesty and it is apparent that political exigencies trump honesty in the political process. The only other male figures who represent truth are his apolitical fisherman friend who is shown to lack commitment and therefore to be unacceptable as a model, and Fama the transvestite, who by her very sexual honesty is shown to be one of the most admirable of all characters in the film. Though Fama is not adopted as a focal point for identification, the film does present her alternative lifestyle as morally superior to that of lying politicians and homophobic society as a whole. However, despite their prominence in the press, regional politics was not the only issue haunting the new democracy. The rapid and supposedly smooth transition to democracy seemed to leave behind a feeling of unease that gave rise to a number of films and works of fiction in the detective and horror genres including Beltenebros and Tras el cristal. Benet describes an ambient “atmósfera de pesadilla”/“nightmarish atmosphere” (167) that infuses many of these works and links it to the effect of

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Figure 3.3. Mikel (Imanol Arias) finds release in the company of Fama (Fernando Telletxea). La Muerte de Mikel. Dir. Imanol Uribe, Aiete, 1984.

a confrontation with the past. In the detective films discussed he describes this confrontation in the following way: “un presente onírico cargado por las insistentes sombras del pasado . . . El cine español contemporáneo se ha distanciado de esa reflexión crítica con el franquismo pero permite . . . que las sombras de sus fantasmas y sus demonios se proyecten sobre el presente como un trayecto de descubrimiento que ha de conducirnos a una verdad esencial”/“A dream-like present filled with the persistent shades of the past. . . . Contemporary Spanish cinema has distanced itself from a critical reflection on Francoism but shadows of its ghosts and demons are projected onto the present, providing a path of discovery that must lead us to an essential truth” (174). In the film Beltenebros by Pilar Miró, a professional hitman in the service of the Communist Party is sent to Madrid to eliminate a traitor who has been betraying the identity of Party officers to the police. His journey mirrors a trip he made twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of the Second World War in which he executed a man he erroneously believed to be a leader of the resistance. It appears that a former Party leader turned fascist cop is the traitor and mastermind behind both events. The intricate plot and baroque structure (frequent flashbacks, voice-overs, doubled-identities, etc.) serve to occult the original motives and acts that would explain the present situation and allow the viewer to establish right from wrong, causes from effects, heroes from villains. This film, like others of the

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genre, creates in the viewer a sense of unfinished business that does not allow for a neat resolution of events of the past. And finally, there are few films as dark and unresolved as Augustí Vilaronga’s Tras el cristal which escapes any totalizing narrative that may comfort the viewer and provide contextualization. Leora Lev has commented on the significance of this film: This suggests that a dark reservoir of unprocessed recent history remains just below the surface of a “Westernized,” post-Franco politicocultural landscape. The fascist Spain excoriated by Buñuel and Saura might be buried under a new façade but consumerist technologies and economies have awakened new decadent desires as well as summoned evil energies from the past like so many returns of the repressed. (176)

The film rips open a traumatic fissure which reflects the pain that was wrought upon many under the dictatorship. The opening scene depicts a naked and bloodied boy hanging from a rope connected to the ceiling. His captor, an older man, takes photos of him, kisses him, and finally kills him. From beginning to end, the film never relents in its indictment of the horrors perpetrated against the innocent, showing how innocence itself is easily corrupted and made complicit. The plot centers around the former victim of the ex-Nazi. The young man comes back and obtains a position as nurse to his former tormenter who is now living quietly with his wife and daughter in the Spanish countryside, confined to an iron lung as a result of a past accident. This former victim recreates scenes of torture and murder upon the bodies of young boys in full view of the old man as a way of bringing his horrible deeds back to face him. The film is painful to watch and resists any attempt to be assumed into the “miraculous” Transition narrative. A bloody and repressive history, as Spain’s was in the earlier part of the twentieth century, cannot simply be wished away as Fernando Trueba and others apparently tried to do in avoiding discussion of that violence. Nor could a “modern” vision of a progressive and liberal Spain do away with the psychological effects of those years. Villaronga’s dark film rises up to present the unpresentable: “La política de consenso que organiza la producción cultural a partir de sus narraciones hegemónicas de tachadura de la memoria y de la homogeneización de lo diverso y lo plural—que de este modo pierde parte de su fuerza transgresora—presenta brechas, espacios de fisura por los que sale a escena la urgencia del afecto cancelado”/“The politics of consensus that organized cultural production according to dominant narratives based on the erasure of memory and the homogenization of diversity and plurality—thus losing part of its trangressive force—offers gaps, fissures through which unrepresented horrors make their appearance” (Moreiras Menor 40). This film is pointed out by Moreiras Menor as one of those films that escapes through the cracks. It represents the unassimilated past that could not be incorporated into the Transition’s process of repackag-

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ing recent history. This film exaggerates and distorts those characteristics of masculinity such as mastery and dominance to grotesque proportions to show the reverse side of these characteristics—once highly lauded under fascist regimes—and now exposed for the cruelty that inheres in their foundation. CONCLUSION Consensus politics dominated cinematic production in the 1980s and early 1990s, a fact that led to an attempt to package Spain itself for internal as well as external consumption. As demonstrated, historical and literary films, along with films by Pedro Almodóvar, were supported by Miró Law subsidies and contributed to the fixing of a Spanish identity which was then exported to the world. A common characteristic of films of the period is their great reluctance to address contemporary politics or to question in any serious way the reigning political order. In great contrast to the 1970s which saw an outburst of experimental and politically explicit productions, in the 1980s public opinion was being consolidated around the common goals of economic advancement and sexual gratification, and only a few films deviate from this path. The search for pleasure and the satisfaction of one’s desire become a mandate that, though it might have the power to destroy lives, seems impossible to resist. Individualism and a concern for personal gain replace participation in a larger social structure and the individual is often seen as alienated or at odds with those who would thwart his attempt to enjoy. This shift toward isolated individualism reflects the movement toward a society of commanded enjoyment and the end of the social hierarchy based on prohibition—a trend that will become the norm in later years. NOTE 1. Real Decreto 3304/1983 (BOE-A-1984-688).

FOUR Individualism, Alienation, and Adaptation

The role of Spanish film and its level of embeddedness in society have clearly changed through the years, dramatically so in the last several decades as viewership has declined and international co-productions have become a norm, and this work does not purport to speculate on the extent of these changes nor analyze the role of autochthonous cinema in Spain today. Lines become blurred as the same country produces idiosyncratic films like Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (Segura 1998) and Ocho apellidos vascos (Martinez-Lázaro 2014), two locally grown and consumed products dealing pointedly with national identity in a humorous way; and Los otros (Amenábar 2001) and También la lluvia (Bollaín 2010), international co-productions, filmed with foreign actors and intended to appeal to international audiences. It is certainly beyond the scope of this work to undertake a deep exploration of these and other relevant issues when discussing Spanish cinema of recent decades. Major developments such as the omnipresence of digital content which has changed the privileged position of studio film production, ongoing developments in the relationship between television and film, the cinema industry’s dependence on subsidies and government promotion, and the vertical integration of the entertainment industry have all dramatically altered the cinematic landscape in Spain in recent decades. 1 What follows, then, is a more summary analysis of several trends in the representation of masculinity. I offer these in the hope that further investigation in the area will more clearly define key issues and a more pointed discussion of current trends. Consumerist values have become firmly entrenched in Spanish society as the alternative and contrast to dictatorship values. Pedro Almodóvar’s film Carne Trémula (Live Flesh; 1997) offers a specific representa161

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tion of the nature of the change that has occurred. Before the opening credits a sign situates us clearly in January 1970 in which a state of exception has been declared. The sign outlines those freedoms that have been suspended—freedom of expression, freedom to gather, etc. The stark white lettering on black background provides a visual austerity that supports the sobering message. In the following scene a young prostitute (Penelope Cruz) is seen, about to give birth on a speeding bus. The bus careens through dark, barren, and unpopulated streets—streets that represent prohibition and repression during the Franco years. Jump to the end of the film and a parallel scene returns us to the same streets twentysix years later—streets now filled with people shopping. The busy, brightly colored streets lined with open shops are clearly representative of freedom and modernity, juxtaposing directly prohibition of the previous era with current freedom (to shop). Spain since the time of Franco has often been characterized as largely uninterested in politics or history and recent generations grow up without ever having known or cared about Franco or the dictatorship. Many survivors of the era, like Pedro Almodóvar, would prefer to leave the past behind as an unpleasant reminder of an archaic age which has nothing to do with the fast-paced, global, and modern nation that Spain has become. When they are represented, political situations are generally presented in retrospect and serve as a backdrop for the indvidual’s attempt to make sense of his or her own life. The media, more than history, seems to dominate the lives of these post-modern subjects and the general absence of politics in cinema reflects the interests of the populace. In 2002 Moreiras Menor characterized the individual in this period in the following way: El ciudadano español vive sumido en la más absoluta individualidad, bajo el dominio de la incertidumbre, de las lógicas de la comunicación de masas (la televisión, el vídeo y el ordenador sobre todo), y la desconfianza hacia el Estado, siendo simultáneamente testigo implicado o distanciado, pero siempre impotente, de importantes y novedosos procesos sociales que están cambiando la faz de la vieja Europa y con ella, de España. The Spanish citizen lives immersed in a state of utter individualism, dominated by uncertainty, by the logic of mass communications (televisión, video and above all the computer), and mistrust of the State, feeling at once both implicated and distanced, but always powerless in the face of important and evolving social trends that are changing the face of old Europe and with it, Spain. (19)

The conscious attempt to forget the past as seen in cinema of the latter part of the Transition seems to have yielded the desired end result—the past is unimportant in a world dominated by the constant unfolding of the present.

