The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia 9781847791665

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The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia

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Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers Series editors: Núria Triana Toribio, University of Manchester Andy Willis, University of Salford

Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers offers a focus on new, and reclaims previously neglected, filmmakers, and considers established figures from new and different perspectives. Each volume places its subject in a variety of critical and production contexts. The series sees filmmakers as more than just auteurs, thus offering an insight into the work and contexts of producers, writers, actors, production companies and studios. The studies in this series take into account the recent changes in Spanish and Latin American film studies, such as the new emphasis on popular cinema, and the influence of cultural studies in the analysis of films and of the film cultures produced within the Spanish-speaking industries.

Already published Julio Medem

Rob Stone

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The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave

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Copyright © Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis 2007 The right of Peter Buse, Núria Triana Toribio and Andy Willis to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 7136 2 hardback First published 2007 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

page vii ix 1

1

Acción mutante (1993): against the conspiracy of boredom

33

2

El día de la bestia (1995): comedy, subcultures, television

53

3

Perdita Durango (1997): the body, sex and Mexico

77

4

Muertos de risa (1999): comedy, television, history

97

5

La comunidad (2000): modernity and the cinematic past

119

6

800 balas (2002): undoing the ignominy of boyhood

139

7

Crimen ferpecto (2004): the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène

161

Conclusion

177

Filmography of Álex de la Iglesia Bibliography Index

181 189 197

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List of illustrations

1 2

3

4

5 6

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Frontispiece to Introduction: image from Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo. 1 Image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 3 Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 29 Frontispiece to Chapter 1: image from Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo. 33 Poster for Acción mutante (Joaquín Manchado). Courtesy of El Deseo. 49 Frontispiece to Chapter 2: image from El día de la bestia (Pipo Fernández). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 53 Image from El día de la bestia (Pipo Fernández). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 71 Frontispiece to Chapter 3: promotional image for Perdita Durango (Eníac Martínez and Drew Carolan). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 77 Image from Perdita Durango (Eníac Martínez and Drew Carolan). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 85 Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 91 Frontispiece to Chapter 4: image from Muertos de risa (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 97 Image from Muertos de risa (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 99 Frontispiece to Chapter 5: image from La comunidad (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 119 Image from La comunidad (Paola Ardizzoni and Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Lolafilms. 128

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Frontispiece to Chapter 6: promotional image from 800 balas (Ricky Davila). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 9 Image from 800 balas (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 10 Photograph of 800 balas set (Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda). Courtesy of Pánico Films. Frontispiece to Chapter 7: image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films. 11 Image from Crimen ferpecto (Mónica de Pascalis). Courtesy of Pánico Films.

139 146 156 161 167

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Acknowledgements

Parts of the Introduction appeared in a different form in New cinemas, as did Chapter 1 in Tesserae: Journal of Spanish and Latin American Studies. The School of Modern Languages at Liverpool University and the School of Media, Music and Performance at Salford University provided us with timely sabbaticals during the writing of this book, and the British Academy funded a research trip to Madrid. Linda Pariser of Cornerhouse, Manchester, Jennifer Green of Screen International, Isabel Santaolalla, Carrie Hamilton, Nerea Barragán, Josep-Lluís Fecé, and Valeria Camporesi all provided us with research materials and advice. Valuable feedback on the final manuscript were provided by Chris Perriam and the anonymous reviewer at MUP. Special thanks to our editor at MUP, Matthew Frost, without whom no activity is ever as enjoyable, and to Dani Caselli and Manu Basile for taking us to the Pinacoteca Brera at just the right moment. Purificación García at Pánico Films was immensely helpful in assembling images for us. Finally, thanks of course to Álex de la Iglesia, who fielded so many questions and has patiently awaited the appearance of this book.

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Hatchet job A hatchet in the head is a cheap novelty item obtainable from a party shop. The blade is plastic, the arc where it fits round the skull has been removed, and a strap under the chin secures the whole contraption in place. The effect is ludicrous, the intent puerile, a Halloween trick with a number of variants: the saw, the arrow, the axe. In cartoons, it can have an indexical value, signifying a headache. A hatchet in the head is also a minor feature in the iconography of martyrdom in fifteenthand sixteenth-century century painting. This tradition coincides with the rise of illusion in figurative art, but abides only sporadically by the rules governing the illusionist regime. It portrays sainted martyrs as if alive, but adorned with the object or weapon that brought their suffering or deaths. These may be gravity-defying stones, which perch on shoulders or foreheads, or the spiked wheel upon which Saint Catherine was tortured, or, in the case of St Peter Martyr (d. 1252), a broad blade slicing into the brainpan of a bald head. Key exponents of this image of the martyred Dominican monk are Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto and Giovan Battista Cima de Conegliano. The type of blade varies, from the pointed machete of Cima de Conegliano’s St Peter Martyr with Saints Nicholas and Benedict (1504) to the more cleaver-like weapon in Lotto’s Virgin and Child with Peter Martyr (1503). The image also appears in two of Álex de la Iglesia’s films. In Acción mutante, Ramón, the leader of a band of ‘mutant’ terrorists, murders his comrades one by one, dispatching Juan Abadie, one half of a pair of conjoined twins, by the same method suffered by St Peter Martyr. Juan’s brother Álex survives Ramón’s killing spree and drags his brother, meat cleaver and all, around with him for the duration of the film. Meanwhile, in Crimen ferpecto, Rafael, head of ladies’ wear in Yeyo’s department store, accidentally murders the head of men’s wear, Don Antonio. With the help of Lourdes, who is handy with a meat cleaver, Rafael disposes of Don Antonio’s corpse, dismembering it and burning it in the department store’s incinerator. Lourdes deposits the cleaver in Don Antonio’s skull before incinerating it as well. When Don Antonio returns as a ghost, the cleaver returns with him, positioned in the classical manner found in the depiction of St Peter Martyr. Where is the true lineage of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia to be found? In the clown’s prop or in the iconography of saints? St Peter

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1 Cleaver in head: Luis Varela as Don Antonio, Guillermo Toledo as Rafael in Crimen ferpecto

Martyr wears his blade with tranquil dignity; it is an emblem of his sacrifice and guarantees his passage to higher rewards. The clown suffers no pain, but sacrifices his dignity in his efforts to obtain our approving laughter. For the saint, the body is no longer of any consequence, while for the clown this tool of the trade is a turbulent thing: pure matter, denuded of spirit. Dignity and tranquility are certainly scarce commodities in the films we analyse in this book, and the lines of affinity in De la Iglesia’s cinema lead more obviously to the irreverence of the clown than to the sanctity of St Peter Martyr. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss too lightly the importance of the latter. The hatchet in the head of crude physical comedy and the hatchet of saintly iconography share in common a disregard for verisimilitude, insisting that a blade severing the cerebellum leaves the skull intact and is not always an impediment to waking consciousness. It does not really matter whether the cleaver in Don Antonio’s head is a direct allusion to St Peter Martyr or just a cut-rate sight gag. It is both; it is neither. Nor are the potential sources of the hatchet in the head exhausted by these two possibilities: we would have to consider, at the very least, the conventions of horror movies, with their walking mutilated complete with instrument of mutilation. What matters is the willingness to diverge from a realist tradition born in the fifteenth century and hegemonic ever since. The hatchet is the marker of a rupture, the head an index of intelligence, of the bien pensant realist

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tradition. This rupture is neither absolute nor unique, but it is an essential starting point in the understanding of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia and the first reason that he commands our attention. The second reason is directly related to the first. We argue in this book that Álex de la Iglesia represents a special phenomenon in Spanish cinema. He is what we might call a ‘popular auteur’, a term we use with the understanding that for many it is an oxymoron. Scholarship on Spanish cinema, for the most part, still subscribes to an unquestioned dichotomy which privileges art-house cinema and neglects its supposed opposite, ‘popular’ cinema. As a result, this scholarship, whether it concentrates on the broader development of Spanish cinema or on individual film-makers, tends to rely heavily on the high art concept of auteurism at the expense of an understanding of cinema as a mass form. This attitude is the product of decades of Europe’s cultural rhetoric of aesthetic and cultural distinctiveness, which set its products apart from the industrial ‘standardization’ of Hollywood. However, recently there has been a move in European cinema studies to reassess the ‘non-auterist’ genre cinema in order to understand better the entirety of European production, a move that has been trickling down into Spanish film studies.1 The need to dismantle this paradigm has become more urgent in light of recent cinema production in Spain. Since the 1990s particularly, Spanish cinema has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of film-makers who, like De la Iglesia, have achieved considerable box-office success by appropriating Hollywood formulae and mixing them with the autochthonous non-art-house traditions, whilst not relinquishing their status as auteurs. That is, a director like De la Iglesia draws on popular genres and seeks much wider audiences than the art-house elite, but still possesses the typical attributes of the auteur: he is director-screenwriter of all the films, enjoys considerable autonomy in the production process, experiments at the level of form and content, and has developed a distinctive visual style. As Steven Marsh and Parvati Nair (2004) argue, Pedro Almodóvar must be considered the recent trailblazer in this trend, but as they also point out, there is a rich line of Spanish cineastes who have drawn on popular forms (7). This line goes back to the Second Republic, but most relevant in relation to De la Iglesia are Luis García Berlanga and Fernando Fernán-Gómez, whose brand of black comedy known as esperpento De la Iglesia updates and most typically fuses with elements of horror. The affinities with Berlanga and Fernán-Gómez and the debts owed to them we explore in depth in Chapters 2 and 5.

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5

It is also worth noting that the category of the ‘popular auteur’ is elastic and not based on box-office receipts alone. After all, Carlos Saura, who is most decidedly not a popular auteur, achieved box-office success with the literary adaptations Carmen (1983) and ¡Ay, Carmela! (1990), while Alejandro Amenábar, who is (or at least was) a popular auteur, outgrossed all other films in Spain in 2004 with Mar adentro / The Sea Inside, a film whose sobriety and calculated social conscience bear little resemblance to other works of Spanish popular auteurism. At the same time, it is constructive to contrast the figure of the popular auteur with another striking development in Spain in the late 1990s, the low-brow blockbuster. Santiago Segura, a sometime collaborator of Álex de la Iglesia, is writer, director, and star of Torrente: el brazo tonto de la ley / Torrente: the Stupid Arm of the Law (1998) and its sequel Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella / Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella (2001). The broad appeal and financial success of the Torrente franchise have been matched for the most part by its critical marginalization in Spain. The general horror with which these films are met in middle-brow Spanish critical circles should of course come as no surprise, given the ‘art-house auteurist’ biases of the establishment. Santiago Segura is not a ‘popular auteur’ because he is easy for the establishment to dismiss, while Álex de la Iglesia is a popular auteur because he is hard to dismiss, but also hard to include. Santiago Segura, in spite of being a director-screenwriter, is never in danger of troubling the canon of auteurs, because traditional auteurist methodology not only sees the auteur as the individual ‘responsible, in the last instance, for a film’s aesthetics and mise-enscène’ (Stam 2000, 85) but also conceives film-making as a mode of self-expression which rejects or subverts formulae of the kind that commercial and genre cinema provide. If these are the parameters within which to study a film-maker, then what is to be done with an output like De la Iglesia’s, which is at once resolutely commercial and draws freely on Hollywood codes and genres, and yet which also receives retrospectives at the Lincoln Center in New York (2002) and is dense with allusion to Spanish film history, as well as avant-garde traditions, in particular surrealism and dadaism? The exemplary symptomatic statement on the work of De la Iglesia comes from Tomás Fernández Valenti (2001): Álex de la Iglesia es el cineasta que mejor filma de su generación, podría hacer cosas mejores de las que hace . . . siempre y cuando no ceda facilmente a la puerilidad: a La comunidad, por ejemplo, le falta un poco más de madurez para estar bien del todo. (48)

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The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia Since Álex de la Iglesia is the most talented film-maker of his generation, he could make better things than he has so far . . . provided he does not give in so easily to puerility: La comunidad, for example, is too lacking in maturity to be consistently good.

The frustration with De la Iglesia, who is apparently a potential auteur who refuses to conform to the qualities of the auteur, is captured perfectly by Valenti’s paradoxical and perhaps incomprehensible claim that De la Iglesia is at once the most accomplished film-maker (que mejor filma) of his generation and has failed yet to make a decent film. It is a strange sort of judgement – to acclaim a film-maker’s talent without being able to point to any firm evidence – but Valenti is not alone in this stance. Film-maker Chus Gutiérrez confirmed this point in a conversation with the authors of this book during the Spanish Film Festival in Manchester in 2003: De la Iglesia is a good film-maker who cannot seem to make good films. Or, more precisely, he fails to make mature films, if we paraphrase Gutiérrez, using the vocabulary of T. S. Eliot which Valenti deploys.2 What this means, we think, is that De la Iglesia is highly accomplished technically, but that he continues to insist on telling stories in which, for example, a hatchet in the head is a source of much mirth. One might well ask, why auteur studies now, even if it is done with this compromise category of the popular auteur, and why invoke an outmoded term like ‘art cinema’? These two questions are far too infrequently posed in contemporary Spanish film studies, especially in Spain, but also in the UK. Too often in the study of Spanish cinema there is a silent endorsement of the concepts of the auteur and art cinema and not enough acknowledgement that approaches to film that are anchored in authorship are both historically contingent – the product of a specific set of polemics in Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s and in Movie in the early 1960s – and, since the 1970s, increasingly discredited, having been displaced by subsequent waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, all suspicious of the unified creative subject the idea of the auteur presupposes. In the field of popular cinema journalism, in contrast, the idea of the auteur has remained significant and reviewers in the UK broadsheets will constantly refer to directors without questioning their authorial status. But it is hardly the politique des auteurs they are implicitly invoking. Instead it tends to be the traditional view of the European auteur which predates the 1950s work of Cahiers and which we might call ‘art-house auteurism’. This tradition, which is alive and

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kicking in language-based departments, if not in film studies departments, embraces, for example, Lang and Renoir, but only in their preHollywood phases, whereas the point of auteurism in the 1960s and 1970s was that certain directors ‘transcended’ the limitations imposed by working in genre cinema for Hollywood studios. Vestiges of this art-house auteurism are particularly strong in writing on Spanish cinema. A good example is Rob Stone’s recent text, Spanish Cinema (2002). Stone devotes auteur-driven chapters to personalities such as producer Elías Querejeta and director Carlos Saura, as well as to newly canonized figures such as Julio Medem. In analyzing the latter, he resorts uncritically to the romanticism of early author-centred critics, enthusing that ‘It’s all there in Julio Medem’s eyes: a much darker creative sensibility than the texture of his films might suggest’ (158). Not for Stone the colder, structuralist notion of Medem as a system of signs: he confidently asserts that it is the ‘real’ person, Medem, who is the ultimate source of the work, and goes on to detail how Medem’s personal life can be read against the films. Medem is the artist in control of what we see on the screen, his life experiences forging his artistic expression; without these personal experiences, Stone implies, the films would be drained of merit. This is not to say that we are not interested in the very distinctive star persona of Álex de la Iglesia, but only in the sense that it is a persona, constructed in the para-filmic space of publicity and criticism and functioning to shape the reception of films released under his name. As for De la Iglesia’s ‘creative sensibility’ and his life experiences, we would prefer to leave them to one side and consider instead the ways in which his films are the products of a team that has been involved in the labour behind the images on the screen as well as a set of social structures and cultural contexts which make possible certain utterances and exclude others. If we are trying to revisit the notion of the auteur today in Spanish cinema it is in order to challenge the outmoded and yet still highly prevalent notion of the art-house auteur. We therefore propose to ask what it might mean to think of Álex de la Iglesia as an auteur, precisely because he is an auteur very unlike Julio Medem. It should already be clear that we do not engage in such an activity without reservations. We admit from the outset that we view the concept of the ‘auteur’ with a good deal of suspicion and recognize that its function is to organize cinema for film critics and teachers of cinema, and that tied up with the concept is a whole set of assumptions about genius and creativity, not to mention gender, which makes the concept of the auteur at best

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anachronistic if it is not approached with eyes wide open. However, since it is very difficult to escape the formal structures by which knowledge of cinema is organized, we hope to attack Spanish auteur studies from within rather than without. We are therefore taking De la Iglesia as a borderline case, who sits on the cusp of the auteurism/ popular cinema divide and causes as a result many difficulties for unreconstructed art-house auteurism. What we hope is that as well as shedding light on De la Iglesia’s cinema, this case study of the 1990s and early 21st-century Spanish cinema will contribute to reorient debates on Spanish cinema in general and help to break the tight conceptual grip of traditional auteurism. ‘Álex de la Iglesia’: the work, the team, the star In this book we concentrate our attention on the seven feature films De la Iglesia directed between 1992 and 2004, devoting a chapter to each: Acción mutante / Mutant Action (1993), a science-fiction comedy; El día de la bestia / The Day of the Beast (1995), a ‘satanic action comedy’; Perdita Durango (1997), a violent and visceral tale set on either side of the US–Mexico border; Muertos de risa / Dying of Laughter (1999), a mock biopic of two Spanish comedians of the 1970s; La comunidad / Common Wealth (2000), a story of hidden treasure and vicious neighbours; 800 balas / 800 Bullets (2002), a tribute to the Spanish stuntmen of spaghetti westerns; and Crimen ferpecto / Ferpect Crime (2004), a satire of consumerist culture in a Hitchcockian vein. However, this list is by no means a complete account of De la Iglesia’s contributions to visual culture. After a youthful period in Bilbao’s alternative comics scene, he worked first in cinema as scriptwriter and artistic director on the short film Mama (Pablo Berger, 1988). He designed the poster for Enrique Urbizu’s Tu novia está loca / Your Girlfriend Is Crazy (1988) and was artistic designer on the same director’s Todo por la pasta / Everything for the Money (1991), as well as the short Amor impasible / Impassible Love (Iñaki Arteta, 1992). He has also directed two short films, Mirindas asesinas / Killer Mirindas (1991) and Enigma en el bosquecillo / Enigma in the Little Wood (2000); an interactive video-game, Marbella antivicio / Marbella Vice (1994); and two television advertisements for FNAC (2002). Work in television punctuates much of this basic chronicle. In the early years of Basque regional television, De la Iglesia worked on set decoration for the talk-show Detrás del sirimiri / Behind the Sirimiri (1988) and

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for Doctor Livingstone, supongo / Doctor Livingstone, I Presume, both on Euskal Telebista; for about four months he directed the sketch show Inocente, Inocente (1993) which was broadcast on Tele Madrid and Euskal Telebista; and in 2005 he directed for Tele 5 La habitación del niño / The Baby’s Bedroom, one of a series of TV movies under the collective title Películas para no dormir / Movies to Keep You Awake (screened in 2006). Finally, De la Iglesia has acted as producer for the theatrical work Dos hombres sin destino /Two Men without a Destiny (2004), and provided the voice for the character of the ‘Underminer’ in the Castilian dubbed version of The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004). We do not, in The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, go into any sustained analysis of the director’s work outside feature films, but even this very condensed summary of that work allows us to make certain wider observations about the development of his career. The beginning in comics is naturally very important and is remarked upon as a matter of course by virtually anyone discussing De la Iglesia in detail. To the background in comics can be attributed, among other things, a fondness for gory violence, two-dimensional characterization, improbably proportioned women, and a generalized non-realist aesthetic. It would be a mistake, however, to emphasize comics and graphic art over the double apprenticeship in television and artistic design. De la Iglesia is perhaps not unusual in using the small screen as a stepping stone to cinema during a period when regional and private television was expanding in Spain, but it is worth remembering this inside experience when we consider the ambivalent critique of television that runs through much of his cinema. That he came to directing through artistic design, rather than, say, cinematography, is also worth noting, given how distinctive a contribution production design makes to the ‘look’ of the films. It is also worth remarking on the geographical trajectory followed here, with a movement from a localized and alternative Basque scene in Bilbao to a national and mainstream commercial setting in Madrid. As we will suggest later in this introduction, this relocation is in no sense complete, and the tension between the provincial and the metropolitan remains active in many of the films. But perhaps the most valuable insight we can draw from this capsule curriculum only becomes apparent when we stop considering it in isolation as the work of an individual. That is, this simple list of projects, major and minor, takes on greater significance when we consider the patterns of collaboration evident within it.

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Once, not that long ago, there was a trend to refer to authors in inverted commas as a way of indicating that the proper name was simply an arbitrary and contingent marker, a necessary fiction to hold together a disparate bundle of texts. In cinema studies, meanwhile, there is the commonplace, but necessary, observation that the director’s name is effectively only shorthand for a team of collaborators who have designed, filmed, performed in, composed music for, produced and edited a final product. ‘Álex de la Iglesia’, then, is not an individual who makes films, but a protean set of alliances shaping and reshaping around a fixed core of collaborators. This collaborative core, which formed in Bilbao prior to any cinematic work, is at the heart of all the feature films, as well as assembling in whole or in part for Mama, Detrás del sirimiri, Mirindas asesinas, and Marbella antivicio. This collective body, at one point known as the ‘Morgens’, is made up of Álex de la Iglesia; Jorge Guerricaechevarría, who is co-scriptwriter of all the films; and José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri) and Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) who are artistic designers on all the films. The division of labour is very clear, as the director himself has told us, but the films should always be considered the product of this Bilbao-born unit. Also emerging from the Basque context on the technical side is the cinematographer for El día de la bestia, Perdita Durango, Muertos de risa and 800 balas, Flavio Martínez Labiano, as well as the bilbaino Kiko de la Rica (cinematography on Mirindas asesinas and La comunidad), and the costume designer on Acción mutante and El día de la bestia, Estíbaliz Markiegi. If we are interested in constructing a narrative of development in the cinema of ‘Álex de la Iglesia’, of breaking it, for example, into phases, then perhaps the most fruitful areas to examine are the provisional and temporary partnerships formed with producers, performers and composers. In each case a different story can be told, a different set of ‘phases’ identified. The narrative we could put together on the basis of De la Iglesia’s three producers might easily descend into clichés: early support from a high-profile patron launches the young director’s career; a stable home in a major production company guarantees big budgets and yields some major Spanish blockbusters; and a dispute with the big producer forces the now-established director into the wilderness to set up his own production company. Acción mutante, De la Iglesia’s opera prima (debut feature) was made under the auspices of Pedro Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo, and as a result De la Iglesia was for some time seen as a disciple of

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Almodóvar. The fact of the matter is that the alliance was short-lived because Almodóvar disliked the satanic elements in El día de la bestia and declined to produce the script. However, it is true that De la Iglesia’s cinema shares with Almodóvar’s an exuberant use of popular genres and a disdain for the dominant conventions of realism, matters that we take up in detail in Chapter 1. El día de la bestia was eventually picked up by the Iberoamericana–Lolafilms organization run by one of Spain’s most powerful producers, Andrés Vicente Gómez, who had recently entered into an ambitious agreement with the communications firm Sogetel and the PRISA group to produce 30 films between 1994 and 1996. Although Gómez has financed films right across the spectrum of Spanish film-making, he is associated with large budgets and international productions, and under his supervision, De la Iglesia gained a reputation for spectacle, special effects and free spending. The partnership lasted for three more films – Perdita Durango, Muertos de risa, and La comunidad – before ending unhappily with De la Iglesia breaking away to form his own production company, Pánico. The break was not a bid for autonomy, because De la Iglesia had always enjoyed considerable independence under Lolafilms’ management. It came about after Gómez finally pulled the plug on a project De la Iglesia and his team had been preparing for many years: a big budget international co-production based on the legend of Fu Manchu to be filmed entirely in English. It is perhaps too early to judge, but the Pánico-produced films, 800 balas and Crimen ferpecto, although reasonably successful, have not enjoyed the enormous box-office returns of the work made under Iberoamericana and Lolafilms, with their powerful distribution networks. Over the course of this book, we inevitably have quite a few things to say about casting and performances in the individual films, particularly in the chapters on Perdita Durango, La comunidad, and 800 balas. It is also possible to consider the films collectively in terms of the shifting ensembles of actors who take part in them. From this overarching perspective, a couple of key developments can be observed. Firstly, while the constitution of the technical team on all seven feature films retains a distinctly Basque influence, the same cannot be said for the acting talent. Mirindas asesinas and Acción mutante both rely heavily on actors whose formation was in Basque theatre companies: Álex Angulo, Ramón Barea, Karra Elejalde, Saturnino García. While Angulo went on to be a central performer in El día de la bestia and Muertos de risa, and Barea appears in small roles in Muertos de risa,

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La comunidad, and 800 balas, the participation level of Basque performers dwindles progressively. Secondly, and more significantly in terms of the consequences for the overall texture of the films, there is a key change of personnel for central roles after Muertos de risa (with Perdita Durango an exception for reasons outlined in Chapter 3). In Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, and Muertos de risa the ‘De la Iglesian star’ is embodied by Angulo, Santiago Segura and El Gran Wyoming, while in La comunidad, 800 balas and Crimen ferpecto, it is Carmen Maura, Sancho Gracia, Terele Pávez and Guillermo Toledo who take on this responsibility. There are obviously certain points of overlap – Pávez appears in El día de la bestia and Gracia has a small part in Muertos de risa – but one can still very profitably break the entire work of Álex de la Iglesia into two basic periods: pre- and post- Álex Angulo and Santiago Segura. The actors of the first period are drawn from outside the Spanish star system, and are distinctly notable for their lack of movie star good looks. The success of El día de la bestia brought Segura and Angulo to prominence, and Segura’s subsequent ventures in the Torrente series made him possibly the most recognizable film star in Spain. However, this was a version of stardom constructed in spite of, or even in opposition to, the standard aesthetic criteria. In fact, the ugliness of Segura and Angulo is a feature exploited and even amplified in all the work they appear in for De la Iglesia (Angulo and Segura also participated in Marbella antivicio and Segura has a small role in Perdita Durango). In addition, neither Segura nor El Gran Wyoming had any formal training in acting, the former getting his start in underground horror and the latter in music and television comedy. The actors of the second period, by contrast, are all established film performers. Even though, with the exception of Toledo, they are not the stars of the moment when they appear in De la Iglesia’s films, they nevertheless bring with them well-known star personas. Carmen Maura, for example, was in the 1980s one of the most high-profile Spanish actresses internationally, thanks to her participation in Almodóvar films, but also nationally, as a consequence of her broad and constant cinematic and televisual exposure. As a result, the later films, even though they retain many of the design values of the first three or four, lose some of the subcultural significations produced by the presence of Angulo and Segura. Acción mutante and El día de la bestia, which paint pictures of obscure, underground worlds, were able to become cult movies thanks in part to their unknown and unattractive performers. La comunidad constructs a similarly dark and hidden

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world, but could never take on cult value, given the notoriety of its stars, and by that stage, its director. The same gradual movement away from the subcultural can also be detected in the final area of teamwork we want to briefly consider: the musical accompaniment. From Muertos de risa onwards, the film scores have all been composed by Roque Baños. In his notes to the CD of the music for 800 balas, De la Iglesia praises Baños and makes the following comments about the importance of a musical score: La música es como un amigo que, sentado a tu lado, te explica la película, te avisa si tienes que emocionarte, o reírte, o aplaude contento cuando llegan los Buenos. La música además, viste la película, construye la imagen. (Baños 2002) The music is like a friend who, sitting next to you, explains the film to you, tells you when to get emotional, when to laugh, or when to applaud because the good guys have arrived. The music also clothes the film, constructs the image.

This is a fairly conventional understanding of movie music in that it assumes that music should go with the grain of the image, working in a heightening capacity. According to this view, music in film is a faithful helpmate to the narrative, but should not call attention to itself. It is true that music functions admirably in this capacity in Muertos de risa, La comunidad, 800 balas, and Crimen ferpecto, but we would argue that the music in the films from the earlier period does not work in quite this way, tending towards dissonance and certainly calling attention to itself. The indie rock group Def Con Dos provided the music for Acción mutante as well as the title track for El día de la bestia, which features a number of other groups from the Spanish underground jevi (heavy metal) scene, including Headcrash, Soziedad Alkoholica, Negu Gorriak, Pleasure Fuckers, Sugar Ray and Siniestro Total. The disharmonious nature of this genre of music means that it can hardly function well in the ‘background’, but tends instead to be what Brecht calls ‘gestural’. The same might be said for Perdita Durango, which often favours jarring rock music, although it had a conventional score by the composer Simon Boswell. If the earlier films tend to show their seams more than the later ones, this can partly be attributed to the relative inexperience of the film-makers, but is also partly down to the choice of collaborative partnerships made. We have been emphasizing the ways in which the constitution of the ‘Álex de la Iglesia’ film-making team and the changes in personnel

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it undergoes impact subtly or overtly on the final product that bears the director’s name. In doing so, we are not saying anything controversial, for De la Iglesia himself has always called attention to the collaborative nature of the enterprise. In a series of interviews conducted in 1997, he laid out this position very clearly: Frente al tío que va de autor, yo siempre estaré a favor del grupo, del equipo. Una de las herencias más nefastas de la Nouvelle Vague fue la política de autores, según la cual parece que cualquier cosa que hiciera un supuesto autor iba inmediatamente a misa. Ya sé que a todo el mundo le encanta la Nouvelle Vague, pero sería interesante revisar sus problemas: Desprestigió por completo el rodaje en estudio y con decorados, promocionó un modelo de iluminación horrenda . . . Y, sobre todo, en su faceta de críticos, en Cahiers, hizo olvidar justamente eso: que las películas son una labor de equipo. Cuando las cosas están parcializadas se consigue una mayor especialización y mejores resultados. (Ordóñez 1997, 85–6) As opposed to the guy who styles himself an auteur, I’ll always be in favour of the group, of the team. One of the most unfortunate legacies of the Nouvelle Vague was the ‘politique des auteurs’, according to which it seems that everything done by a supposed auteur was automatically right. I know that everyone likes the Nouvelle Vague, but we shouldn’t forget its shortcomings: the total devaluation of sets and studio shooting, the promotion of a horrendous lighting model . . . and above all, in their work as critics for Cahiers they tried to make us forget that films are the product of teamwork. When work is divided and allocated, you get an increased specialization and better results.

He also suggests that he became the director in the team as a result of circumstances rather than inevitability: De repente, a Pablo [Berger] . . . le salió la oportunidad de estudiar en una escuela de cine de Nueva York y allí sigue. Muchas veces he pensado que, de no ser por eso, el director de cine sería él y yo me hubiera quedado de director artístico. (Ordóñez 1997, 88–9) Suddenly, Pablo [Berger] . . . had the opportunity to study in a film school in New York, and he’s still over there. I’ve often thought that if that had not been the case, he’d be the director and I’d have stayed as artistic director.

However, it is worth adding that in a later interview with us, De la Iglesia very firmly claimed ultimate responsibility for mise-en-scène as well as editing, so the rhetoric of the team eventually runs up against

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the reality of hierarchies. Of even more interest on this account is the way in which, in spite of the various assertions about collective production, the star persona of De la Iglesia has been carefully cultivated by the films’ publicity machine and by other media such as the director’s website. Prominent among these is the very book of interviews we have been citing from, whose title, La bestia anda suelta: ¡Álex de la Iglesia lo cuenta todo! / The Beast Is on the Loose: Alex de la Iglesia Tells All!, identifies the director intimately with his most successful film, turning him into the beast of El día de la bestia. Paul Julian Smith has commented on the ways in which publicity for Pedro Almodóvar’s films encourages audiences to identify him directly with the characters he has created. For Kika (1993), Almodóvar appeared in photomontages playing the parts of all his characters, suggesting that each is simply an aspect of the auteur’s personality (see Smith 2000, 169). The identification of De la Iglesia with ‘the beast’ may be empathy of a slightly different order, but is not necessarily out of place if we consider the fans of horror and gore De la Iglesia attracts. Like Almodóvar, then, and in spite of the importance of the team, he enjoys, as an individual, very high media exposure. He admits himself that he is one of the most publicly recognizable film directors in Spain (Lakunza 1999, 5), a state of affairs that has to be manufactured rather than simply coming about as a matter of course. Álex de la Iglesia is clearly a commodity, and his image and name are as much a part of the marketing strategies for the films as the stars. However, he is not an art-house property like Saura or Medem, whose names raise altogether more sober expectations in the filmgoer, and the persona is tailored accordingly. What, then, are the defining traits of the De la Iglesia persona? An extract from an ‘Autoentrevista demencial’ (Demented self-interview) in the press book for La comunidad is a good place to start: Me piden una autoentrevista para el Pressbook. ¿Y el periodista? ¿También me ha abandonado, como el desodorante? . . . Veo un individuo exageradamente gordo, con barba, quizá para disimular su rostro aniñado, con rosados mofletes. Sin embargo, ya no parece joven. . . . Las manitas regordetas que cuelgan alegres de sus brazos dan un poco de grima: como dijo una vez Wyoming, parecen un ‘manojo de pollas’. La barriga, que se extiende inmensa como un planeta desierto bajo sus pantalones de chandal, ocupa generosamente el centro del cuerpo y parece su auténtico cerebro. Los pies congestionados sobreviven a cientos de grados centígrados en el interior de unas zapatillas viejas de deporte.