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Without a sense of history, films of this period often revolve around the individual’s very specific circumstances, concerns and pleasures, and demonstrate a lack of solidarity of the male protagonist with others in a world where competition is often the principal conflict. Gone are the specific confrontations with everyday consumer products that we saw in films like La vida conyugal sana and Bilbao. In more recent films individuals struggle to discover their own subjectivity especially in the areas of sexuality and individualism. Guasch cites the constant barrage of images as a cause of instability and lack of a sense of control: La precariedad consagra el corto plazo, la instauración social del ahora es el momento, y de disfruta ahora y empieza a pagar el año que viene, genera fenómenos tan dispares como el consumo basura, el endeudamiento familiar y el consumo grupal y festivo de estupefacientes (tanto entre jóvenes como entre adultos). Las sociedades occidentales viven deprisa en el presente, carecen de memoria histórica e insisten en no plantearse un futuro que sienten no poder controlar. Uncertainty leads to emphasis on the short term, the establishment in society of the “seize the moment,” and the “enjoy now and pay later;” it generates such disparate phenomena as mass consumption, family indebtedness, and consumption at parties of an array of drugs (among young people and adults). Western societies live fast in the present; they lack historical memory and insist on not focusing on a future they feel they cannot control. (Héroes 54)

Within the context of the eternal present, as image takes precedence over substance and films of this period represent the ephemeral nature of hegemonic masculinity, many male characters who do not learn to forge new bonds with others become isolated and insecure. They seem stuck on a dead end street and often turn to violence or self-absorbed individualism as coping mechanisms. Masculinity in the films of the past few decades continues to defy the easy identification of a hegemonic model, but several trends can be observed. Among these are image-oriented, specularized masculinities; traumatized or unmoored and melancholic masculinities that may express themselves through reactionary or violent means; hypersexual, self-indulgent, and/or self-absorbed masculinities; and clearly modern masculinities which attempt to find new grounding, often basing themselves in friendship or alternative family relationships. CONSUMER IDENTITY AND IMAGE In the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the concept of self is revised in the consumer age to increasingly include media images as a source of reference in the creation of individual subjectivity. The individual is exposed ever more to media and computer-generated images, most intended to interpellate the viewer as consumer.

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Moreiras Menor describes this phenomenon regarding post-1992 Spain the following way: “Nace así el sujeto de la sociedad del espectáculo, aquel sujeto que se articula a partir de una total identificación con la sociedad del consumo y cuyas señas identitarias provienen de las que las grandes corporaciones internacionales favorecen”/“In this way the subject of spectacle is born, the subject that is articulated through a total identification with the society of consumption and whose identifying characteristics originate from among those that international corporations favor” (65–66). Large corporations, ever more powerful and dominant in an age of neoliberal economic policies, increasingly cultivate and mediate reality for Spanish citizens. Even in public spaces like Madrid’s large plaza “Puerta del Sol” corporate influence is felt as the plaza’s metro stop was for a time renamed “Vodafone Sol,” as a result of a sponsorship deal. Films from this period represent a variety of ways of depicting the male’s positioning before the consumer identity on offer. Whereas many appear to smoothly incorporate the consumer identity, others self-consciously reject or mock those values associated with an identification with the society of consumption. The film Por qué lo llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo (Why Do They Call It Love When They Mean Sex?; 1993) by director Manuel Gómez Pereira demonstrates the commodification of sexual identity through the body of male star, Jorge Sanz. As in Amantes and Belle Epoque, Sanz’s character, Manuel, is presented as a sort of beautiful but somehow naive explorer. He wanders into a stint as a successful peep-show star as if by accident, initially needing only to earn some quick cash to pay off a gambling debt. His female co-star, the more experienced Glori (Veronica Forqué), introduces him to the “art” of performing sexually in public. Not surprisingly, the woman is presumed to be more familiar with the role of sexual object and thus able to “instruct” this new inductee into the system. She teaches the handsome young man how to conform to his role as sex object for sale. Though she takes pains to point out that their sexual enactments are purely a business transaction (“No hacemos el amor—follamos”/“We’re not making love—we’re fucking”), the two end up falling in love. The boundary between their “real” selves and their performing selves becomes blurred as the film progresses, until finally they consummate their “real” relationship by “making love” (“Vamos a hacer el amor”/“Let’s make love”). Ironically this union takes place within the confines of the peep-show booth while paying customers watch from behind mirrored glass, merging their commodity identity with the “real” identity both of the characters and of the viewers of the film who have been induced to identify with them. Their bodies, elevated on a round platform, revolve slowly so that no corner is left unseen, no secret enjoyment withheld. The film plays with the ambivalence of pornographic sex in the consumer age—at once easily accessible and completely visible, the film also attempts to maintain the

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sense of distance necessary to create desire. The purposely scopophilic arrangement of the film viewer peeking in on the viewers of the peepshow who peek in on the lovers, seeks to maintain the element of titillation, of the pleasure “just beyond” or prohibited. However, the freedom with which the film shows all curiously seems to neutralize its eroticism. McGowan attributes a certain “domestication” of sexuality in a society of commanded enjoyment noting that: “Rendering the object present eliminates precisely what is appealing about it—its Real dimension, that dimension of the object that doesn’t fit smoothly in our world of sense” (79). The “pornification” of Western culture has become a topic of great social and academic interest, and it has been cited as damaging to children, marriages, families, individual sexuality, etc. Far from representing a new form of freedom, it has been seen to institute a new regime of control. Fouz Hernández relates the phenomenon of hyper-visibility of the body to producing “nuevos sistemas de clasificación y (auto) censura corporal que recuerdan a los sistemas opresivos”/“new systems of classification and (self)censorship of the body that recall systems of oppression” (Cuerpos 28). In this film the carefully negotiated business dealings regarding sex between the protagonists, and an extremely transparent approach to sexual topics (sadomasochism is casually discussed on a television talk show) removes the distance once imposed by prohibition and, unlike the stir created by Rita Hayworth removing her gloves in Gilda, renders sex nothing more than another commodity in a consumerist world. The media image that is held up for consumption in films, television and especially advertising at this time shifts importance from the symbolic identity of male characters to the value of their image, focusing on the representation of perfect bodies as valuable in preference to traditional forms of power related to honor or one’s “good name.” Since the disbanding of the “band of brothers,” and the return of the “anal father of enjoyment” who promotes pleasure at every instant, masculinity’s value finds itself in need of constant reinforcement and is thus vulnerable to market forces in a way that it never was in the past. Moreiras Menor describes the temporal nature of subjectivity at this time: “el sujeto espectacular y posmoderno, producto de la sociedad del mercado y la información pierde a su vez sus raíces históricas y se transforma en sujeto profundamente inmerso en la superficie de la contemporaneidad más radical—Es el dominio de la perspectiva del momento”/“The postmodern subject of spectacle, product of a market and information society, loses his/her historical roots and is transformed into a subject immersed in the surface of a radical contemporaneity—it’s the age of perspective of the moment” (69) This “perspective of the moment” of which she speaks imposes an unforgiving set of requirements for adhering to a successful model of masculinity. Physical beauty, style, and purchasing power are designated as markers of a precarious masculine value as seen in Huevos

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de oro (Golden Balls), Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun), El crimen ferpecto (The Perfect Game), and other films. But, while many of the films from the period feature the attractive actors Jorge Sanz, Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas, Eduardo Noriega, Juan Diego Botto, and others, the striking success of the Torrente series (Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley [Torrente, The Stupid Arm of the Law] and its many sequels) of films as well as others like Acción mutante that featured purposely unattractive leading male characters, or Los lunes al sol that featured realistic, average-looking male figures, constitutes a sort of backlash against the imposition of the buffed and polished consumerist image of masculinity in these other films. However, while some male protagonists express a longing for values of the past—an escape from the fastpaced, hyper-individualist, consumer-oriented present—the pursuit of personal gain to which they are drawn often negates these nostalgic desires. This science fiction film Acción mutante presents the story of a ragtag group of anti-superhero/revolutionaries, all of whom bear some sort of obvious physical or mental disability—a hunchback, Siamese twins, one eye, subnormal intelligence, and so forth—as if to call attention to lack as a fundamental structuring characteristic of masculinity. Ramón, the strong father figure/leader who tries to invoke the values of the past— hierarchy, alliance among men, and the explicit rejection of consumer products and the “beautiful people” he associates with them, ultimately betrays his men by killing them off in order to enjoy sole possession of money and the girl, thus destroying any chance of recapturing the lost brotherhood. A rejection of consumerist pressure drives the plot of Acción mutante: “Society, for these mutants, is controlled by advertising and the media that dictate a lifestyle based on a strict body discipline. For the mutants/terrorists, the act of refusing to follow the media edicts is subversive enough to marginalize them from mainstream society—a society preoccupied by the integrated elite of the posh, stylish and fashionable” (Fouz Hernández Live Flesh 87). However, as much as Ramón seems to want to revive the “band of brothers” and reject society’s dictates, his intense individualism and selfishness lead him to kill each of his companions in order to escape with all of the ransom money collected from the kidnapping of an “hija de bien,” or rich heiress. By refusing to accept prohibition of any kind, Ramón and his treacherous companions lose any chance of recovering the object of their nostalgic desire—a pre-consumerist world where masculinity was not subject to the laws of the market. The Torrente phenomenon with its gross comedic appeal also taps into this latent desire to reconnect to a past where a man was not judged by his physical beauty or his wealth, but rather simply on his status as a man. The dramatic success of the Torrente films could be an indication of a desire to reject the pressure to conform to a physical ideal of beauty propagated in the media—the same pressure that women have been sub-

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jected to for years. As Triana-Toribio describes Torrente’s success: “[He demonstrates] the appeal of comic ordinariness and to add to this appeal that of the refusal to surrender to the media’s imposition of the beautiful, clean and healthy body which other Spanish stars display” (“Santiago Segura” 152). The Torrente films’ performance of the anachronistic traditional “macho ibérico” comes with a modern twist however—he has an utter disregard for the needs and desires of anyone but himself. He refuses to recognize any law outside of himself and seeks his own advantage at all times—outrageously disrespecting his own aging father whom he forces to beg in the street and feeds waste leftover from the bar. The Torrente films offer the viewer an opportunity to identify with a sort of pre-consumerist model of masculinity but now without the restriction of prohibition. It nostalgically recalls a past model of masculinity that never existed—one that was free from the pressures of consumerism yet free from prohibition as well. While freeing the individual from the necessity to adopt a self-image based upon one’s own body, identification with media-generated images can create a sense of discontinuity with one’s physical reality. Guasch notes that “El problema es que nuestras sociedades priorizan la imagen hasta llegar a confundirla con la identidad”/“The problem is our societies prioritize the image to the point of confusing it with identity” (Héroes 135). Films like Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother; 1999) by Almodóvar and 20 centímetros (20 Centimeters; 2005) by Ramón Salazar represent individual subjectivities dissociated from their physical bodies. In these films, as in many others since the early Transition years, one or more characters seek to radically alter their body as a means of conforming to the ideal they hold for themselves. In both cases a biologically male character (interestingly the actors are both women) self-identifies as a woman and continues to “perform” as a female, claiming that it is important to physically resemble what you feel yourself to be. In 20 centímetros the protagonist, a narcoleptic prostitute, hovers between wakefulness and dreams—two states that contrast markedly as her sordid reality, shot in muted tones in the poor neighborhoods where she lives and works, are transformed into clean and colorful theatrical sets resembling Hollywood dance films from the 1930s and 1940s in which she herself becomes the beautiful and graceful woman she dreams of being in real life. She believes that all that stands between her present reality and the realization of her dream is the sex change operation for which she is saving money. Likewise the trans woman, Agrado, in Todo sobre mi madre imagines herself in terms of media images claiming that she draws her inspiration from magazines from the 1970s and defending on stage her decision to spend large amounts of money on cosmetic surgery because, “una es más auténtica cuando más se parece a lo que sueña de si misma”/“a person is more authentic the more they look like the image they imagine for themselves.” The crowd heartily applauds her decision to have undergone

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reconstructive cosmetic surgery on her eyes, nose, breasts, and jaw; injections of silicone in her forehead, cheeks, hips and buttocks, and hair removal over her entire body—all of which came with a very specific price-tag which Agrado outlines in detail. Almodóvar avoids any presentation of risk or pain associated with such invasive procedures and presents rather, the svelte body of a young woman as the supposed end result of these many surgeries and treatments. By avoiding the reality of the process as well as falsifying the result (using a female actress rather than a transgender person for the role), the film serves as an extension of a culture that promises that happiness and self-fulfillment can be purchased—and should be purchased—if one is to live “authentically.” McGowan discusses modern society’s turn toward the primacy of the image saying: “an emphasis on the image is symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because it provides the illusion of total enjoyment and freedom without the kind of enjoyment that might disturb the functioning of the social structure itself,” and states that this shift, in psychoanalytic terms signals a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary (End of Dissatisfaction 59). Agrado, rather than confining herself to her symbolic identity, the (overly restrictive masculine) identity society has originally assigned her, engages in a seemingly endless pursuit of the 1970s magazine image she has adopted into her imaginary. By attaching a very specific price tag to the many procedures she has undergone, the new identity can be very clearly mapped as a concrete consumer product which can be purchased to supposedly live as one would like according to the imaginary. Her desire is clearly authentic and perhaps the attempt to recognize and honor that desire defines authenticity in the age of commanded enjoyment, but she is also forced to recognize that there are very real consequences of the procedures she has had. Her ambivalence is exposed in another scene in which she admits that she is tired and that the silicone implants are weighing heavily on her. The burdensome nature of masculinity and its benefits in a consumer age is emphasized in other films of the period. Whereas masculinity had once been rooted in a patriarchal hierarchy based on the symbolic order which centered itself on the transcendental signifier or “name of the father” associated in the Spanish context with the body of Franco, now it is unmoored, constantly required to reassert itself in the image. A quote by Martín-Gaite in Pavlović’s fascinating study on the body of Franco helps illustrate the groundedness of the symbol in the “despotic body,” “quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o España es Franco?”/“who has been able to insert themselves in the heart of Spain like Franco—to the point of not knowing if Franco is Spain or Spain is Franco” (Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies 6). Spain, the symbolic construct, was inextricable from the body of Franco and thus grounded as long as he existed. Pavlović goes on to say that Franco’s reign ended at the point of loss of

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“le trait unaire,” in Lacan’s words, “the point of symbolic identification to which clings the real of the subject” (Žižek Enjoy Your Symptom 2). As his body died, so his symbolic identity disintegrated and was dispersed. For Pavlović it revealed the “fragility of the symbolic order that sustained the Franco dictatorship, the intricacies of Spanish society and culture, and the drastic changes occurring in less than forty years” (4). The fragility of the symbolic identity associated with the dictatorship gave way in the society of commanded enjoyment, and various films from the post-Transition period reflect this change. Among the films that emphasize the ephemeral nature of masculine power are Abre los ojos (Amenábar 1997) in which the protagonist appears to lose everything when he is disfigured in an automobile accident: “Losing his beauty in a car accident signifies an immediate disempowerment, a loss of phallic power” (Fouz Hernández Live Flesh 86); Los lunes al sol (León de Aranoa 2002) in which a group of unemployed dock workers struggle to find selfworth; and El crimen ferpecto (De la Iglesia 2004) in which competition for the coveted “floor manager position” appears to define the entire selfworth of the protagonist who claims that he has no existence outside the department store where he works. Unlike in crusade cinema and many other films of the dictatorship, masculinity has no enduring value apart from its immediate and constant performance. A sudden change in circumstances seems to effect an instant revaluation of the male individual based on consumer market forces—an instability that appears frequently in films of the era. Economic modernization and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism in Spain had profound effects on social organization and the way that masculinity was lived, especially among the working classes. Los lunes al sol (2002) represents the disruption wreaked on a certain style of masculinity that occurred as a result of the transfer of the shipbuilding industry abroad, especially to China, in a massive restructuring starting in 1985. The context is explicitly rendered in the opening scene through documentary-style footage of displaced workers violently demonstrating. They express their anger by burning tires and chanting, but are clearly out-muscled as they fire slingshots at heavily armed police in riot gear. Sad, melancholy music indicates that their cause is clearly already lost and the demonstration is but a formality. The film follows the lives of a group of friends, centered around their crossings on a ferry called “Lady España” and their meetings in a bar named “La naval.” Interestingly, though Santa (Javier Bardem) is the focus of the film, the cohesion of the group of friends is emphasized and, except for brief forays into their personal lives, they are represented through the friendship and the ties that bind them. But despite their unity, they are cast adrift in Spanish society. When they appear in the bar owned by their friend, they are generally the only customers. They wander the night streets of Bilbao apparently alone. And when the clearly

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alcoholic and destitute friend, Amador, commits suicide, they are the only ones at his funeral. Santa steals an elaborate wreath of flowers from another funeral and cuts off half of the banner naming the other party so that it reads, simply, “de tus compañeros”/“from your friends.” They are shown literally adrift when they attempt to execute their plan to steal “Lady España” from its moorings and head out into the harbor in order to cast Amador’s ashes over the water. Day dawns to find lines of people waiting on shore for the ferry which bobs along aimlessly, the friends sitting on deck contentedly taking the sun. Within the context they understand, the displaced workers find themselves emasculated in a variety of ways. José (Luis Tosar) struggles to find his identity as he sees his wife go off to work each day at a fish processing plant. When he goes to the plant to see her, the floor manager’s voice on the loudspeaker orders her back to work. “Qué pasa, que no puedo hablar con mi mujer?”/“What the hell, can’t I talk to my own wife?” he protests as she says, “¿Qué quieres, que me quedo en la calle también?”/“What do you want—to put me out on the street without a job too?” When the two apply for a loan the bank officer asks who will serve as security and co-signer. “Yo” replies José until the bank officer tells him he needs some source of income. When the officer requests the signature of “el sujeto activo”/“the active party,” José moves to sign the paper but again is put off in favor of his wife. In frustration, he yells at her afterward, saying “Pero están riendose de mí! ¿Si no soy el ‘agente activo,’ quien soy?”/“But they’re laughing at me! If I’m not the ‘active party,’ who am I?” Long accustomed to his role as the “man of the house” or primary breadwinner and head of the household, he reacts in paranoia and frustration by insulting and becoming angry with his wife. Lino (José Ángel Egido) obsesses primarily about his age, dyeing his hair dark brown and attempting to learn computer skills from his son. He laments that when looking for a job he is always at a disadvantage because “los niños no tienen canas”/“the kids don’t have gray hair.” He goes so far as to steal a sweater from his son’s closet for a job interview but, as his incorrectly applied hair dye drips down his sweaty neck, he backs out of the interview, watching young men laughing and joking. And Amador (Celso Bugallo) drinks himself into oblivion in the bar day after day. When Santa accompanies him home one night after a particularly excessive day of drinking, he discovers that Amador is living in extreme squalor—his wife has left him, the water in his apartment has been shut off, and there is nothing to eat in the filthy apartment. The shaky camera rotates around Santa who stands in the middle of his room, producing a disorienting effect. Soon after, Santa returns to find Amador dead from an apparent suicide. Santa rages quietly against the senselessness of their position after a lifetime of hard work in the shipyards. In the demonstration he destroyed a street lamp—for which he is fined 8,000 pesetas (around $80) in court

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proceedings, the judge pointing out to him, “Pero la farola no tenía culpa de nada”/“But the streetlight didn’t do anything to you.” After a struggle to collect the fine money, he leaves the court with his lawyer, pulls into a semi-isolated street, and immediately smashes another light. By refusing to help the court understand the logic behind his decision, and then by recommitting the same crime, Santa asserts his freedom—the only freedom he has left to express—that of secret defiance. Santa gets a lesson in business dealings within this new context when he takes a babysitting job subcontracted to him by the bar owner’s fifteen-year-old daughter. When he protests that she got paid more than she is giving him, she responds, “Mi comisión. El mundo funciona así”/“My commission. That’s how things work.” Santa makes his final statement of allegiance to a passing social order as the friends toast their fallen comrade, Amador, “Si le den por culo a uno pues eso a los demás lo mismo porque somos la misma cosa, la misma cosa”/“If they screw one of us over then they’re doing it to all of us, because we’re the same thing, the same thing.” Susan Faludi commented extensively on the lack of mooring encountered by male workers displaced in the American context by the shifting sands of industry in the twentieth century in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. She states, “There were to be no iron-clad union protections. The postwar grunts’ submission to the national-security state would, after a prosperous period of historically brief duration, be rewarded with insecurity and pink slips, with massive spasms of downsizing, restructuring, unionbreaking, contracting-out, and outsourcing. The institutions that men had identified with no longer identified with them” (30). And Harvey emphasizes how the dominant, neoliberal economic model ensures an unstable economic environment, “Capitalists are forced to redouble their efforts to create new needs in others, thus emphasizing the cultivation of imaginary appetites and the role of fantasy, caprice and whim. The result is to exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle” (The Condition of Postmodernity 104). In this way consumer society further destabilized masculine identity and, except for senseless destruction and temporary flight, Aranoa’s film promises little in the way of relief from this insecurity. INDIVIDUALISM AND ISOLATION Male characters, represented as unmoored within the patriarchal hierarchy and subject to the constant need to “perform” their masculinity, become self-absorbed and give up solidarity with others. The films discussed in this section reflect the secure establishment of the “anal father