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No se atreven a salir más que de noche, angustiados por el peso que abruma sus conciencias. Evidentemente Álex de la Iglesia no parece ser una persona obsesionada por mejorar su aspecto, y muchos menos su higiene. (Lolafilms 2000, 9) They ask me for a self-interview for the Pressbook. And the journalist? Abandoned me, like my deodorant? . . . I see an exaggeratedly fat individual, with a beard, perhaps to conceal a child’s face, with its chubby, rosy cheeks. However, he doesn’t look young any more. The chubby little hands which dangle happily from his arms are a little creepy: as Wyoming once said, they look like a ‘bunch of pricks’. His belly, which is enormous, emerges like a desert planet from his sweatpants and takes over the centre of his body, looking like it might be his real brain. His feet are trapped inside an old pair of trainers, suffering at hundreds of degrees centrigrade. They only come out at night, such is their shame. Evidently Álex de la Iglesia cares little for his appearance, and even less so for personal hygiene.

The self-interview carries on in this mocking fashion, refusing to engage in the game of serious cinematic discourse. The general effect is of a frivolous figure: cheeky, mischievous, deliberately trivializing, perhaps a little immature. This same persona usually appears in the presence of real journalists, particularly at the release of new films. It can be seen as well on the DVD version of El día de la bestia, where the director, in an arch-Hitchcockian send-up, appears in an armchair surrounded by skulls to introduce the film in a manner reminiscent of the ‘good evening’ introductions of the English director to his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It is the sort of ironic self-dramatization and self-promotion practised so successfully and for so long by Salvador Dalí. Nor should we underestimate what is going on here: Franco’s cultural mandarins always frowned on frivolity, and their inheritors under democracy, whatever their political stripe, have steadfastly continued to do so, as Almodóvar, another openly frivolous figure, can testify. The emphasis in the self-interview on the director’s obesity and generally repulsive physical appearance is an exaggeration to say the least, but is also essential to the persona. The ample gut is emblematic, almost embodying an ideological position. Just as the characters in the films reject or fail abjectly to live up to a cultural regime of health, beauty and propriety, so the director’s corpulence proselytizes for another path, of deodorant-free gluttony and unconstrained excess. His reverse vanity, which mirrors his dishevelled and unattractive protagonists, is therefore an integral component in the

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De la Iglesia film machine. Santiago Segura, the perfect incarnation in the films of this ideal of physical repulsiveness, has cultivated, in parallel with De la Iglesia, a very similar star persona. And once again, the contrast with Segura is very instructive, for frivolity and fatness are far from being the sum total of the De la Iglesia persona. Although he most often appears in t-shirts emblazoned with skulls, cartoon characters, or the names of heavy metal bands, suggesting a continuing intimacy with all things adolescent, also perpetually present are sets of dark-framed glasses, which give a counter-balancing air of intellectuality. The DVD to El día de la bestia may contain a certain amount of play-acting, but De la Iglesia also provides a sequence-by-sequence commentary on the film, outlining key technical aspects, as he does on DVD releases of the other films. An important by-product of DVD technology is the way it has allowed the re-centring of the director as source of meaning, with directors’ cuts and running commentary, and De la Iglesia has fully availed himself of this opportunity. He is, then, at the same time professional wit and dedicated metteur-en-scène. When critics, whether journalistic or academic, search for biographical facts to repeat about De la Iglesia, they invariably come up with the same two: his background in comics, and his degree in Philosophy from the University of Deusto. What could sum up better the twin polarities of the ‘popular auteur’? The mask and the mannequin This book treats each film independently; its structure is self-evident. There are, however, a series of threads that tie it together, a set of recurring arguments and theses that are worth rehearsing here. Among these is the supposed visual ‘style’ of the director’s films. We spend considerable time describing and analysing the distinctive miseen-scène of each of the individual films, but it is not until the very end that we risk any broad generalizations about the ‘typical’ style of the films as a collective entity. Chapter 7 reads the production design of Crimen ferpecto against that of the other six films and identifies three key recurring elements. Briefly, and without preempting the discussion in the final chapter, these are: (1) an aesthetics of shabbiness, decay and dilapidation (also discussed in relation to Acción mutante and La comunidad); (2) a proclivity for baroque interiors and a concomitant horror of empty space; and (3) a preference for building sets over shooting on location, but often expressed by paradoxically building sets

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‘on location’. In addition to these three aspects of production or artistic design, we might point out a general ethos of film-making that is summed up by De la Iglesia in an interview in 2004. Asked whether he felt all his films were in one way or another ‘comedias de acción’ (action comedies), he replied, No, me gusta rodar de todo. Pero la acción requiere un control técnico que me resulta muy atractivo, rodar esas sequencias especialmente complejas técnicamente. Como espectador, prefiero el cine de acción, de hecho, creo que el cine es acción: dos tíos hablando no es cine, es una postal; dos tíos en una cama no es cine. Es un problema de definición del cine como tal. El cine son imágenes en movimiento sobra una pantalla de luz con gente sentada y si las lucecitas no se mueven no es cine. Hay mucha gente que hace diaporamas, que pueden ser buenos, pero no neguemos que es un diaporama, no cine. (Martín 2004, 13) No, I like making all sorts of films. But action does require a certain technical control that I find very attractive: putting together those especially complicated sequences. As a spectator I prefer cinema of action, in fact, I believe that all cinema is action: two people talking isn’t cinema, it’s a postcard; two people in a bed isn’t cinema. It’s a problem of the definition of cinema as such. Cinema is images in movement on an illuminated screen in front of an audience, and if the little lights don’t move, it’s not cinema. There are lots of people who make dioramas, which can be nice, but we mustn’t forget that it’s a diorama and not cinema.

An orthodox Aristotelian, De la Iglesia unambiguously pins his colours here to a cinema of narrative and spectacle. Within a Hollywood context, this would be a safely conservative position to occupy, but within a Spanish film-making culture, it has a very different significance. Spanish film, like all European film, cannot dream of competing with the enormous resources of Hollywood production, and as a result it more often than not places its meagre wager on static dialogue, character-studies and cultural capital (as in the case of literary adaptations). Or at least this was the case before De la Iglesia and some of his contemporaries came on the scene. Certainly, in 1993, Acción mutante was hailed as a harbinger of something new. It was not just the hyperbolic statements of a few converts such as Rene Santamaría Amat, who wrote, ‘Acción mutante es trabajo “deslumbrante” como nunca antes se había conocido en España’ (Acción mutante is a dazzling work, unlike anything we have known before in Spain’) (Santamaría Amat 1993, 46). On 15 May 1993, the bullish first issue of El Mundo’s film pull-out, Cinelandia, announced, ‘El cine español se

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pone de pie. El cine español echa a andar con una cámara en la mano. Algo nuevo está ocurriendo. El paralítico, el desahuciado, se levanta y filma’ (Spanish cinema has got to its feet. Spanish cinema is beginning to walk with a camera in its hands. Something new is happening. The paralytic, the dying one, has risen and is filming) (Hidalgo 1993, 1). These lines were written under two separate headlines: ‘Los nuevos cineastas españoles están aquí’ (The new Spanish film-makers are here) and ‘Acción mutante en el cine español’ (Mutant action in Spanish cinema). The symbolic centrality of De la Iglesia to this new dawn was reinforced by the illustrations on the front page, which reproduced and then adapted the logo from Acción mutante.3 To privilege the kinetic possibilities of cinema, as De la Iglesia did then, and still does, is a bold move within the Spanish context. It is in this light that we should consider certain characteristic features of the films: the use of sudden violence, the speed of camera movements, or the speed of objects or actors within the frame. At the same time we need to keep in mind on what sort of resources this kinetic manifesto is built. Although De la Iglesia has a reputation for commanding big budgets, he works on a shoestring in comparison with the finances mobilized for a Hollywood blockbuster. Issues of cinematography and mise-en-scène will continue to be examined throughout the book, but for the purposes of this introduction, we would like to identify two specific elements of mise-enscène which appear so often in the films that they demand further attention. From the very beginning this is a cinema striking for its use of masks and mannequins. These two aspects of production design are of course marked by their artificiality, even theatricality, and their presence in the films signals economically a break from the realist tradition. Breaking from realism also entails breaking from humanism, and masks and mannequins play their part here too. In addition, the mask and the mannequin, if we trace their pedigree, can lead us to very different sources. On the one hand, they are staples of comedy and one of its modern variants, horror. But as well as these low-brow filiations, the mask of course has antecedents in high culture, and the mannequin found favour among twentieth-century avant-gardes. In other words, in the mask and the mannequin we can find summed up many of the problems and paradoxes of Álex de la Igleisia’s cinema. The two elements are put to varied use in the films. In De la Iglesia’s first short, Mirindas asesinas, Álex Angulo’s ‘tubular killer’ breaks off

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from terrorizing his fellow customers in a bar to stare into a uniquely Basque piece of kitsch against a wall. Inside a glass case there is a machine which dispenses children’s toys. Presiding over the machine is the slightly larger than life-size plastic or wax figure of Olentxero, the Basque Father Christmas, who returns Angulo’s mad stare with an unperturbed and sightless gaze. In Crimen ferpecto, meanwhile, Lourdes conceals the dead body of Don Antonio in a skiing outfit, complete with padded jacket, and he remains safely unnoticed on the display floor for an entire day. When night falls, Lourdes and Rafael take the corpse to the basement in order to feed it to the store furnace. Lourdes takes responsibility for dismembering Don Antonio, and each time her cleaver comes down on his joints, bits of stuffing fly up from the ski jacket he still wears, making it seem as if she is chopping up a large doll or a toy animal. Between De la Iglesia’s first short film and his seventh feature, there any many such appearances by what in Castilian are called muñecos. No word in English has quite the flexibility of muñeco, which takes in doll, dummy and effigy among its meanings. We use the word mannequin, but that hardly captures the range of human simulacra to be found in the films. There are, for example, the robot bouncers at the doors of the wedding party in Acción mutante, and the lacquered mechanical priest inside. As well as the conventional fashion mannequins of Crimen ferpecto, there is the demonic baby in the occultist shop window of El día de la bestia and Nino’s incomplete sex-doll in Muertos de risa. Also in Muertos de risa is the wax museum featuring Spanish comic greats Tip y Coll and, later, the mock-up of himself that Nino assembles from a mannequin’s head and a dressmaker’s dummy in order to cast replacements for his partner Bruno. And if we stretch slightly the meaning of mannequin, there are the wax and latex corpses found in Perdita Durango and La comunidad and the hanged man of 800 balas. As for masks, they are even more abundant. They are sometimes worn by childish characters, such as Carlos at the opening of 800 balas, who sports first a terrorist balaclava and then a samurai helmet; or Charly in La comunidad, who alternates Darth Vader and Stormtrooper masks from Star Wars. And just as mannequins are exploited for their comic value, so are masks: José María clowns about in the various primitive masks hanging in Professor Cavan’s apartment in El día de la bestia, and Don Antonio’s death is rendered ridiculous by the ski mask, scarf and wooly hat that Lourdes disguises him in. At yet other times, a concealed face contains an implicit threat of violence, as with

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the heavy helmets of policemen in Acción mutante and 800 balas or the Mexican wrestler’s mask Romeo uses to hold up a bank in Perdita Durango. There is a nod to slasher films in the half-mask that Ramón wears in Acción mutante to hide his scarred and mutilated features. And while not technically speaking masks, there are variations on the clown’s face in Perdita Durango, Muertos de risa, and Crimen ferpecto. Finally, there is of course the abandoned project, The Mask of Fu Manchu. In any case, throughout the films, there is a tendency to obscure the faces of performers, either with make-up or with other masking devices. In Chapter 3 we explore in depth what impact this propensity for masks and mannequins has at the level of performance, and what implications follow for subjectivity in general in De la Iglesia’s films. What is worth noting here is that these masks and mannequins are not simply discrete objects that crop up at various points as reminders that this is a ‘film by De la Iglesia’, acting as a sort of signature, like the iconic goat of El día de la bestia which turns up again in Perdita Durango and Muertos de risa, or the bottle of Marqués de Riscal which apparently works its way into all the films. Their logic extends well beyond their individual manifestations so that characters without masks sometimes act as if they are wearing one, and not only do mannequins become characters, but characters are often treated as if they were mannequins. The clearest instance is the comedian Nino in Muertos de risa, whose success is based on the impassivity with which he receives slaps in the face. No matter what the circumstances in which the slap is delivered, he remains perfectly expressionless, registering neither anticipatory fear nor consequent pain. When the comedians Nino and Bruno appear on the talk-show Directísimo, Bruno explains to the host that Nino doesn’t feel a thing, that he is ‘como un muñeco’ (like a doll). Nino combines therefore the unchanging qualities of the mask and the unfeeling nature of the mannequin. We are not arguing that this cinema is somehow a throwback to Greek theatre, with its fixed tragic and comic masks. A more apposite comparison might be with puppet theatre in its more violent manifestations, or with the dialectic of malice and humiliation found among circus clowns; and Chapters 2 and 4 explore at greater length the importance of slapstick traditions in particular to the films. In any case, the frequency with which masks and mannequins appear is a strong reminder that De la Iglesia’s cinema is predominantly, if not exclusively, comedy, and as a result draws on character types rather

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than purporting to depict for us unique individuals. This is, of course, another way of saying that the mask and the mannequin allow, like the hatchet in the head, departures from the dominant codes of realism. This mode, which we prefer to call illusionism, takes for granted, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that characters in fiction are human. Masks, on the other hand, deny access to the reassuring expressivity of the human face, while mannequins present us with an uncanny double of our own bodies, mocking the corporeality that realism so confidently portrays. Cinema is by no means short of automata or cyborgs which impersonate living flesh, but it generally does so in an illusionist mode, deploying abundant technical resources to convince us of the authenticity of its mannequins. The same could not be said of the cheap mechanical robots of Acción mutante or the bricoleur’s sex-doll and stand-in conjured by Nino in Muertos de risa. In its Hollywood manifestation (from Westworld through Terminator to I, Robot) the high-tech mannequin hints at the perfectibility of the human form and the prowess of its makers, only to retreat to the safe ground of humanist morality-tale at the level of the plot, even if it is in fact the technological means employed to produce the mannequineffects which are being venerated. In Álex de la Iglesia, the mannequin functions in almost the opposite way. Patently imperfect and unconvincing, it mimics the comic failings of the human body and the indignities it is subject to, whilst emphasizing the jerry-built nature of the filmic world. If from dadaism is inherited a taste for provocation and a contempt for bourgeois values, the fascination with mannequins can be traced to surrealism. From the mid-1930s this found object of commercial culture made regular appearances in surrealist art and exhibitions. The leading proponent of the use of mannequins in art was the German Hans Bellmer, whose text Die Puppe (1934) was made up of a series of photographs of a female doll in a number of states of disarticulation. The ‘Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme’ in 1938 at the Galérie Beaux Arts, Paris, included an installation of mannequins by Dalí, Max Ernst, Marcel Jean, André Masson and Roberto Matta for a ‘Surrealist Street’; and Dalí’s Dream of Venus pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 carried on the use of this object. The appeal of the muñeco for surrealism is both formal and conceptual. The sinew-less doll or mannequin is governed by the automatism so valued by the movement as a mode of access to unconscious processes. Since its limbs and joints are not governed by a waking consciousness, it is subject above all to

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chance: dropped from a height or thrown into a corner, the subsequent arrangement of its parts cannot be predicted. And those detachable parts are imminently subject to the manipulation and assemblages of collage, a favoured technique of the surrealists. Mary Ann Caws argues that the ‘dislocated and separated body parts that appear frequently in surrealist imagery can . . . be interpreted negatively as a trace of trauma and psychological disturbance . . . but they can also be a positive manifestation of desire’ (2004, 30) In Chapter 3, under the rubric of ‘the body in pieces’, we tackle this same preoccupation with ‘dislocated and separated body parts’ in the cinema of De la Iglesia, although we reach slightly different conclusions than Caws, with a little help from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Politics I: modernity/anachronism Another important lesson that this cinema has learnt from surrealism is the tactic of incongruity, of the striking juxtaposition of opposites, although unlike in surrealism, the meeting is not left to chance. We are by no means the first to notice it, but Álex de la Iglesia’s films regularly stage a troubled encounter between modernity and its others. Paul Julian Smith detects ‘the conflict between tradition and modernity’ in the opening credits of El día de la bestia, where a group of ‘raggle-taggle beggars complete with goat’ occupy the same image as ‘the twin towers of the skyscrapers known as the “Gate of Europe”’ (Smith 1996, 42); and Jordi Costa notes something similar in La comunidad, calling Terele Pávez’ Matrix-style leap ‘una destilación de esa suma de tradición y modernidad que define la estética del cineasta’ (a distillation of that mixture of tradition and modernity that defines the director’s aesthetic) (Costa 2000). We are not convinced, however, that ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ work quite like this in the films. Metropolitan modernity is certainly evident and is embodied variously in fashion and the ideology of fitness (Acción mutante), in television (El día de la bestia and Muertos de risa), in American culture (Perdita Durango), in the predations of Madrid real estate developers (800 balas) and in consumer society (La comunidad and Crimen ferpecto). ‘Tradition’ is somewhat more elusive, however. It can perhaps be glimpsed in Nino’s mother in Muertos de risa, uprooted from her Castilian village to a gleaming Madrid suburb, or in the Basque priest, Father Berriartúa, similarly displaced from the provinces to the metropolis in El día de la bestia, but there the examples begin to run

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dry. There is no shortage of characters ranged against modernity in these films, but the fact is that most of them do not stand for ‘tradition’ in any conventional sense of the word. Julián and his band of stuntmen hold out against the Madrid developers in 800 balas, but they themselves are the products of an imminently modern cinematic genre: the spaghetti western. And Ramón and the rest of his terrorist group in Acción mutante may violently reject a consumerist culture obsessed with health and beauty, but they fly in a spaceship and benefit from an impressive array of technological prostheses. Arjun Appadurai argues in Modernity at Large that too much of modernization theory is predicated on an unexamined opposition between modernity and the ‘tradition’ it supposedly displaces. This theoretical position ‘has steadily reinforced the sense of some single moment – call it the modern moment – that by its appearance creates a dramatic and unprecedented break between past and present. Reincarnated as the break between tradition and modernity and typologized as the difference between ostensibly traditional and modern societies, this view has been shown repeatedly to distort the meanings of change and the politics of pastness. Yet the world in which we now live – in which modernity is decisively at large, irregularly selfconscious, and unevenly experienced – surely does involve a general break with all sorts of pasts’ (Appadurai 1996, 3). Appadurai’s corrective is crucial: he calls into doubt the category of ‘tradition’, but retains the idea of modernity as a force of rupture. Modernity is not the Manichean opponent of tradition, but it nevertheless intervenes decisively in our relationship with the past. This perspective corresponds more closely with what we observe in De la Iglesia’s films. They do not, in general, stage a clash between the traditional and the modern, but rather, depict a world in which modernity is, in Appadurai’s words, ‘unevenly experienced’. The key concept for us here is anachronism: the films present us with a series of people and places temporally out-of-joint. Among the people, there are, for example, the mutant terrorists of Acción mutante, the priest and the heavy metal fan of El día de la bestia, the two comedians at the end of Muertos de risa, the community of La comunidad; and among the places, the pensión of El día de la bestia, the apartment building of La comunidad, the Western town of 800 balas, and the arcade at the end of Crimen ferpecto. These people and places exist alongside their more accelerated and advanced counterparts, and act as a reminder that progress is not only uneven, but not progressive for all concerned.

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To understand what is at stake here it is necessary to provide a little contextual information. Chapter 1 gives a sense of the cinematic contexts into which De la Iglesia emerged, but we can profit as well by sketching out something of the socio-historical situation of the early 1990s in Spain. The previous generation, in the form of Almodóvar and the movida, explored in an often ludic spirit the lifting of Francoist constraints and the coming of democracy, but De la Iglesia’s generation arrives at the end of that party. If De la Iglesia and his team, as they were putting together Acción mutante, happened to look out from their studio, they would have encountered a veritable feast of selfcongratulation, for 1992 was a bumper year for Spain’s public image. Madrid was the cultural capital of Europe, Seville was hosting the Expo, Barcelona the Olympics, and there were also the unselfconscious Quincentennial celebrations of 1492, hardly dampened at all by political objections. In 1992, Spain was 40% wealthier than it had been in 1980, and whereas 23% of the population considered itself middle class in 1982, 54% did so in 1992 (Montero 1995, 319). Spain had gained admission to the European Economic Community in 1986 and, after a seven-year period of gradual economic integration, became a full member of the club as the Maastricht treaty of 1992 brought down the last barriers to the movement of goods and peoples between participating states. From being for so long a shameful political anachronism on the edge of modern Europe, Spain had undergone a highly accelerated process of modernization, and could bask in its newfound respectability. The Socialist government’s plan to ‘lavar la cara de España’ (clean the face of Spain) had yielded tangible results: one only had to look at a regenerated Barcelona to see proof of the successful rehabilitation of Spain as a modern democratic country. This may all make for excellent tourist brochures and end-of-year reports to the cultural commission, but it is hardly the stuff of drama, never mind black comedy. More to the point, ‘the triumph of neoliberal theology’ – as Eric Hobsbawm describes the ‘tough economic reforms’ presided over by Western governments left and right in the 1980s – could not conceal completely the social and economic detritus left behind by full-blown marketization (1994, 431). It is this impossible fairy-tale of fully achieved modernity that the films will not accept. A single scene in Acción mutante sums up this skepticism about the rhetoric of accelerated progress. The surviving members of the terrorist band are on board the Virgen del Carmen spaceship en route to the mining planet Axturias. They are playing

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cards and bickering as an open stove in the background keeps them warm. Also in the background is a small television, on whose flickering screen can indistinctly be seen a wheelchair race, presumably from the Barcelona paralympics. Far from being accepted by and integrated into the able-bodied world in the manner of disabled athletes, though, these characters are totally at odds with it, and in fact resistant to the blandishments of progress. This is not to say that they represent tradition, for they are recognizably modern, but their modernity is of a decrepitude that hardly matches up with the progressive ideals embodied in wheelchair races. The television itself, with its hyperactive news broadcasts, plays an important part in De la Iglesia’s critique of modernity. As part of its economic integration into Western capitalism in the early 1990s, Spain saw the licensing and development of its first private television stations, and the resultant expansion of mass mediation. As we argue in Chapters 2 and 4, the films are ambivalent at best about this crucial aspect of Spain’s rapid modernization. Boal, Clark, Matthews and Watts have recently and compellingly argued for ‘a non-nostalgic, non-anathematizing, non-regressive, nonfundamental, non-apocalyptic critique of the modern’ (Retort 2005, 185) We are not confident that De la Iglesia’s films avoid all of these potential pitfalls in their critique of the modern, but the uneven and inevitably incomplete process of modernization is a subject which shadows all of them, and a problem we explore at greatest length in the chapters on La comunidad and 800 balas. Politics II: Basque allegiances In an earlier section of this introduction we argued that the creative crucible of this body of work was urban but non-metropolitan: the posttransition Bilbao of the 1980s. This basic fact prompts some more substantial questions. To what extent do those origins impact upon the content of the films, particularly given that the site of production quickly changed to Madrid? And more contentiously, to what extent can De la Iglesia’s films be considered part of a Basque cinema? These are not questions that we pursue at any length in The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia. This is not because we are avoiding the issue. It is simply that investigating the Basqueness of this cinema is not a very fruitful line of enquiry, for there is very little material to go on. Unlike his immediate Basque contemporary, Julio Medem, who has consistently addressed issues of Basque history, culture and politics (in Vacas, La

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Pelota Vasca, Aitor), De la Iglesia never explicitly enters this territory. Nevertheless, De la Iglesia and his collaborators from Bilbao all have lengthy entries in the encyclopedia of Basque cinema, Los Vascos y el séptimo arte, and the films they have produced are cited as an essential part of ‘una etapa dorada para el cine de Euskadi’ (a golden chapter in the history of Basque cinema’ (Larreta 2004, 39) that was the 1990s. But these honours are not based on the content of the films, or even, for that matter, on their sources of funding. If one wants to find the ‘Basque’ themes and concerns in De la Iglesia, one is forced to find them expressed indirectly, in displaced or coded forms. When we interviewed him, the director partially, but by no means enthusiastically, encouraged such an approach. We had asked him about the Jeep which Romeo Dolorosa drives in Perdita Durango, which has tyres inscribed with the words ‘Euskadi Radial’: A: [In English in original] It was a joke for the Basque people. I feel it is funny for me. It’s not only jokes, de una manera sutil. No creo que mis películas tengan una lectura política. Pero sí que reflejan una manera de pensar. Q: ¿[Quieres decir] Que te sientes vasco? A: Recuerdo una lectura muy curiosa de El día de la bestia. No soy yo quien debería decirlo. Creo que debe ser la gente que ve las películas. Pero sí que hay una preocupación por la violencia. La comunidad también me da esa sensación. La idea de la traición. A: It was a joke for the Basque people. I feel it is funny for me. It’s not only jokes, it’s more subtle than that. I don’t think my films have a political meaning. But they do reflect a certain way of thinking. Q: Do you mean you feel Basque? A: I remember a curious reading that was made of El día de la bestia. I’m not the one to decide. It has to be the people who see the films. But, yes, there is a preoccupation with violence. La comunidad also gives me this sensation. The idea of betrayal.

We do not go down the road of discovering in the films an allegorical account of the political injustices endured by the Basque country both under Franco and since democratic times, not the least because we are uneasy with the idea of any film somehow expressing anything as intangible as ‘cultural identity’.4 We do feel, however, that it is important to flag it up as a potential path not taken. Leaving aside the allegorical possibilities, there are other, more tangible, traces of the Basque country in the films. We have already mentioned the kitsch Olentxero of Mirindas asesinas and the ‘Euskadi

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Radial’ tyres of Perdita Durango. Other connections made with Euskadi in the films tend also to be in this allusive and ironic mode. Obviously, the terrorist group in Acción mutante could not exist without the political example of ETA, but the real Basque group is at best travestied in the film, which also includes a scene where one of the characters, in order to deceive intergalactic police, poses as a mock Basque fisherman, complete with striped shirt, beret, and exaggeratedly strong accent, while his colleagues hum a Basque tune in the background. The precredit sequence of El día de la bestia unfolds in a Basque church and when the film transposes to Madrid, Father Berriartúa very pointedly steps off a bus from Bilbao. The heroic priest is the only fully realized Basque protagonist in all the films, and it would be tempting to read El día de la bestia as an encounter between the corruptions of Madrid and the innocent idealism of the crusading Basque, even though Father Berriartúa considers himself a servant of God rather than Euskadi. It is true that Muertos de risa, as well as what we call in Chapter 7 the Madrid trilogy (El día de la bestia, La comunidad, and Crimen ferpecto), paint a dark and dystopian portrait of the Spanish capital. However, the critique of metropolitan modernity does not extend to an idealization of its regional others. On the contrary, Father Berriartúa is as much a figure of satire as he is a champion facing the demonic forces at work in Madrid. The allegiance to things Basque in these films, then, primarily takes the form of ironic detachment. Clichés about violence and the Basque country are recycled here as though in quotation marks: when Lourdes casts about the department store in search of a weapon to take her revenge on Rafael in Crimen ferpecto, she finds what she is looking for in a display case of knives of the Basque brand Aitor. Crimen ferpecto was partly subsidized by Euskal Irrati Telebista and was only the second of De la Iglesia’s seven feature films to receive any Basque funding. The first was 800 balas, which is set entirely in Madrid and Andalucía, but still received support from the Basque government. Under the funding guidelines that kick-started post-Franco Basque cinema in the early 1980s, 800 balas would not have received any support at all. Regulations laid down in 1984 set as a minimum requirement that all exterior locations be shot in Euskadi, that 75% of technical and performing staff be Basque, and that the film either be recorded in the Basque language or provide a dubbed version in it (Larreta 2004, 34). There are no Basque characters in 800 balas, but there is one from Cádiz, Manuel (Manuel Tallafé), who is under the delusion that he is

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2 Misplaced loyalties: Andalucian Athletic Bilbao fan in 800 balas

from Bilbao. In one scene in a bar he noisily cheers on the football team Athletic Bilbao on television, and refuses to be convinced by bar-owner Don Mariano (played by Basque actor Ramón Barea) that he is in fact from Andalucía. His misplaced allegiance, we are led to understand, is the result of falling once too often on his head as a stuntman. This is Basque cinema only in a negative sense, then, in that it issues gentle warnings against the dangers of cultural overidentification. Politics III: gender Perhaps the greatest potential hazard of this format – the study of a single film-maker – is a loss of critical distance. We might call ‘auteur infallibility’ the ailment that afflicts writers who become over-invested in their directors. Give in to it, and one ends up in the fatal trap of defending one’s subject at all costs. We are partisans, we admit: what would be the point, if we were not? But we are primarily concerned with Álex de la Iglesia’s cultural significance, not his aesthetic merits or moral worth. Our task, then, is to locate the director, not elevate him. Consequently, we would be negligent if we failed to consider the sexual

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politics of the films. Just as we return regularly in this book to questions of comedy and genre, to aspects of mise-en-scène, to the politics of modernity, and to De la Iglesia’s relationship to Spanish cinema history, so sexual difference and its status in the films will frequently receive our attention. One might legitimately ask why we should be detained at all by such a topic in relation to the Basque director. Surely it is an open and shut case? Certainly, on the face of it, the evidence for the prosecution is compelling. With the notable exception of La comunidad, and the partial exceptions of Perdita Durango and Crimen ferpecto, these films are above all men’s stories, where a skilled performer such as Terele Pávez may excel in a secondary role, but where the idea of a woman’s point of view is virtually unthinkable. Most typical perhaps is the pneumatically amplified younger woman whose major attributes are exaggeratedly emphasized by costume or mise-en-scène. So, Maria Grazia Cucinotta (Susana) in El día de la bestia totters into the film on over-sized heels, is quickly shrieking in Italian, and soon finds herself comically trussed and gagged in a bathtub. Carla Hidalgo (Laura) in Muertos de risa activates the rivalry between Nino and Bruno, and after smiling her way blandly through a few scenes, including one alone in the shower, vanishes from the plot. And in 800 balas, Yoima Valdés (Sonia), mainly giggling in genial fashion in her Wild West prostitute’s garb, provides emotional succour and moral support to the besieged stuntmen of Hollywood-Texas. What is more, gender is closely tied up in the films with both the critique of modernity and the director’s star persona. In the portrait we sketched of this persona, we did not point out that this is clearly a figure which is coded masculine. The refusal of the basic standards of hygiene, the pride in dishevelled appearance and unkempt clothing, and the emphasis on the director’s fatness: these features all turn up in various forms in the male characters in the films, and as we argue in the chapter on Muertos de risa, they can all be seen as modes of resistance to a domesticity which is coded feminine. In 800 balas, the young protagonist, Carlos, chooses the masculine world of his dusty, dirty, unshaven grandfather over the pristine Madrid suburb where his mother and grandmother rule the roost. The former world is a site of fun and play, the latter of tidiness and bedtimes. That women should be the ones to bear the greatest burden of domestic ideology and get depicted as the killjoys who ask you to clean up your room is hardly a new paradox of patriarchal relations. In this version of that paradox, women also get the blame for the negative aspects of modernity,

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particularly in the later films. Not only is Carlos’s mother Laura not nearly as entertaining as his grandfather, but she is a rapacious property-developer who works in a gleaming office block and drives a silver Mercedes (in marked contrast to the grandfather, who moves about on horseback). A similar logic is at work in Crimen ferpecto. That film is fiercely condemnatory of cultures of consumption as embodied in the modern department store. The double bind of femininity is operative in this instance as well. In modern consumer societies both the burdens and the pleasures of shopping fall disproportionately on women, who are enjoined to be narcissistic and yet at the same time find themselves damned for that narcissism. Unlike most of De la Iglesia’s male protagonists, Rafael in Crimen ferpecto is well integrated into this modern, feminized world. He is the head of ladies’ wear in Yeyo’s department store, and regales himself in the world of commodities and female shop assistants at his disposal. It is precisely this scenario that the film sets out to destroy: Rafael’s satisfaction with his artificial modernity is tested and shown to be wanting. After enduring a number of trials, including the horrors of Lourdes’ voracious sexual appetite (the reverse face of feminine consumption), he is thrown out of his fool’s paradise and into the shabby and anachronistic universe of De la Iglesia’s male heroes. His expulsion from ladies’ wear is a form of redemption, though, for he now finds himself in a small shop selling ties. In spite of this catalogue of stereotypical representations of women, overt misogyny will not be the central concern in our analysis of the films’ sexual politics. On the contrary, we will argue that this cinema is marked above all by a sexual indifference. Rather than going to great lengths to demarcate a femininity that is opposite and inferior to a privileged masculinity, De la Iglesia’s films instead tend to efface sexual difference, or wishfully do away with it. This is the case from the very outset with the main female character in Acción mutante, Patricia, who spends most of the film in a wedding dress, an unambiguous signifier, if ever there was one, of femininity. And yet, by the end of the film, the dress is tattered and covered with blood and dust, and Patricia has become an honorary member of the band of exclusively male ‘mutants’. In Chapter 1, we consider this effacement of sexual difference in terms of the generic conventions of science fiction, but also in relation to the sexual act and its elision, a topic we explore in much greater depth in the Chapter 3, on Perdita Durango. We reach the conclusion that for the most part this is a ludic, pre-Oedipal cinema, or, to translate

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Freudian vocabulary into Lacanian, a cinema of pre-symbolic play. Although it embraces the kinetic values of Hollywood, it foregoes the standard Oedipal trajectory that tradition favours. The clear exception to this general rule is 800 balas, and in Chapter 6 we outline the classic Oedipal narrative of that film. By emphasizing the generalized sexual indifference of the films, we are by no means trying to get De la Iglesia ‘off the hook’, but rather hoping to reach a more nuanced understanding of a central structuring principle of the films. Note on referencing and translation The research for this book could not have been done without the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, and we are deeply indebted to that institution. Not all the newspaper articles we accessed in the Filmoteca had full pagination and so we apologise in advance for any incomplete references. All translations from the Castilian are our own, and we always provide the original as well as the English translation. Notes 1

2 3

4

See, for instance, Dyer and Vincendeau’s Popular European Cinema (1992), Triana Toribio’s Spanish National Cinema (2003), Lázaro-Reboll and Willis’s Popular Spanish Cinema (2004) and the work of Josep-Lluís Fecé (2005). Eliot proposes ‘maturity’ as a measure of artistic worth in his essay ‘What is a classic?’ (1975 [1945]). Inside the issue of Cinelandia is a glossary of new young talent of the 1990s. Along with De la Iglesia, we find, for example, Juanma Bajo Ulloa, Pablo Berger, Icíar Bollain, Chus Gutiérrez, Julio Medem, Santiago Segura, David Trueba and Enrique Urbizu. In his essay ‘Contemporary Basque cinema’, Joseba Gabilondo outlines some of the pitfalls of trying to pin down what he calls ‘the uncanny identity of Basque cinema’ (2000, 266). See also Zunzunegui (1985) for details on the development of Basque film-making.

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Acción mutante (1993): against the conspiracy of boredom

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Speaking at the Manchester Spanish Film Festival in 2000, Álex de la Iglesia declared that he was not really a film director. ‘I’m more of a barman’, he declared, ‘I just make cocktails’. His films, he implied, were simply an elaborate montage of quotations from other directors, genres, and film-styles, a self-assessment well borne out by Acción mutante (1993), the De la Iglesia team’s first feature film, which promiscuously mixes science fiction and comedy, film noir and western, Almodóvar and Ridley Scott. Were such a claim, and its associated renunciation of auteur status, to issue from an American independent director, or even a relatively self-conscious Hollywood director, would it even raise an eyebrow, so eloquently does it express postmodern orthodoxy? And does it make any difference when it comes from a modern Spanish director? As a bravura cut-and-paste job, a frenetic exercise in filmic intertextuality, Acción mutante is highly accomplished, but it would be a mistake to praise or criticize it on the grounds of its postmodern sensibilities alone without taking into account the intervention it made into a specifically Spanish filmic context where, in the words of the title song ‘Esto no es un juego, es acción mutante.’ The protagonists of Acción mutante are a collection of politically radicalized disabled men who have formed a ‘mutant action’ terrorist group to carry out guerrilla warfare on a culture obsessed with fitness and beauty, some time in an ill-defined future. In the absence of their imprisoned leader, Ramón, they badly botch kidnapping attempts and attacks on televised aerobics programmes. Once Ramón is released and returns to guide them, however, they successfully kidnap Patricia, a wealthy heiress, from her wedding party, slaughtering most of the guests in the process, as well as losing two of their own number. Escaping in their space ship, the mutants prepare to rendezvous with the heiress’ father, Orujo, on the distant planet of Axturias to collect the ransom. On the journey, Ramón’s followers realize that he is short-changing them, and after they confront him, he murders them one by one, finishing with Álex, one of a pair of conjoined twins. The ship crash lands, and Ramón begins to drag the heiress across the desert planet to the rendezvous point, pursued by Álex who has in fact survived. After a series of violent incidents, all remaining characters assemble in The Lost Mine Bar for a final showdown with the vengeful Orujo.

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After the decreto Miró In 1997 Álex de la Iglesia defined his cinema in terms of what it was not. He claimed that he and co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría had set out to write Acción mutante with three basic premises: 1 2 3

evitar la Guerra civil y la posguerra, no adaptar una novella de prestigio y, no recrear traumas infantiles (Ordoñez 1997, 100)

1 2 3

to avoid the Civil War and the post-war era not to adapt a culturally prestigious novel not to recreate childhood traumas

There is no great mystery about what sort of cinema De la Iglesia refers to here – one need not look far in the Spanish cinema of the immediate post-Franco era (1975–90), just before De la Iglesia started making feature films, to find numerous examples of films from these categories, and sometimes all three at once. If we accept that De la Iglesia necessarily caricatures that cinema to which he opposes his own, it is nevertheless worthwhile examining more closely what he objects to in it. Although the three things to be avoided (childhood, the Civil War, literary adaptations) overlap, we will take them one at a time. 1 Childhood If we ask whose childhood is at stake in films such as La guerra de papa / Daddy’s War (Antonio Mercero, 1977), El Sur / The South (Víctor Erice, 1983), or Las bicicletas son para el verano / Biclycles Are for Summer (Jaime Chávarri, 1983), then we quickly come to the crux of the issue. These are the childhoods of a generation of directors who lived through the Civil War or at least under Franco, a generation removed from De la Iglesia’s by twenty years or more. The childhoods depicted in these films are almost universally negative, etched by trauma and psychological dislocation. As Marsha Kinder, who has canonized this cycle, puts it, these children have to cope with ‘the crimes of their devouring mothers and murderous fathers . . . They are the children of Franco, who bear the crippling legacy of Francoist cultural and political repression’ (1993, 215). For De la Iglesia’s relatively privileged generation, this agonized, introspective view of childhood is virtually unrecognizable and clearly no longer necessary. 2 The Civil War With the death of Franco and the coming of democracy Spanish cinema carried out a much-needed reexamination of both the Civil War and Franco’s regime, which until that point

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had been represented within Spain almost entirely from the point of view of the right. It was considered the political and even moral duty of cinema to ‘reconstruct’ the past, and this was done rigorously in a well-known sequence of films including the ones already mentioned as well as, for instance, La vaquilla / The Heifer (Luis García Berlanga, 1985), ¡Ay Carmela! (Carlos Saura, 1990), and Después del sueño / After the Dream (Mario Camus, 1992) (see Jordan and Morgan-Tamosumas 1998, 15–60). De la Iglesia, on the other hand, was part of the desencanto, the period of disillusionment with politics in general and with the leftist parties (PSOE) in particular, which had failed to deliver the changes they promised. De la Iglesia, then, like Almodóvar, would set out to make cinema as if Franco had never existed (see Kinder 1987, 42). 3 Literary adaptations The mainstream cinema in the years prior to Franco’s death had been dominated by popular and non-literary genres such as the ‘sexy Spanish comedies’, the melodramas of Pedro Masó, and the horror genre. From 1975 onwards, ‘serious’ directors undertook the task of rescuing the national production from such ‘cheap and nasty’ forms – what better way to elevate cinema than by privileging high culture and literature? Not only did literary adaptations bring automatic respectability to cinema, but the authors adapted usually possessed excellent liberal or leftist credentials. To take just one example, four of the novels of Miguel Delibes were either adapted directly or inspired screenplays during this period, the most well-known of these being Los santos inocentes / The Holy Innocents (Mario Camus, 1984). This emphasis on the literary of course implies a concomitant distrust of cinema as cinema, of cinema as a mass cultural form. The rejection of literary adaptations by De la Iglesia signals a renewed interest in exclusively cinematic codes, and more importantly, a disavowal of the ‘respectability’ literature endows on cinema. A cursory examination of Acción mutante reveals how De la Iglesia and his team break away from the dead hand of literary adaptations about children of the Civil War. Far from being a reexamination of the past, it is set in a murky future where a group of men with various disabilities appropriate for themselves the designation ‘mutants’ and wage terror on the establishment, represented by the whole-wheat bread-making tycoon Orujo. Leaving aside the fact that many of the characters are infantile or puerile in their actions and desires, there is

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only one child in this film, and he is no innocent traumatized by the misdeeds of his elders. The demented and sadistic Zacarías (Carlos López Perea) is a perpetrator, rather than a victim of violence, torturing the mutant leader Ramón on the dinner table (he is, in any case, played by a suspiciously adult-looking, if small, actor). Finally, if it were absolutely necessary to trace the literary antecedents of Acción mutante, the path would lead to alternative comic books, while most of the sources for the film, as has already been noted, are cinematic (genre films) rather than literary. Acción mutante is an all-out assault on what De la Iglesia has called the ‘conspiracy of boredom’ (Ordóñez 1997, 73) in Spanish cinema, by which he means the hegemonic literary-political cinema of the 1980s. This might be an exaggeration on De la Iglesia’s part were it not for the fact that the sort of cinema he excoriates was ultimately endorsed and sponsored by the Spanish state from the mid-1980s. When the PSOE were elected in 1982 they set about fulfilling their promise to reassess and reorganize the Spanish film industry. The result, under the direction of Pilar Miró, was the decreto Miró (1983), or Miró decree (popularly known also as Ley Miró), which encouraged a very particular sort of cinema production through the concentration of funds on a smaller number of productions, the awarding of grants and prizes, and assistance in distribution of those films approved by the Comisión de Calificación de las Películas Cinematográficas (Committee for Cinema Classification) and the Subcomisión de Valoración Técnica (Subcommittee for Technical Valuation). One of the main objectives of the legislation was the elimination or at least squeezing of the ‘subproductos’, the many genre films (horror, soft-porn, comedy) being made in Spain, and considered ‘undignified’ by the new cinema authorities. In practical terms this attack on genre cinema meant the consolidation – not for the first time – of realism as the ‘official’ style of Spanish national cinema (see Triana Toribio 2003, 108–19). In its efforts to curtail the perceived excesses of genre cinema, the decreto Miró must be judged a success, but in its desire to capture the audiences who once enjoyed the genre cinema, the decreto Miró was an unqualified failure (see Ansola González 2004, 121). By the early 1990s, the policies driven by the decreto Miró had been exhausted through shortage of funds, and its main legacy, besides a national cinema distrustful of ‘entertainment’, was the promotion of new young film-makers who failed to fit the decreto Miró mould – Pedro Almodóvar, whose films wed art cinema and genre cinema, was a

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notable beneficiary. It is within this context of a decaying anti-popular cinema policy that Acción mutante must be understood. Non-literary, anti-realist The opening shot of Acción mutante is a close-up of the soon-to-be suffocated President of the National Association of Bodybuilders, Matías Pons, screaming in protest against the attentions of his wouldbe kidnappers. In the ‘future’ Spain of Acción mutante, Matías Pons represents all that is hegemonic: celebrity, beauty, health, physical perfection. The opening sequence which follows is designed to elicit an equivalent dismay in the hegemonic milieus of Spanish cinema production. Mock television footage is integrated with the opening credits in a film style which acts as a miniature manifesto against both realism and the literary pretensions of decreto Miró cinema. Jaime Blanch, dressed in a suit inscribed repeatedly with the word ‘Sucesos’ (News) reports on the bungled kidnapping of the previous scene. His mention of the group ‘Acción mutante’ cues the credits, and when these are finished we return to the ‘JQK’ television news which introduces us to the ‘mutants’ through spinning mugshots, as well as the Orujo family who are to be the next victims of ‘Acción mutante’. The use of television news serves more than one purpose. Clearly it provides an economical mode of exposition, introducing the characters and the basic plot backgrounds, which is a common enough deployment of television’s documentary function, but it also calls attention to the conventions of news presentation – its visual style (back projection, the positioning of the presenter in relation to the audience) and its sensationalist and frivolous content (‘periodismo rosa’ or celebrity news). The credit sequence is also highly self-conscious in relation to the cinematic apparatus and announces a comic, anti-realist aesthetic. The actors parade theatrically in front of a fiery back projection, the character M. A. approaches the camera directly and simulates hitting the lens (at one point cracking a screen placed in front of it), and when Manitas’ machine-gun fails to fire (during the credits for special effects), a props man enters the scene from behind the camera to assist him. The characters are also introduced in a style more appropriate to cartoons than to a cinema with pretensions to psychological insight. The mugshots identify and characterize each mutant through his single deformity, mutation or handicap, thereby asserting the two-dimensionality of fantasy over the cherished depth

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of realism. The references to comic-book conventions are deliberate, as are the other citations of mass cultural forms: in addition to the framing device of television news, the credit sequence clearly pastiches Bond films’ opening credit conventions, and the accompanying hiphop lyrics are provided by popular band Def Con Dos. It should also be noted that the satirizing of televisual conventions comes hand in hand with an admiration for their visual potential and takes for granted the relevance of such a mass cultural medium to its audience – hardly an assumption acceptable to the proponents of the decreto Miró style who were keen to disavow the popular mass cultural side of their medium. Generic impurities As we have already noted, one of the key achievements of the decreto Miró was the denigration and suppression of the Spanish tradition of genre cinema. Not only Acción mutante, but all De la Iglesia’s films, draw unashamedly on genres usually eschewed by Spanish auteurist cinema. In fact, one of the most important developments in Spanish cinema in recent years – certainly in terms of box-office takings – has been the rejuvenation of genre cinema. One need only mention the success of Alejandro Amenábar’s psychological thriller Abre los ojos / Open Your Eyes (1997) and ghost story Los otros / The Others (2001), as well as the inexorable rise of Santiago Segura and his growing Torrente (1998–) empire. In the case of De la Iglesia, the revivification of genre cinema has not been an exercise in nostalgia; it has not been an attempt to go back to the ‘good old days’ prior to the decreto Miró by directly revisiting those genres Spain excelled at in the 1960s and early 1970s. Clearly, such an approach would be at best naive, at worst backward looking. The sentimental resurrection of earlier Spanish styles has of course taken place, yielding, for example, the anodyne and socially conservative El amor perjudica seriamente la salud / Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health (Manuel Gómez Pereira, 1997), a hamfisted rehashing of the sexy Spanish comedy genre. De la Iglesia is not interested in mining a supposed seam of indigenous Spanish cinematic tradition. If anything, his films are rather a bold statement that anything can be Spanish cinema, or better yet, forget the idea of Spanish cinema as some discrete and bounded entity. The ‘main’ genre upon which Acción mutante is based, if one can say such a thing about this generically eclectic film, is science fiction. Science fiction cinema has no established tradition in Spanish cinema

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and there is still no entry for ‘ciencia ficción’ in the Diccionario del cine español (Academia de las Artes, 1998) nor in any of the encyclopedic works on Spanish cinema. Acción mutante may very well be the first ever Spanish science fiction-comedy (the classification it is given on IMDB).1 For various historical reasons to do with frontiers, space exploration, the Cold War, and the advances of US corporate capital, science fiction cinema has been a predominantly American phenomenon. Keeping this in mind, it is useful to consider what Acción mutante borrows from the SF canon and how it deviates from it. H. Bruce Franklin has devised an ironic and economical typology to distinguish early, technologically optimistic SF film from the post-utopian films which came to the fore from the 1970s onwards. The ‘archetypal image[s] of the future projected in early SF film’ are ‘THE WONDER CITY OF THE FUTURE’ and ‘THE MARVELLOUS FLYING MACHINE’ (1990, 20–1). Drawing on films such as Alien (1979), Outland (1981), The Last Chase (1981), Parasite (1982) and Blade Runner (1982), Franklin claims that rarely appears any longer in the cinematic visions of tomorrow, except occasionally as some kind of domed world of illusory pleasures, as in Logan’s Run or Futureworld. Instead the cities of the present have been reduced to rubble through which our poor descendants have their last pathetic adventures . . . When THE MARVELLOUS FLYING MACHINE makes an appearance, it is usually as a harbinger not of progress but of terror. It may be a vehicle bringing either some threatening alien life-form – as in The Andromeda Strain (1971) or Alien; or assassins sent by human powers – as in Outland. (1990, 23) THE WONDER CITY OF THE FUTURE

Broadly speaking, Acción mutante subscribes to this post-utopian view of the future. What we see of the city (Bilbao) of the future in the first third of the film contains little in the way of stunning progress or technological wonders. Like the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) this city seems to be devoid of sunlight, a dim visibility provided instead by neon street signs and car headlights. Although we see the decadent rich devoted to hedonistic partying, there is no sign of a social or governmental structure beyond the unseen guard who releases Ramón from prison and helmeted and faceless police gratuitously doling out beatings to protestors and ‘mutants’. Meanwhile, the spaceship, Virgen del Carmen, which hosts the middle third of the film, resembles not in the least the gleaming fantasies of triumphant technology to be found in so much science fiction. Its

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computer is unreliable, from the outside it looks if anything like a greybrown bon-bon on stilts, and its ‘bridge’ is more mechanic’s yard than Enterprise. Perhaps the most striking feature of Virgen del Carmen is its constant need for greasing and its tendency to spurt brake fluid with great gusto at the least provocation. Even Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, the paradigm for such decaying and inefficient spaceships, was hi-tech enough not to require ministrations as mundane as the oilcan, although the immediate model for Virgen del Carmen is the spaceship in John Carpenter’s satirical Dark Star (1974). Robots, another staple of the SF film, also appear here, but they too fail to testify to a brave new world. The mechanical bouncers, musical trio and priest at the wedding are hardly sophisticated in their actions, less cyborg or android than shop-window mannequins. Obviously, much of the emphasis in Acción mutante on the limitations of technology (and by association, of special effects in SF films in general) has to do with the film’s comic thrust, which consistently and deliberately undermines the fantasy prerequisite to SF, and therefore the whole pessimistic post-utopian trend identified by Franklin. What, then, is to stop Acción mutante from moving entirely into comedy and becoming nothing more than a spoof along the lines of Dark Star, Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) or Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, 1987)? Several aspects of the film prevent this from happening and allow it to tread the fine line between comedy and science fiction without ever dipping over exclusively into one or the other. If we compare it with Sleepers and Spaceballs, we will notice immediately that both these films are almost uniformly brightly lit, in accordance with the sunny disposition of comedy, and its emphasis on visibility. In contrast, large parts of Acción mutante take place in obscurity, in poorly lit interiors – the spaceship, García’s bar, Orujo’s office. In fact, there is a consistency in the mise-en-scène which holds the film tightly together and constitutes an overall ‘look’ for the film. This could be characterized in terms of the cluttered, baroque interiors where the action unfolds and the emphasis on dirt, grime, rust and decrepitude in both sets and costumes. De la Iglesia has explained that he was aiming for an ‘oxidized aesthetics that give the film a rusty (roñoso) look’ (cited in Heredero 1999, 193). In addition, the comic elements of the film are always held in check by the brutality of the grand guignol violence which punctuates the plot, with stylized exit wounds and gory deaths. Finally, the strong narrative drive of the film – from early on, the clock is ticking on the inevitable final

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confrontation in García’s bar – ensures that suspense is never entirely sacrificed to satire. Although the primary generic fault-line in the film runs along the comedy–science fiction axis, Acción mutante also pilfers from, or imitates in passing, horror, westerns and film noir. Horror and science fiction have of course always overlapped. To give just one example from Acción mutante, one could point to the death during the wedding reception massacre of Chepa, the machine-toting hunchback who falls from the top of the fake wedding cake which has concealed him. The shot shows the newlyweds, Patricia and Luis, in medium shot cowering under the table upon which the cake sits, and then an abrupt racking focus changes planes to show in close-up the bloodied face of Chepa who has fallen from above. The shot is an ironic reference to the use of such sudden rack focusing for shock effect in horror films. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas have argued that Ramón’s ‘release from jail and his grisly murder of his colleagues on the spaceship strongly recall film noir’ and they also point to the ‘westernstyle shoot out finale’ (1998, 108). The film noir-style off-centre framing of Ramón as he plots the deaths of his companions and the bleak desert landscape of Axturias reminiscent of the terrain of European westerns support both of these claims and reinforce the case for Acción mutante as a generic mélange, or marmitako, to use a term from De la Iglesia’s native Basque country. Does this constant referencing of disparate film styles serve a purpose or is it merely gratuitous and arbitrary? It would be wrong to discount entirely the latter hypothesis, since one of the unifying drives of the film is the commitment to sheer excess; however, there are two further things worth noting about this heteroclite borrowing of genres. First, just as the ‘oxidized aesthetic’ brings a look of antiquation to the supposed ‘future’, so the borrowing from film noir and westerns – genres associated with the past – reinforces the post-utopian sensibilities of the film. In other words, many of the references, however disparate, contribute to Acción mutante’s overall visual structure. At the same time, the mixing of genres must be considered a refusal of generic purity. Acción mutante revisits genre cinema, but recognizes that this can never be done in an innocent fashion. This resistance to playing genre ‘straight’ leads to a series of deliberate clashes or juxtapositions, where from sequence to sequence, and sometimes even within a sequence, discontinuity in visual style becomes the rule.

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Almodóvar for boys The most striking sudden shift of styles takes place during the wedding reception scene. This shift is partially camouflaged because it is motivated by a narrative development which we have already been prepared for – Ramón has instructed M. A. to extinguish the lights during the kidnapping, which he eventually does once the plan has gone spectacularly wrong. After the fade-out the black screen is held for a considerable time before the subsequent fade-in to the death of Chepa which continues the scene and initiates a new visual style. There could not be a greater contrast between the two parts of this scene both in terms of mise-en-scène and camera movements. The brightly lit party dominated by the garish colours of guests dressed in camp costumes is displaced by dim lighting, and the black and white of the mutants’ tuxedos and Patricia’s wedding dress. Whereas the former scene heaves with frantically dancing and then frantically fleeing bodies, the latter contains slow, deliberate movements by fewer figures. The first half pulsates to Def Con Dos and then the jaunty ‘Aires de fiesta’ (Party Time), while the soundtrack of what follows is punctuated by Patricia’s deep breathing and piercing screams. In the first, there is a mixture of long and medium shots giving the audience a breadth of spatial knowledge which is dramatically curtailed in the next scene, dominated by medium shots and close-ups. It is not difficult to identify the generic conventions being invoked in the second part of the scene. The features mentioned already – the dim lighting, the close-up screams of the victim – along with such techniques as the menacing off-screen presence of Ramón confirmed by the returned look of the victim, Patricia’s pathetic attempt to defend herself with her concealed knife, and the sudden close-up of Ramón’s disfigured face, all announce a pastiche of slasher films. In order to place the style which precedes this one, we need only quote selectively from Paul Julian Smith’s review of Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika (1992). Kika was made in the same year as Acción mutante and financed by the same combination of Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo SA and the mainstream French producer CIBY 2000. In terms of the colour and costume, at least, Smith could be describing here the wedding scene in Acción mutante: ‘Kika offers fans the frantic farce and gloriously saturated colours and costumes we have come to expect from its director’ (2000, 166); ‘Kika’s gorgeous art design and consistently inventive cinematography . . . produce pleasure, but no

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longer surprise’ (168); ‘This cult of surface is nowhere more evident than in Kika. Gloriously shot, beautifully dressed, and skillfully acted’ (169); ‘The scene is shot against a . . . blaze of sunflowers’ (170). If it were not already abundantly obvious that Acción mutante is citing the trademark Almodóvar style in the wedding scene, then the presence of Almodóvar regulars Bibi Andersen and Rossy de Palma (also stars of Kika) as decadent party-goers drives it home. Given that Acción mutante owes an enormous debt, both financial and stylistic, to Pedro Almodóvar, isn’t De la Iglesia taking a risk with his patron when he has his heroes massacre pretty much every last one of the ‘Almodóvarian’ characters who appear in the party scene? In fact, during the shooting of this scene, De la Iglesia worried that his sponsor would walk onto the set to find himself being satirized (Heredero 1999, 194). Indeed, when Ramón reminds his charges exactly what they are fighting against, his list of enemies sounds like a not so thinly veiled reference to the exotic and self-consciously frivolous protagonists of Almodóvar’s oeuvre. Gathering his team around him he declares, ‘El mundo está dominado por niños bonitos e hijos de papá. ¡Dios! ¡Basta ya de mierdas “lite”! ¡Basta ya de colonias, de anuncios de coches, de aguas minerales! No queremos oler bien, no queremos adelgazar. Todo el mundo es tonto o moderno. Somos mutantes, no pijos de playa ni maricones diseño’ (The world is run by pretty boys and rich kids. God! Enough of this ‘lite’ shit! Enough of eaux de cologne, car adverts, mineral waters! We don’t want to smell good; we don’t want to lose weight. Everyone is stupid or modern. We are mutants, not beach preppies or design queens). The pleasure which Almodóvar’s films take in modern, democratic Spain is forthrightly rejected here, from a self-proclaimed position of marginality vis-à-vis the stylized, design-conscious world inhabited by Almodóvar’s characters. Interestingly, Ramón’s vitriol is reserved for men. The pretty boys, the spoilt rich kids, the beach preppies, and the design queens all suffer from a diminished masculinity, brought on, Ramón suggests, by a modern obsession with appearances, with how they smell, with their figures. Almodóvar’s films, in contrast, are celebrated for their heroines, for consistently placing women centre-frame. Could Acción mutante’s scorn for the feminization of men be an indirect response to the embracing of the ‘feminine’ in Almodóvar? This question takes on greater significance when we consider the similarities of Almodóvar’s and De la Iglesia’s filmic projects. Does not De la Iglesia’s knowing rehabilitation of genre cinema in a collage

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which emphasizes discontinuities and clashing styles provoke a sense of déjà vu? Is this not what Almodóvar had already been doing for more than ten years? It is not terribly important what relationships of influence or even anxiety of influence exist between Acción mutante and its patron. What is important is how Acción mutante and De la Iglesia’s other films have done for popular genres traditionally coded ‘masculine’ what Almodóvar did for popular genres coded ‘feminine’. It is routinely recognized that Almodóvar’s oeuvre brings a postmodern playfulness and skepticism to melodrama and screwball comedy, two timeworn staples of the Spanish (and Hollywood) popular cinema repertoire, which are traditionally labelled ‘women’s’ genres. De la Iglesia, meanwhile, has constructed his films on the basis of genres we could argue are coded, for lack of a more nuanced vocabulary, ‘masculine’. On the one hand, the two directors are on the same side, against the sober production of the decreto Miró era, making films which are not literary adaptations, do not explore childhood, and studiously ignore the unsavoury episodes in Spain’s past. At the same time, they could not be further apart as result of the specific genres they have chosen to carry out this cinematic operation. Genre, gender, politics Another part of Paul Julian Smith’s analysis of Kika gives us a sense of what might be at stake in the choice of generic conventions: ‘Kika shamelessly proclaims itself a woman’s film and one whose female characters are granted both the “ultra feminine” visual pleasure characteristic of mainstream film and the central narrative position generally occupied by men. This implicit threat to masculinity is confirmed by the male leads who, as so often in Almodóvar, are comparatively dull’ (2000, 169) There could not be a greater contrast with Acción mutante in which there is only one female character of any importance, and the film’s treatment of Patricia, the kidnapped heiress, is, like the rest of the film, shameless. In most modern films asymmetrical gender relations have to be carefully excavated, so judiciously are they buried in seeming egalitarianism. In Acción mutante, however, sexual prejudice is disconcertingly transparent throughout. Cinema of this period is not short of examples of violence against women being justified through elaborate narrative necessity (Fatal Attraction [Adrian Lyne, 1987], Basic Instinct [Paul Verhoeven, 1991]), but Acción mutante takes no such precautions in the slapstick violence it inflicts

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on Patricia. She is regularly punched or slapped by Ramón and his colleagues; Ramón unceremoniously drops her like a rag-doll from the crashed spaceship, and then drags her by the hair across Axturias. While many female characters in films are manipulated to collude indirectly in their own oppression, Patricia, suffering from what Ramón identifies as the Stockholm Syndrome, ends up assisting her captor. Acción mutante, in other words, tends to literalize what many films leave implicit or metaphorical, and there could be no clearer example than the stapling shut of Patricia’s mouth for the voyage to Axturias, an image which is regularly reproduced and has become iconic of the film. No need here for the subtleties of classic cinema which Kaja Silverman calls ‘a textual model which holds the female voice and body insistently to the interior of the diegesis, while relegating the male subject to a position of apparent discursive exteriority by identifying him with mastering speech’. (1988, ix) This transparent silencing of woman mirrors a general transparency at other levels of the film. In spite of Heredero’s claim that the allusions to ETA and terrorism are submerged and need to be disinterred through interpretation (1999, 195), we would argue that nothing is more obvious than the ironic links between the Basque group and ‘Acción mutante’. Against Heredero’s wishes, this film cannot be retrieved for a cinema of political depth, the metaphorical, allegorical cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s (Monterde 1993, 43–54), which, not incidentally, indulged heavily in violence against women. When the mining region of Asturias is cunningly disguised as the mining planet ‘Axturias’, we know that occluded meaning is not the main project of the film. Although Acción mutante does not trade in the allusiveness so beloved of art cinema’s proponents, this does not prevent us from examining what the film leaves out in its articulation of sexual difference, nor what it says without knowing it says it. The making of Acción mutante coincided with the rapid expansion of private Spanish television, a development the film itself draws on. As Rosa Montero notes, the drive for markets led to a proliferation of sexually centred programmes, ‘with women being exploited ad nauseam as sexual objects of the crudest kind.’ (1995, 383) Telecinco, which resembles more than a little the JQK television channel of Acción mutante and produced such fare as the stripshow ¡Uf, qué calor!, was the main culprit in this televisual display of the female body. Horror and science fiction genres are also generally quick to exploit opportunities to show female flesh, however, Acción mutante for the most part declines to do

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so. It is notable, in fact, that Patricia is only treated as an object of sexual desire at one point in the film, although the desires of most of the characters revolve around her. For Ramón she is a business proposition, worth only as much as her ransom; for Álex she represents the possibility of romance once his conjoined twin has expired; for her father her wedding is the chance to gain a title; and her aristocratic fiancé wants access to her father’s wealth. Only the isolated and dysfunctional all-male family of colonists on Axturias, the walls of whose house are plastered with photos of naked women, think of Patricia as a sexual being. The characterisation of the grandfather and his three grandsons goes out of its way to depict male sexual desire as perverse, grotesque and sinister. For instance, when the ‘boys’ go to tell their grandfather that there is a woman outside their house, he is filmed in an armchair watching a pornographic video, his face at first hidden from view; and when the whole family emerges to see the visitors, Ezequiel (played by Santiago Segura) apparently ejaculates prematurely at the mere sight of Patricia. Failing to agree a trade for Patricia’s sexual services, the family attack and restrain Ramón; once dressed in their Sunday best, they prepare to rape Patricia, whom we see only briefly through a doorway in the background of a deep focus shot, tied to a bed with her legs suspended by rope in the air. The grotesque humour of this scene should not prevent us from making more general conclusions about the nature of sexuality and sexual difference in the film. It is not clear whether the rape takes place because there is a narrative ellipsis which takes us from the scene in the colonists’ house to a scene in which Patricia is driving the unconscious Ramón towards García’s Bar. Cross-cutting then reveals the naked grandfather and two of the boys (once again in the background, deep focus) tied up in comically complicated bondage, the youngest boy having assisted in Patricia’s escape. The film therefore not only elides the sexual act, but when it shows the preparations for it, the cinematography keeps the actors at a distance and partially obstructed from view. In addition, there are voyeuristic characters in the film, but the camerawork never eroticizes Patricia with any of the voyeuristic codes cinema is so well equipped with. In other words, Acción mutante represents satirically the male gaze in the shape of the pornography-watching grandfather, but it does not gratify that gaze in its own mise-en-scène. We are not suggesting a recuperation of Acción mutante as some kind of feminist text, even in spite of itself. It is instructive, however,

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to contrast its sexual economy with that found in another Spanish film of the 1990s, one which is in many ways more typical in its articulation of sexual difference: Abre los ojos (1997), Amenábar’s hymn to besieged male subjectivity. This futuristic thriller unfolds in such a way that the audience has little choice but to take up the perspective of the narcissistic César, a niño de papá if there ever was one. The two women in the film, Nuria and Sofía, function solely as ciphers to articulate an internal split in the protagonist. The terrifying, sexually aggressive Nuria (Najwa Nimri) mutilates the hero by crashing her car with him in it, and the chaste, idealized Sofía (Penélope Cruz, of course) promises to erase this symbolic castration through her bland ministrations. In both cases, sexual difference is absolute and constitutive of César’s subjectivity, on the one hand figured as the threat of death, on the other as the guarantee of an illusory wholeness. In addition, the vicissitudes of César’s fantasy life leave plenty of scope for the specularization of Nuria and Sofía, as well as violence against them justified by narrative logic. In contrast to this hysterical, but by no means unusual, representation of sexual differentiation (consider any number of films with Michael Douglas as the tormented alpha male), Acción mutante tends ultimately to efface sexual difference. In a film with more than its share of mutilated men, the final scene brings Patricia closer to the all-male ‘mutants’: her arm is severed at the elbow and she joins the similarly one-armed Álex in the ongoing struggle against the niños de papá represented by her effete, and now dead, fiancé. Thus, while Abre los ojos establishes femininity as a primary structural principle in its symbolic economy, Acción mutante, not unlike many modern science fiction films (see Penley 1990, 123–5), tries to do away with sexual difference, which effectively means the exclusion of femininity. Finally, Patricia’s desire throughout the latter half of the film to ‘become mutant’, and her eventual realization of this desire, raises the question of the political stance of a film which deliberately sets itself against sober political cinema. In the first instance, there is no let-up in the film’s irreverence when it comes to Patricia’s ‘conversion’ to the cause of the oppressed ‘mutants’. Acción mutante clearly mocks her as an upper-class political parvenu, mouthing slogans about alienation as she is dragged across Axturias. That she is called Patricia and is diagnosed with ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ by Ramón is clearly intended to make us associate her with heiress Patty Hearst, first victim and then willing member of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

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3 Poster for Acción mutante

Nevertheless, the film’s cynicism and satirical bite have encouraged radical disabled groups in Spain and elsewhere to borrow the slogans and logo (see Figure 3) of this fictional terrorist cell.2 In a reading which manages to ignore the trenchant satire of the film, Madeline Conway

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has even argued that ‘[w]atching the “freaks” in this film . . . does not reinforce our feelings of normalcy, as happened to the audience of the freak show, but rather breaks down the barrier between “normal” and “abnormal”, “able-bodied” and “disabled”’ (2000, 258). It might be tempting, then, to find in Acción mutante a model for a de-centred micro-politics, typical of a postmodern era distrustful of the grand narratives based on class offered by traditional Marxist politics. However, while the film may be open to such readings, we have to recognize that ultimately, the film favours cynical detachment over political engagement. On two occasions Ramón rallies his charges with what is clearly a much-rehearsed mantra: Ramón: ¿Qué eráis cuando os encontré? Mutantes: ¡Éramos basura, deshecho de hospital! R: ¿Quién os sacó del arroyo y os hizo lo que sois? M: ¡Tú, Ramón! R: ¿Qué sois ahora? M: ¡Mutantes, Mutantes, Mutantes! (Ramón: What were you when I found you? Mutants: We were rubbish, hospital debris! R: Who got you out of the gutter and turned you into what you are now? M: You, Ramón! R: What are you now? M: Mutants, Mutants, Mutants!