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of enjoyment” instead of the “father of prohibition,” as characters fail to demonstrate self-restraint, seeking to accomplish personal aims at any cost. Huevos de oro (Bigas Luna 1993) demonstrates some of the principal characteristics that dominate films from this period—a self-centered disregard for others, sexual hedonism, including the use of sex as a commodity, and the fundamental insecurity of the masculine position in which external economic circumstances rather than personal characteristics are the measure of worth. After his first love betrays him with his best friend, Benito (Javier Bardem), sets out to achieve material success at all costs. He eventually cheats his way to the top by marrying the daughter of a banker whose financing he needs for the construction of a towershaped hotel that he will build on the beach. He appears to have everything—a strong attractive body, a beautiful home, a rich and beautiful wife, a lover, and financial success. However, when the tower proves structurally unsound (Bigas Luna does not concern himself with subtlety here—the film is filled with phallic symbols of various kinds) due to the use of inferior materials, he loses everything, soon after becoming paralyzed in a car accident and winding up in Miami, impotent, and supported by yet another girlfriend, who is now having an affair with the gardener. The movie itself is filmed in brilliant color, with long and erotically charged close-ups of both male and female bodies displayed for visual consumption. The entire film is suffused with nostalgia as Benito sings cheesy old Julio Iglesias songs to camp effect, and thinks bitterly of his lost love—all the while cheating and conniving to achieve personal advancement and sexual satisfaction. He winds up utterly dependent on a woman he does not love in a place he despises—betrayed by his own desires and thus permanently estranged from the sort of patriarchal brotherhood that might have afforded him some power and esteem, despite his circumstances. Self-centered pleasure-seeking reaches a new extreme in the scathingly critical film Hombres felices (Happy Men; Roberto Santiago 2001), in which the protagonist is concerned exclusively with his own happiness, a happiness narrowly defined as the constant experience of pleasure which he finds primarily through receiving oral sex. According to Antonio Lucas: “La idea original de la película le sobrevino al joven director cuando leía una encuesta sobre la calidad de vida de los españoles: único objetivo, la felicidad. Así que ideó una comedia ácida, sangrante por momentos, donde unos personajes van hipotecando el alma por la felicidad que nunca encuentran”/“The original idea for the film came to the young director while reading a survey about the quality of life of Spaniards: the only objective, happiness. So he came up with a bitter comedy, blatant at times, in which the characters sell their soul for a happiness they never find” (n.p.). A husband and father repeatedly disregards his obligations, paying and seducing women into having sex with him. His unwillingness to accept any responsibility, along with his incessant desire for

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pleasure, position him as a sort of pre-oedipal infant-man who believes he can and should live exactly as he wishes. He embodies the maximum expression of the consumerist promise—pleasure without regard for consequences—and thus is an example of the subject produced in a society of commanded enjoyment. Guasch discusses this tendency in society, reflecting the spirit of what has become known as “Generation X”: “Nuestra sociedad se ha infantilizado de forma dramática. Una sociedad de niños irresponsables que lo quieren todo y lo quieren ya”/“Our society has become infantilized in a dramatic way; a society of irresponsible children who want what they want and want it now” (Héroes 56). The extreme narcissistic pursuit of pleasure leads the character to desire nothing but a constant passive, orgiastic state of being. A common theme in films of recent decades is the exceptionality of one, generally male, character who struggles to perform some superhuman task. In Hollywood cinema it can be seen in films like the series related to Star Wars (Luke Skywalker), The Matrix (Neo), Harry Potter (Harry), The Bourne Identity (Jason Bourne), and many, many others. In Spain it is a trend that is only recently becoming noticeable. The film Eva (2011) by director, Kike Maillo reflects this trend and illustrates how the isolation and elevation of the individual, characteristic of a consumer society, makes comprehensible and desirable the quest of the exceptional individual to accomplish some task, and answer to his own logic. Rather than being embedded in a social structure, the male individual hovers on the periphery, considered superior in some way yet frequently relating to technology better than to other humans. In this science fiction thriller a gifted young computer robotics whiz, Alex (Daniel Brühl), returns “home” to a sort of university/laboratory run by head scientist, Julia (Anne Canovas), where he is charged with creating the prototype for a humanoid child, which should be indistinguishable from human children. He has recently returned after a long absence, and is accompanied only by his constant companion—a robot cat that he has created. His frustrated experiments with a small boy robot lead him to conclude that his creation should be a girl, not a boy robot. “Los niños son torpes, aburridos . . . las niñas son dulces, maduras, sensibles, y mucho más guapas”/“Boys are awkward and dull . . . girls are sweet, mature, sensitive, and much prettier.” He believes he has discovered the model for his prototype when he encounters the precocious and witty daughter, Eva (Claudia Vega), of his former lover, Lana (Marta Etura),— who is now married to his brother David (Alberto Ammann). He develops a relationship with the child, studying and observing her, and incorporating her qualities into his new project. At the same time, he reignites his relationship with his ex-lover, bringing him into conflict with his brother. When Eva discovers that she is the product of Alex and Lana’s union before her mother married David, Eva flees and suffers a sort of break-

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down, collapsing in the snow. Lana finds her and performs surgery by cutting her skin to reach the battery pack within, revealing that Eva is a robot herself. Eva revives immediately, but quickly deduces that she is not a normal child and, confused and enraged, pushes Lana over a cliff. It turns out that, unbeknownst to Alex, Eva is his own creation, the product of a project he was engaged in with Lana before fleeing their painful relationship. When Julia requires that Eva be deactivated given that she is a defective robot, an anguished Alex performs the procedure by uttering the universal robot shutoff term “¿Qué ves cuando cierras los ojos?”/ “What do you see when you close your eyes?”—effecting Eva’s immediate termination. Again, as with the robotic cat, it seems that Alex is best suited to interacting with a robot (Eva, the creation of his own mind), and that complicated human relationships are not his primary concern. Here the male protagonist is not the head of the household—nor even primarily a lover or friend—but rather a lone, exceptional individual, largely content to design and manipulate the material world according to his desire. He is man as the creator/father, but of mechanical creations. The film elevates his sort of mystical creative process in a scene in which Alex experiments with creating the prototype in his lab. In a slow-motion shot he casts crystal orbs in elaborate shapes into the air where they hang suspended— all to a soundtrack of magical, tinkling percussive music. Though he desires Lana, his closest relationships are clearly with his robot cat, his robot butler, and Eva. Interestingly, his relationship with the young Eva takes a clearly flirtatious path. He first catches sight of her through a shot of her elevated feet behind a barrier—as she walks on her hands, alone, while other children play in a group. Thus begins a sort of fascination with her quirkiness and exceptionality, for which he clearly feels an affinity. On her part, she playfully accuses him at various moments of being a “pervertido”/“pervert,” and derides him for his voyeurism. He calls her “Princesa”/“Princess,” and both seek out and enjoy frequent interactions with each other. In the final scene in which he is forced to deactivate her, she attempts to derail the process by reminding him of the 1001 Nights. In this scene she lays back sensually on his bed, beginning to tell him a story—a story that she won’t have time to finish as he whispers the words, teary-eyed, that cause her destruction: “What do you see when you close your eyes?” Her dying vision, which can be assumed to be the unattainable object of desire of Alex who created her, is an idyllic beach scene in which the “family” is united and happy, “Y te veo a ti, papá, y también a mamá. Y me veo a mí, juntos, jugando para siempre.”/“And I see you, dad, and mom too. And I see me and we’re together, playing, forever.” The reality of the male character’s situation is that he has no wife nor child, but is alone with only his technology and his desire.

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ALIENATION AND CONFLICTING MESSAGES The hyper-individualist state of the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcentury Spain seems to have led to the alienation of male characters in various films, which portray dinosaur-like relics from a bygone age, who react violently to the changes occurring around them. Guasch points to the instability of masculinity as a cause for this violence: “Hay que entender las epidemias de violencia masculina en el hogar como el resultado directo de la crisis de la heterosexualidad y de la redefinición de la identidad masculina”/“The epidemic of masculine violence in the home has to be understood as a direct result of the crisis of heterosexuality and the redefinition of masculine identity” (Crisis 128). In the films Celos (Jealousy; Vicente Aranda 1999), Solas (Alone; Benito Zambrano 1999), El Bola (Pellet; Achero Mañas 2000), and Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes; Icíar Bollaín 2003) alienated “macho” men resort to violence as a way to cope with their sense of irrelevance as their wives, girlfriends, and children slip from their control. Lacking the patriarchal support provided by the dictatorship model of masculinity, and subject to the hyper-individualism of the period, they fail, either to maintain patriarchal control, or to establish the sort of interpersonal relationships that might redeem them. Like Antonio in Te doy mis ojos who struggles to express himself in a spousal abuse support group, these characters seem alienated from their own feelings, unable even to recognize them, let alone express them constructively. Hatty makes the following connection between violence and the self: “Violence in the service of the modern self, preserves individuality and forestalls the possibility of fusion with the dangerous not self” (10). Unable to firmly establish themselves in a symbolic order grounded in the transcendental signifier, male characters in these films struggle to assert an identity in a world which views them as irrelevant reminders of a now-outgrown and unpleasant past. In these films, the protagonists are represented as loners, devoid of friends and unable to relate to their partners or children, stranded remnants of a bygone era. Te doy mis ojos represents the, unfortunately, still problematic gender relationship between men and women, as male heterosexuality continues to experience itself as destabilized and linked to violence. In an economy dominated by consumerist thinking, Antonio (Luis Tosar) is plagued by jealousy and the idea that his wife Pilar (Laia Marull) might trade him for a more interesting and attractive male. His sense of personal devaluation is played out violently in their relationship. The film opens with a terrified Pilar and her son fleeing their home in the middle of the night. We discover that she has been violently abused by her husband, to the extent that she has been hospitalized on various occasions. She seeks refuge with her sister, Ana (Candela Peña), and Ana’s fiancé. As the film progresses, Antonio attempts to win her back, going to counseling for his anger and sending her gifts. She eventually relents, and they move back

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in together, until Antonio becomes violent again after feeling threatened by her budding confidence and new career as a museum guide. Antonio is plagued by insecurities which, when aggravated, result in violent behavior toward his wife. He becomes angry if she says that he is “better” than his job as an appliance salesman—and also if she says that he is suited for the supposedly lowly job. When he is finally able to express his fear to his therapist, he explains that he has nothing interesting to talk about, just sales and billing at the appliance store. “Qué le ofrezco yo?”/ “What do I have to offer her?” he laments with anguish in his voice. He has taken his place in the consumerist world in which he lives, but his ambivalence and anger indicate that he has gotten the bad end of the bargain—as a salesman he is a cog in a machine that squeezes value that he will never see from his work, yet now he himself is also subject to market forces—resulting in anxiety over not making enough money, dressing well enough, being interesting enough, and so forth. It must be recognized that the dictatorship had been dismantled for over a generation by the time this movie was released and yet the relatively young couple represented in the film continue to suffer the effects of a violent, destabilized masculinity. Rather than being the products of a societal value system based on violence and patriarchal privilege, the abusive men represented here seem more isolated—outcasts in need of some sense of personal value, connection, and community with others. The men do not bond easily with each other and, rather than forming any sort of “band of brothers” as they did in much of Francoist cinema, they insult, laugh at, and undermine each other. On a building project, his brother belittles Antonio’s ideas, mocking him for presuming to be an “architect,” and saying that he should keep his ideas to himself. Antonio says nothing, but on the way home vents his anger on Pilar, screaming and kicking the car. In his abuser group-therapy session, the men listen avidly to the advice the therapist extends, telling them how they might extract themselves from potentially violent situations. Still, the pressure of the code of masculinity quickly prompts them to ridicule one another and derail the moment of introspection and vulnerability. As Guasch points out, society does not seem ready for men to reflect critically on their own reality, “A principios del siglo XXI, las teóricas feministas revisan las masculinidades con ojos de mujer. Pero eso tiene consecuencias sociales indeseables porque esa mirada excluye el punto de vista de los hombres. El desarrollo de una mirada autónoma y crítica de los hombres sobre sí mismos está por construir”/“At the beginning of the 21st century feminist theorists examine masculinities with the eyes of a woman. But this has undesirable social consequences because this perspective excludes the point of view of men. The development of an independent and critical view by men of themselves is still to be constructed” (Actes 2). But Faludi identifies the very nature of the construct of contemporary masculinity as inimical to the sort of admission of vulnerability, or insufficien-

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cy, required for real self-knowledge and change, “The very paradigm of modern masculinity—that it is all about being master of your universe— prevents men from thinking their way out of their dilemma, from taking active political steps to resolve their crisis” (14). It seems that Spanish society (like that of the United States) is not ready to reflect critically and honestly about the ways of thinking that create hegemonic masculinity. The fact that masculinity is still cited in the twenty-first century as being a sort of taboo topic for men, indicates the tremendous pressure that society exerts. Interestingly, the film also represents the complicity of women in a system that prevents men from becoming more connected with others. Pilar’s relationship with Antonio is directly compared to her sister Ana’s relationship with her Scottish fiancé. While Pilar dreamed of a fairy-tale wedding in which a strong, heroic figure of few words swept her off her feet, Ana scoffs at the emphasis on romance, choosing to forgo the white dress and church wedding. Pilar asks her how her future husband proposed to her and Ana answers, “I don’t remember.” Whereas Pilar can recount in great detail the moment of Antonio’s proposal, Ana, whose relationship is presented as decidedly more modern and mutually respectful, cannot summon any of the details of this traditionally important moment in a girl’s life. Pilar also seems unwilling to recognize the weakness and vulnerability of her husband. In one of their encounters, he excitedly recounts the work he has been doing in his therapy group, while she clings to his arm staring at him uncomprehendingly. When he finally asks if she understands what he’s explaining, she says simply “no” and does not probe further. She is drawn to their passionate encounters, but appears unwilling or unable to confront the possibility that her husband is neither hero nor monster, but rather a frightened, confused, and vulnerable individual. Again, citing Guasch, men are permitted the role of hero, but must not display the vulnerability that facilitates intimate relationships, “Pero pocas veces incorporan la intimidad, ya que esta es una forma de transparencia carente de disimulo, que no pueden permitirse si pretenden vivir el mito heroico que la sociedad les ofrece”/ “But rarely do they incorporate intimacy, given that it’s a form of transparency without bravado that they cannot permit themselves if they aspire to live the heroic myth that society offers them” (Actes 2). It seems that Pilar is unable or unwilling to enter into a truly intimate exchange with her husband, nor to contemplate his weakness, preferring instead the narrative of romance and heroism which has ruled their lives up to this time. Pilar’s sense of self grows in the company of a group of professional women she encounters at the museum, but does not appear to extend to any greater understanding of her husband. She resolves to move out and as she gathers her things, she and Antonio merely stare at one another wordlessly until the door shuts between them. He watches forlorn from

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the window of their cramped apartment as she walks off with her friends to a new life in Madrid. Though Antonio’s struggle is presented somewhat sympathetically through part of the film, the ending represents him as an unrepentant abuser. His attempts to mend his ways are dismissed as manipulations employed to recover his wife and, left abandoned in his home, there appears to be no solution offered for his problem. He had returned to acts of unpardonable violence and humiliation of his wife. The final shot in the film is a long shot of Pilar and two friends receding into the distance on the sidewalk below the apartment while the camera pans up above the mountains and to the horizon. Pilar is moving to Madrid to begin a new business as a tour guide in Spain’s modern economy—a world of possibility that does not seem available to Antonio, left alone in his cramped and dingy apartment. ADAPTATION AND A REDEFINITION OF “FAMILY” El Bola offers a privileged vantage point for observing the bankrupt violent masculine model of the past contrasted with an idealized alternative, represented by two fathers—one physically abusive, alienated, and unhappy, and the other—kind, connected, and communicative. The kind father’s openness and extended social group of family and friends indicates that he has adopted a new construction of masculinity, based on close interpersonal relationships and a certain fluidity of boundaries between family-member roles. He is a caretaker as well as authority figure, and recognizes Bola, another man’s son, as his responsibility too, thus breaking with the concept of the strict nuclear family as socializing unit. This model of interrelatedness has been promoted by Hatty as a way out of the hyper-individualist, violence-based model of masculinity as found in Western society: “it is imperative that we replace the violence mythos with another set of cultural discourses that turn on the construct of interdependence” (207). El Bola represents the two alternatives presented to men at this juncture—a self-destructive, desperate, and abusive father clinging to the remnants of a bankrupt patriarchal masculine model, or an accepting, loving, forward-looking father who accepts others and fights injustice. “Bola” is the nickname given to Pablo (Juan José Ballesta), an introverted boy who, we discover, is regularly beaten by his father (Manual Morón). Bola befriends his new classmate Alfredo (Pablo Galán), and finds in the company of Alfredo’s family the love and acceptance lacking in his own. After a particularly severe beating, Bola runs away, and Alfredo’s father, José (Alberto Jiménez), shelters him from further harm. Masculinity and socialization into it are at the center of the film as evidenced by a focus on the boy’s relationship with each of these father figures who come into direct conflict with each other, and through various “coming of

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age” scenarios. Throughout the film a group of boys, including Bola, play a sort of initiation game that involves crossing in front of a speeding train. Boys like Alfredo who do not choose to play are teased with the epithet “maricón”/“fag.” The fastest and most daring boys are esteemed until Alfredo ridicules the game, refusing to participate in it. He has been taught by his father not to engage in this foolhardy masculine rite of initiation, in favor of rational self-preservation. Further emphasizing a sort of male bonding, the boys pass around a porno magazine on the playground, commenting on the anatomy of the women represented there. Once again, Alfredo appears uninterested and, instead, focused on getting to the hospital to visit his godfather who is dying of an AIDSrelated illness. The shift in focus to a reaction of empathy, rather than on traditional predatory masculinity, is clearly related to modernity as the godfather’s homosexuality and contraction of AIDS—two phenomena only relatively recently visible in Spanish culture—are clearly marked. The arrival of Alfredo marks the possibility for a new model of masculinity, as he refuses the game and openly resists the power of the leader of the boys. Bola is drawn to him and to the relaxed relations among his family members. Alfredo’s young tattoo artist father, José, differs dramatically from Bola’s father. While Bola’s father is taciturn and strict, seemingly preoccupied with his masculine reputation, Alfredo’s father laughs easily, hugs his friends, male and female, gay and straight, and reasons with his son rather than issuing orders. Bola’s father is linked to the closed and stifling environments in which he appears—an almost windowless apartment on the outskirts of the city, and his tiny hardware shop where Bola is made to work. He wields absolute power in both environments, but it is a power based on the use of violence. At home his wife and son move cautiously around him, ever on guard of incurring his anger. At the hardware store where Bola assists, he docilely and quietly completes the tasks his father orders him to do. In contrast, Alfredo’s father is relaxed and good-natured. He gives tattoos in a large open shop and takes his family for picnics in the mountains on weekends. On one trip a pan of the mountain range with blue sky and open air all around, accompanied by peaceful music, represents the life Bola wishes to have. A shot of the boy’s face as he perceives the beauty and good will all around him provides sharp contrast to his father’s anger upon his return. He is beaten and forbidden from ever associating with their family again. The father rightfully recognizes that his son’s access to this new world poses a threat to any power he has been able to exert over his son. His insecurity before others is clear as he strongly reprimands Bola saying, “Don’t look away from me, especially in public,” or when he resentfully lets Bola go with Alfredo’s family simply because he cannot say “no” in front of others. The connection with this man and the moribund nature of this model of masculinity is indicated through the pallor of the actor’s face. His overly dark hair provides stark contrast to his cadaver-white

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countenance. Dark circles under his eyes and frown lines on his face imply that he is a tormented man. Bola’s father’s only sense of power seems to come from the physical intimidation he exercises in his home. But it seems to be a precarious power, not supported by the social environment. Guasch points to a heterosexual crisis due to Spain’s modernization: “La heterosexualidad está en crisis y en el proceso de disolución porque sus rasgos básicos sufren un proceso de cambio social rápido”/“Heterosexuality is in a state of crisis and disintegration because its basic characteristics are undergoing a process of rapid social change” (Crisis 121), and goes on to connect masculine domestic violence with this crisis: “Hay que entender las epidemias de violencia masculina en el hogar como el resultado directo de la crisis de la heterosexualidad y de la redefinición de la identidad masculina”/“The epidemic in masculine domestic violence has to be seen as a direct result of the crisis in heterosexuality and the redefinition of masculine identity” (Crisis 128). A later shot of Bola’s father in the back seat of José’s car as they look for the runaway Bola shows him as pathetic and shaken, hardly able to light his cigarette. The future seems foretold, as José says to his social worker/friend: “tell him [Bola’s father] whatever you want but I am taking the boy.” In Cachorro, or “Bear Cub,” (Albaladejo 2004), the modern father figure is taken a step further in that he is a gay man, Pedro (José Luis García Pérez), who is not an actual biological father at all. The title plays on the

Figure 4.1. José (Alberto Jimenez) inscribes a tattoo on his son (Pablo Galán) as “El Bola” (Juan José Ballesta) looks on. El Bola. Dir. Achero Mañas, Tesela, 2000.