The second time that Ramón thus invokes the solidarity of his group, though, he is already planning to defraud them of the ransom and therefore uses their politicized consciousness as a weapon against them. As with Patricia’s misplaced sympathy for Ramón, then, group action is depicted here as collective self-deception. Ramón pronounces his true ethos only after he has disposed of his mutant crew and just before the spaceship crashes into Axturias: ¿Qué era cuando me parió mi madre? El número uno, el mejor. ¿Quién me hizo lo que soy? Yo mismo sin ayuda de nadie. ¿Qué es lo que soy? ¡El puto amo! Who was I when my mother gave birth to me? Number one, the best. Who made me what I am? I did, without anyone’s help. Who am I? The Fucking Boss!

It turns out that Ramón’s allegiances are motivated by self-interest and not political solidarity, for when he arrives at The Lost Mine Bar, we discover that his co-conspirator in the kidnapping is the able-bodied

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García. Ultimately, then, Acción mutante asks its audience to align itself with a Machiavellian individualism and a distrust of, and scepticism towards, organized political action. By making its heroes (like the eccentric heroes of all De la Iglesia’s films) marginal and disfigured, though, it refuses the humanism under whose cover individualism usually travels. While the Socialist government of postFranco Spain was intent on ‘cleaning up the image’ (lavarle la cara) of the nation, Acción mutante, steeped in the desencanto, resists any such temptation. In the next feature film, El día de la bestia, it becomes rightwing vigilantes who are demonically intent on ‘cleaning up’ Madrid, but true to the politically sceptical ethos of Acción mutante, resistance from the margins takes the form of hallucinatory ‘group-think’. Notes 1

2

Since Acción mutante there is at least one further instance of Spanish SFcomedy in El milagro de P. Tinto / P.Tinto’s Miracle (Javier Fesser, 1998). The financial flop, El caballero del dragon / The Knight of the Dragon (Fernando Colomo, 1985) probably deserves the title of first mainstream Spanish science fiction film, although from the late 1970s the Valencian Juan Piquer directed a series of low-budget ‘fantastic’ films, such as adaptations of Jules Verne, Viaje al centro de la tierra / Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1977) and Misterio en la isla de los monstrous / Mystery on Monsters’ Island (1981). A very full discussion of Spanish science fiction cinema and the even broader category of ‘fantasy’ can be found on the España mutante website: www.espacioexterior.net/ caspa.html. See, for instance, http://members.tripod.com/~discapacitados/barreras. htm.

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El día de la bestia (1995): comedy, subcultures, television

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El día de la bestia, released in 1995, is Álex de la Iglesia’s second featurelength film, and marked the beginning of the director’s association with the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez and his Lolafilms organisation. The film was the third to appear from a deal between Gómez and Sogetel to produce around eight to ten features a year, a deal that established both parties at the forefront of film production in Spain. Costing just under 2 million euros, it was a substantial commercial success in Spain, cementing De la Iglesia’s central position in the generation of young directors who had begun making features in the early 1990s. Often a director’s second feature is described as difficult or troublesome, particularly when their first film had marked them out as a major new force, or someone to watch in the future, but El día de la bestia clearly goes against this trend. Josetxo Cerdán calls it the ‘fenómeno cinematográfico nacional del año’ (national cinematic phenomenon of the year), seen by more than 1 million spectators (1995, 328). At the presentation ceremony for the 1996 Goyas, De la Iglesia was named best director, Santiago Segura was best new actor, and the film picked up further awards for artistic direction, sound, make-up and hair, and special effects. It in fact quickly took on canonical status, and in 1997 was included by Augusto M. Torres in El cine español en 119 películas (Spanish Cinema in 119 Films, 1997) and in the Antología crítica del cine español (see Zumalde Arregui 1997, 958–60). In Spain, then, El día de la bestia was both a commercial and critical success. The film was also widely distributed outside Spain where it has become a firm favourite of both art-house cinema-goers and cult movie fans. The plot of El día de la bestia concerns a Basque Catholic priest, Father Ángel Berriartúa (Álex Angulo), who in his research role at the University of Deusto has discovered that the predictions of the apocalypse by St John have been miscalculated. His new calculations have revealed that the Devil is actually due to appear in Madrid on Christmas Eve 1995. With this knowledge, he ventures to the Spanish capital determined to commit all the evil he can in order to draw the Devil out, gain his confidence and ultimately defeat him. Upon his arrival in Madrid he crosses paths with José María (Santiago Segura), a heavy metal fan, who suggests Father Berriartúa stay at the family pensión run by his mother (Terele Pávez). After further investigations, the pair violently enlist into their anti-satanic struggle Professor Cavan (Armando de Razza), the presenter of an occult TV show, La zona oscura. After taking large amounts of LSD the trio pursue Satan to the landmark KIO towers in Madrid where they seem to defeat him and

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save the world. José María, however, dies in the battle and the film ends with the scarred but surviving duo sitting in Madrid’s Retiro park reflecting on a victory known to no one but themselves. Throughout the film, a shadowy group of vigilantes known as Limpia Madrid (clean up Madrid) carries out vicious attacks on immigrants and the homeless. The members of this group appear as the Devil’s henchmen at the KIO Towers, and are killed along with him. Critical reception

El día de la bestia is probably still Álex de la Iglesia’s best-known film. This is certainly the case internationally where it was critically well received, with David Rooney, for example, stating in Variety that ‘The over-the-top cast is fully synchronized with the outlandish material, with production credits tops all round’ (1995). In Spain the film was also generally reviewed positively with Lluís Bonet Mojica in La vanguardia (1995) stating that it was evidence of De la Iglesia’s talent and growing reputation, and Joan Boixeda reporting from the Sitges film festival for Diario 16 (1995) that it was a much more mature film than Acción mutante because it engages with contemporary social issues. This latter point was picked up by a number of other reporters such as Alberto Bermejo in El mundo (1995), who argued that whilst the film was not strictly realist in its mode, real life and contemporary issues appeared through the cracks. El día de la bestia also appeared at a number of film festivals, such as the Brussels International Festival Fantastic Film in 1996, where it was awarded the prestigious Méliès d’or for Best European Fantastic Film (the highest accolade of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation). The positive reception for the film is further evidenced by the fact that, even before it was screened at the 1996 American Film Market in Santa Monica, distribution rights had already been sold to companies in the UK and Japan, with deals pending for Benelux and France (www.filmfestivals. com/afm). The high level of circulation for the film, combined with its popularity with audiences, has meant it has become one of De la Iglesia’s most commented upon works within a variety of critical writing on contemporary Spanish cinema. Indeed, such has been the interest in the film that it has been the subject of a detailed book-length set of interviews with many of the creative personnel involved in the production: Vera’s Cómo hacer cine 2: El día de la bestia de Álex de la Iglesia (2002).

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Academic criticism has been more ambivalent about El día de la bestia than reviews in the press. Apart from numerous brief discussions or mentions of the film in broad surveys of Spanish cinema of the 1990s, there are a number of lengthier and more sustained engagements with it. It is worth looking at these longer studies in more detail particularly since they reach such dramatically different conclusions. While some see the film as a neo-conservative work, others are able to argue that it is a left-leaning critique of contemporary Spanish capitalism. As will soon become clear, we believe that a close and careful analysis of El día de la bestia favours the latter interpretation. However, this does not mean that the former approach is purely and simply misguided, although there have also been some outright mistakes in its interpretation, particularly among Anglophone critics who are perhaps too removed from its Spanish context. Rather than simply dismiss these critics, though, we will read them symptomatically, as the logical effects of a film that in fact tempts such partial readings. El día de la bestia is itself a film about reading signs, and the often diabolical misreading of signs, as well as the misreading of diabolical signs. Some of the signs that Father Berriartúa seeks to read are of course signs from the Devil, and the Devil is a notorious dissembler, not to be taken at his word. Is this a right-wing or a leftwing film? Our argument is that some critics have taken El día de la bestia too literally as a message from the Devil. For example, Mark Allinson makes the film one of the three he focuses on in his article about violence in Spanish cinema, ‘Not matadors, not natural born killers: violence in three films by young Spanish directors’ (1997). His central assertion is that El día de la bestia is an attempt to emulate American cinema. He begins by stating that Spanish cinema in general is catching up with American commercial cinema’s violence and with it that film-makers such as De la Iglesia are ‘at long last catching onto the commercial appeal of conventionalised violence in films, taking contemporary US cinema as the model’ (315). He suggests that De la Iglesia ‘aspires to the high budget spectaculars of the Anglo-Saxon film world’ and oddly claims that he has ‘tried something quite rare in Spanish cinema: a science fiction extravaganza’ (320). Whilst acknowledging that the film is a generic hybrid Allinson asserts again later that the film is a piece of science fiction, claiming that, ‘In his appropriation of the eminently Hollywood genre of science fiction, Álex de la Iglesia has chosen freely exactly which elements he wishes to transpose from Hollywood to Spain’ (322). El día de la bestia,

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which seems to encourage such misrecognitions, is clearly not a science fiction film, and Allinson has himself latterly corrected this view (Jordan and Allinson 2005, 95). Clarification of this point is essential, because an adequate understanding of the film is predicated on correctly identifying the ways in which it plays with generic codes and crosses and re-crosses generic boundaries. It is not a science fiction film, nor is it simply a horror film, which is the more usual designation of its generic debts. El día de la bestia is first and foremost a film comedy that draws on a range of other generic models. Acknowledging the way it combines comedy with the violence typical of horror is an important step in beginning to understand some of the potentially more politically subversive and anarchic elements within the film. Recognising that much of the approach to comedy within the film comes from Spanish traditions is also vitally important as it questions the reductive equation of the violence contained within El día de la bestia with American cinema. The Americanization argument is also weakened when one considers how critical the film is of Spanish television and its invasion by foreign capital and programming formats. The tendency to take only a partial view of the film is perhaps best characterized by Marsha Kinder’s reading of it in her introduction to Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (1997). Where Allinson implies that there is a capitulation to American values in the imitation of Hollywood, Kinder is much more explicit, and leads the charge in labelling the film politically conservative. She reads El día de la bestia against its immediate political backdrop – thirteen years of rule by an increasingly beleaguered and soon to be unseated PSOE government. For her, El día de la bestia and Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (No one Will Speak about Us When We Are Dead) (Agustín Díaz Yanes), another film from 1995, with their ‘severe attacks on the widespread corruption in Madrid and their intense reengagement with Catholicism (however parodic), evoke the kind of mentality that made [the PSOE’s Felipe] González’ defeat and [the right-wing PP’s José María] Aznar’s coalition possible’ (18) This is no light charge. Concentrating on the ‘dystopian’ representation of Madrid in the film, she concludes that it is an indictment of the corruption of Spain under the Socialists, concluding that it represents ‘a growing disillusionment with the libertarian ethos and an attempt to recuperate conservative traditions’ (23). Kinder picks up the Cervantine echoes of the film, with Father Berriartúa a Quijote figure and José María a genial Sancho, but she then fails to credit the film with any of the critical force

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of Don Quijote. While compelled to recognize the film’s parody of Catholicism, she sweeps aside this aspect of El día de la bestia and concludes instead that it is an endorsement of Jesuitical values on the grounds that De la Iglesia studied at a university, some of whose faculty were Jesuits. If we assume for a moment that this sort of biographical speculation has any validity at all, we need to ask why such an education would be a guarantee of a Jesuitical outlook rather than the best inoculation against it. Meanwhile, Kinder’s absurd claim that the attacks by the vigilante gang Limpia Madrid on the homeless is somehow an allusion to the PSOE’s ‘covert support of violence against Basque terrorists’ (21) is not substantiated, presumably because there is no evidence in the film to support this view. In fact, if one wants to go down an allegorical route, or read the film as a sort of roman-à-clef of Spanish politics, the starting point would have to be rather different. Although it is true that Catholicism in Spain has habitually affiliated itself with the forces of repression and patriarchy, it must also be remembered that in the late 1960s and early 1970s an important part of the resistance to Franco’s regime came from dissenting clergy, particularly in the Basque country, where many radical priests felt the direct wrath of the dictatorship. Crusading Basque priests may be a throwback, as Kinder implies, but a throwback to a moment when, unusually, the Church can be proud of its political record (see Preston 1986, 22–6).1 Kinder states that the film has a ‘radical surface of outrageousness’ (1997, 23), but goes on to argue that this is merely an affectation, something that operates to disguise the real conservative nature of the film in relation to Spanish society. However, her dismissal of the film as essentially conservative seems based on the assumption that the position of the Socialist government was the only one available on the left and that anything that seemed in any way in opposition to it was automatically from the right. The openly anti-authoritarian and anarchic stance of El día de la bestia is difficult to equate with this reading of the film as neo-Catholic (sic). The problem, as with Allinson, has to do with genre. Whereas Allinson simply misrecognizes outright the generic mix of the film, Kinder correctly identifies its comic drive, but then promptly disavows this recognition, because it might compromise the box into which she wants to fit the film. Father Berriartúa is not the only one tilting at windmills. The same sort of disavowal is at work in Claudia Schaefer, who admits El día de la bestia is ‘a self-proclaimed “satanic comedy”’ (2003,

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135) and a ‘self-proclaimed satanic parody’ (142), but goes on to read it purely in terms of the ‘rhetorics of horror’ (135) and how they reveal the wider social anxieties that existed in a world on the edge of a new millennium. Utilising sources as varied as Jeffery Sconce’s ideas of ‘paracinema’, the Freudian uncanny and Walter Benjamin’s analysis of urban modernity, Schaefer proceeds in an oddly apocalyptic tone totally inappropriate to the discussion of a film she has also identified as comic and parodic. Although she productively comments on the thematics of misreading at the heart of the film, she nevertheless falls into the trap of treating El día de la bestia solely as a horror film. Not only does this lead her to such unfortunate claims as the supposed influence of Scream (1996 – a year after the release of El día de la bestia) on De la Iglesia, but to the overly subjective and the over-stated: De la Iglesia, apparently, ‘lead[s] us to face a collection of our greatest fears in a habitat so frightening that we might be tempted to suppress the fact that they are indeed based on reality’ (141). Only a complete denial of the comic structure of the film allows for this sort of claim and for her consideration of the ‘sinister’ opening of the film (144), which we re-read below to point out the clear comic construction of the sequence. El día de la bestia has suffered less at the hands of Spanish-based critics, who are usually quick to place the film within national traditions of black comedy. Josetxo Cerdán makes a number of points that can usefully be developed to inform an understanding of El día de la bestia. Unlike Anglo-American critics who, as noted, often overlook the film’s comedy, and like many of the press reviewers, he picks up on the fact that the film works against the then dominant realist tradition within Spanish cinema, while at the same time introducing elements of social reality (2004, 240, 247–8). He also argues that the film offers a powerful critique of the populist programming that was appearing on Spanish television at the time, something we will develop below. Cerdán shares with Kinder the sense that the general air of corruption within the film is reflective of the latter days of the Socialist government in Spain. However, rather than indicting De la Iglesia on these grounds, he merely notes, correctly in our view, that the corruption and sleaze that permeates so many facets of the film reflects the loss of the optimistic feelings that had existed within the country in the wake of the transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s (249–50). And in contrast to Kinder, who reads El día de la bestia as a disguised ‘neo-Catholic’ tract, Cerdán sees it as a ferocious attack on

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‘la institucíon eclesiástica y las perversiones sociales que parten de sus formas discursivas y su entorno’ (the Church and the social perversions that emerge from it) (248). Finally, in this critical survey it is worth mentioning a critic who has no doubts about the progressive political credentials of El día de la bestia, even though he too fails to take into account its genre. In an essay devoted primarily to the architectural changes wrought on postcambio Madrid, Malcolm Alan Compitello argues that ‘far from being the conformist vision of Spain that Kinder posits, De la Iglesia’s film is truly radical’ (1999, 213) Contextualizing the film in relation to the resurgent neo-liberal economics of the 1980s onwards, Compitello concentrates on the use it makes of two icons of Madrid’s architectural modernity and postmodernity, the Edificio Capitol and the Torres KIO. He makes the case that El día de la bestia calls our attention to the capitalist shaping of urban space and consciousness: the enemy that De la Iglesia confronts is not El Maligno, but powerful and unchecked capitalism of flexible accumulation and the effects it produces through the way it urbanizes capital and consciousness in turn. In this way El día de la bestia functions as a kind of contestatory urbanized consciousness. (212)

Compitello also helpfully points out that the Partido Popular and not the PSOE controlled local government in Madrid from the late 1980s, so if we really want to read the Limpia Madrid group allegorically against contemporary Spain, as Kinder does, they must stand in for the PP.2 It is our contention that the ‘contestatory’ aspects of the film can be identified in a number of other ways, not simply in terms of its representation of place and space. However, identifying how this critique and rejection of dominant ideas and beliefs permeates the film more widely demands a level of detailed close analysis that has not been undertaken by those writers who have thus far engaged with the film. Cinematic contexts

El día de la bestia, as one might expect from a film by Álex de la Iglesia, is filtered through the lens of a cineaste and abounds with cinematic in-jokes and references. In addition to the essential Spanish intertexts pointed out by Cerdán (2004, 240) – Botón de ancla / Anchor Button (Ramón Torrado, 1947), La gran familia / The Large Family (Fernando

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Palacios, 1962), and Buñuel’s unfilmed screenplay Là-bas – we would note an important possible allusion within the title credit sequence to Richard Brooks’ exposé of the Christian revivalist movement, Elmer Gantry (1960), with its animation of a shadow from a cross. From the very outset, then, this suggests the film is concerned with the ways in which people may be manipulated into believing anything if it is presented in a convincing way. In Brooks’ film the manipulation is through public oratory; in De la Iglesia’s, as Cerdán suggests, through populist television programmes such as La zona oscura. Cinematic references such as these are therefore key clues for the interpretation of a film which deals so heavily in red herrings. We have already stated that, in the last instance, El día de la bestia is a comedy, but it is also true that its most overt references are to the horror genre. Starting with the title itself, the surface satanic horror elements are clear: the diabolic plot, the FX-driven appearances of the devil, the heroic priest and his sidekicks, and the horror imagery used in the marketing of the film all suggest that this genre is driving the film. The Spanish poster for the film brings this to the fore by including pentangles and goats’ heads, reinforcing these generic elements and preparing audience expectations. More generally the film cites heavily from the iconography of the satanic horror movie which had become a very popular cycle in the early to mid-1970s following the world-wide success of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). In Spain during the same period well- known horror practitioners such as Armando de Ossario (La endemoniada, 1975) and Paul Naschy (Exorcismo, dir. Juan Bosch, 1974) made their own satanically themed films in the hope of reaching some of the same large audience that had flocked to USproduced films, most notably The Exorcist (1973). However, perhaps the most immediate Spanish horror influence on El día de la bestia is the successful late 1960s television series Historias para no dormir / Stories to Keep You Awake, the initial series of which was produced from 1966 to 1967 under the supervision of director and producer Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. De la Iglesia openly pays homage to the series and its creator in the title credit sequence with the use of an animated door creaking open. The acknowledgement goes further on the Spanish DVD release of the film where, sitting in front of a roaring fire and a fireplace adorned with skulls, De la Iglesia introduces the film reading from a file in the same manner Ibáñez Serrador had done for his series almost thirty years before. The evocation of the earlier director and producer, who in his appearances had promoted a

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distinctive star persona, reveals how De la Iglesia, by the time of the DVD release, had also established a star persona of his own. The knowing manner in which he introduces El día de la bestia reveals that De la Iglesia was by then almost as recognisable in Spain as Ibáñez Serrador had been when introducing his Historias para no dormir. This playing the host in ironic mode also reminds us that in spite of all the horror components on the surface, the film is broadly speaking a comedy. In the sequences involving La zona oscura / The Dark Zone, the film affectionately pastiches exorcism scenes from The Exorcist and The Omen (1976), without ever becoming an out and out parody. It is perhaps this combination of the overt referencing of horror and a certain undecidability at the level of genre which has blinded many of the film’s academic readers to its comic centre. Comedy Comedy’s manifestation in El día de la bestia is often physical, violent, and crude. This mode of comedy, perhaps best described as slapstick, distinguishes it from the more ‘sophisticated’ style commonly associated with Spanish film comedy of the period. It is possible to see the use of this particular slapstick style of humour as a further example of De la Iglesia’s rejection of the thematic, visual and narrative sophistication of ‘good’ Spanish cinema in favour of more low-brow traditions. The film’s reliance on a very physical comic violence recalls the division that has been identified by film historians between socalled ‘genteel comedy’ and slapstick within Hollywood during the early decades of the twentieth century. Neale and Krutnik note that ‘it is important to stress that “genteel” comedy and the values of wellmade narration did not displace silent slapstick during the 1910s. It rather grew up alongside it’ (1990, 117). Genteel comedy represented a more sophisticated and supposedly modern style of film-making for many critics at the time, whilst slapstick comedy was deemed oldfashioned and outmoded. Donald Crafton argues that for critics such as Gerald Mast slapstick is basically ‘a bad element, an excessive tendency that narrative must contain’ (1995, 107). In El día de la bestia, but also in all the other films, De la Iglesia gives that ‘bad element’ full rein, as a deliberate strategy to position his cinema outside the dominant comic forms and styles produced within Spain at that time. A New Spanish Comedy or more specifically comedia madrileña had appeared in the late 1970s and was associated with directors such

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as Fernando Colomo and Fernando Trueba. It favoured sophistication and wit, particularly in terms of its dialogue and settings. Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas argue that ‘In broad terms, the New Spanish Comedy incorporated many of the features of earlier comedies of manners and customs . . . The trend also revealed the imprint of certain American and European filmmakers, notably Woody Allen, Eric Rohmer, Alain Tanner and also Andy Warhol’ (1998, 69). The evocation of Allen perhaps best illustrates the particular urban, middle-class settings and stylistic aspirations of these films. Like Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) these type of films concentrate on the relationships and emotional foibles of their main characters, relying on dialogue rather than out and out physical comedy. In the 1990s in Spain this style of comedy was replaced by a newer generation of ‘sophisticated’ films made by directors such as Emilio Martínez-Lázaro (Amo tu cama rica, 1991) and Manuel Gómez Pereira (Salsa rosa, 1991). Núria Triana Toribio notes that they followed on from the comedia madrileña, and were seen as ‘“light” and displayed “good taste”’ (2003, 152). In other words, they could not be further in tenor from El día de la bestia. The use of comedy in El día de la bestia is markedly different and in contrast to both of these phases in recent Spanish cinema. It draws on another comedic tradition within Spanish culture, esperpento, a black humour associated with the late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury dramatist Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. As John Hopewell notes, ‘Esperpento is the grotesque, the ridiculous, the absurd’ (1986, 59). Álex de la Iglesia (Ordóñez 1997, 58–9 and 145–6) has often stated his admiration for the 1950s and early 1960s films of Marco Ferreri (El pisito / The Little Flat 1958, El cochecito / The Little Car 1960), Luis Berlanga (Plácido 1959, El verdugo / The Executioner 1963) and Fernando Fernán-Gómez (El extraño viaje / The Strange Journey 1964), who, Hopewell argues, ‘all appealed in their best work to the same tradition of Spanish black humour, esperpento’ (1986, 59). This influence is perhaps clearest in Acción mutante and La comunidad but can also be seen in the everyday, down at heel heroes and settings of much of El día de la bestia, and of course its cruel violence. In fact, Josetxo Cerdán argues that with the film De la Iglesia has created the best present day example of esperpento, one that prolongs the tradition within contemporary cinema (2004, 241). This view is shared by Heredero and Santamarina, who call the ‘sainete esperpéntico’ a ‘genuine specialty’ of De la Iglesia (2002, 70). The chapter on La comunidad explores these debts in greater detail.

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Although critics in Spain have no difficulty in placing El día de la bestia within the traditions of black comedy, it is presumably the darkness of this comedy that deceives non-Spanish commentators. Of course, the film itself, and particularly its marketing mechanisms, set out to deceive. For example, the trailer, which many audience members will have seen before they visited the cinema, does not disclose that El día de la bestia is primarily a comedy. It includes a series of shots from the film that seem designed to emphasise action and violence, and not the comedy. Following shots of Father Berriartúa telling of his discoveries regarding the appearance of the Devil, we are shown characters running through crowded streets, being beaten, shooting, hanging and falling from tall buildings, and finally the Beast. The short TV spots work in a similar way, with only the slightest hint at the film’s humour, which suggests that the marketing campaign prepared the audience for a more serious film than the one they saw. The opening shots of the film continue to mislead the audience in this manner, but by the time the opening scene is finished, there can no longer be any doubt about the film’s irreverence, in spite of Schaefer’s wide-eyed reading of it. In the first shot of the film Berriartúa approaches a church looking around in a concerned manner as bells loudly toll. Once inside he explains to another priest about his theological findings and his colleague warns him to be careful as their enemy, the Devil, is very powerful. This sequence is shot in a sombre light with Church candles out of focus but clearly visible flickering in the background. As the pair of priests talk, the performances of Álex Angulo and Saturnino García, as the other priest, are clearly meant to be taken at face value, due to their tone and lack of any clear comedic inflections in their facial or body movements. For most of the sequence the soundtrack has no music, only bird noises, including a loud crow call, enhancing the atmosphere of menace. As another unseen person enters the church behind them, García turns his head, clearly worried about their conversation being overheard, and footsteps echo around the building. Then the church bells begin to toll again as Berriartúa whispers his theological findings in his friend’s ear, preventing the audience from hearing. It is now that the priest played by García warns Berriartúa of the dangers that may face them and that they must stick together whilst undertaking their task. With this dimly lit setting and the generally sombre tone to the first part of the sequence one can only conclude that something diabolic is afoot, and then just after Berriartúa’s friend agrees to help against this ‘powerful’ enemy, the

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disproportionately large stone cross that dominates the altar falls on top of him and crushes him. It misses Berriartúa, because in that instant he has dropped his papers and moved out of the way of the falling cross as he picks them up. Oblivious to the danger around him and yet immune to it, Angulo is here the natural inheritor of Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr (Charles Riesner, 1928), who remains unscathed by a building that collapses around him. As Andrew Stott puts it, the ‘slapstick protagonist is continually prone to attack through either a bodily revolt or loss of self-control, or from an external source that threatens to dismantle his dignity’ (2005, 93). The visual comedy of this moment shatters the mood of suspenseful horror which has previously been established, and dissuades the audience from a potentially serious reading of the film, the sharp shift of tone further enhanced by the sudden inclusion of a jarring rock soundtrack. This moment establishes the pattern for the rest of the film. It mixes seemingly straight dramatic moments and events with exaggerated interjections that break up the tonal unity of the sequences. The end of the opening sequence has Berriartúa standing next to the prone cross: open-mouthed and shocked he looks directly at the camera. His eye contact suggests that he wants us to share his feelings, but also that we should be careful and not take things too seriously when it comes to this devilish business. Soon after, upon his arrival in Madrid to do battle with the evil forces afoot, Berriartúa again looks directly into the camera, this time inviting us to join him on his journey. These two brief moments of direct address, or breaking of the frame, explicitly indicate that in the world of this film not everything should be taken at face value. If one of the main aims of El día de la bestia is to keep its audience off-balance, by hovering uncertainly between comedy and horror, perhaps slapstick is the best tool to achieve this end. Although slapstick moments are not meant to be taken seriously, they are nonetheless often marked by extreme violence, a violence which can function to distance the audience and shock them out of any semblance of a cosy comedic world they may have thought they were entering. As Geoff King has noted, such violent moments in films ‘leave the viewers in the awkward position of not being able to clearly determine how seriously or offensive it is meant to be taken’ (2004, 132). In El día de la bestia this is further enhanced through the use of juxtaposition, with two planes of action regularly on show at the same time, and often clashing with each other in tone.

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A good example of this juxtaposition of comic and non-comic elements can be found in the extended sequence in which Berriartúa and José María visit Professor Cavan at his apartment in an attempt to force him to help them in their quest for satanic knowledge. Here the scene turns quickly from comedic to violent and back again, leaving us unsure of how to read the action. Initially Berriartúa enters the apartment and smashes Cavan in the face, then ties him up whilst José María waits outside on the street in his mother’s car. José María is shown laughing at newspaper clippings belonging to the priest, including one of his audience with the Pope and photographs that confirm Berriartúa’s status within the world of theology. The implication that perhaps the concerns of the priest are real is quickly undermined as José María rolls up the newspaper clippings and prepares to snort cocaine through them. A policeman interrupts him and tells him to move his car, forcing him to go to the apartment to join Berriartúa. This accidental intervention rather than heroic determination is typical of much of the action in El día de la bestia. After José María’s interaction with the police, the film cuts back to the apartment where the priest is explaining to Cavan his impenetrable theories about the Devil returning to earth, with the assistance of Hebrew writing chalked on the wall. Elements in the mise-en-scène hint at how seriously we should take Berriartúa’s interpretations of the scriptures. Throughout the apartment the walls are adorned with masks from primitive societies and statues from various religions. This links Berriartúa’s religious beliefs – he too places his symbols on the wall – to a much wider spectrum of non-rational belief systems. The set is over-stuffed with symbols, the suggestion being that we should take Berriartúa’s views as seriously as we would take these other ancient belief systems. Of course, semiotically, a mask can go in radically different directions. In horror, it is on the side of concealment and terror at what is concealed; in comedy it is a ludicrous distortion and a main tool of the clown. José María’s arrival in the apartment quickly clarifies which of these possible meanings of the mask will prevail. The first thing he does is ask if the presumably expensive masks are plastic and then, to Cavan’s horror, begins trying them on. Through the use of a deeper focus than usual, one that allows José María’s actions in the background to be clearly visible, the scene presents us with a visual image that further undermines Berriartúa’s prophesying, and the potentially heroic status of these ‘saviours’. Whilst the priest stands in the middle of the shot, showing the seated Cavan, whose back is to the

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audience, the evidence he has accumulated, the audience’s attention is distracted from what would conventionally be an important moment – the proof of the logic of the story that will follow – by José María, who is trying on masks and generally fooling around in the background. The comedy in the background, therefore, wins the viewers’ attention rather than the serious exposition in the foreground. At this point Berriartúa once again turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly, earnestly explaining the methods of the devil. Berriartúa becomes the object of the shot and the background is now out of focus although Cavan and José María are visible. Whilst Álex Angulo’s performance does not suggest self-consciousness or parody, the seriousness of the moment is deflated by what has gone before. Only the priest believes what he is saying, Cavan mocks him, and José María’s eternal teenager takes nothing seriously. The juxtaposition of elements, the distractions created by action on more than one plane, it is worth noting, could have come straight out of a black comedy by Ferreri, such as El cochecito. What follows next is absolutely central to how the film is read. Having been beaten by Berriartúa again, Cavan pretends to help invoke the Devil. He describes what is needed for the ceremony, and Berriartúa and José María find they have none of the correct ingredients. They resort to improvisation: a kitchen knife stands in for a magic sword; a psychotropic mushroom is replaced by a handful of LSD tabs; sliced white bread becomes consecrated hosts, and virgin’s blood is extracted (eventually) from José María’s cousin Mina. What follows the collection and consumption of these ingredients is a seemingly successful invocation of the Devil. A goat, that standard diabolical cipher, appears in the hall, approaches the trio, then stands on two legs and looks the priest in the eye, with the genuine horror of the moment endorsed by the soundtrack. In spite of the consistent mocking and undermining of Berriartúa’s beliefs which has preceded this scene, everything here indicates that the Devil has indeed appeared in a Madrid apartment. That is, until we remember that all three protagonists have just consumed large quantities of a hallucinogenic drug. It is no wonder that they see a goat and that it stands and communicates with them through letters on burnt paper. The importance of the consumption of LSD to this scene is remarked upon by Cerdán (2004, 249), but entirely overlooked by all the Anglo-American critics we have discussed. Unable or unwilling to recognise that the film is a comedy, they take for granted the actuality of this scene and have

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gone on reading the rest of the film accordingly. If we accept, however, that what much of what follows is in all probability a hallucination, then we must reach much different conclusions about El día de la bestia. The film itself reinforces the hallucination interpretation in its concluding scene. Cavan and Berriartúa sit in the Retiro in the shadow of the statue of the fallen angel, Cavan lamenting that their victory over the Devil has gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. Berriartúa, meanwhile, fingers a memento of José María which is pointedly shown to us in close-up: a set of miniature yellow boxing gloves in which the heavy metal fan kept his drugs stash. Cults and subculture In the continuing attempt to locate El día de la bestia politically, it is helpful to consider the use it makes of musical subculture. The subcultural world of heavy metal is a very significant component of El día de la bestia, and on the level of plot it is the supposed links of this musical form to satanic beliefs and practices that lead Berriartúa to the record store where José María works, thus setting in motion their unlikely alliance. Although the priest asks his future sidekick to play records backwards for him in hopes of hearing demonic messages, heavy metal signifies much more in the film than this familiar cliché suggests. It works to confirm the outsider status of Berriartúa. In addition, José María is clearly a heavy metal fan, rather than simply a shop worker, and his attitude and appearance mark him as existing well beyond polite middle-class society. José María’s membership in an underground cult movement, and the film’s celebration of ‘heavy’ culture, suggests a refusal to accept the values of mainstream Spanish culture, here represented by, for example, the Puerta de Europa. Youth subcultures have long been seen as the site of symbolic struggle against and resistance to mainstream values and cultures. From the pioneering work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the UK during the 1970s there have been various attempts to articulate how this challenge may be understood (see for example Hall and Jefferson 1976; McRobbie 1989). Significantly, little of this work has addressed heavy metal. Andy R. Brown has argued that heavy metal has been relatively neglected by subcultural studies because it is perceived as ‘inauthentic’. And unlike the favoured subjects of subcultural studies, such as punk and skinhead cultures, the radicality of heavy metal, as opposed to its

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marginality, has always proven more elusive (2003, 209). In the context of post-Franco Spanish society radical youth culture has most often been associated with the movida movement. Emma Dent Coad explains that ‘this phenomenon was first identified in Madrid, where underground rock bands suddenly became folk heroes. The bars and clubs where they performed served as a focus for a new, young, active, articulate avant-garde’ (1995, 376). José María and heavy metal are far removed from this mainly middle-class version of youth culture. In fact, in Spain, los jevis, as fans of heavy metal are known, were historically drawn from the poorest sectors of urban society (see Ordovás 1986, 558–9), and José María, of course, is from the drab working-class area of Carabanchel (‘¿Tú eres satánico, verdad?’ asks Father B. ‘Sí señor, y de Carabanchel’ replies José María). As a devotee of heavy metal he is unlikely to become assimilated by mainstream culture as many movida figures were: ‘the supportive political environment in which the movida flourished may well have also been instrumental in its demise by the mid-eighties, coupled with the more familiar commercial appropriation of subcultures, and other local, national and international historical factors’ (Allinson 2000, 268). José María, committed to a continually dismissed or ignored musical genre, remains ex-centric to the hegemonic norms represented by Limpia Madrid. These points are made more concrete when one analyses the film itself in some detail. When Father Berriartúa first enters the record shop where José María works, he has to go downstairs, literally underground. There he produces a list of established heavy metal bands whose music he believes contains satanic messages, including Napalm Death and Iron Maiden, established international acts. After the playing of a record backwards does not satisfy Berriartúa, José María suggests that he try another band, Satannica. They are a local and more underground band than those on the priest’s list. When he plays them and Berriartúa complains about their sound being different, he assures him that this is because the tape is a demo. He then shows the priest his Satannica tattoo which has a pentangle on it. This is an important moment because it establishes that José María is part of the local heavy metal scene and therefore an authentic subcultural character. Satannica themselves have not yet signed a record deal, so have no links with the capitalist music industry and are thus less well known and remain part of an underground movement. This indicates that in the battle against Satan – especially in the form of Limpia

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Madrid – one must recruit from the strata of society least touched by the corruption of capitalism. In establishing José María as a character so culturally marginal as to be untainted by consumer capitalism, the risk is that the film may idealise him: out of step with the present, it is only he who can team up with the Basque priest who imports anachronistic values to the metropolis. However, if we examine the old-fashioned pensión where José María lives, and particularly its proprietor, his mother, we can see that the film is careful not to align itself unequivocally with the past. Whilst the film is ferociously critical of the glossy new Madrid of rampant Yuletide consumption, it is no less open-eyed about those who over-value the past. In this case conservativism resides in José María’s mother, who is unhappy with the present and wants to return to older values. She complains that the area is over-run by ‘putas, negros, drogadictos y asesinos’ (whores, blacks, drug addicts and killers), implying that she would mete out her own vigilante-style justice if they came near her. Her right-wing rhetoric is concretised visually later when she discovers that Father Berriartúa has been extracting blood from cousin Mina. She phones the police, but when confronted by what she sees as their needless bureaucracy (they ask for her name, address and ID number), she takes matters into her own hands, removing a shotgun from the drawer that contains her late husband’s Guardia Civil uniform. As she does so a photo of him, in the same uniform with the distinctive headgear, is seen on the top of the chest of drawers, which is like a small shrine to him and his beliefs. The Guardia Civil is forever tainted as a tool of Franco’s regime, and this image of it leaves us in no doubt about the authoritarian political views in operation inside the old-fashioned pensión. The importance of the Guardia Civil uniform alerts us to the politically charged coding of costume throughout the film. Costume is one of the main ways in which cinema constructs character and as such is an integral part of the mise-en-scène. The opposition between José María and the right-wing vigilantes of the Limpia Madrid gang is typical of this. José María’s marginality is anchored by his costume and make-up: his hair is long and greasy, he has an unkempt beard and cigarette-stained fingers, nose and eyebrow rings, and wears a cut-off or sleeveless denim jacket over a similarly customised leather biker jacket. His jeans sport a bullet belt, made famous by those other heavy metal outsiders Mötorhead, and he wears cowboy boots. All of these clothes are made to look as though they have not been washed in some

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time. This is in stark contrast to the Limpia Madrid characters, whose costumes unequivocally signify middle-classness. In the final confrontation they appear like models for middle-brow department store windows, wearing woollen jumpers in autumnal shades, chinos, quilted or wax jackets, deck shoes or loafers and neatly trimmed hair. This is perhaps visually most clear before Cavan is beaten near the end of the film, when we see a shot of two of the group, one of them wearing expensive sunglasses, a light blue oxford shirt with a cravat, a dark blue waistcoat under an open dark green overcoat with a burgundy jumper slung over his shoulders. As the film’s costume designer, Estíbaliz Markiegi, explains of Limpia Madrid, ‘Álex lo tenía clarísimo, eran muy pijos e iban en plan sport pijo’ (Álex made it very clear: they were real preppies, and they were dressed in a sporty preppie style) (Vera 2002, 76). The idea is straightforward enough: these ‘respectable’ people are willing to do anything – they are in the act of pouring petrol over Cavan – to achieve their ideal of an ordered society where those on the fringes are simply exterminated. There is no Devil in El día de la bestia. Satannica may play in the Sala Infierno (The Hell Venue), but the Beast is not to be found there. The Beast is a normalizing class-based force that can only be perceived by

4 Heavy metal costume: Santiago Segura as José María in El día de la bestia

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those on the margins of culture, and in a situation of drug-induced extremity. We argued earlier that most critics of the film fail to notice that all the supernatural events that follow the ‘successful’ invocation of the Devil in El día de la bestia must be considered in light of the LSD consumed by Cavan, Berriartúa, and José María. This does not mean that we should simply discount what the intoxicated trio experience. As we intermittently emphasize, this cinema has learnt the lessons of surrealism, and one of the most important ones is the value of intoxication. Walter Benjamin notes of drug-taking how ‘the trance cuts itself off from everyday reality with fine prismatic edges’ and argues that for the surrealists it was one of the key routes to ‘profane illumination’ (1997, 220, 227). It is only through intoxication that the demonic face of contemporary Spanish bourgeois culture is exposed, for in its ‘everyday reality’ it seems banal, harmless. For instance, when Berriartúa chases Cavan’s screaming girlfriend down the staircase of the apartment building we get one of our few glimpses of ordinary, ‘everyday’ Madrid: a prosperous-looking man, dressed in pijo attire, but without the threatening aspect of Limpia Madrid, looks suspiciously out his door before returning to his seasonal celebrations. If this seems a slightly exaggerated or even hysterical analysis of Spanish society, it is worth remembering that it is precisely these pijos (preppies) who are taken for granted as protagonists of much of contemporary Spanish cinema, from Historias del Kronen (Montxo Armendáriz, 1995) and Abre los ojos (A. Amenábar, 1997) to El otro lado de la cama (Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2002) and El Método (M. Piñeyro, 2005). This is not to say that there are not also many earnest Spanish films which take as their subject-matter characters from José María’s socio-economic background. But one cannot imagine, for example, the director of Barrio (1998), Fernando León de Aranóa, making a film whose protagonist is someone as ‘inauthentic’ as a jevi. Raymond Williams has argued that realism, as well as being secular, and dealing with contemporary material, has historically been marked by ‘social extension’, that is, the opening up to representation of groups who have not previously been represented (1977, 61–74). By these criteria, and counter-intuitive though it may seem, Isi y Disi, a boxoffice hit of 2004 in which Santiago Segura successfully resurrected this heavy metal persona in a more purely comic mode, is a realist film. Not only does it depict the Spanish heavy metal scene, but also puts onto celluloid the otherwise under-represented neighbourhood of Carabanchel.

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Television The Beast is subtle and takes on many forms. El día de la bestia was made in the wake of rapid and profound changes in Spanish television and the shock of these developments registers heavily not only on this film, but on others from the era such as Acción mutante and Almodóvar’s Kika (1993). As Philip Deacon chronicles (2000, 154–5), the Commercial Television Law was passed in 1988, putting out to tender licences for private television stations. The first three licences were awarded to Antena 3, Telecinco and Canal Plus, and all three went on air for the first time in 1990. Although loss-making at first, they soon cut deeply into the dominance of the state-owned RTVE, whose audience share fell from 43% in 1991 to 26.9% in 1996 (Smith 2002, 318). In the scramble for audiences that followed privatization, there was a spate of cheaply made and sensationalist programming, mainly on the part of Antena 3 and Telecinco. As Cerdán observes (2004, 251), the ‘Tele3’ of El día de la bestia is a clear condensation of these two private stations, and its tawdry and exploitative La zona oscura an obvious parody of their style of programming. La zona oscura is a compendium of formats popular in the epoch: confessional talk shows, phone-ins, and horoscope and tarot-readings. Following a series of flashy title graphics, including flying crosses, strange writing and occult symbols, the show cuts to Cavan being mobbed by his adoring audience, waving to the viewers at home and passing by his scantily clad female assistants. Cavan then introduces a guest, eleven–year-old Juan Carlos Cruz, whom he describes as the Devil himself. The boy, dressed in the manner of Harvey Stephens as Damien in The Omen, thanks La zona oscura for saving him. Cavan then introduces a video report of him and his team ‘saving’ the boy at his home. With a lightweight camera accompanying him, the Professor enters the hallway of the boy’s house. The visual style is clearly that of ‘reality’ TV shows, and the ‘exorcism’ that follows is also clearly staged. Just in case we were in any doubt that it is a sham, José María, who is watching the show in a bar with Father Berriartúa, exclaims that it is all a set-up. Cavan passes the boy’s father who is holding up garlic and enters the boy’s room where he is writhing on the bed and puking like Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973) and any number of actors in the cheap European horror film rip-offs that followed that film’s success. Like Father Merrin in The Exorcist, Cavan prays over the possessed child and sprinkles him with holy water. As he picks him up, now

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saved, the show cuts back to the studio and the film cuts to José María’s cousin who is enthralled by and believing it all. For the film audience in 1995, well-trained in a diet of such programmes and films, there would have been no risk of confusing the fake exorcism for the real thing; indeed, the film obviously asks its audience to take up an ironic relation to television. However, El día de la bestia’s relation to its sister medium is more complicated than mere parody. As María Pilar Rodríguez points out, Father Berriartúa, the film’s Quixotic innocent, is unable to interpret the world around him, mainly because of his lack of knowledge of mass media, and yet: Paradójicamente va a ser la incapacidad del cura para diferenciar entre los diversos tipos de comunicación lo que le llevará a transgredir los principios de sumisión al sistema hasta llegar a alcanzar su objetivo. (quoted in Cerdán 2004, 253) Paradoxically, it will be precisely the priest’s incapacity to distinguish between different types of communication that allows him to transgress the laws of the system and reach his objective.

Unlike the cynical and knowing consumer of the postmodern spectacle, Father Berriartúa does not assume that the image is empty. As a result, he can see what is not visible to others: the jagged line connecting the products of mass media to the demonic activities of Limpia Madrid. Without turning into a detailed analysis of the ins and outs of transnational capital, El día de la bestia shows a keen awareness of its movements and effects. By making Professor Cavan Italian, the film highlights the creeping influence of Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi over privatized Spanish television. Berlusconi’s influence on Spanish television dates most significantly from August 1989. When the franchises for the three new commercial television stations were granted, his Fininvest gained 25% control of Telecinco. This was an example of the international expansionism being practised by the Italian entrepreneur, who had become known as ‘Mr Broadcasting’ in Italy, even though his companies also had interests in Football (AC Milan), construction, retail and insurance. A smugly smiling Berlusconi even makes a personal appearance in El día de la bestia in the shape of an enormous photograph on the wall of the corridor at the television studio that records La zona oscura. This photograph is seen as Cavan, after being separated from the other two, returns to try and contact them via his show. In a tracking shot down the corridors of the

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television studio, the camera pauses quite pointedly on this over-sized image. The Italian influence and control at ‘Tele3’ is further emphasised by the presence of the Italian producer of the show who meets Cavan as he returns. Just in case the point is missed, the two converse in Italian, which is seen to alienate the rest of the Spanish crew. El día de la bestia was, of course, made partly with Italian finance and it might seem perverse to attack Italian involvement in Spanish media in a co-production with Italy. But this is not an anti-Italian film, for it is precisely Cavan’s position as an outsider that allows him, with Father Berriartúa and José María, to truly see what is going on in Madrid. Berlusconi does not represent the incursion of Italian capital so much as global capital. Indeed, as Jeremy Tunstall explains, Berlusconi had been ‘long snubbed by the “old guard” of the exclusive club of Italian high finance’ (1991, 172), and as Herman and McChesney observe, ‘the rise of the Berlusconi empire illustrates the intensifying politicisation of the mass media under the globalization-commercialization process’ (1997, 17). The film’s suspicion of Berlusconi, subsequently exposed as a member of the secret, ultra-right-wing P-2 organization, therefore goes much deeper than an aesthetic dismay at telebasura (tele-garbage). There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about television: but the networks of possession, in the more banal meaning of that word, it belongs to, are indeed a cause for concern. El día de la bestia, with its unwillingness to offer an easy political position for the liberal viewer and its generic hybridity which refuses the bounds of good cinematic taste, is indeed one of the most radical Spanish films of the 1990s. The film also brought De la Iglesia to much wider international prominence and opened up a number of interesting new opportunities for him, including the commission for Perdita Durango. Notes 1

2

One example of these ‘curas rojos’ and ‘curas nacionalistas’ whom Paul Preston mentions was called Father Berriciartúa. See Preston (1986, 22–9). This is precisely the conclusion reached by Carlos Heredero in 20 nuevos directores del cine español (1999).

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Perdita Durango (1997): the body, sex and Mexico

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Una película de encargo Perdita Durango is exceptional among Álex de la Iglesia’s completed films in a number of ways. It is an international co-production with Spanish and Mexican finance; it is a bilingual film, set and filmed in Mexico and the United States; it makes use of a mainly non-Spanish cast, including a then prominent Hollywood star, Rosie Pérez; and it was a relative failure, both critically and at the box office.1 In addition, the story and script for Perdita, unlike De la Iglesia’s other six feature films to date, were not in the first instance the work of De la Iglesia and his co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría. In the pre-release publicity and interviews De la Iglesia repeatedly calls attention to this fact, emphasizing that it is first and foremost a ‘producer’s film’.2 Perdita is based on 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango (1992), by Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart was adapted for the cinema by David Lynch (1990), and who was also co-writer with Lynch of Lost Highway (1996). Producer Andrés Vicente Gómez purchased the rights to Gifford’s novel in 1993. Gifford himself wrote a screenplay of the novel, and Gómez entrusted this to Catalan director Bigas Luna, who produced with Cuca Canals a modified screenplay, scouted locations, and cast the central characters. Vicente Gómez was unhappy with Luna’s script, which included a political sub-plot absent from Gifford’s original, and hired David Trueba to rewrite it. The producer then offered the directing job to De la Iglesia, who subsequently made further alterations to the existing script with Guerricaechevarría. In the final product, then, it is quite a crowd, with four writing credits: Gifford, Trueba, De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría. In the wake of the success of El día de la bestia in 1995, a Basque newspaper asked De la Iglesia about his future projects and he replied, ‘Tengo previsto hacer una película de encargo’ (I’m going to be making a commissioned film) (Redondo 1995). It is not easy to translate una película de encargo, which carries a set of pejorative associations within Spanish film-making culture. Instead of calling it ‘commissioned work’, one might translate the term as ‘a film made to order’. The implication is that the idea and script for a film are not the director’s own but that he or she has simply been contracted to complete a job already started, becoming in effect a ‘director for hire’. In Spain, directors with pretensions to auteur status will often later disavow the películas de encargo that they were obliged, through economic or political circumstances, to take on before they became established. This was the case with both Josefina Molina and Pilar Miró, who distanced

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themselves, respectively, from Vera, un cuento cruel (Vera, A Cruel Story) (1973) and La petición (The Petition) (1976). In other words, in the minds of Spanish directors, at least those who are products of the Escuela Oficial de Cine like Molina and Miró, it is technicians and not artists who make películas de encargo. Álex de la Iglesia, of course, is not the product of any film school and has on more than one occasion expressed his abhorrence for auteur cinema: ‘hay que quitarse de encima esa puta manía del cine de autor, de la película hecha por un tio que está siguiendo su paranoia y su paja mental . . . así que odio bastante ese rollo de cine de autor’ (We have to shake off this obsession with auteur cinema, with films made by some guy exploring and expressing his innermost demons and solipsistic crap . . . I really detest auteur cinema’ (T. García 1997, 10) Given this prejudice, we can be sure that De la Iglesia did not invoke the term ‘película de encargo’ as a pre-emptive disavowal of Perdita. When he insists in interviews that Perdita is first and foremost ‘una película de productor, al viejo estilo’ (a producer’s film, in the old style), the ‘old style’ he invokes has nothing to do with Spain, but in fact refers to the Hollywood studio system (Díaz-Cano 1997). At one point he even suggests that Perdita is a film in the manner of David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone with the Wind (1939), which had innumerable scriptwriters and three directors, and was above all the child of the producer (J. L. Sánchez 1997). But the comparison is ultimately a false one. In truth, the relative autonomy with which De la Iglesia worked on Perdita bears little resemblance to the industrial conditions of Hollywood at the height of the studio system in the 1930s and 1940s. The comparison does, however, tell us a little of how he would like to position himself as a director, that is, how his ‘author-function’ has been constructed by the pre-release machine of publicity and interviews. De la Iglesia clearly rejects the model of European auteur pursuing a unique personal vision, but would not resent being equated with prestige directors such as Howards Hawks or John Ford, who worked within the studio system producing genre cinema, but with a much freer hand than the average jobbing director. Without stretching the comparison too far, we could say that, like Hawks and Ford, De la Iglesia has shown a proficiency in a wide range of pre-existing genres already in circulation in popular culture, whilst still producing cinema with a distinctive thematics and visual style. In one respect, then, it hardly matters that Perdita was una película de encargo, since it does not differ from the rest of De la Iglesia’s films,

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which all draw promiscuously and unevenly on popular forms, rather than promoting themselves as art cinema (which tends in contrast to make claims for the uniqueness of its stories and images, whether in the form of realism, or more abstract or expressionist modes). And as with the rest of the films, the precise genre of Perdita is difficult to pin down, for like the others, it mixes the features of a range of genres – in this case action, gangster, road, horror, and of course, black comedy – without abiding entirely by the rules of any of them. Nevertheless, there are a number of features of Perdita Durango which distinguish it from the other six films scripted solely by De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría. Precisely because Perdita does not fit perfectly in the system of films circumscribed by the name ‘Álex de la Iglesia’, it becomes the ideal borderline case by which to delineate the rules of that system. Cinema of sequestration For instance, each of the first three films hinges on a kidnapping: in Acción mutante, Ramón and his band of mutants kidnap from a party the daughter of a bread-making tycoon; in El día de la bestia, Professor Cavan, the fraudulent television occultist, is held captive in his own house by Father Berriartúa and José María; and in Perdita, Perdita (Rosie Pérez) and Romeo (Javier Bardem) seize the gueritos (little blondies) Duane (Harley Cross) and Estelle (Aimee Graham) from the streets of Susie, Texas, take them across the Mexican border to Romeo’s ranch, rape them, involve them in a santería ritual, and then eventually release them in Las Vegas after a violently picaresque journey through the American southwest. One could even say that De la Iglesia specializes in sequestration. In the conventional kidnapping film – Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990), Ransom (Ron Howard, 1996), Don’t Say a Word (Gary Fleder, 2001) – the audience is presented with the point of view of the investigator or the victim. In De la Iglesia’s treatment of this scenario, in contrast, the kidnappers are the protagonists, and however terrifying or repulsive they might be, the film eventually contrives to align the audience with them. In this way, the spectator of Acción mutante, El día de la bestia and Perdita Durango is enlisted in the idiocies of the mutants, the delusions of Father Berriartúa, and the savagery of Perdita and Romeo. In fact, kidnapping might be a useful model for understanding the relationship between spectator and screen in all De la Iglesia’s films: the

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successfully interpellated audience member of these films will, like Patricia in Acción mutante, begin to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, or like Cavan in El día de la bestia, become convinced of the wild prognostications of Berriartúa, or like Estelle in Perdita Durango, end up hoping that Romeo and Perdita can live happily ever after.3 However, the kidnapping in Perdita is of a different order from the kidnappings in the other two films. The key difference is this: the kidnappers of Acción mutante and El día de la bestia are the regular inhabitants of the De la Iglesian universe; but Perdita and Romeo are only visitors to it. De la Iglesia has said himself that Barry Gifford’s novel is not the sort of story he would normally tell: Yo hubiera hecho ‘Las aventuras de Álex Angulo en la frontera’, un tipo pequeñito que dicen que es santero y realmente no es nada de eso, esa hubiera sido mi historia y hubiera tenido problemas con la policía y con los mexicanos y con todo el mundo. En cambio ésta no, ésta es la historia de un tipo que es casi un superhéroe, con poderes, que cruzó la frontera porque ejerce un poder hipnótico con los guardas. (Sotomayor and Portocarrero) I would have made ‘The border adventures of Álex Angulo’, about some little guy who claims to be a santero, but who is really a sad case; that would have been my story, and this guy would have had problems with the police and the Mexicans and everyone else. In contrast, Perdita is the story of a guy who is almost a superhero, with real powers, who crosses the border freely because he has this hypnotic power over the border guards.

The standard De la Iglesian hero is ugly, bungling, deformed, a human failure at odds with modernity and social hegemony. The only trait that Perdita and Romeo share with the incompetent mutant terrorists (Acción mutante), the priest obsessed with the Apocalypse and his unwashed metal-head sidekick (El día de la bestia), the repulsive feuding comic duo (Muertos de risa), the failed estate agent and the community of monsters who terrorize her (La comunidad), and the washed-up stuntman and his ragged band of initiates (800 balas) is a marginality vis-a-vis dominant culture.4 Perdita and Romeo are representatives, in the loosest sense, of an Hispanic underclass along a border where socio-economic relations are skewed asymmetrically in favour of the United States, represented here in caricature by the naïve, pale and blonde Estelle and Duane. But Perdita and Romeo are neither ugly nor incompetent. They are not played by the

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sort of actors De la Iglesia favours (secundarios with peculiar physiognomies), but by more conventionally attractive movie stars, one a symbol of Spanish virility (Bardem), the other an established performer in Hollywood (Pérez). Nor are they bungling and errorprone: unlike the terrorists of Acción mutante, who accidentally suffocate with a plastic bag their first prospective victim, a bodybuilding champion, Perdita and Romeo carry out the kidnapping of Estelle and Duane decisively and efficiently, and remain masterfully in control of them during subsequent escape attempts. To see the difference, one need only compare Perdita cornering the fleeing Estelle in the barn with Father Berriartúa tripping over his robes as he pursues Cavan’s girlfriend down the stairs of the apartment block in El día de la bestia. The former is the uncannily composed and cold-blooded villain of thrillers, the latter a hapless product of slapstick. Cinema of deflation The qualities of Perdita’s protagonists are in fact at odds with the principles of comedy which regulate De la Iglesia’s fictional worlds, where there is usually room for neither heroism nor beauty. If in the other films audiences are enlisted on the side of characters in spite of their evident failings, in Perdita the two leads embody a more traditional form of wish-fulfilment for the spectator – sexual potency and mastery of the world around them. To Romeo, the Mexico–US border is insubstantial, a frontier he crosses at will and as if by magic. This phantasy of mobility is clearly at odds with the reality of ‘a permeable barrier through which goods and services [are] exchanged at an ever increasing rate’ (Lorey 1999, 117) but which presents rather more considerable difficulties to the passage of peoples, at least from the Mexican side. Whereas the illegal immigrant or El Paso maid crosses under conditions of subordination, Romeo raids the US undetected, like a latter-day Pancho Villa. This pattern of more traditionally heroic characterization is also evident at the level of the film’s genre. Although Perdita Durango refuses many of the clichés of the road movie (certainly there is no question here of ‘a spiritual journey’ which ‘parallels but always overshadows the physical journey’ [Roberts 1997, 53]), Romeo is in at least one respect a conventional road-movie hero. According to Corey K. Creekmur, one of the main reasons to ‘go on the road’ in cinema is the pursuit of fame or notoriety. This can take the form of courtship of

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the media (as in Bonnie and Clyde [Arthur Penn, 1967], and Natural Born Killers [Oliver Stone, 1994]) or in ‘even more allusion-saturated postmodernist outlaw couple films, characters explicitly affiliate themselves with popular celebrities’ (Creekmur 1997, 100). For example, in Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) Martin Sheen models himself on James Dean, and in Wild at Heart Nicolas Cage emulates Elvis. In Perdita, Romeo’s ego-ideal is Burt Lancaster as the eversmiling Joe Erin in Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1953). Like Lancaster in that film, Romeo dresses all in black and possesses luminous white teeth, while his death at the end transforms, through superimposition, into the death of Lancaster at the hands of Gary Cooper. In spite of these conventional tools of characterisation, it might be argued that any identification with this outlaw couple on the part of the spectator is blocked or at least imperilled by the brutalities meted out by them – desecration of a corpse, rape, intention to ritually sacrifice Estelle. But it is at the very point when the sacrifice of Estelle is averted that the film draws back from the risky wager of centring its narrative on two authentically diabolical central characters. It does this at the midway point of the film by diluting the villainy of Perdita and Romeo with the introduction of a series of even more villainous and destructive figures whose actions become stations on Romeo’s path to a final apotheosis, reincarnated as the dying Lancaster. These include the vengeful and maniacal Shorty Dee (Santiago Segura); the paedophilic double-crossing crime-boss Marcellos Santos (Don Stroud); Santos’ drug-crazed henchman Pete Armandriz; and the sleazy pimp Catalina who has been terrorizing Romeo’s grandmother back in Petit Caribe. Romeo sees off these adversaries one by one, and although Perdita concludes with his death, it is one of his own choosing, while Perdita survives to walk away in a credit sequence of unparalleled sentimentality in Álex de la Iglesia’s films. Freud writes of the heroes of popular fiction, ‘through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story’ (1985 [1908], 138). In striking contrast with De la Iglesia’s other films, then, Perdita offers relatively standard narcissistic satisfactions to the spectator. The need to generate for Perdita and Romeo a more conventional sympathy also has a knock-on effect at the level of cinematic style. Flash-back is not a technique normally favoured by De la Iglesia, but in Perdita it is necessary to mitigate the brutalities of the lead pair. Romeo may mutilate corpses and rape teenage girls, but he loves his

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grandmother; Perdita is vicious and unpredictable, but her sister and nieces were murdered by her brother-in-law. Such exaggerated and violent juxtapositions owe something to the shock effects of surrealism, but one reviewer still complains, ‘All these flashbacks and dreamsequences do is chop up the narrative, adding up to less than the sum of their parts’ (Arroyo 1999, 49). For a director who has a reputation for rhythm in editing and for constructing ‘compelling narrative which builds, sustains, and resolves in the best Hollywood tradition’ (Smith 1996, 42) this is no small charge. It is worth remembering, then, that these elements of ‘back-story’, like the potency and magnetism of Romeo and Perdita, were demanded by Gifford’s source material. If the central pair in Perdita are more or less immunized against the black humour De la Iglesia’s characters are normally subjected to, these elements are nevertheless present, at the level of mise-en-scène as well as in changes made to Gifford’s original plot. The generalized tactic of deflation is evident, for instance, in the handling of the santería sequences. Santería is a syncretic religion, a mixture of Yoruba culture and Roman Catholicism, but Perdita Durango, predictably, is less concerned with socio-theological accuracy than the potential for spectacle the religion provides. We have already discussed in the previous chapter how El día de la bestia treads a delicate line on supernatural matters, openly mocking Father Berriartúa’s apocalyptic predictions, while still leaving open the possibility that the Anti-Christ might walk the streets of Madrid: the entire finale of El día might be no more than an acid-induced hallucination, and yet the film freely exploits the power of Catholic (and satanic) imagery throughout. Perdita takes a similarly equivocating tack with regard to santería. In the first of two ritual scenes, Romeo enters into an epileptic-like trance, chops an arm and a leg from a corpse, spits blood in the faces of the audience in the barn, and carves the heart from the chest of a dead man. The soundtrack, editing and camerawork of the sequence are all calculated to elicit involvement rather than detachment from the cinema spectator. In three minutes of film there are approximately one hundred shots cut to follow the beat of an increasingly frenetic Pérez Prado mambo; camera distance and position change with disorienting frequency; bellowing animal sounds emerge impossibly from Romeo; and the entranced and horrified audience members in the barn provide a model of credulity for the cinema spectator to follow. The fact that many parts of this sequence were excised for DVD and video release in the anglophone world gives some sense of its visceral force.5 And yet,