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Figure 4.2. El Bola’s abusive father (Manuel Morón) at his shop. El Bola. Dir. Achero Mañas, Tesela, 2000.

meaning of “bear” as a certain style of gay identity, and indicating that his young nephew Bernardo (David Castillo), who is committed to his care, is his “cub.” In this film a hippy mother leaves her son with her brother and goes off to India for a vacation. Neither Pedro nor Bernardo are particularly excited about the arrangement but gradually develop a deep affection for each other and, when Bernardo’s mother is put in prison in India for drug trafficking, decide they would like to stay together. Bernardo’s homophobic, maternal grandmother forces Bernardo to stay in a boarding school near her, but the boy and his uncle stay in close contact. Cachorro attempts to imagine fatherhood without a traditional patriarchy. Though the cast is primarily male, these male characters refer to each other using feminine pronouns. When Bernardo meets Pedro’s friends, one is introduced as “la matriarc . . . er . . . el patriarcha”/“the matriar . . . er . . . the patriarch” of the group. Among themselves these gay men reject the patriarchal moniker but struggle to adopt it in their attempt to maintain appearances for the boy. Pedro appears to adjust his lifestyle to become what he believes a responsible father figure to be—forbidding his friend from rolling a joint in Bernardo’s presence, limiting his own sexual activity, and trying to socialize Bernardo as best he can. In an act of trust, Bernardo askes Pedro to cut his hair in the style of his own. In the film it marks a sort of initiation into acceptance and enjoyment by Bernardo of Pedro’s life. As in El Bola, an alternative family, here made up primarily of Pedro’s gay friends, is represented as a happy and caring place. Bernardo is present at a party where all dance and laugh joyfully to the song

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“Hombres”/“Men” by Movida icon Alaska, inviting the reader to reflect on the nature of masculinity—and through the relationship Pedro-Bernardo, to reflect on the nature of parenthood itself. Bernardo’s adoptive “father” Pedro proves more caring and loyal in some respects than Bernardo’s mother who, against her promise to her son, engaged in drugrelated activity that resulted in her incarceration; or Bernardo’s grandmother who disregards her grandson’s wishes out of self-interest and blindness, due to her own prejudice. Despite Pedro’s limited attempts to suppress the appearance of enjoyment in representing himself as a responsible father, the film presents homosexual masculinity as a sort of refuge in which drug use, alcohol consumption, and promiscuous sex are fully accepted as the regular activities of a fun-loving and generally happy extended friend group. The film itself is surprisingly open and explicit about sex between men. It crosses boundaries that popular film, (which is generally quite comfortable implying homosexual sex, but not representing its realities) does not usually cross—lubricants, positions, condom use, etc. It contains long sex scenes in which oral and anal sex are clearly indicated (though still not explicitly shown). The pursuit of pleasure and hedonism are explored and seemingly promoted through the joyful tone and attitudes represented. As Guasch points out, “En una sociedad del placer que adora al Baco más frívolo . . . la subcultura gay aparece claramente como el modelo a seguir”/“In a pleasure-seeking society which worships the god Bacchus at his most frivolous . . . the gay subculture clearly appears as the model to follow” (Crisis 28). This hedonism is placed in direct contrast to traditional mores of society. Pedro’s night on the town involving visits to gay bars and engaging in casual hookups results in the child’s grandmother blackmailing him in order to gain custody of the boy—thus pitting the old order against the new, and obviously favoring the new.

Figure 4.3. “Bear cub” (David Castillo) is welcomed into the party. Cachorro. Dir. Miguel Albaladejo, Hispanocine, 2004.

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NOTE 1. See pp. 425–31 of El cine español: una historia cultural by Vicente J. Benet (Barcelona: Paidós, 2012) for further discussion of this topic.

Conclusion

By analyzing cinematic representations of hegemonic models of masculinity in Spanish film from the beginning of the Francoist dictatorship to the present, this study observes, as a fundamental organizing focal point, the relation of the male individual to desire. A study of so-called “art house,” as well as popular film traditions, reveals a relationship in the early dictatorship between “successful” masculinity and adherence to prohibition. The positive masculine model, as most vividly represented in dictatorship “crusade cinema,” renounces personal pleasure and desire in favor of service, as the patriarchal father demands obedience in exchange for a place in the masculine hierarchy. The oedipal narrative, first introduced by Freud and later expanded upon by Lacan, Silverman, Kinder, Jagodzinski, McGowan, and others, serves as a descriptive paradigm to elucidate the transfer of power from father to sons. While early dictatorship film represents an orderly, clearly hierarchical power structure and the mutual renunciation by male characters of pleasure, later films introduce a breakdown of the hierarchy and a shift toward individualism and the pursuit of pleasure. This shift represents a fundamental alteration of the oedipal narrative, in which the power of the “father of prohibition,” as Freud referred to civilization’s founding principle, gives way to the “father of anal enjoyment”—a theoretical construct that represents the ruler of the pre-oedipal horde. The “return” of this primal father reflects a transition toward consumerist values, and is reflected on screen by the breakdown and rejection by male characters of a social organization founded on prohibition. The father who had formerly imposed prohibition on his sons, now commanded that male characters enjoy. This shift caused a disjuncture that is especially evident in films of the 1970s in which there appeared a profusion of “dysfunctional” male characters who were often represented as orphaned, infantilized, sexually “perverse,” violent, or self-destructive, and who were almost universally unwilling or unable to adopt a normative patriarchal masculine role in the now-destabilized masculine order. The waning power of the dictatorship, beginning with the assassination of Carrero Blanco in 1973, and culminating in the death of Franco in 1975, deprived the oedipal system of its most important bulwark against incipient consumerist values that, at least in part, had been instigated by the dictatorship itself, as a result of economic policy of the early 1960s. While popular film struggled to assimilate the changing emphasis from prohibition to consumption 185

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through humor, and a focus on the consumption of female bodies, other films explored “deviant” and “subversive” masculinities in the aftermath of the dissolution of the prohibitive oedipal model. A reorganization took place in the representation of masculinity in the 1980s and beyond, as male characters came to be dominated not by prohibition, but by the injunction to enjoy—as a modern progressive attitude in society came to be equated with consumption, and the antiquated dictatorship with prohibition. Male figures in films of this period are often esteemed for their physical beauty, financial success, and ability to enjoy, rather than their ability to serve. Miró-era films often promoted a non-controversial approach that covered traumatized masculinities with a veneer of visual plenitude. High production values and beautiful scenery served to diminish the sense of loss, or castration, at the hands of the prohibitive dictatorship. The relatively conservative use of the film medium in the 1980s reflects society’s reorganization, not around divisive political themes and past trauma, but rather, around consensus and common goals, including the pursuit of personal satisfaction in the form of wealth and/or pleasure. The films of Pedro Almodóvar serve as an obvious exception in the 1980s, in terms of their innovation and creativity, but his characters’ fundamental organization around desire, as well as the rejection of divisive political themes, inserts them securely into this trend. Later, certain “reactionary” films belied the nature of the pressure exerted on masculinity in the wake of consumerism. The extremely popular Torrente series, as well as the work of Alex de la Iglesia, represent leading male characters who reject the consumerist ethos of cleanliness, fashion, and beauty. A study of these “anti-heroes” reveals the pressures inherent in the system, which thrusted upon male characters the pressure to compete in a consumerist market that did not recognize the inherent “superiority” of masculinity as the oedipal patriarchy had. Rather, it demanded that male characters strive constantly for success, revealing a deep precariousness of masculine status within the consumerist system, while also demonstrating the impossibility of escaping the state of hyperindividualism and competitive pursuit of pleasure, in which their characters live. As discussed in this study, the liberation of desire in the aftermath of the dictatorship did not free the individual to enjoy more completely than his predecessors had. In the new context, desire became ubiquitous and consumption a mandate. Constantly bombarded with images of plenitude and the promise of the satisfaction of one’s desires, the male individual was encouraged to engage in a relentless pursuit of personal satisfaction—a search that seems to preclude, in many cases, the possibility of real enjoyment. Happiness often seems to depend on financial success, one more surgical procedure, or in Roberto Santiago’s satirical vision in Hombres felices, a constant state of solipsistic, pre-oedipal, orgiastic bliss. In many films after the Transition, male characters become unstable and

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isolated in their constant pursuit of enjoyment, seeing others as a source of competition or interference, given their preoccupation with the self and with their own happiness. Many seem to long for a resurrection of the patriarchal hierarchy, but lack the willingness or the ability to reconnect with other men, as male characters had in the past. Perhaps the “good father” in El Bola who is content to grant his own son a great deal of freedom, while caring for another’s son as if he were his own, is an indication of the positive direction that personal freedom and the expression of desire can have. This father, who passes on his patriarchal inheritance in the form of a tattoo he inscribes on his son’s back, approaches his role with humility and respect for others, including his son who appears not so much as a subordinated character reacting to his relationship with his father, but rather, as a separate, self-aware and caring individual in his own right. This study has attempted to trace changes in tendencies in the representation of masculinity in Spanish film as a means of drawing nearer to an understanding of how various factors, especially prohibition and consumerism, have acted to alter hegemonic models. Bearing in mind the important political, social, and economic changes that have occurred in Spain, especially the transition from a social order based on prohibition (as was Franco’s long dictatorship), to one based on enjoyment and consumption, radical changes are observed in the performance of successful masculinity. In recent decades, the effects of neoliberal economic policies, such as those employed in Spain since the 1960s, have come to dominate individual lives as well as social interaction, promoting consumerism at a seemingly ever-increasing pace. Harvey refers to neoliberalism itself as today’s “hegemonic as a mode of discourse” (A Brief History 3). Attention to hegemonic masculine representations created by this discourse, as well as deviations from these models, is meant as a means of drawing nearer to an understanding of the pressures exerted on the individual in a consumer age. My focus on hegemonic masculinity is not meant to diminish the importance of the exploration and study of marginalized and minority representations of masculinity in Spain, nor of further study of issues related to the gaze, performance, and film consumption practices that explore the possibility of alternative and “subversive” readings. It is my contention that the transition from a society of prohibition to one of “commanded enjoyment,” as is the media-dominated Spanish society of today, is the primary factor affecting masculine subject formation in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I hope that the reader will recognize, through this study, that hegemonic masculinity is not the creation of a few strong men interested in propagating their influence and power in the world, but rather is the product of specific political and socioeconomic contexts in which all are implicated.