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5 The first ritual: Javier Bardem as Romeo Dolorosa in Perdita Durango

at the same time, elements both within and framing the sequence undermine the mesmerizing power of Javier Bardem’s histrionic performance. The sequence opens with Romeo’s henchman Adolfo (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) popping a CD into a Discman, and the same Adolfo circulates collecting money from the audience as the ritual proceeds, which suggests that this is more karaoke for the gullible than authentic black magic. Furthermore, during the scene we are also shown the sceptical eyes of Perdita, and in the scene in the bath immediately afterwards Perdita argues that Romeo is simply duping people in a money-making scheme, a charge which he neither directly admits nor denies. By keeping certainty in abeyance, by keeping the audience wondering about the veracity of the supernatural, the film accentuates suspense, which ‘depends on our anticipation of an impending threat, whether or not it is actually realized. The closer the threat, the greater the suspense’ (Wollen 2002, 267). The second ritual sequence contains the threat that Romeo will actually sacrifice Estelle. Held in suspense here for the audience are two possible outcomes – the burst of laughter or the shudder of horror – for just as the stakes are higher in this second ritual, so are the tactics of deflation more prominent. On the side of

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terror, there is Romeo’s face, painted devilish red, as well as Estelle’s screams and Duane’s terrified whimpering. At the same time, Duane and Estelle, painted white and dipped in chicken feathers, are too preposterous to be taken seriously as ‘food for the gods’; furthermore, Romeo performs the ceremony in blue underpants. There are effectively two countervailing tendencies in De la Iglesia: great skill in the manipulation of the audience through suspense and spectacle, and the prankster’s pleasure in unmasking the cinema-magician as a mere prestidigitator, a con-artist. Here, the burst of laughter is co-terminous with the shudder of fear. In Gifford’s novel Romeo tells Duane of the inspiration he has found in a range of mass murderers. In the equivalent scene in the film, Romeo explains to Duane the importance of being a sacrificial victim by showing him his sticker album containing pictures of Aztec rituals. The body in pieces One has only to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. (Lacan 1977, 11)

The powdering and feathering of Duane and Estelle is a relatively gentle example of the sort of deflationary humiliation usually undergone by De la Iglesian characters. The true prototype for the De la Iglesian subject is to be found in the parts played by Álex Angulo in Acción mutante and El día de la bestia. In the former, he is Álex Abadie, the longer-surviving member of a pair of conjoined twins. Thwarted in romance by the ever-presence of his brother, Juan, the true catalogue of ignominies he must suffer only really begins after his twin has been killed by Ramón. For the rest of the film Álex drags his first putrefying and then stuffed brother everywhere with him, and in the process is attacked by vultures, zapped by a cattle prod, hung from a tree, and bumped on the head by the tyre of an enormous bulldozer, with liberation coming only in the film’s final moments as he tears himself from lifeless Juan to leave a bloody stump where they were once joined. This relentless denuding of physical dignity and bodily integrity continues in El día de la bestia. Not only does Father Berriartúa burn crosses on his own feet in a travesty of self-harm, but he also loses part of an ear to a gunshot blast, is clubbed by a shotgun, battered by Rosario

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(Terele Pávez), tossed down stairs, thrown from a speeding car, headbutted, and crashed head-first against a urinal, which shatters on impact. And just as Álex in Acción mutante improbably emerges battered but breathing, so does Berriartúa, a body in pieces, but a living one nonetheless. Since Romeo, and particularly Perdita, are excluded from this regime of humiliation (protected by the exigencies of the plot inherited from Gifford and by Pérez’ stardom), it is visited instead on minor characters in Perdita. Especially singled out is Special Agent Woody Dumas of the DEA (James Gandolfini), who in Gifford’s text is attacked by ‘The Fist’ and subsequently wears bandages, but in De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría’s version is in addition unceremoniously tossed in the air by a speeding car and bounced off the bonnet of a sport utility vehicle into a ditch. He spends a large part of the film limping and wearing a neck-brace, a piece of costume also worn by Manitas in Acción mutante and Rafael in Crimen ferpecto. Estelle’s father Herb is similarly treated like a rag-doll, flipped head over heels by a car in Tucson. Other characters stripped of physical dignity include Dede Peralta, crushed by the enormous wheels of the truck, and ‘Skinny’, a character not found in Gifford’s version, who dies because he chooses the wrong moment to zip up his fly. Meanwhile, the seriousness of the arch-villain, Santos, is compromised by his out-of-context fondness for jabugo ham (like the ‘Euskadi Radial’ inscribed on the tyres of Romeo’s Challenger, a Spanish/Basque in-joke in a Mexican-set movie) and his caricatured paedophilia. Finally, it is worth noting one other minor alteration to Gifford’s story. In the novel, Romeo and Perdita drive a cargo of placentas across the US southwest; but in the film this becomes foetuses (presumably aborted). When we are introduced to Agent Doyle (Alex Cox) after the shootout, he gingerly picks up one of these foetuses from the highway and hands it to another agent with the words, ‘Charlie, can you make sure this baby gets a decent burial.’ This black vignette on bodily fragility was of course removed from the various anglophone versions of the film. In an interview with Senses of Cinema, director-turned-actor Alex Cox comments that Perdita Durango . . . was one of those films where you go in and the tape marks are already on the floor . . . [De la Iglesia] really doesn’t like actors. Movies are what he likes, actors are just a bother for him. They just get in the way. He’s really a cartoonist, a very talented cartoonist and he’s a good filmmaker too. But it’s not an environment where actors flourish

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. . . For the principal characters, there’s endless kinds of lighting and moving the camera a bit and moving the tape marks on the floor a little bit and it’s quite boring. (Le Cain 2003, 8)

Although Cox’s remarks are broadly negative, they are helpful in understanding the wider implications of De la Iglesia’s systematic attack on corporeal integrity, particularly when we consider them in conjunction with a couple of passages of dialogue from Acción mutante: Blind man: Having just finished stuffing Álex’s brother: ¿Qué tal? / How does he look? Alex: Parece un muñeco / It looks like a doll. Blind man: Ya, ya lo arreglaré. / Don’t worry, I’ll fix it. Crushes cheekbones to remove grin. –– Abuelo: Having just driven a bulldozer into Álex’s head. Eh, tú, con el muñeco, quita de en medio. / You with the doll, get out of the way. Abraham: Es un ventrílocuo. / He’s a ventriloquist. Ezequiel: Un mimo. / A mime.

Cox complains that to act for De la Iglesia is to become no more than an inanimate being, a puppet or doll, manipulated down to the last movement, with no room left for the spontaneity or animation of the actor. And of course, he is right: De la Iglesia and his team not only storyboard a film in its entirety before shooting, but De la Iglesia is firmly antipathetic to improvisation (De la Iglesia 2003). This regimented treatment of actors must, as Cox suspects, be partly the legacy of a background in comics, but it also participates in a more venerable tradition of non-naturalist and anti-psychological acting inaugurated in the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. For example, Jarry in his manifestoes for the Ubu plays (1995, 12) and Antonin Artaud in the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (1970, 72) conducted a campaign against the individuality of the actor, suggesting the use of abstract masks and puppets; and Edward Gordon Craig announced in On the Art of the Theatre, ‘I . . . propose to clear the stage of ALL the actors and actresses in order to revive the art of the theatre’, planning to replace them with the Über-Marionette (1956, 77). Closer to home, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, whose esperpento theatre of grotesque distortion finds new life in De la Iglesia’s cinema, also experimented with puppets in, for example, Los cuernos de don Friolera (Don Friolera the Cuckold, 1921). The only established Spanish star in Acción

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mutante, Antonio Resines, was, as De la Iglesia himself points out, rendered virtually unrecognizable by a half-mask and a blackened face (Ordóñez 1997, 61), and Javier Bardem, who at one point wears a wrestler’s mask in Perdita, is also obscured under a black mullet and facial hair. Is it too much of a stretch to see in the ochre-red faces of Álex Angulo in Acción mutante and Bardem in Perdita the inheritors of Beckett’s Hamm and Clov? And is it any wonder that Chris Perriam writes of Bardem’s ‘dislocation’ in the film, of a ‘performance . . . as adrift as is the character he plays’? (2003, 104). Dolls, puppets, stuffed toys, mannequins: anthropomorphic but organless, these composites of working parts can be dismantled or dismembered, rearticulated and reassembled. Their lack of autonomy and their travesty of the animate beings they copy make them meat for any number of pejorative discourses, but for precisely the same reason they can also be frightening, acting as three-dimensional memento mori. Subjected to the wild contortions of puppets, characters in Álex de la Iglesia’s films are, from a Lacanian perspective, a constant reminder of the bodily disarray of infancy, that retroactively imagined corps morcelé (fragmented body) which finds expression in ‘images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’ (Lacan 1977, 11). Music to the ears, perhaps, of those who have correctly labelled this cinema infantile, but for the wrong reasons. Just as the first five films – with the partial exception of Perdita – reflect on the ‘body in bits and pieces’ which antedates the mirage of bodily coherence provided by the illusions of the mirror, so they are all marked by the state of non-differentiation constitutive of a pre-symbolic or pre-Oedipal state. The world of these films, like the world of the infant, is generally blind to the shadow of sexual difference and indifferent to the strictures of the law inaugurated by the symbolic order. Put another way, women and police, symbolic representatives of sexual difference and the law, rarely impinge on games and play in this cinema. And once again Perdita is the (partial) exception to this rule. The sixth and seventh feature films, 800 balas and Crimen ferpecto, mark, in some respects, a new development in De la Iglesia’s cinema. 800 balas, as we will argue in Chapter 6, is De la Iglesia’s first properly Oedipalizing narrative, while Crimen ferpecto gives more substance and consistency to the law than any of the previous films. Nevertheless, both of these films continue to participate, if in a less thoroughgoing fashion, in the ludic, presymbolic economy which we will now describe in more detail.

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According to Barry Jordan, in the 1980s and 1990s Spanish cinema ‘became synonymous with sex and plenty of it, the steamier and more explicit the better’ (2000, 73). He takes this idea from Marsha Kinder, who credits Pedro Almodóvar in particular with ‘establishing a mobile sexuality as the new cultural stereotype for a hyperliberated Socialist Spain’ (1997, 3). While this reputation is justified to a certain extent, and the term ‘Spanish cinema’ has taken on some of the sexualized connotations once reserved for Swedish films, it is all too often based on an unexamined and unacknowledged stereotype of Iberian ‘passion’. This stereotype is also behind Spanish film’s reputation for violence (see Kinder 1993, 136–96), a reputation that Álex de la Iglesia’s cinema of course reassuringly confirms. However, all too often when the adjective ‘violent’ appears in discussion of films such as El día de la bestia, it is accompanied by a shudder of dismay and signals the end rather than the beginning of analysis. As for sex, it is remarkable only for its absence from De la Iglesia’s films, which fail almost comprehensively to conform to the pattern identified by Jordan and others. The assumption that sex and violence should be constant companions persists though. One can only guess that the prevalence of this way of understanding and receiving Spanish film leads the Sight and Sound reviewer of Perdita Durango to claim that Acción mutante ‘pushed graphic representation of sex and violence to the point of comic disbelief’ (Arroyo 1999, 49). This is a symptomatic misrecognition: as we have already pointed out in the chapter on Acción mutante, there is no direct representation of sex in the film. Although it hints that a rape may take place, the possible sexual act is replaced by a narrative ellipsis. And just as we have made clear that the first film tends to efface sexuality and sexual difference, so the other films in general fail to gratify the expected stereotype of a sexualized cinema. In 800 balas, for example, both central protagonists, the abuelo Julián (Sancho Gracia) and the grandson Carlos (Luis Castro) end up in bed with Sandra (Yoima Valdés). However, the age of both – the grandfather is too old and tired, the grandson too young – ensures that no consummation takes place. This is typical of De la Iglesia’s films: the possibility of a sexual relation is suggested, but then eluded by default, as in the case of 800 balas, or dissolved in comedy, as in Acción mutante, La comunidad and even Crimen ferpecto, where the protagonist is a Don Juan blackmailed into monogamy. Why this prevarication, this admission of a sexual possibility and then coy withdrawal from it? In classic psychoanalytic terms it is a

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disavowal of difference: from a Freudian perspective, the threat of castration attends the recognition of sexual difference; in Lacanian vocabulary, the oblique slash of difference marks the entry into the symbolic realm and submission to patriarchal law. The way that De la Iglesia’s films imagine a body in a disassembled and undifferentiated state is intimately connected to their tendency to skirt round the implications of sexual difference. Both indicate an attempt to evade symbolic law. It is for this reason that, apart from Perdita Durango and Crimen ferpecto, the police in De la Iglesia’s cinema are either helmeted, club-wielding gangs unrecognizable as individuals (Áccion mutante, El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa, 800 balas) or incompetent or ineffective in the application of the law (La comunidad, 800 balas). The protagonists in these five films may be transgressors, but they never have to answer in any real terms to the symbolic delegates of the law. Only in Perdita and Crimen ferpecto do Agent Dumas and Inspector Campoy wield any real authority to investigate as true agents of the law rather than purely discredited caricatures. And perhaps more importantly, only in Crimen ferpecto does a central protagonist wrestle with feelings of guilt and fear of being apprehended. Perdita Durango is also the only one of the first six films to directly represent the sexual act. There are in fact no fewer than five (plus one)

6 The anonymity of the law in 800 balas

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sex scenes in Perdita, and they occur in the following order: Romeo and Perdita shortly after meeting; Romeo raping Estelle crosscut with Perdita’s interrupted rape of Duane, the latter intercut with Duane’s flashback to his ‘first time’ with a very large woman; Romeo and Perdita in the desert shortly after the rape; Estelle and Duane in the Tucson motel. These sex scenes share a symbolic economy and establish a differential system, but it is not primarily a difference based on gender. They serve instead to make plain the cultural difference between Perdita and Romeo on the one hand and Estelle and Duane on the other. Spanish-Caribbean Romeo (his name alone contains amorous promise) and Tex-Mex Perdita are highly sexualized: they talk about their desire openly, are quick to anger and arousal, and copulate energetically. Perdita, who is associated with a jaguar in the opening sequence, is, animal-like, inclined to bite at any opportunity; and Romeo’s libido is so powerful that he stops in the middle of a bank robbery to admire the breasts of a teller and stroke them with a pistol. When they have sex they tumble out of bed onto the floor mid-coitus, or just do it in the desert, amongst the sagebrush and cacti. ‘ “The two greatest pleasures in life” ’, says Perdita, ‘ “are fucking and killing” ’. Duane and Estelle, meanwhile, are sexual innocents: inexperienced, naïve, even querulous in matters of sexuality. Perdita hates Estelle, who has smoked one and half cigarettes in her life, because she sounds ‘like a fucking Judith Krantz novel’ and churns out ‘twelve hours of uninterrupted teenage bullshit’. ‘Always be in control’ is the motto of Estelle’s father, in whose house is clearly visible a thermometer, symptom of Anglo-American retentiveness. On the one hand, then, Latin passion, and on the other WASP repression. And if this cultural opposition is not obvious enough, it is amply reinforced by the soundtracks to each sex scene. The exertions of Romeo and Perdita are accompanied first by fast tempo percussion inside the ranch and then by the howling of the wind in the desert, nature’s enthusiastic endorsement of their instinctual ardour, which is capped ironically by a fighter plane flashing past an erect cactus. As Perdita and Romeo begin their rapes of Duane and Estelle, the soundtrack is slow tempo and ominous, but switches to the high-tempo percussion of the first sex scene between Romeo and Perdita once Estelle has been forcibly initiated into Latin passion. Duane’s sexual flashback, meanwhile, is done as nightmare, with the cackling of his enormous companion competing with the sound of an eerie and unnatural interior wind. Finally, the last sex scene, between Duane and

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Estelle, is a timid and giggling affair in long shot, left unpunctuated by soundtrack, and mainly heard rather than seen. Given this trajectory of sex scenes, it is worth noting that Estelle and Duane’s turbulent rite of passage fits more neatly with the pattern of the road movie, which generally ‘sets the liberation of the road against the oppression of hegemonic norms’ (Cohan and Hark 1997, 1). To drive this point home, Estelle’s father is run down and killed by a car just before Estelle and Duane have sex. In contrast, Perdita and Romeo are outside hegemonic norms from the outset, and, if anything, come closer to those norms through the alternative family unit they establish with Estelle and Duane on the road. More importantly, Perdita is not so much defined as feminine against Romeo’s masculinity, but rather the two are defined together against the WASP background of the gueritos. This accords with the conventions of gender in the outlaw-couple road movie, where ‘the actresses play integral halves of the heterosexual, anti-heroic couple, yet they remain bound up in the limitations of a male-oriented and -dominated fantasy’ (Roberts 1997, 62). We have already shown in Chapter 2 how this process is at work in Acción mutante, one of whose generic sources – science fiction – also tries its best, as Constance Penley has argued, to do away with sexual difference (1990, 123–5). Perdita is an interesting compromise, then. While the plot inherited from Gifford requires a much fuller treatment of sexuality than any of the other films embark on, generic conventions and the foregrounding of cultural antagonisms allow a containing circle to be drawn around sexual difference, and the De la Iglesian world of pre-Oedipal play is more or less safeguarded. Down below in Mexico There is of course an even more critical assessment of Perdita’s sexual economy calling out to be made. As we have made clear, De la Iglesia’s films in general do not confirm the clichés of a highly sexualized Spanish cinema, but when the setting moves to Mexico, those clichés are powerfully activated. It is hardly novel in the history of colonial relations for the colonizer or ex-colonizer to imagine the colonized as governed by ‘primitive’ instinctual urges, as closer to the intimate passions of animals. Although the imperial gaze here may be Spanish, the semiotics of the Mexico–US border found in Perdita also coincide with the meanings historically attached to that border. The Prohibition brought into force by the Volstead Act of 1919 ensured that throughout

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the 1920s vice-based tourism thrived on the Mexican side of the border, as Americans went in search of alcohol, gambling and prostitution (see Lorey 1999, 45–7 and Martínez 1996, 149–51). Although Prohibition is long past and the economic exchanges between the two countries are now overwhelmingly at the level of manufacturing and services, the image of Mexico as a site of illicit pleasure for Americans persists. According to Claire F. Fox, in the popular imagination, the border is a ‘highly eroticized milieu of outlaws and whores’ (1999, 43) and ‘the association of Mexico with the lower body is still very prevalent in contemporary U.S. popular culture’ (51–2). The Mexican living in the United States, meanwhile, must live in the shadow of these historically accreted meanings: ‘Like similar stereotypes of other subordinate groups, those of the Chicano depict him as dirty, violent, hypersexual, treacherous, and thieving’ (Limón 1992, 3). Romeo, of course, is not Chicano or even Mexican, but he fulfills many of these cultural expectations, even if they are turned in Perdita Durango into anti-heroic virtues. However, Perdita is not wholly un-self-reflexive about the sexually defined cultural stereotypes that it deals in. In the film’s second, pre-credit scene, Perdita is approached in an airport lounge by Manny Flynn (James Gooden), a computer software salesman who offers her a drink and wonders if she is Mexican. Clearly, he assumes that if she is Mexican, she will be sexually available, an assumption, as we have seen, that prevails in the US imaginary of border relations. Rather than rebuff Manny directly, Perdita instead aggressively confirms his phantasy and raises the stakes, offering him much more than he bargained for as a way of driving him off. The very first sequence of the film, then, establishes a knowingness on Perdita’s part about her status as a culturally sexualized being. ‘Crossing the border’, writes Oscar Martínez, means leaving behind the predictable and mundane world in the United States. For pleasure seekers, it means escaping from restrictions that govern daily behaviour back home, or venturing into a mysterious and exotic land where fantasies can come true. (1996, 227)

In the light of this we might consider the adventures of Estelle and Duane back and forth across the frontier in Perdita as a ferocious parody of timeworn American ideologies about the pleasures of Mexico. At the same time, the dangers and violence Perdita and Romeo present to the gueritos simply confirm that ‘there is considerable anxiety in the United States about anything identified as Mexican

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crossing the border’ (Fox 1999, 65). The film is fully alive to these issues and plants its tongue firmly in its cheek when dealing with them, as is attested by the hysterical laughter of Perdita when, shortly after the kidnapping, Duane says, ‘Listen, I understand that your people, you know, have been oppressed by our country and I feel for you, you know, I mean I really do, but it’s not our fault, it’s not our fault.’ Nevertheless, it is still difficult to refute José Arroyo’s charge that ‘nobody in this Spanish-Mexican production knows enough about the American culture . . . the film is meant to be ridiculing to tease out the subtleties and nuances that would transform mere social crudity into social satire’ (1999, 49). But does Perdita really have any pretensions to be subtle or nuanced about its sociological setting when it struggles to even get its geography right? (Perdita meets Romeo in what is clearly the California side of the Tijuana crossing, and then drives her straight across the border to his ranch in Tamaulipas province, which is opposite Texas.) The film’s signifiers of Mexico, meanwhile, are familiar clichés: wrestling matches and the iconic Santos mask. Apart from the travelling helicopter shots during the opening credits which show shanty-towns and third-world squalor in extreme long shot, ‘social reality’ is hardly conspicuous in the film. André Bazin, great proponent of realism in film, famously argued in favour of deep focus and long takes and against montage in cinema (1967, 23–40). Perdita Durango is as far away as one could wish from the Bazinian ideal. The few extreme long shots in it, which might serve to stabilize the spatio-temporal dimension, are generally aerial travelling shots, which do not linger on one space for any duration. In addition, as Teresa Font, the film’s editor, explains, at 2,370 cuts, Perdita contains three to four times as many cuts per reel than the average film made in Spain (Fortea 1997, 5). Perdita Durango may not tell us anything empirically valuable about social relations along the US–Mexico border, but it does once again confirm that the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia, even when it is a película de encargo, is firmly on the side of spectacle and against the traditions of cinematic realism. Notes 1

Depending on the report, Perdita cost between 1,200 million and 1,400 million pesetas to make. According to ICAA figures, its takings at the box office were only 2,573 million euros (or about 430 million pesetas) in Spain. Although it was expected to find an American market, it was only released

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The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia on video in the United States under the title Dance with the Devil. It was not, however, a ‘Hollywood bomb’ as Kercher (2002, 55) puts it, since it was not a Hollywood film. Some casting took place in Los Angeles and much of the filming was done at the Churubusco studios in Mexico City, where Hollywood often makes use of the cheaper space and labour. See, for example, Díaz-Cano (1997, 154); Castilla (1997, 38); J. L. Sánchez (1997); Pita (1997, 27); Ordóñez (1997, 156). Those other experts in cinematic kidnapping, the Coen brothers, explore similar territory, but draw back from fully sequestering the audience. In Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987), the protagonists, Ed and Hi, are also the kidnappers, but they are basically harmless and wholesome. In Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991), the audience is aligned with Barton, held hostage in his own hotel room; and in Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996), the point of view of the bungling kidnappers is eventually displaced by that of the investigating policewoman. The closest comparison might be with The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983), whose kidnapper Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is the focus of the film. In Crimen ferpecto, the unjustifiably narcissistic Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) thrives at the very heart of modern consumerist culture, a major department store, but finishes the film in a small shop in an archaic setting: an arcade off Calle Montera. Meanwhile, Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), and the team of aesthetically unpleasing shop assistants she recruits, fit perfectly into the De la Iglesian mould. The scene is approximately two minutes long on the DVD released by Metrodome Distribution, and eliminates the following shots present on the Spanish DVD: Romeo cutting open a cocaine parcel and holding it to his face; Romeo carving a symbol in the back of a female spectator; Romeo chopping limbs from the cadaver; Romeo spitting blood in the faces of spectators; Romeo’s machete entering the chest of the cadaver. In its video releases in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, Perdita was subjected to many and varied cuts in addition to the ones in the first santería sequence. Brad Stevens (2000) has carefully catalogued these.

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Muertos de risa (1999): comedy, television, history

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After the first British screening in 2004 of Torremolinos 73 (2003), an audience member complained to director Pablo Berger that Spanish film was obsessed with revisiting the past and that Torremolinos 73 was yet another example of this malady.1 Berger, one of Álex de la Iglesia’s former collaborators, admitted that the Civil War had been over-represented in Spanish cinema, but argued that the early 1970s, the period in which Torremolinos 73 is set, had hardly been touched at all. Although Torremolinos 73 and De la Iglesia’s fourth feature film, Muertos de risa (1999), are neither the first nor the only ‘historical films’ to tackle the epoch just prior to the transition to democracy in Spain, it is true that they are in a relatively select company.2 The reasons are perhaps self-evident: the last years of the dictatorship were by no means free of conflict and repressive state action, but its origins were more dramatically violent and more urgently required re-examination, since for forty years, in Spain at least, only the victors’ story had been heard. As we have pointed out in Chapter 1, De la Iglesia and his team from the outset vowed to have nothing to do with the Civil War, so there was no risk when they came to make their first ‘costume drama’ that they would venture into the 1930s. This does not mean that the past is not at issue in De la Iglesia’s other six feature films. On the contrary, we argue throughout this book that the main thematic in De la Iglesia’s films is the persistence in the present of the past, an anachronistic but insistent remainder of Franco’s Spain in modern Spain. Muertos de risa interrogates a moment in Spain’s recent past when the values of Franco’s Spain were, officially at least, on the verge of extinction. But what counts as history in Muertos de risa is another issue, for this film takes as its historical subject matter neither high politics nor social movements, but television light entertainment, and, occasionally, the intersection of that light entertainment with the broader stream of history. Muertos de risa, therefore, carries on the scrutiny of television begun by El día de la bestia, this time emphasizing the ways in which public memory is shaped by televisual experience. As De la Iglesia’s co-scriptwriter Jorge Guerricaechevarría says of the 1970s, ‘Nuestra experiencia estaba filtrada por la televisión’ (Our experience was filtered through television) (Calleja and Costa 1999, 49). De la Iglesia himself puts it like this: ‘There are generations that remember some television programmes better than certain political events. Or they remember those events that had to do with television better’ (quoted in Kercher 2002, 57). The film traces, then, not only the history of Spanish television, but television as Spanish history.

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7 The anarchic double act: El Gran Wyoming and Santiago Segura as Bruno and Nino in Muertos de risa

Muertos de risa tells the story of the rise and fall of two fictional stars of Spanish popular television, the comedians Bruno (José Miguel Monzón a.k.a. El Gran Wyoming) and Nino (Santiago Segura). It opens as the pair, driving at high speeds and pursued by the police, curse each other from the open windows of their cars. They are on their way to a television studio to record a lavish New Year’s Eve special in 1992. After a surprising twist, when the pair shoot each other in front of the live audience, their jaded manager, Julián (Álex Angulo), recounts through a flashback the story of their very particular rise to fame and stardom in the world of 1970s television light entertainment. Nino begins his career in small-town bars as an off-key singer specialising in covering the songs of the iconic Nino Bravo. One of these establishments employs Bruno behind the bar and the pair are thrust together when a unit of legionarios beats them up, trashes the building and leaves it in flames. With no obvious future now that the bar is in ruins, Bruno and Nino head for Madrid to seek their fortune in the world of television. After a failed audition for a variety show, they meet their future manager, who takes them to a wax museum and explains the secret of success in the art of comedy. Soon afterwards they stumble

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on their unique routine at an open-mic session at the Teatro Argentino, a touring carnival: after Nino forgets his well-rehearsed lines, Bruno slaps him in the face, causing uproar in the crowd who instantly change from heckling them to loving them. Boosted by their newly found success, the two of them begin to tour with the carnival, eventually becoming the stars of the show and finding their way into television, this time as a hit comedy double act. Their new status is confirmed by a telephone call from the legendary TV producer Chicho Ibañez Serrador who offers them a spot on what Julián describes as ‘the greatest TV show of all time’, Un, dos, tres. . .responda otra vez (One, Two, Three. . .Answer Once Again). The greater their popularity, however, the more their already strained relationship deteriorates into jealousy and paranoia. Each plays vicious tricks and practical jokes on the other in order to get the upper hand. Eventually the pair agree to do one last New Year’s Eve special and we rejoin the story where the film started, with the cars hurtling towards the studio. However, we now realise that the on-stage shooting is an act of reconciliation not hatred. The ‘sober 1970s’ The potential popularity of the retro comedy film became clear with the enormous world-wide success of Jay Roach’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). A broad parody of 1960s espionage films, it revelled in its exaggerated reconstruction of fashions, language and settings. Whilst not a parody like that film, one of the most striking aspects of Muertos de risa is also its retro style and 1970s look. In creating a version of the past De la Iglesia pays detailed attention, as he and his team always do, to production and costume design. Artistic designers Arri (José Luis Arrizabalaga) and Biaffra (Arturo García) explain how they set about evoking the specificity of Spain in the 1970s: Los años 70 españoles tienen un impronta muy clara. Si en Estados Unidos fueron la década del plástico, aquí teníamos otros elementos decorativos: la céramica, la pana, etcetera . . . Antes que optar por los papeles pintados grotescos tiramos más por las paredes enmoquetadas y cosas similares. Un referente perfecto era el de la película Boogie Nights, que no caía en el kitsch . . . Queríamos mostrar unos años 70 muy sobrios. (Calleja and Costa 1999, 56)

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The 70s in Spain were very distinct. If in the USA it was the decade of plastic, here other decorative elements dominated: pottery, corduroy, etcetera . . . Rather than opting for hideously patterned wallpaper, we went for flock wallpaper and things like that. The style we were trying to achieve was like that in Boogie Nights, which doesn’t resort to kitsch . . . We wanted to show a very sober 1970s.

In addition to this generalized 1970s look, Arri and Biaffra meticulously reconstructed the sets for two key television programmes of the 1970s: Un, dos, tres. . .responda otra vez (1972–94) and Directísimo (1975–76). The production team consulted the creator of Un, dos, tres, Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, and made use of the extant floor plans conserved by the original artistic director (Calleja and Costa 1999, 52–3). As well as giving cameos to a number of ‘real’ TV personalities of the 1970s, including ‘Chicho’, Muertos de risa casts in a central role a major television personality of the 1990s, El Gran Wyoming, who starred in programmes such as El peor programa de la semana (1992–94) and Caiga quien caiga (1996–2005). The film also draws on the digital technology pioneered in Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), inserting its protagonists into televisual history at key moments such as the Barcelona Olympics. Within the film, then, the medium of television, rather than the press or other forms of historical record, becomes the authenticator of the fictional world and the medium that De la Iglesia clearly links most closely with popular memory. In Muertos de risa costume is another essential ingredient in recreating the past, and it could be argued that it performs the same function as it does in the heritage film. As in the heritage film, the costumes in Muertos de risa are fastidiously created to complement the sets in order to give the impression of verisimilitude. There are in effect three different sorts of costume on show in the film: the daily wear of the various characters, appropriately signalling 1970s fashion in Spain; the special costumes the two protagonists and other members of the Teatro Argentino wear to perform in; and the faithfully recreated costumes worn by performers and presenters on the restaged television programmes of the epoch (including, for example, the skimpy white outfits and over-sized glasses of the azafatas (hostesses) on Un, dos, tres). Not only do these three levels of costume design contribute to what Amy Sargeant calls the ‘effect of reality’ of the historical film (2002, 202), but costume in Muertos de risa is also central in marking the elapsing of time. Although the narrative runs from 1972 to 1992, it is only the years 1972–75, 1981 and 1992 which receive extended

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treatment, with the intervening years compressed into montage sequences. As the story progresses, then, the characters’ costumes move from the flares and strong patterns of the 1970s to the pastel shades, loafers and ponytails of the 1980s and early 1990s. Costume and its contribution to the overall look of a film is something that is often overlooked or even ignored by cinema critics, especially beyond the realm of the traditional historical or period film. Pam Cook, in her sustained consideration of the place and role of costume and fashion in film, argued in 1996 that Costume design is one of the most under-researched areas of cinema history. A vast amount of literature exists on theatrical costume and, since the 1970s, there has been a burgeoning of interest in fashion amongst cultural historians; to all this, film studies has, for the most part, remained impervious. (1996, 41)

She went on to argue that this is due to the importance given to the director in many approaches to cinema at the expense of others who were involved in creating the ‘look’ of the film. This point is significant for us as we have argued throughout that in the case of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia the members of the creative team, such as production designers, costume designers, cinematographers and editors, are key components in the construction of the final film. As Sarah Street observes, recent scholarship in this area has worked towards Opening up the subject to fresh approaches by suggesting the ways in which film costume can be linked to wider debates about film form, the meaning and function of mise-en-scène, the role of the costume designer, the complex way in which film costumes are ‘read’ as intertexts, and finally, the impact of such representations on audiences. (2001, 1)

The costume designer for Muertos de risa was Lala Huete, in her first contribution to a De la Iglesia film. If, as Arri and Biaffra say, the look they were aiming for in the film’s design was a ‘sober 1970s’, then Huete brought to the project just the right combination of experience. Not only had she worked on the lush period pieces, Belle époque (1992) and La niña de tus ojos (1998) for Fernando Trueba, but she had also just finished designing the costumes for Santiago Segura’s decidedly unlush Torrente: el brazo tonto de la ley (1998). Like the costumes in Trueba’s glossy recreation of the 1920s and 1930s, the clothing in Muertos de risa needed to be ostentatious, in the sense of pretentious display, but also ostensive, in the sense of pointing to an earlier epoch. At the same time, in order to achieve the ‘sobriety’ of a Spanish early

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1970s, Huete’s experience on Torrente would have been ideal preparation. The aesthetic of that film, in contrast to Trueba’s, is decidedly shabby, with the grubby protagonist deluding himself that he reincarnates Miami Vice style in his ‘tacky Sonny Crockett clothing’ (Lázaro Reboll 2005, 219). If the overall look of Muertos de risa is a paradoxically shabby ostentation, then costume design plays no little part in this effect. A survey of the wardrobes of the protagonists indicates how this is done. Although the street wear of Nino and Bruno (as opposed to the costumes they perform in) includes the requisite number of wide collars, bold check patterns and bell bottoms, the colours of these clothes tend to be muted and washed out, as well as rumpled or badly fitting. For instance, at the party scene where the two celebrate their success with the Teatro Argentino, Bruno wears a sober blue-grey suit jacket that drowns out his checked shirt, while Nino’s orange polo-neck is ill-fitting, and, like his wide-collared pink shirt, is faded rather than bold. In the album of interviews that accompanies the film, De la Iglesia explains, ‘Queríamos que el color de la película fuera el color de la época, un color como tristón porque la historia es triste’ (Calleja and Costa 1999, 43) (We wanted the colour of the film to be the colour of the epoch, a pathetic colour because the story is a sad one). The director also explains that this effect was achieved in the developing of the film itself, by taking out the usual bleaching process. The ostentatious-shabby aesthetic might also be seen as a form of compromise, a way of dealing with a situation almost inevitably faced when approaching the 1970s: the self-conscious adornment of the male body. In Undressing Cinema, Stella Bruzzi claims that analysts of clothing in film ‘have tended to exclude men and male identities, as if an attention to dress is an inherently feminine trait’ (1997, xv). According to Bruzzi, ‘[m]en’s clothes have usually been interpreted as unproblematically functional . . . and male costumes as an irrelevance’ (26) and that ‘men’s fashion . . . is conventionally presumed to be antideclamatory’ (30). Instead, it is women who have always been considered the clothes-horses of classic cinema, and therefore its main narcissists. As a result, when men’s clothes are ostentatious in a film it is not only striking, but often attracts comments about the supposed ‘feminization’ of these men. If men’s adornment in cinema has indeed been relatively invisible, it is worth pointing out that this is certainly not the case in Muertos de risa, in which Nino and Bruno, between them, wear upwards of fifty outfits. As well as their muted 1970s fashions and a range of tuxedos, this includes the flamboyant sequinned jackets they

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perform their routine in, and the extravagant magician-and-rabbit costumes they wear for Nino’s unscripted attack on Bruno with a fish. This is where the shabbiness of the clothing comes into play and where a comparison with Torrente is instructive. The Madrid policeman Torrente, as played by Santiago Segura, comically over-values his own aesthetic merits: his narcissism and imagined virility are visibly contradicted by his grubby attire and lack of personal hygiene. But the comic deflation of Torrente is in fact a stubborn retrenchment of masculinity, for the mise-en-scène associated with Torrente suggests a deliberate rejection of a domesticity coded as feminine. The shabbiness of his wardrobe extends metonymically to the flat he shares with his father, which is also filthy, dusty and grimy. (Triana Toribio 2004, 153)

Because clothes narcissism, rightly or wrongly, is also associated with femininity, it can engender a certain panic when it manifests itself in men. Perhaps the most typical expression of this panic in films is the tendency, on display in Torrente, to puncture male narcissism with comedy, making it ridiculous and thereby saving masculinity as the unselfconscious gender. In Muertos de risa the narcissism of the lead characters is just as evident, and is given many more sartorial opportunities to express itself, thanks in part to the setting in the ostentatious 1970s. But that narcissism – in the form of ostentation – is dampened down either by the comic ludicrousness of the costumes, or by their shabbiness. For example, Nino’s character is established, not long after the two central characters meet, by the fact that he has not changed his ‘lucky socks’ since he began his singing career eighteen months earlier. Even when he is a huge star, these filthy and disintegrating socks have enormous sentimental value for him and confirm that fame has in no way impacted on his fashion sense. The aesthetic of the ‘sober 1970s’, then, is not only an attempt to faithfully reproduce the melancholy of that decade in Spain, but participates in continued negotiations over Spanish masculinity at the end of the 1990s. Anarchic comedy The comedy ‘act’ at the centre of Muertos de risa originates when Bruno and Nino fail miserably at an audition for Un, dos, tres . . . responda otra vez. Their attempt to perform a conventional stand-up routine involving straightforward joke-telling is hopelessly compro-

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mised by Nino’s stage fright and his inability to remember his punchlines. They are nevertheless recruited by Julián, who is impressed that some women at the audition find the pair attractive. Earlier in the audition scene Julián’s credentials as a manager have been firmly established. We see him confronted by a performing group dressed in traditional peasant costume who complain that he has not only pocketed their money and not managed to get them a part in the programme, but that they have not even been allowed to audition, in spite of Julián’s promises of success for them. Julián is a liar and a fraud, and yet, we are invited to believe that his version of the story of Bruno and Nino – the flashback is initiated by his reminiscing – is accurate simply because he asserts, ‘I was there’. The ways in which the events of the film might be interpreted are therefore potentially affected by the degree to which one accepts Julián as a reliable narrator. As Bruno and Nino leave the artificial and frenetic world of the television studio and enter the dull and rainy reality of the Madrid streets, Julián catches up with them and offers to become their agent. His first lesson in the ways of the entertainment world is to take them to the wax museum where, amongst figures of comedy greats astride a merry-go-round, he tells them what he sees as the secrets of being a good comedian. He cannot help embellishing and tells another tall tale, this time that it was he who suggested that the famous Spanish double act Tip y Coll take that particular name. He then enters them in a talent contest that is taking place at the Teatro Argentino. While the studio for Un, dos, tres was depicted as mildly chaotic, it is an exemplar of peace and order when compared with the Teatro Argentino, which is a space of almost uncontained anarchy. The establishing shot of this touring carnival shows the taxi carrying the three central characters as it struggles to navigate the mud in front of the entrance to the Teatro tent. It is wildly windy and pouring with rain, with people being blown all over the frame. As the taxi attempts to stop it skids and knocks down a passer-by. The argument that ensues between the taxi driver and the passer-by he hit, which is at the back of the frame as the protagonists move towards the tent’s entrance, further suggests an atmosphere of lawlessness. The cut from the outside to the inside of the tent heightens this feeling. The camera follows the trio in and tracks from its initial position at the back of the audience to the front just as a burlesque show is taking place and a dancer reveals her breasts. This is followed by a reverse-angle cut to show the audience’s reaction to this revelation of flesh: they are a baying mass, howling

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their delight and demanding more. When the dancers leave the stage the crowd greet the magician who follows with rotten vegetables and a chorus of boos, only calming down when his female assistant arrives on stage, then once again going crazy and throwing bottles and more vegetable matter in disapproval when she steps into the magician’s box. This sort of violent and dangerous public space can be found in many of De la Iglesia’s films. Its original imprint is The Lost Mine Bar at the end of Acción mutante, and it reappears as The Hell Venue in El día de la bestia, the Florida nightclub in Perdita Durango and the saloon in 800 balas. Although details change, the same basic pattern applies in the various manifestations of this public space: it is obscurely lit; noisy, often to the point of dissonance; physical violence is never far away; the clientele, generally of a lower class, is unruly, even savage; gender relations are not at an advanced stage; and there is usually some form of popular entertainment on offer, sometimes provided by the venue, sometimes by the customers themselves. These spaces are all marked by a tremendous kinetic energy, with many bodies in often violent and exaggerated movement, and the camera usually mobile as well. In a word: tumult. In this paradigmatically De la Iglesian environment, language is much less important than the image, its movements, and noise. It is therefore perfectly appropriate that it is here that Nino and Bruno have their comedic Eureka moment: a mythical beginning, as narrated by the ever-embroidering Julián. As the magician beats a hasty retreat, the duo make their way onto the stage and stumble upon their act: Nino once again forgets his lines, and at the instigation of an audience member, Bruno gives his partner a slap. The uncontrollable, anarchic, audience love the simple wordless act of violence and the pair are an instant success, bringing the house down. If El día de la bestia on occasion makes use of slapstick comedy, Muertos de risa goes back even earlier, evoking the vaudeville tradition that many early film comedians came from. Certainly, the act that Bruno and Nino perform is reminiscent of popular theatrical forms in its simplicity. Comedy performance in popular theatre was very different to the comic performance styles associated with the ‘legitimate’ theatre and De la Iglesia again uses an opposition between low-brow popular culture and the middle-brow to place his work in opposition to accepted notions of a good performance. Henry Jenkins argues that for the vaudeville performer what mattered was the

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moment of the gag, ‘not the larger context in which a particular comic “bit” might be placed’, and he goes on to cite Hartley Davis, a trade press reporter, who says, ‘The artistic “legitimate” actor wastes too much time in working up to his points, but the skilled vaudevillian strikes them with a single blow and scores’ (Jenkins 2003, 78). In the shape of the Teatro Argentino and Bruno and Nino’s act, Muertos de risa aligns itself with just such an alternative tradition. De la Iglesia himself continually draws on performers associated with genre cinema traditions, regional theatre companies and television rather than the ever-changing ‘flavour of the month’ stars of Spanish cinema or actors with reputations forged on the major metropolitan stages. When he does employ star actors, such as Carmen Maura, they are past their most famous and iconic work. As Bruno and Nino gain fame as part of the Teatro Argentino touring show we see a montage of their successful sketches. They are dressed in various outfits which reflect the situation the comedians are placed in: a jungle, with Bruno as an explorer and Nino as a native; a battlefield, with Bruno as an officer and Nino as a foot soldier; a mansion, with Bruno as an English lord and Nino as his butler. Whatever the scene and whatever the backdrop, the focus remains on the anticipated and repeated action: the slap on the face and its acoustic accompaniment. This focus on the gag and not the context, which becomes a mere vessel, reflects Brett Page’s assertion that ‘scenery has no artistic meaning’ in vaudeville (quoted in Jenkins 2003, 77) and as Jenkins himself argues, ‘the absence of other stage effects sharpened the focus upon the performer’ (77). As Julián recalls in his voice-over, ‘Lo bueno eran las bofetadas, así de sencillo y brutal, así de absurdo’ (A slap in the face. So simple and brutal. So absurd). Bruno and Nino’s act is an example of slapstick at its most basic: a man slaps another man in the face. The term ‘slapstick’ referred to the stick that was slapped together as a sound prop that was used as an effect when one clown hit another in the face at the circus. Appropriately Bruno and Nino’s act has been ‘devised’ at a fairground circus tent and like early slapstick cinema, which as Donald Crafton observed ‘frequently depended on the same kind of emphatic, violent, embarrassing gesture’ (1995, 108), it is very simple. It is Julián who states that the slap was ‘un acto de anarquía total’ (an act of total anarchy), his voice-over giving a pseudo-intellectualising explanation for their popularity. At the uncontrollable fringe Teatro the anarchy of the comedy is drawn from the wild audience and the refusal of character, psychological depth or

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rationality, its simplicity impossible to contain within wider discourses of legitimate entertainment.

Muertos de risa and politics Muertos de risa, then, presents in its mise-en-scène a muted and ‘sober’ version of the 1970s, but at the same time offers the spectacle of an unruly, anarchic comic space. If the sobriety of the costumes and setting is designed to capture the gloominess and uncertainty of a country in the final stages of a dictatorship, could the violence and energy inside the Teatro Argentino be read as a form of incipient resistance to that regime? That is, what are the politics of Muertos de risa? Álex de la Iglesia has been asked more than once about the politics of his films, and his answers are usually unequivocal. Here are two typical examples, the first made, notably, in the politically radical Basque newspaper, Egin: Soy un puto peliculero y no tengo ni criterio ni valor suficiente como para andar dando juicios políticos. (T. García 1997, 9) I’m just a film-maker and I don’t have the knowledge or qualifications to start making political pronouncements. No disfruto hablando de política, soy bastante ignorante en ese sentido . . . Con mi opinión o mi criterio sobre ciertos temas, no ayudo a nadie . . . Personalmente, tengo mi opinión sobre las cosas y mi criterio, pero no intento reflejarlo en las películas que hago, a no ser de una manera indirecta. No me caracterizo por tener una intención dogmatizante en absoluto. (Díaz-Cano 1997, 55) I don’t enjoy talking about politics, I’m pretty ignorant in those matters . . . By offering my opinion or airing my thoughts on certain topics, I don’t help anybody . . . Personally, I have my opinion about such things, but I have no intention of putting that into the films I make, unless it’s in an indirect manner. It isn’t in my make-up at all to proselytize.

These avowals were both made just before De la Iglesia embarked on Muertos de risa, a film not only set in the last years of the dictatorship and during the tentative opening to democracy, but about a popular form that was inextricably tied up with politics. Television, kept on a very tight leash under Franco’s regime, remained firmly within the grasp of the state afterwards because the new democratic parties saw to it that the two existing channels remained ‘the effective fiefdom of the party in power’ (Jordan 1995, 363). By engaging with an historical

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period of profound political change and with a medium so tied up with regime policy, how could De la Iglesia avoid in Muertos de risa taking up a political position? Co-scriptwriter Guerricaechevarría gives a calculatedly cynical answer to this sort of question: a los personajes de la película les debía importar poco lo que estaba ocurriendo en España y en el mundo. Estaban concentrados en su propia movida, como le ocurría al 90% de la población española. No todo el mundo estuvo viviendo la lucha anti-franquista: yo creo que casi nadie, ni el 90% de las personas que luego van vendiendo que lo hicieron . . . Nino y Bruno están al margen de la Historia, pero la Historia, inevitablemente, les influye. (Calleja and Costa 1999, 49) it was essential that the characters in the film were uninterested in what was happening in Spain and in the world. They were wrapped up in their own little world, just like 90% of the Spanish population. Not everybody fought in the anti-Francoist battle: I believe that hardly anybody did, especially not that 90% who claim that they did . . . Nino and Bruno are at the margins of History, but History, inevitably, influences them.

Putting it another way, Nino and Bruno want to experience the sexual and economic freedoms of liberal democracy, but without putting themselves at risk in order to bring those freedoms about. Like so many of De la Iglesia’s characters, they are egoists untouched by any form of the ‘groupthink’ so despised by the Basque director’s disenchanted generation. The ‘anarchy’ of their comic routine is a political action only insofar as it is an attempt to draw a perverse enjoyment out of a dour regime dead set against frivolity. Nevertheless, as Guerricaechevarría says, this does not mean that Nino and Bruno can be cocooned against political developments, and at regular intervals their paths intersect with these realities. In terms of the film as a whole, we would argue that these interruptions by the political serve as an antidote against any possible nostalgia. Although its protagonists are only political as opportunists, Muertos de risa as a film purposefully dilutes the pleasures of the ‘heritage film’ by consistently reminding its audience of the repressive situation in Spain in the early 1970s. From the moment Julián’s flashback takes us to 1972, we are presented with a country in the control of General Franco’s supporters, at a historical moment where they were becoming increasingly anxious about who would succeed the Caudillo and about the level of liberalization that had occurred in the 1960s. This liberalization was typified by a relaxing of press censorship in 1966 which as Stanley Payne notes, ‘would henceforth be “voluntary”, and no official guidelines would be

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imposed (though many informal ones would be laid down)’ (2000, 511). According to Payne, Franco himself was concerned that the reforms might have gone too far (512) and this anxiety eventually led to a tightening of censorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Román Gubern, in his study on censorship in the Francoist state, details the recrudecimiento (hardening) of censorship that took place in the late 1960s when Franco’s right-hand man Admiral Carrero Blanco brought in his men to replace the aperturista (liberalizing) team of Manuel Fraga Iribarne. As Gubern relates, the new Minister of Information and Tourism, the ultra-conservative Alfredo Sánchez Bella, soon found ways of muzzling the press and reining in the cultural world at large (see Gubern 1981, 248–71). Whilst much of Europe was entering what for them was the hedonistic early 1970s, Spain was experiencing a period of renewed political repression under a military dictatorship that was aware of its own imminent demise. The atmosphere of fear is represented near the opening of the film when we are first introduced to Bruno and Nino. In the isolated People’s nightclub where the two future comedians are working, Bruno, at this point still known as José Luis, is a bartender, and Nino, still Joaquín Molina, covers the songs of Nino Bravo. In a corner a company of legionnaires are drinking, harassing local women who sit with them and generally being rowdy and intimidating. Nino performs the song ‘Libre’, whose lyrics evoke ideas of freedom and liberty that clearly annoy the commander of the company (Sancho Gracia), leading him to exclaim, ‘Te vas a enterar, hijo puta, con lo de libre’ (‘I’ll show you freedom you son of a bitch’). Here the blandest of popular songs can be construed as a threat to the established order. At this moment in Spanish history, the military, with the full approval of the soon-tobe assassinated Carrero Blanco, could do pretty much as they pleased, and the way in which they are a law unto themselves is reinforced when one of the legionnaires climbs over the bar, smashing glasses and helps himself to a number of bottles of spirits. Bruno nervously questions his actions but just gets the blunt reply ‘¿Qué pasa gillipollas?’ (‘What’s up, asshole?’) accompanied by an aggressive look. When the bar owner, an old man called Antonio, appears a moment later from his hiding place in the backroom he is only concerned that Bruno keeps the legionnaires happy, advising ‘tú ponles lo que quieran y buena cara hasta que se vayan’ (‘give them whatever you’ve got and keep smiling’). All goes wrong when Nino accidentally kills the company mascot, a goat, whilst performing on stage. The legionnaires surround Nino and Bruno,

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threatening them with violence and then beating them up, although the film notably does not show the beating, cutting instead to its aftermath outdoors as the club burns down. Immune from prosecution they ride off in their military wagon sarcastically shouting ‘Feliz Navidad, artista’ (‘Happy Christmas, smart-ass’) and firing their guns into the night sky. By reminding the audience, almost from the outset of the film, of the power of the military and their ability to terrorize without fear of retribution, Muertos de risa never risks being a simple exercise in kitsch retro nostalgia. As we have said, Nino and Bruno’s act comes about as a result of Nino’s stage fright, his constant corpsing in front of audiences and cameras making him unable to deliver punch-lines. But the anxiously paralysed look which is his trademark and which precedes a slap from Bruno, predates the double act and can be seen already in the People’s nightclub where he performs in terror at the unrestrained powers of the legionnaires. As we discover later when Bruno struggles to train Nino’s replacement, Tino, it was never the slap itself that Nino feared, for he never flinched when hit: it must, then, have been the fear of speaking out. Sequences such as the one involving the troupe of legionnaires call into question De la Iglesia’s own claims to being an apolitical filmmaker. Another example of the political situation intersecting with the protagonists unfolds when the two are on tour with the Teatro Argentino. Jealousy has affected Bruno and Nino’s relationship and when they are both attracted to Laura, a young woman with leftist sympathies, their practical jokes become more and more bitter. As they are sitting in a local bar with manager Julián, Bruno explains that he cannot rehearse because he has arranged to go to a demonstration with Laura. Julián is shocked by this overt political activity and exclaims, ‘¿Quieres que acabemos todos en comisaría?’ (Do you want to get us all thrown into jail?). When Nino tests Bruno’s commitment to the cause, implying he is only acting to impress the girl, Bruno, bluffing, describes the government as ‘all fascists’, which attracts looks of disapproval from a pair of regular drinkers standing at the bar. (Bruno is unable to name the Minister of the Interior when asked by Nino and clearly has no political principles unless they will get him into bed.) When Laura and Bruno head off to the demonstration she leaves some anti-government leaflets which Julián quickly hides from the eyes of a suspicious bartender, fearing that ‘nos van a detener a todos’ (they’ll arrest us all). The sequence that follows this exchange shows Nino playing a practical joke on Bruno that is designed to make Laura end

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their relationship. As she bathes the bruises Bruno received at the hands of the police at the demonstration, there is a knock at the door and two policías antidisturbios (riot police), whom Bruno fails to recognize as members of the Teatro Argentino in disguise, barge in and begin to search the room, finding a printing press and some leaflets poorly concealed under the bed. A close-up reveals that the leaflets contain a photomontage of Franco in military jacket and high heels with a feather boa. Under interrogation a terrified Bruno quickly blames Laura for everything, claiming that he is ‘just a comedian’. One of the officers then fires a water pistol at Bruno and Nino bursts through the door laughing at the practical joke. Once again, there is an oddly ambivalent attitude here towards politics on the part of Muertos de risa. Bruno’s bruises, although obtained in bad faith, are real; and his terror of the fake riot police is genuine even if their threat is not. Julián is deeply paranoid about the government’s powers to detain him, but is able to say about its figurehead, Franco, ‘Para mí que es un actor. Han buscado a un tipo pequeñito y calvo que se parezca y lo sacan al balcón a saludar’ (‘For me, it’s an actor. They’ve found some little bald guy who looks like him, put him on the balcony and get him to salute’). It is as if, from the safety of twenty-odd years of democracy, the scriptwriters of Muertos de risa recognize the force of the regime, but are unwilling to treat it with too much solemnity. It is a ghost story that no longer frightens. This is why the demonstration, where Bruno’s bruises have been dealt out, is never shown to us, but remains off-screen, just as the beating by the legionnaires was not shown. Finally, in terms of the film’s politics it is worth considering in more detail its treatment of Spanish television. Television revisited Paul Grainge has argued that ‘cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life’ (2003, 1). Referring in particular to the United States, he claims that ‘The balance of memory and forgetting in American culture – what is remembered, by who and for who – has in recent years become entwined in hegemonic struggles fought and figured around the negotiation of America’s national past’ (3). While it could be argued that Muertos de risa is precisely one such film which struggles with popular memory and the national past, its lesson would appear to be that it is television and not cinema which most powerfully mediates popular memory in Spain. Or, to be more

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precise, Muertos de risa commemorates an epoch in Spanish history when television still had the capacity to unify an imaginary national experience. While Acción mutante and especially El día de la bestia lampoon Spanish television of the early 1990s fragmented by privatization, Muertos de risa, in addressing the television programming of two decades earlier, is much more celebratory and affectionate. The affection is not primarily for the quality of the programming, though: the game shows, chat shows and advertisements re-created or rescreened in Muertos de risa are cheaply made and formulaic. Instead, they are most valued for their wide dissemination and consumption. While in the 1970s in the North America that Grainge describes there was already a multitude of cable channels dividing up the viewing audience, in Spain television was still monopolized by a single company, TVE (Televisión de España). From its inception in 1956 TVE, and from 1965 TVE 2, were closely controlled by the Francoist state until the transition to democracy in 1977 and the establishment of a new statute regarding the medium in October 1978 (O’Donnell 1998, 159). Television, then, had no opportunity to be critical, never mind oppositional, and ‘absent from the Spanish experience under the dictatorship would be any attempt to foster an educated, well-informed, and demanding viewing public. Indeed, the regime required the exact opposite’ (Jordan 1995, 363). Rather than condemning this state of affairs, whereby TVE peddled generous doses of diverting light entertainment to Spanish audiences in the 1970s, Muertos de risa emphasizes how important television was as a shared experience and how it produced memories held in common. The key such instance in the film is when José María Íñigo interviews Uri Geller on Directísimo. Acting as a microcosm of the nation-wide audience, members of the Teatro Argentino and their entourage crowd around a small television in a bar to watch the Israeli showman bending spoons. It is difficult to credit, but as many as 34 million people in Spain watched this broadcast (Lakunza 1999, 4), mainly, one suspects, because there were no other channels to choose from. Speaking in an interview in 1999, De la Iglesia noted how large the audiences were for such broadcasts and claimed, ‘eso no volverá a ocurrir’ (this situation will never occur again) (Lakunza 1999, 4). In the album accompanying the film, he expands on this thought at greater length: Además, como en esa época solo había un canal de televisión, se trataba de una referencia compartida por todo el mundo. Nuestra generación –

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la de los que ahora tenemos treinta y pocos – es la última que tiene referencias culturales exactas y compartidas por todos sus miembros. Los chavales de ahora tienen un caudal tan brutal de posibilidades que no podrán comentar al día siguiente los dibujos del Escuadrón diabólico como hacíamos nosotros, porque cada uno de ellos habrá estado viendo mil movidas distintas. Cuando Uri Geller apareció en la programa de Íñigo, todo el país lo comentó al día siguiente. (Calleja and Costa 1999, 41) In addition, since in that era there was only one TV channel, it was a shared point of reference for everyone. Our generation – the current thirty-somethings – is the last one to have a clear set of shared references amongst all its members. The kids of today have such an abundance of choices that they can’t talk the next day about the Evil Squad cartoon like we did, because each one of them has watched something different the night before. When Uri Geller appeared on Íñigo’s programme, everyone in the country was talking it about the next day.

One of the film’s stars, Santiago Segura, echoes this sense of a bygone era of universally shared visual experience: Todos los individuos de mi generación, y los de generaciones anteriores, hemos visto los mismos anuncios, los mismos programas, las mismas películas y teleseries. Tenemos las mismas referencias. (Calleja and Costa 1999, 25) Everyone in my generation, and in earlier generations, saw the same advertisements, the same programmes, the same films and tele-serials. We have the same reference points.

Did this mythically unified television audience ever exist in the first place? Are audiences now as irrevocably fissured and fragmented as De la Iglesia claims they are? We will have to leave such questions to the sociologists. We do know that Uri Geller’s appearance on Directísimo is so fetishized by the makers of Muertos de risa that they specially restaged the encounter, hiring Geller and Íñigo for the occasion. The gradual erosion of TVE’s monopoly is also significant for Nino and Bruno, for their decline coincides with the advances of democratization and the pluralization of television. The need for television continually to reinvent itself eventually leads the pair from the slap they are famous for to actually shooting each other whilst recording a programme. This extension of the act is ultimately something that television cannot contain and it marks a return to the anarchy of the fairground tent that launched them. Following a car

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chase in which Nino’s replacement, Tino, is killed, the pair realize the futility of their feud. This moment of awareness extends to a realization that their act is no longer viable in the world of Spanish television in the 1990s. Their once outrageous act of violence has been made obsolete by ever more sensationalist programming and news bulletins of the sort satirized in Almodóvar’s Kika. What had been radical twenty years before is now tame by the new standards of television. Bruno and Nino have become men out of time, their comedy from another, now past, era. Their only choice becomes how and when to die, and in this case death becomes a final grandstand performance. After the death of Tino, they agree to put their fall-outs behind them and speed on to the studio to act out their new pact. Of course, like most of their actions throughout the film, they fail in this, and the film ends with them still alive in hospital. The slap is now finally something useful, once again bonding the pair as Bruno uses it to reawaken Nino when his vital signs fail. However, the real moment of crisis in their act has come much earlier, in 1981, and overlaps with the first major crisis in the new democracy. This crisis is not only one of the protagonists’ recurring brushes with macro-history, but one of those moments mediated by television and shared by a large audience. Briefly, then: on 23 February 1981, encouraged, if not openly supported by senior military officers, a group of civil guards led by Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina stormed the Congress chamber in a misjudged coup d’état. The coup received little popular support and had ended in failure by the next day, thanks partly to the intervention of King Juan Carlos. Part of the coup attempt was seen live on television because TVE was broadcasting the Presidential investiture vote of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo. Like any good coup, this one saw the seizure of the means of communication, which meant that broadcasting studios at Prado del Rey were briefly occupied by a unit of the División Acorazada de Brunete (see Preston 1986, 195–203). This is where Nino and Bruno come in. As it happens, they are in the TVE studios at the time, recording an episode of their show. Just before this, Bruno has accidentally caused the death of Nino’s mother, but Nino holds him to his contract and takes the opportunity to take his revenge: instead of Bruno handing out slaps, it is Nino, dressed as a giant rabbit, who attacks Bruno with an enormous fish. Meanwhile, soldiers have arrived at the studios and taken control, in a manner of speaking. The fact is, these soldiers are hardly the intimidating legionnaires of the film’s opening and appear to have no strong political

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feelings. One reveals that they are just doing military service and another asks if they can get a beer anywhere, while the officer in charge is easily distracted from his orders by the images of the famous Bruno and Nino on the studio monitors. The fact that this army officer admires the comedians so much indicates how backward-looking their act has become and how they have effectively become associated with the Francoist past. Casting is very important here. While the commander of the legionnaires was played by the physically imposing Sancho Gracia, the officer in this case is played by the diminutive comic actor Jesús Bonilla. The climate of fear has receded to such an extent that even the normally quietist Julián objects to the invasion of the studios. Meanwhile, Nino and Bruno, true to form, are oblivious to the momentous political developments around them, so embroiled are they in their own feud. Muertos de risa uses the archive footage of the coup attempt that was broadcast on TVE as the events unfolded and then shown repeatedly after its failure. This again emphasizes the importance of televisual images to popular memory of key events. As Andrew Hoskins argues, Fundamental to the process of both individual and collective memories is that they are increasingly mediated. In this way our understanding of the past is ‘manufactured’ rather than remembered. At the same time, our sense of collective memory or history is also much more of an electronically mediated one, or, rather reconstructed, from the ever more manipulable global image banks of television and film. (quoted in Drake 2003, 185)

As a result of electronic mediation and wide transmission, the coup took on retrospectively a greater significance than perhaps it deserved. But for Muertos de risa, which taps into televisual memory as popular memory, the original footage of the coup serves its purpose perfectly. Since television images become the guarantor of fidelity to the actual time and events, by juxtaposing the pictures of soldiers in the Congress with those of Nino battering Bruno, the latter automatically take on the patina of authenticity and meaningfulness. For Nino and Bruno, though, that meaning is ominous. By seeing them on adjacent monitors, we realize that both they and Tejero’s party are on the edge of obsolescence. And at the same time, just as television has come of age democratically, the need for Nino and Bruno’s type of diverting comedy seems to have passed.

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The fact that the final breakdown of Bruno and Nino’s relationship occurs as democracy is maintained and the coup is defeated seems appropriate as their act is so much a part of the 1970s landscape created in the film. Significantly, their estrangement just predates the breaking up of the TVE national monopoly and the creation of regional television stations in 1983. This period also saw a move away from the inwardlooking ‘Spanish’ programming of the 1970s towards the increased importation of glamorous US shows such as Dallas and Falcon Crest with their high production values. Bruno and Nino have no real place in the new television world of the 1980s and Muertos de risa shows that whilst Bruno plots revenge, Nino embraces the corruption that for many seemed to become part of the new Spain. This is best reflected in his appearance at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics: courtesy of generous bribes (and digital technology), he marches with the team, fires the arrow that lights the flame and sings the opening song. Like the coup attempt, the opening ceremonies are one of that dwindling set of televisual events which commands virtually the full national audience. Muertos de risa as a whole suggests that the political legacy of the past should not be forgotten as the past is revisited from the safety of the present. And yet, we are entitled to be critical about the nostalgia which remains in the film for such ‘communal’ viewing events. To feel nostalgic about the days of one television channel, does one not have to forget what political conditions need to prevail in order to bring about such a ‘unified’ audience? The answer is perhaps given in La comunidad. With the perpetually postponed Fu Manchu project firmly on the back burner, De la Iglesia’s next feature set out to explore once again the idea of commonly held wealth, but this time with no illusions about the drawbacks of a truly shared community. Notes 1 2

¡Viva! Spanish Film Festival, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 18 March 2004. For example, in the years before and after the making of Muertos de risa the following films deal wholly or partly with the early 1970s: Entre rojas (Azucena Rodríguez, 1995); Los baúles del retorno (María Miró, 1995); El amor perjudica seriamente la salud (Manuel Gomez Pereira, 1996); Carreteras secundarias (Emilio Martínez Lázaro, 1997); El tiempo de la felicidad (Manuel Iborra, 1997); La marcha verde (José Luis García

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Sánchez, 2001); Yoyes (Helena Taberna, 2000) and El lobo (Miguel Courtois, 2004). That the period is opening up to scrutiny is attested by the popular success and occasional controversy of the television series Cuéntame cómo pasó (Miguel Ángel Bernardeu, 2001–).