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Index

20 centímetros, 167 Abella, Rafael, 26n9, 64 Abre los ojos, 165, 169 Abril, Victoria, 150 Acción mutante, 166 Acero, Ricardo, 46 advertising, 114 Agustina de Aragón, 44 AIDS, 19 Alaska, 181 Alba de América, 30, 35 Albaladejo, Miguel, 180 Alfeo Álvarez, Juan Carlos, 105 Allinson, Mark, 145 Almodóvar, Pedro, 25, 125n5, 129, 141, 144–149, 159, 161, 167, 186 Alonso, José Luis, 98, 107 Althusser, Louis, 17 Altman, Dennis, 143 Altman, Rick, 118 Amantes, 130, 150–152 Amenábar, Alejandro, 161, 169 Ammann, Alberto, 173 Amorós, Andrés, 65 Anal father of enjoyment. See enjoyment Ana y los lobos, 80, 82, 97 Anderson, Benedict, 32 Andrade, Jaime de, 29 Arrebato, 99, 107 Aranda, Vicente, 129, 130, 150, 152, 175 Arias, Imanol, 137, 148, 155, 157 A un dios desconocido, 107 Aured, Carlos, 111, 122 auteur, 12, 82 Azcona, Rafael, 85, 139 Balarrasa, 42–44, 43, 45, 49 Ballesta, Juan José, 178

Ballesteros, Isolina, 19 Banderas, Antonio, 142, 148, 166 Bardem, Javier, 166, 169, 172 Bardem, Juan Antonio, 51 Basque, 155–156 Baudrillard, Jean, 87–89, 112 Bautista, Aurora, 46 Belle Epoque, 130, 152–154 Beltenebros, 154, 156 Bennassar, Bartolomé, 153 Benet, Vicente, 22, 156, 183n1 Benjamin, Walter, 154 Berlanga, Luis García, 52, 77, 82, 85, 129, 139 Bersani, Leo, 114 Un beso en el puerto, 65 Las bicicletas son para el verano, 129, 133, 135–136 Bigas Luna, Josep Joan, 80, 87, 171 Bilbao, 80, 82, 87–90, 100 binding, 50 Bodegas, Roberto, 80, 92 El Bola, 175, 178–180, 181, 187 Bollaín, Icíar, 161, 175 Borau, José Luis, 80, 132 Bordieu, Pierre, 17, 24, 44 Botto, Juan Diego, 166 Bourgault du Coudray, Chantal, 113, 115 The Bourne Identity, 173 Brandes, Stanley, 19 breakdown. See crisis Briski, Norman, 101, 103 Brühl, Daniel, 173 Bugallo, Celso, 170 buen vasallo, 31 Bulfill, Juan, 87–89 Butler, Judith, 16 La cabina, 82, 90–92 197

198 Cachorro, 180–182 Calle Mayor, 51 Calvo, Pablito, 49 Calvo, Rafael, 35 Camada negra, 97–100 camp, 21, 145 Camus, Mario, 129, 136 cannibal, 112, 113 Canovas, Anne, 173 Caparrós Lera, José Marie, 22, 74n1 Capell, Bárbara, 115 Cardona, Gabriel, 26n9, 64 Carmen, la de Ronda, 50 Carne trémula, 161–162 carnival, 153 Carrero Blanco, Luis, 7, 24, 25n1, 185 La casa de Bernarda Alba, 153 Castillo, David, 181, 182 casting, 2 castration, 9, 44, 47, 50, 90 Castro de Paz, José Luis, 22 Catholicism, 6, 49, 77, 100, 114 La caza, 56 Celos, 175 censorship, 51, 77, 115 Cerdán, Josetxo, 22 Chaney Jr., Lon, 125n6 Chaplin, Geraldine, 57, 58, 60, 82 Chávarri, Jaime, 99, 107, 129 Children of Franco, 95, 104, 127 El Cid, 31 CIFESA, 44, 50, 53, 79 “cine de barrio,” 65 “cine con cura,” 44, 49 “cine con niño,” 44, 49 Civil War, 28, 31, 49, 95, 138 Clover, Carol, 117 El cochecito, 54 Colmeiro, José, 35, 36, 153 commanded enjoyment, 3 Connell, R.W., 16, 18, 26n7, 26n13, 47, 146 consensus, 131 consumerism, 3, 13, 144; in Spain, 1, 4 Copjec, Joan, 11 coproduction, 115 Cornwall, Andrea, 17 El crimen ferpecto, 165, 169 crisis, 5, 7, 14, 26n12, 76

Index Crumbaugh, Justin, 20, 64, 65 crusade cinema, 9, 27, 29, 31, 76, 185 Cruz, Penélope, 162 cruzada, cine de. See crusade cinema El desencanto, 99, 100 desire, 11 destape, 71, 110 Deleuze, Gilles, 104, 109, 147 El Deseo S.A., 141 Deveny, Thomas, 22 deviance, 28 Díaz López, Marina, 78 Dibildos, José Luis, 25n3 El diputado, 80, 107, 133 dissatisfaction, 5 Donde hay patrón, 71, 73 Duquesa de Benamejí, 44 Dutoit, Ulysse, 114 duty, 8 Dyer, Richard, 32, 34 Easthope, Anthony, 16, 39, 49 Egido, José Ángel, 170 enjoyment, 8; Anal father of, 3, 7–8, 9, 13, 18, 136, 185; society of, 12 En un lugar de la Manga, 66, 68 Erice, Victor, 92, 99, 104 Esa pareja feliz, 51, 53–54 Escobar, Manolo, 24, 27, 62–72, 73, 82, 99, 110 Escrivá, Vicente, 99 españolada. See folkloric films Espíritu de una raza, 74n1 Espíritu de la colmena, 99, 104 Estabilización, Plan de. See Stabilization Plan Esteso, Fernando, 64, 81, 110 Evans, Peter, 41, 79 ETA, 25n1, 155 Etura, Marta, 173 Eva, 173–174 Falange, 29, 74n2 Falcón, Lidia, 81, 143 Faludi, Susan, 170, 176 Fama (Fernando Telletxea), 156, 157 Family Man, 91 fantasy, 12

Index El Fary, 64 fascism, 6, 39 feminism, 23 Fernández de la Mora, Gonzalo, 56 Fernández, Nani, 36 Fernández, Ramón, 57 Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 42, 45, 54, 104, 135 Ferreri, Marco, 51, 54 fetishism, 48, 85, 87, 100 folkloric films, 21, 49, 79 Forqué, Verónica, 164 Foucault, Michel, 16, 19, 66, 69, 142, 143 Fouz-Hernández, Santiago, 21, 169 Fraga, Manuel, 114–115 Franco, ese hombre, 30 Franco, Francisco, 1, 6, 9, 13, 24, 36, 75, 114, 168, 185 Francoism. See Franco, Francisco Franco, Ricardo, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 7, 50, 79, 89, 94, 99, 151, 185 Fuchs, Gaby, 115 Fuga de Segovia, 155 Furtivos, 80, 97, 100, 133 Gabilondo, Joseba, 14, 19, 105 GAL, 155 el galán, 64, 121 Galán, Pablo, 178, 180 García Carrión, Marta, 23 García Escudero, José, 114 García Pérez, José Luis, 180 Garci, José Luis, 129 Garland, David, 21, 143, 153 Giachetti, Fosco, 34 Gilda, 77 Gilmore, David, 19 Gil, Rafael, 82, 90 glamor, 48 Los golfos, 51, 56 Gómez, Asunción, 38, 40 Gómez Fuentes, María José, 97 Gómez Pereira, Manuel, 164 González, Felipe, 125n4, 143 el gracioso, 64 Graham, Helen, 20, 79 Grosz, Elizabeth, 79

199

Guasch, Oscar, 4, 13, 15, 19, 163, 167, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182 Guattari, Félix, 109, 147 Gubern, Román, 22 Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel, 82, 83, 99 Habla Mudita, 82, 83–85 Ha llegado un ángel, 49 Hall, Stuart, 31, 37 Harka, 30, 32, 38–40 Harry Potter, 173 Hartocollis, Peter, 79 Harvey, David, 4, 170, 187 Hatty, Susan, 17, 68, 175, 178 Hayworth, Rita, 77 Heath, Stephen, 143 Heredero, Carlos, 133 Hernández Ruiz, Javier, 22, 127–128, 132 Higginbotham, Virginia, 22, 31, 34, 44 Hocquenghem, Guy, 16, 106, 109, 147 Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño, 107, 108–109 El hombre que se quiso matar, 82, 90 Hombres felices, 172, 186 homosexuality, 105–109, 110, 149 Hopewell, John, 21, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 87, 98, 110, 128, 132 Huerta, Miguel Ángel, 23 Huevos de oro, 165, 171 hysteria: male, 18 identity, 1 ideological fatigue, 51 ideology,: function of film in, 12, 27 Iglesia, Alex de la, 169, 186 Iglesia, Eloy de la, 80, 106–107, 112 Iglesias, Julio, 64, 171 imaginary, 12, 46 individualism, 17 infantilization, 98, 102 interstitial identity, 114 Isbert, José (“Pepe”), 54 Jackie Brown @ 2n5 Jagodzinski, Jan, 9, 14, 18, 53, 104, 153, 185 Jiménez, Alberto, 178, 180 Joselito, 49

200

Index

jouissance, 113, 151 Jové, Ángel, 87 Jover Zamora, José María, 26n4, 26n10, 112, 149 Kinder, Marsha, 20, 21, 31, 39, 68, 94, 101, 128, 141–143, 145, 185 Klimovsky, Leon, 111, 115 Kornbluh, Anna, 91 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 16 Labanyi, Jo, 20, 22, 50, 79, 130, 154 El laberinto del fauno, 125n4 Laberinto de pasiones, 129, 148–149 Lacan, Jacques, 8–11, 17–18, 33, 79, 130, 144, 147, 168, 185 lack, 10, 11, 46, 56, 81, 85, 129, 142 Lagos, Vicky, 120 Landa, Alfredo, 21, 61, 64, 81, 110, 136, 139 landismo. See Landa, Alfredo Latham, Rob, 112 Lazaga, Pedro, 57 Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, 22, 23, 28 Lehman, Peter, 17, 41, 47, 107, 140 La leona de Castilla, 44 León de Aranoa, Fernando, 169 lesbianism, 121 Lev, Leora, 158 Ley del deseo, 129 La ley del divorcio, 125n3 Lindisfarne, Nancy, 17 Locura de amor, 46 Lola la piconera, 44 López Echevarrieta, Alberto, 20 López Vázquez, José Luis, 54, 57, 58, 60, 64, 68, 83, 91, 99 Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos, 99 Lowenstein, Adam, 111 Lucas, Antonio, 172 Los lunes al sol, 165, 166, 169–170 MacKinnon, Kenneth, 17, 68, 152 Madmen, 25n2 madre castrante, 156 Mahieu, José Agustín, 77 Mainer, J.C., 76 Mamá cumple cien años, 97, 100–103 Mañas, Achero, 175

Marcelino, pan y vino, 49 Marisol, 49 Marisol, rumbo a Río, 49 marriage, 100 Marsh, Steven, 21, 146 Martínez-Expósito, Alfredo, 21 Martinez-Lázaro, Emilio, 161 Martín-Gaite, Carmen, 41 Marull, Laia, 175 Marx, Karl, 1 masochism, 103–104 Matador, 125n4 Matellano, Victor, 23, 115 The Matrix, 173 Maura, Carmen, 143, 146 Mayo, Alfredo, 36, 60 McGowan, Todd, 3, 7–11, 13, 18, 26n11, 28, 60, 66, 68, 71, 77, 78, 87, 89, 92, 133, 143, 165, 168, 185 McNair, Brian, 110 McNamara, Fabio, 149 Me has hecho perder el juicio, 68 Melero Salvador, Alejandro, 19, 105, 106, 118 Mercero, Antonio, 82 Messerschmidt, James W., 26n7 Miller, Toby, 17 Mira, Alberto, 20 La mies es mucha, 49 “mirada arrebatada,” 35 Miró Law, 25, 115, 125n4, 131, 134, 158, 159, 186 Misión blanca, 49 missionary films, 21 Mistral, Jorge, 46 Moix, Terenci, 22 Molina, Ángela, 98 Moncloa Pacts, 2, 26n5 Montaner, Francisco, 116 Monterde, José Enrique, 92, 95–96, 131 Montiel, Sara, 46, 50 Morán, Manolo, 40 Morán, Martín, 78 Moreiras Menor, Cristina, 20, 75, 130, 158, 162, 163, 165 Morón, Manuel, 178, 181 Morris, Barbara, 56 La Movida, 141

Index La muerte de Mikel, 131, 154, 155–156, 157 Muerte de un ciclista, 51 Mulvey, Laura, 15, 44 Muñoz, Amparo, 103 Muñoz, Carlos, 35 Muscular Christianity, 44 Myers, Tony, 144 Nair, Parvati, 21, 146 Naschy, Paul, 115, 120, 122, 125n6 national cinema, 32 Neale, Steven, 113 neoliberalism, 4, 170, 187; in Spain, 26n8, 149, 169 neorealism: Italian, 51 New Spanish Cinema, 57 Nieto, José, 37 Nieves Conde, José Antonio, 42, 52 La noche de Walpurgis, 111, 115–117 No desearás al vecino del quinto, 61–62 NO-DO newsreels, 6, 26n9 Noriega, Eduardo, 166 Nuevo Cine Español. See New Spanish Cinema oedipal narrative, 9, 14, 22, 79, 80, 94, 95, 106, 147–148, 181, 185 objet petit a, 8, 11 Ocaña: retrat intermittent, 107 Ocho apellidos vascos, 161 Old Spanish Cinema, 57 Olea, Pedro, 107, 108 Opus Dei, 2, 6, 26n8 Orduña, Juan de, 44, 68 El orfanato, 125n5 Other, 36, 46, 50, 59 Los otros, 125n4, 161 Ozores, Mariano, 66, 110 Pact of Madrid, 2 Pajares, Andrés, 64, 69, 81, 110 Palacio, Manuel, 22 Parra, Vicente, 118, 120, 121 Pascual Duarte, 99, 105 pasotismo, 76, 150 patriarchy, 10 Pavlović, Tatjana, 19, 168 Peña, Candela, 175

201

penis, 41, 47 Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, 141 Peppermint Frappé, 57–59, 60, 61, 82, 91 Pequeneces, 44 El pequeño ruiseñor, 49 Pérez Perucha, Julio, 101 Pérez Rubio, Pablo, 22, 127–128, 132 performativity, 16, 18, 50, 167 Pero . . . ¿en qué país vivimos?, 99 Perriam, Chris, 14, 19, 21, 62–64, 71, 152 perversion, 13, 25, 103, 108 phallus, 41, 46, 47, 51 Piccoli, Michel, 85, 86, 87 La piel que habito, 125n4 Pirie, David, 118 Pisano, Isabel, 87 El pisito, 51, 54 Los placeres ocultos, 80, 107 pleasure, 133, 142 Pons, Ventura, 107 pornification, 165 ¿Por qué lo llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo?, 164–165 Powrie, Phil, 18 Prada, José 1f3 La prima Angélica, 99, 100, 133 Primer Plano, 30 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 42, 74n2, 123n1 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 29, 74n2 Primo de Rivera, Pilar, 41, 74n4, 123n1 La princesa de los Ursinos, 44 prohibition, 3; in Spain, 4, 93; Father of, 7, 13, 78, 98, 136, 185 PSOE. See Socialist Party public recognition, 8 Pulido, Javier, 23 queer cinema, 19 Querejeta, Elías, 56 Un rayo de luz, 49 Raza, 29, 32, 33, 40 real, 46, 130 El retorno de Walpurgis, 111, 117–118, 122 Richardson, Nathan, 60 Rose, Andrew, 153

202 Roth, Cecilia, 148 El ruiseñor de las cumbres, 49 Sacristán, José, 1, 92, 107, 139, 140 Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis, 29, 49, 66 Sánchez-Conejero, Cristina, 20 Salamanca Talks, 51 “Salas X,” 128 Salazar, Ramón, 167 Santiago, Roberto, 172, 186 Los santos inocentes, 129, 133 Sanz, Jorge, 150, 151, 152, 164, 166 Sassatelli, Roberta, 94 Saura, Carlos, 22, 51, 56, 78, 80, 82, 92, 99, 101, 103 scopophilia, 50 Screen Theory, 10–11 Sección Femenina, 71, 74n4, 81, 123n1, 123n2 Segura, Santiago, 21, 161 La semana del asesino, 111, 118–121, 120 Sevilla, Carmen, 64 sexploitation, 111 sexy comedies, 71, 109–111 S films, 87, 128 Silos, Blanca de, 34 Silverman, Kaja, 41, 46, 51, 56, 85, 94, 104, 185 Simpson, Mark, 16, 30, 40, 48, 102, 106 Sin novedad en el alcázar, 30, 34–37 Smith, Paul Julian, 19, 63, 105, 109, 146 Socialist Party, 79, 128, 131, 149 Solas, 175 Sorel, Jean, 61 Stabilization Plan, 26n8 Stam, Robert, 153 Star Wars, 173 Stone, Rob, 29, 49, 53, 142, 146 la sueca, 59, 83, 91 superego, 14 El sur, 104 Surcos, 52–53 symbolic order, 10 Talens, Jenaro, 20 Tamaño natural, 82, 85–87 También la lluvia, 161 Tarantino, Quentin, 125n4

Index Te doy mis ojos, 175–177 technocrats, 2, 6 Tejero, Antonio, 128 Telletxea, Fernando. See Fama Tercera vía. See Third Way Third Way, 25n3, 80, 92, 93 Thrower, Stephen, 23 Tiempo de silencio, 129, 133, 137–139 Tierno Galván, Enrique, 4, 143 Todo sobre mi madre, 167–168 Tohill, Cathal, 114, 115 Tombs, Pete, 114, 115 Toro, Guillermo del, 125n4 Torrente, 161, 166–167, 186 Tosar, Luis, 170, 175 tourism, 20, 114 Transición. See Transition Transition, 1, 4, 6–7, 26n11 Tras el cristal, 131, 154, 156–158 trauma, 51, 95, 99, 103, 129, 133, 155, 186 Tremlett, Giles, 77, 79 Trenzado Romero, Manuel, 22, 28, 128, 131, 133, 138 Triana-Toribio, Nuria, 22, 28, 57, 133, 167 Trueba, Fernando, 130, 152, 158 El último cuplé, 44, 47–49, 50 Los últimos de Filipinas, 30, 32, 36–38 Uribe, Imanol, 131, 155 utopia, 78 “vagina dentata,” 46 vampire, 112, 113, 117, 121 Vampiros lesbos, 125n4 Van Liew, Maria, 97 La vaquilla, 129, 133, 139–141 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 78 Velasco, Conchita, 66 Vega, Claudia, 173 Verdú, Maribel, 150 El verdugo, 51 Vernon, Kathleen M., 56 La vida conyugal sana, 1, 82, 90, 92–94 Viejo Cine Español. See Old Spanish Cinema Vilarós, Teresa, 26n10, 76, 78, 95, 103 Vilaronga, Agustí, 158

Index violence, 17, 105 Volver a empezar, 129, 133–135

Willis, Andrew, 23, 111 Wood, Robin, 111

Walsh, Fintan, 26n12 war films, 28, 29. See also crusade cinema Weinstock, Jeffrey, 118 werewolf, 112, 113, 115 West, Rebecca, 95 Williams, Alan, 32 Williams, Linda, 121

Yarza, Alejandro, 144 yé-yé, 66, 74n3

203

Zambrano, Benito, 175 Žižek, Slavoj, 7–11, 18, 33, 39, 80, 113, 144 Zulueta, Iván, 99 Zunzunegui, Santos, 20

About the Author

Mary Hartson is associate professor of Spanish at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her research centers on masculinity in popular cinema of both Spain and the United States.

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