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La comunidad (2000): modernity and the cinematic past

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Goyas, casting, acting If it is a reliable law of European film production that commercial and critical success rarely go hand in hand, then La comunidad (2000) provides an interesting case study. De la Iglesia’s fifth feature film was seen by 1,263,268 spectators in 2000 and was thus the undisputed Spanish box-office success of the year, but it was incorrectly ‘tipped as favourite’ (Fernández-Santos 2001, 38) to amass accolades at the Spanish Oscars – the Premios Goya.1 Like all of the other films, La comunidad invokes or cites genre cinema without ever simply inhabiting any single genre. It is probably most accurate to say that it is a black comedy with elements of horror and thriller (or a comic thriller, or horror-comedy. . .). The scenario – a group of neighbours terrorizing a new arrival in a block of flats – is borrowed from Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), and the action involves the attempts of this new arrival, Julia (Carmen Maura) to escape from the block of flats with the ‘buried treasure’ she has discovered there. Although the block itself is in an advanced state of decay, the flat Julia occupies under false pretences (she is an estate agent) is fully fitted with all modern conveniences. The other tenants are suspicious of any newcomer because they are keeping watch over the flat of an old man who has won the football pools, and who they feel should share his winnings with the whole community. The man has long since died, and Julia precipitates the discovery of his rotting corpse, as well as unearthing the dead man’s hidden winnings. She only succeeds in getting away from the block with the money after the deaths of five of the residents, including the authoritarian and violent building manager, Emilio (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba). Although it was one of the two films nominated in most Goya categories in 2000, in the event La comunidad only prevailed in three: best female actor (Carmen Maura), best supporting male actor (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) and best special effects (Félix Bergés, Raúl Romanillos, Julio Navarro and Pau Costa). The outcome did not surprise those in the know, and particularly not Álex de la Iglesia himself (see Fernández-Santos 2001, 38). Recent history attests that the Spanish film authorities (the Academia) who bestow the Goyas (and therefore determine what is most legitimate in Spanish cinema) feel most comfortable with the cine social, which deals with ‘social issues’ in a realist idiom (such as recent winners, Te doy mis ojos (Icíar Bollaín, 2003), which broaches the subject of violence against women, and Mar

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adentro (Alejandro Amenabar, 2004), on assisted suicide), or with historical cinema, that is to say, costume drama which is alternately sepia-tinted (such as Belle époque [Fernando Trueba, 1992], La niña de tus ojos [Fernando Trueba, 1998]) or critical of the Francoist legacy (¡Ay Carmela! [Carlos Saura, 1990]). Indeed, in the year of La comunidad, the best film award went to the social realist El bola (Achero Mañas, 2000), a tale of violence against children in the inner city, and the award for best director to José Luis Borau for Leo (2000), another instance of the cine social (La comunidad was nominated for both of these ‘big’ prizes). In contrast the films of De la Iglesia have consistently received the Goya for best special effects (Acción mutante in 1993, El día de la bestia in 1995, and 800 balas in 2002), a pattern that was repeated with La comunidad. Of course, given the aesthetic predilections of the Academia, a film with accomplished special effects is precisely the sort of cinema unlikely to be awarded the prize for best film. Indeed, since the inauguration of the Goyas in 1987, only two films (¡Ay Carmela! and Días contados [Imanol Uribe, 1994]) have picked up both of these prizes. This suggests that in matters of filmic judgment in Spain, spectacle (in the form of special effects) and aesthetic value are almost always considered mutually exclusive. In the light of this analysis of the Academia’s preferences, it is worth examining in more detail that other area of La comunidad which did receive endorsement: the acting performances. The critical recognition of the actors went well beyond the Goyas given to Carmen Maura and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba. Maura had already won the Concha de Oro at the San Sebastián Film Festival when the film was premiered there in September 2000, and María Casanova in her review of the film for Cinemanía underlined Gutiérrez Caba’s performance as one of the best aspects of the film and qualified the casting (and the special effects) as magníficos (superb) (2000, 68). Begoña Piña in La Vanguardia praised De la Iglesia for ‘taking a step back in order to let the actors shine’ (2000, 12) and El Mundo emphasised that ‘it is the cast that stands out’ (Moreno 2001, 54). When the film was released in Great Britain in 2003, José Arroyo claimed that ‘Carmen Maura here has the role of a lifetime’ and that her performance made Julia ‘so understandable that we share in her willingness to trade her morals for upward mobility, to kill for the pleasures of consumerism’ (2003, 38). It is difficult to pinpoint precisely why this film was valued by the Academia for its acting and overlooked in other categories, since prizegiving is dictated, in Spain as elsewhere, by many and contradictory

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agendas. However, one could venture that the critical establishment admired the reliance in La comunidad on traditional acting skills and the use of well-established, old-school actors because they give a glimpse of one of the supposedly ‘redeeming’ features of a director who, in the eyes of many critics, fails to live up to his talent, as we have already discussed in the Introduction. In short, while the film’s comic violence and consistent joking references to Star Wars were hardly likely to enamour the Spanish critical establishment, the strong ensemble acting could be received as an example of De la Iglesia’s knowledge of and admiration for the traditions of Spanish cinema. This rootedness in the history of Spanish film-making is seen by many critics and academic writers as a saving grace in an otherwise unashamedly commercially minded and genre-driven oeuvre (see for instance Heredero and Santamarina 2002, 62). Alternately, the reasoning might have been that since older-established actors bring with them such experience and professionalism, even the vulgarities of a De la Iglesia production cannot drag down their performances. In other words, it is they rather than he who are responsible for the good performances, and hence no Goya for best director. By virtue of its casting, then, La comunidad seems destined to be thought of as the most ‘Spanish’ film of a director heavily influenced by the commercial genres of Hollywood. De la Iglesia remarks in the film’s pressbook that he employed actors whose personas are steeped in ‘Spanishness’ thanks to their longstanding presence in all forms of Spanish drama: cinematic, televisual and theatrical. Tenía muchas ganas de trabajar con actores así, de toda la vida, auténticos clásicos del cine, la televisión y el teatro españoles. Le dan otra dimensión a los diálogos, triplican su fuerza, los mejoran. Detrás de sus caras hay mil historias. Tienen una vida interior muy rica y saben reflejarla en sus interpretaciones. Por eso he incluido muchos primeros planos en la película. He sentido la necesidad de mostrar bien los rostros. No quería que se perdiese nada de su trabajo. (Lolafilms 2000, 5) I was very much looking forward to working with actors like these, the traditional kind, authentic classics of Spanish cinema, television and theatre. They give a different dimension to the dialogue, they triple its strength; they improve it. Behind their faces there are thousands of stories. They have a very rich interior life and know how to reflect that in their performances. That is why there are many close-ups in this film. I have felt the need to show faces well. I did not want to lose any of their work.

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This affirmation suggests that De la Iglesia has not only identified the traditions with which he wants the performances and casting to be linked, but that he has gone as far as letting this choice dictate a particular mode of cinematography in privileging close-ups. The ‘authentic classics’ De la Iglesia refers to are María Asquerino (Encarna), Marta Fernández-Muro (Paquita), Paca Gabaldón (Hortensia), Sancho Gracia (Castro), Emilio Gutiérrez Caba (Emilio), Kiti Manver (Dolores), Carmen Maura (Julia), Terele Pávez (Ramona) and Manuel Tejada (Chueca), and as he implies, they bring with them a huge wealth of associations with Spanish cinema, television and theatre history. Asquerino is from an established acting family and appeared in historical films of the 1940s and 1950s, has wide experience of major theatrical roles and is also linked with the emblematic transition films of Fernándo Fernán-Gómez. FernándezMuro is associated first and foremost with comedia madrileña, as well as avant-garde cinema of the 1970s and 1980s (for instance the iconic Arrebato [Iván Zulueta, 1979]), and early Pedro Almodóvar, while Gabaldón (then known as Mary Francis) was a central figure in the cine de la apertura (‘sexy Spanish comedies’ of the 1970s). Sancho Gracia’s presence on Spanish television screens in the 1970s, as we later discuss in Chapter 6, was virtually uninterrupted, making him a household name. The oppositional and innovative nuevo cine español of the 1960s and 1970s is represented by Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, who was an iconic figure of youthful angst in that period (for example in La Caza [Carlos Saura, 1965]). Kiti Manver and Carmen Maura are both of course linked with Almodóvar, and have been consistent presences on Spanish screens since the late 1970s. Terele Pávez, the only cast member who has a central role in an earlier De la Iglesia film (El día de la bestia), is perhaps most associated with films such as Los santos inocentes (Mario Camus, 1984) which engage earnestly with the Francoist past, while Manuel Tejada has broad theatrical experience. Each actor brings to her or his role an audience’s memory of these previous roles, but it is not any single allusion which is fundamental to La comunidad. Instead, it is the presence of these actors as a group which is important. The publicity material for the film – in effect the logo of La comunidad – implies as much, showing all fourteen members of the comunidad arrayed in an impassable line. Collectively, they embody a continuum of Spanish cinema/theatre/ television history, as sources of autochthonous themes, types and genres.

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Of course, in a small cinema industry such as Spain’s, it is inevitable that the same actors appear again and again, and therefore intertextuality between current roles and previous ones is the rule. It would thus be a relatively banal point to claim that a film carries with it allusions to the cinematic past in the shape of its actors if this invocation of the past were not reinforced by the mise-en-scène and if this specific use of actors were not new for De la Iglesia. In De la Iglesia’s cinema, La comunidad is something of a departure in terms of casting. Prior to this film, and with the partial exception of the American-Mexican venture, Perdita Durango, De la Iglesia’s stars were drawn from outside the normal Spanish acting stable, as we have already pointed out in the Introduction. Rather than relying solely on seasoned professionals, Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, and Muertos de risa are marked by the presence of minor character actors in major parts and the use of stand-up comedians and TV personalities rather than career actors. In their casting, then, these earlier films signal their contemporaneity rather than any connection to the past. In addition to Terele Pávez, who is a special case, there are perhaps three performers whom we might consider typical De la Iglesia stars in the first films: Álex Angulo, Santiago Segura and El Gran Wyoming. Segura, who made his film debut in a small part in Acción mutante and has major roles in El día de la bestia and Muertos de risa, as well as a smaller one in Perdita Durango, had a background in television variety and game shows, but not in drama (see Triana Toribio 2004). This background in television comedy is shared by El Gran Wyoming (a central character in Muertos de risa and a brief appearance in El día de la bestia), who is a humorista (a type of stand-up comic) and took part in Madrid’s movida in the 1980s. Like Segura, he is not trained as an actor, but comes to films with a personality already established in another medium. Finally, Angulo, whose background is in Basque theatre, had only minor roles in films by Basque directors Urbizu and Uribe before starring in Mirindas asesinas (De la Iglesia’s first short), Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, and Muertos de risa. Paul Julian Smith notes of Angulo’s appearance in El día de la bestia that ‘De la Iglesia’s policy of upgrading supporting actors to principals comes up trumps here, especially in the context of a Spanish cinema which normally works to death the three or four stars of the moment’ (1996, 43). These actors are clearly better suited to the comic-book style of the three early films which eschew psychological depth in favour of grand

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guignol humour and pasteboard characterization. In addition it is worth noting that none of these three appear in Las estrellas de nuestro cine, the standard reference book on Spanish actors (Aguilar and Genover 1996), while in contrast, eight of the actors of La comunidad have long entries. Costumbrismo 2000 The change of casting strategy in La comunidad to the employment of ‘authentic classics’ marks a delicate rather than a radical shift in De la Iglesia’s film-making: the pedigrees of the actors may have changed, but he employs them in much the same way as he has done before. To illustrate the continuity, it is worth comparing the mechanical and stylized deaths of the two characters Terele Pávez plays in El día de la bestia and in La comunidad. In the former, as Rosario, she staggers, marionette-like, down the apartment stairs, shotgun in hand, only to be toppled by Father Berriartúa over the banister, at which point she falls like a leaden rag-doll, crashing against four banisters before finally dangling limp on the final one. In La comunidad, meanwhile, as Ramona, she also falls from a great height, crashing and rolling along tiled roofs and then plunging into the building’s courtyard, catching not once, but four times on clothes-lines on the way down. In both cases, the impact of brutal violence is comically deflated through repetition and through the puppet-theatre orchestration of the events. The argument that we put forward in the chapter on Perdita Durango about the De la Iglesian subject as a ‘body in pieces’ holds as much with La comunidad as it does with El día de la bestia. In other words, the presence of established professional actors does not automatically lend any special dignity to the proceedings in La comunidad. Their presence only makes more explicit what has always been there in De la Iglesia’s cinema: a nagging persistence of the past in the present, expressed through a self-conscious invocation of the traditions of Spanish film-making, and more specifically, the sainete costumbrista of the 1950s and 1960s. The sainete or sainete costumbrista is an indigenous Spanish theatrical form originating in the seventeenth century and taking on its modern form in the late nineteenth. In its first incarnation it was a sort of comical interlude depicting lower-class characters in urban settings. At the height of its popularity, in the hands of Carlos Arniches and the

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Quintero brothers, the sainete was a type of light comedy with a very strong sense of place, usually set in a stereotypical but identifiable Madrid (costumbrismo because it supposedly represented faithfully the customs, the habits, the lifestyles of its protagonist class). It was characteristically choral in structure and marked by a strong populist vein. This choral style and concern with the tribulations of the working classes (popular as they were known in the early twentieth century) then transfers to the cinema made in Spain during the Second Republic (1931–36). For the purposes of understanding La comunidad, this tradition is important, but the main reference point is not Arniches and the Quinteros, but the later black comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s (see Heredero 1993, 235–51). This genre emerged from the contact between the heavily censored and dulcified neo-realism of the 1950s and the already existing pre-cinema genre of the sainete. Three directors in particular, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Marco Ferreri and Luis García Berlanga, appropriated the sainete, painted its comedy several degrees darker and created a formal language which elevated it into a vehicle for censure of the social and moral order in the dictatorship. These dark comedies range in shades from the heavily censored and misanthropic films of Ferreri with Rafael Azcona as scriptwriter or co-scriptwriter (El pisito [1958], El cochecito [1960]) to the tragicomic La vida por delante (1958) and El extraño viaje (1963) directed by Fernando Fernán-Gómez, via the unforgiving work of García Berlanga (Plácido [1961], El verdugo [1963]), which is a constant reference point in the De la Iglesia universe.2 Azcona, ‘the éminence noire of the Spanish film industry’ (Hopewell 1986, 58) was also scriptwriter for the Berlanga films, and a common pattern can be traced in all of them. ‘Here, if anywhere’, says Hopewell, is an authentic Spanish film tradition. Its protagonist is a desgraciado, a social failure, a nobody. Being petit bourgeois, his needs extend beyond the instincts of hunger and sex to a social advance gauged by an acquisition of the emblems of the American dream: a flat . . . a car . . . a respectable career. (60)

These desires conflicted comically with social reality under Franco and suggested a democratic subversiveness in opposition to the dictatorship at a time when cinema was heavily censored.3 These films impact heavily on La comunidad in at least two important ways: in its choral element, its use of broad character types; and in its choice of miseen-scène.

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Types and choral structure One of the main characteristics of the sainete costumbrista is that even if a protagonist is singled out for our identification, be it by the title or by amount of psychological information provided or by the privileged perspective endowed to her or him, these sainetes rely as much on a wide cast of types which are identifiable to the Spanish audiences because they are familiar from earlier cinema texts and even from theatre sainetes. For instance, the gossipy neighbour, the annoyingly subservient caretaker, the flirty young female, the timid adolescent who lives with his mother, the Galician sereno (night watchman), the fear-inducing police, the embittered sister or mother-in-law and so on. Berlanga and Ferreri themselves used these types in the ensemble casts of Plácido and El pisito and took them further by adapting these stereotypes to the particular socially and morally decadent setting of Spain at the turn of the 1960s. These comedies tend to involve a series of recurrent actors playing these types (José Luis López Vázquez, Cassen, Mary Carrillo, María Luisa Ponte), and many of them had direct relationships with popular theatre (and eventually with television), very much like the cast of La comunidad. La comunidad boasts many of the sainete types, and its actors are inheritors of these stars. This modern dark comedy, although resolutely non-modern in its look, has made some concession to the present-day Spanish setting and is not inhabited by the ubiquitous swarms of running and screaming children of the Madrid houses depicted in El pisito, La vida por delante or El verdugo. The only child is Armandito, son of Hortensia and Chueca (Charly is an adult even if he is frozen in a perpetual adolescence). In the party scene we can see how the gossipy neighbours have turned into spies who interrogate (Paquita, Encarna and Hortensia) or stalk (Ramona, Castro) and the helpful and subservient portero García (played by Eduardo Gómez) pretends to be peeling off silicone that was blocking Julia’s door lock when he is actually trying to find a way into the flat. The administrador, Emilio, evokes outwardly law-abiding authority figures to whom everyone is deferential such as Rodolfo’s boss in El pisito or the bank manager and the charitable middle-class ladies in Plácido whose philanthropic and respectable posturing is an outward show. To accommodate these large casts of character-types and in order to give a sense of the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by narrow communities, the sainete costumbrista of Berlanga, Ferreri and Fernán-Gómez developed a distinctive film style. Hopewell

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identifies four main recurring visual techniques: deep focus with foreshortened interiors, foreground/background contrasts, long takes, and the ‘diminishing or denial of off-screen space’ (1986, 62). This last feature in particular became a trademark of Berlanga and resulted most eloquently in improbably crowded frames. A notable example is a central scene in El verdugo. José Luis has become an executioner but does not want to ever have to act as such. He identifies a possible blood crime when he sees two men fighting in the street by a drinks and icecream stall and goes over to pull them apart. Soon other characters, curious to see what is going on, surround them. At one point there are ten people in the frame. Plácido goes one step further during a scene in which an old co-habiting couple are forced into wedlock by a group of pious citizens concerned for their spiritual welfare: at one stage during this medium shot eleven characters are crushed into the frame. La comunidad borrows this technique from Berlanga to create a feeling of restriction of personal space and claustrophobia. For example, in the party scene in Oswaldo’s flat, all the characters surround Julia tightly while singing with false and imposed cheerfulness. When she is introduced for the first time to Emilio, they converse in a close medium shot, while Armandito’s head bobs about in the

8 A typically crowded frame in La comunidad

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foreground, and no less than five other characters appear in the frame. The most sustained use of this technique of diminished off-screen space and crowded framing is reserved for scenes in the public space of the stairwell. When Hortensia tries to stop Julia from leaving after Domínguez has been killed in the elevator shaft, Julia grips the suitcase with the money and threatens Hortensia with Domínguez’s knife. In a very tight close-up, Hortensia then tells Julia of the plans of the comunidad while a terrified Armandito, in his Power Ranger attire, points a toy pistol at Julia. They come out of the flat in a low-angle medium shot from the bottom of the stairs (Julia still has a knife to Hortensia’s throat) and are joined by Encarna, Karina, Paquita, Castro and García, all of them trying to reason with Julia to let Hortensia go. The angle of the shots alternates between low and high as other characters join the melee from the bottom landing (Ramona, Emilio). The walls and banisters of the staircase frame the characters and even though they leave and re-enter the frame, there are often as many as seven characters in these medium shots. These types of frame compositions continue when Julia reaches the ground floor as the police arrive to deal with Domínguez’s body. While Emilio and Julia talk to the policemen there is a shot that includes the backs of the policemen in the foreground, Julia and Emilio in the middle ground, and the slightly out of focus but still distinguishable mass of neighbours at the back. As Julia is interrogated in her flat there is a brief respite from these crowded frames, but we return to them almost immediately. Emilio and six other members of the group listen outside the door before Julia attempts to escape with the money protected by two municipal policemen. As she comes out of the flat, one policeman is in front of her and one behind, with the rest of the characters flanking her, meaning that at one point the entire comunidad appears on screen. This extended sequence lasts over seven minutes in total. In the tradition of the sainete costumbrista then, collectivity is emphasized at the expense of individuation. The abundance of bodies in the screen space makes this a choral comedy, which articulates group passions and desires rather than isolated psychologies. However, La comunidad is not strictly speaking a choral film, or at least not exclusively so. It is a film with a clear and developed main character who faces a ‘community’ as the only one with any psychological depth. In addition, the amount of knowledge the audience gains about the other characters is dictated principally by how much information we need to have to understand their interaction with Julia. The visual

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language of the film reinforces her centrality. For instance, in the scenes just described, Maura often occupies the centre of the frame and the dialogue consists of her arguments with each one of the characters who tries to prevent her from leaving the building. In some ways this is entirely consistent with the Berlanga mode: as Marvin D’Lugo argues of Plácido, the film sets the Berlanga ensemble in the background while the title character, Plácido, struggles to pay off the first instalment of a loan on his hire vehicle and is ‘continually thwarted in his efforts’ by ‘the community’s indifference to the real needs of one of their own’ (1997, 90). However, in Plácido, the title character is also for long stretches relegated to the ‘background’, whereas in La comunidad, Julia never leaves the centre of the story, and is an intruder rather than ‘one of their own’. In other words, La comunidad builds on the choral style of Berlanga’s ensemble comedies, but concedes that a contemporary audience expects an individuated focal point, even if that figure, like Julia, is a ‘desgraciado, a social failure, a nobody’ intent – even murderously so – on acquiring the outward signs of social advance.

Mise-en-scène The ‘homage’ to a specific cinematic past (Fernán-Gómez, Ferreri and Berlanga) does not confine itself to a kind of framing and shots, but takes in the specially constructed sets of La comunidad. The film shares with the dwellings in El pisito, El extraño viaje, Plácido and El verdugo an obvious shabbiness and dreariness. For instance, in El verdugo, the flats of Don Amadeo (the retiring executioner of the title) and of José Luis’ brother are dimly lit, have peeling paint, newspapers for wallpaper, makeshift shelving and curtains and primitive wiring. Although El verdugo fiercely condemns capital punishment, the film’s social critique is really centred on the chronic urban housing shortage in Spain in the early 1960s, and the shabby and crowded living spaces visualize this argument. In La comunidad privacy is also at a premium: Charly is unable to masturbate without his mother bursting in to slap him about the head. In the post-credit sequence, pouring rain and grey pavement establish a gloominess to match Berlanga’s interiors, although Julia, a bottle-blonde middle-aged woman wearing an offwhite raincoat over a pink suit and carrying a luminous white umbrella, stands out not only in relation to the background, but against the other passers-by. As she goes into the building, accompanied by the couple intending to see a flat, we seem to have stepped back in time. This is

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evident in Julia’s own dismayed face (which quickly changes into a forced grin) and the reaction of the couple who, even though she is drawing their attention to the ‘super ventajas’ (super advantages) of the location, are appalled at the yellow-stained and dusty walls, the dirty dark doors of panelled wood, with peeling paint in the stairs’ walls, the ancient elevator, the rubbish containers and dusty refuse bags which greet them. The state of the walls and doors offers ‘diferentes calidades de desconchados’ (different states of decay), a look which De la Iglesia, and artistic directors José Luis Arrizabalaga and Biaffra, scoured Madrid for (Ponga 2000b, 88). They also brought their authorial signature in the ‘oxidized aesthetics’ (Heredero 1999, 193), which were already present in Acción mutante: ‘our taste for rust and china red is evident’ (Ponga 2000b, 88). Rusty red, browns and ochre tones continue even in the modern and elegant interior of the murdered engineer’s flat, which is dominated by a leather sofa in a warm camel tone. Moreover, the members of the comunidad are dressed in tones that complement this spectrum: brown and taupe raincoats and jackets, floral but dark housecoats and cinereous cardigans among which Julia’s pink suit, Charly’s shiny Darth Vader attire and Armandito’s cobalt-blue Power Ranger costumes are islands of colour that do not belong in this muted landscape. Julia’s light pink suit, which she wears throughout the film, emphasizes that she is a stranger, aspirational like the members of the community, but on an individual rather than collective basis. She and Charly are excluded from the earthy palette which helps to link La comunidad with the aesthetics of decay of the comedia costumbrista. It is worth noting that alongside Berlanga’s sainete costumbrista of the 1960s there was an altogether more cheerful genre, the comedia rosa (literally, pink comedy). These romantic comedies were supposedly an expression of the end of Spain’s under-development under Franco and came complete with lower-middle-class conformism, urban but sunny settings, young women as central characters, heterosexual romance leading to Catholic marriage and happy endings. In fact, these pink comedies were one of the generic referents of the choral comedies of Pedro Almodóvar, such as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988). Pink, then, is the colour that links Julia to modernity. Unlike the rest of the characters’ clothes, hers belong in early twenty-first-century Spain. This is perhaps the reason why in the post-credit sequence we see her attire in so much detail and in close-up and why her entrance

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into the house is so striking. Julia in her pink suit and her partner, Ricardo, in his tuxedo, economically highlight the contrast of their values and desires (particularly hers since he is disposed of by the plot quite quickly) with those of the community. It is also the modern woman in pink who enables the discovery of the dead body and it is she who is then ensnared by the treasure and ready to kill to keep a fortune that is not hers. The two endings There is, then, an almost murderous antagonism in the film between the figure of individualistic modernity, Julia, and the coercive collective who represent an earlier historical and cinematic moment, so much Berlanga in formaldehyde. The centrality of this antagonism to the film’s logic can help us to understand the slightly odd way in which it comes to a conclusion. La comunidad has at least two endings (and possibly three). These two endings, one on the rooftops above Madrid’s Calle de Alcalá, the other in the convivial surroundings of the El Oso y el Madroño (The Bear and Madroño Tree) bar, clash with each other visually, but have in common that they lift us out of the claustrophobic setting which has dominated the whole narrative. The first ninety minutes of the film are restricted almost exclusively to the interior of Carrera de San Jerónimo 14, to the foyer, apartments, landings, staircase and elevator of the building where the eponymous community lives. As La comunidad progresses, the apartment which Julia (Carmen Maura) has colonized becomes a cell, the neighbours her jailers, and the constant heavy rain outside an additional enclosure. As a consequence, the emergence of Julia and Charly (Eduardo Antuña) onto the rooftop under open blue skies – the first time in the film that the sun is sighted – provides a powerful contrast to the obscurity of all that has gone before. By the same token, the epilogue in the bar which follows the rooftop finale introduces us to a friendly ‘community’ of drinkers and singers who bear no apparent relation to the gruesome community which has been terrorizing Julia. In fact, only in its final ten minutes does La comunidad offer a perspective which allows the spectator to place the building – where virtually all the action unfolds – within the wider context of the city to which it belongs. The one exception is the very first shot of the film, which is an establishing shot of sorts. This shot precedes the credits and tracks into the block of flats from a distance, but by tracking along the pavement in close-up before

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at the last moment tilting up to reveal the building in long shot and then tracking up and over it, only serves to isolate the building rather than place it in its context. This foreclosure of Madrid is the basic narrative fact of La comunidad. Even though the building is located in the very heart of the city, a mere stone’s throw from the Puerta del Sol, there is virtually no interaction between the two worlds: the block of flats and its inhabitants are to all intents and purposes untouched by the metropolis they live in. Julia, the original intruder from the outside, brings with her Ricardo (Jesús Bonilla), her boyfriend, but he shows little interest in settling in. The other emissaries from modern Madrid come in pairs, and none of them penetrate very far into this closed world. They represent on the one hand minor uniformed officialdom (firemen, paramedics, dustmen and policemen) too harassed or jaded to note anything untoward about the community, and on the other potential clients viewing the apartment, all wealthy madrileños, uniformly grey and evidently conservative (the husband in the second couple carries a copy of ABC, and it is he, not Julia, who alerts the authorities to the leak from the flat above, thereby precipitating the discovery of the dead man and his treasure). On the two occasions when we see Julia venturing out of the building, the city is carefully occluded. When she buys the suitcase to fill with money, the scene is shot through the display window of the luggage shop from the street, which is heard but not seen; and when she has breakfast in a local café, we can just about make out the street behind her through the window, but the watching figure of Castro (Sancho Gracia), clutching his Voz de Galicia, ensures that the building, in the shape of one of its tenants, obscures our view even here. It is left to Julia’s stridently ringing mobile phone to maintain a point of connection with modernity and the world outside. Later, as she clings to the side of the building with her loot, she screams for help to a passer-by, who hesitates but then carries on when his mobile goes off. The realities of modern Madrid do not come face to face with the hidden world of the comunidad until Castro throws Oswaldo (Roberto Perdomo) from the roof. With the impact of the Cuban dance instructor’s fall, blood splatters the face of a startled Nordic-looking tourist clutching a guide to Spain. The foreclosure is not only spatial but also temporal, as we have been arguing: the members of the comunidad are not only confined to the building, but to the past, and not only the Spanish past, but to the cinematic past. They have been waiting for twenty years to get their

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hands on the old man’s football pools windfall, and their costumes and the mise-en-scène suggest that time has stood still while they have stood watch by the pools winner’s door. The building is in a state of disrepair, with peeling wallpaper, flaking paint, cobwebs, dust and mould; and the elevator, centrepiece of the lugubrious stairwell, is preposterously antiquated. The characters’ costumes, mainly slippers, housecoats and cardigans, are old but also old-fashioned, and Charly, who eventually emerges as the male protagonist, is autistically trapped in 1977 with his Darth Vader outfit. The other space/time of Spain in Europe is catching up with them in the form of monetary union, but they seem oblivious to the fact that those outsized 5,000 peseta notes will soon be displaced. Only Julia thinks of phoning a friend who works in a bank to confirm that this old currency can in fact be exchanged for the new pesetas and eventually, the impending euros. Clearly, we are a long way from cine social (social realism), which values above all else contemporary settings and modern issues. This brings us back to the problem of the two (plus one) endings. Why does the film struggle to conclude, ending on a dissonant note? Does it have anything to do with the film’s main problematic, the exclusion of Madrid and of modernity from the life of the comunidad? The first ending, as José Arroyo suggests, is ‘an homage to the Mount Rushmore sequence in North by Northwest’ (2003, 38), but not just that. The chase across the rooftops and the climactic struggle on the equestrian monument between Julia and Ramona evokes not only Hitchcock but any number of thrillers which conclude perched on a precipice. The generic debts of the second ending are less apparent. Some time after the climax, Charly and Julia meet up in El Oso y el Madroño, a bar whose name of course is drawn from the symbols of Madrid – the bear and the madroño tree. Inside, the customers (the actual patrons of the bar, plus Biaffra, the film’s artistic director, who makes a cameo appearance), an admirable collection of authentic working-class madrileños known as chulos or chulapos, join Charly and Julia in dancing to a chotis, a traditional form of Madrid music. Finally, the rooftop ending and the bar ending are brought together in a brief sequence which shows the bloodied courtyard where Ramona fell with the suitcase full of Monopoly money before dissolving to the same Monopoly notes swirling round the equestrian statue. Over this, the diegetic music from the bar continues to play, but now extra-diegetically. In purely structural terms there is nothing particularly remarkable about this sequence of endings. They are in effect a climax (ending 1),

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an epilogue or denouement (ending 2) and a final tableau (ending 3), a pattern of concluding which in itself is hardly out of the ordinary. And in terms of the final movement of the film out of the restricted confines of the block of flats and into the city at large, what could be more unequivocal than a scene in a bar which symbolically represents the entire city? This neat symmetry was not appreciated by the reviewer in Fotogramas, who praised the film, but cited ‘el epílogo con chulapos’ as its worst part (Costa 2000). The fact is, the epilogue cuts across the grain of the climax, reducing its impact. One suspects that this scene is an indulgence, an in-joke on the part of the film-makers, a suspicion which is not dispelled by the presence of the film’s artistic director kitted out in flat cap and dancing enthusiastically to the chotis. But there is more to this scene. In it the entirely male clientele is listening to the traditional organillo (a hurdy-gurdy), and many of them are dressed in the chulo costume of flat cap, waistcoat over white shirt and a scarf knotted around their necks. Charly asks Julia if she wants a caldo (broth) and she answers ‘yes, with a little bit of Sherry’ (the traditional way to take caldo). It is like a parodic advert for a long-gone Madrid. As an ending, the entire scene seems tagged-on and sits uncomfortably with the rest of the film not only because it is falsely happy (as De la Iglesia himself declared in Fotogramas [Ponga 2000b, 88]) but because it is an exaggeration of the antiquated and costumbrista genre elements that the rest of the film has been evoking much more subtly. The version of Madrid presented in El Oso y el Madroño is in fact just as anachronistic and antiquated as the murderous elevator which creaks up the centre of the block of flats. The dancing chulapos are no more representative of contemporary Madrid than Pearly Kings and Queens are of East London. In other words, the scene in this castizo bar is not really a departure from the temporal isolation of the comunidad, but a return to it.4 Charly and Julia, the two characters seemingly most desperate to escape the block of flats preserved in the aspic of (an imaginary) pre-transition Spain, are evidently reluctant to embrace the new-found world that their millions of pesetas now open up to them. Far from being a side issue, the incongruous and tongue in cheek epilogue of La comunidad takes us to the problematic at the very heart of the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia. This cinema, as we have been arguing throughout this book, is non-heroic. Although many of De la Iglesia’s films adopt plotting strategies from thrillers and suspense movies (Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, Perdita Durango, La

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comunidad ), their protagonists are drawn from comedy. The structure of thrillers demands bravery, resolution, decisiveness from its characters; Álex de la Iglesia’s films are populated by the grotesque, the ugly, the moronic, the morally deficient. The resulting incongruities are the basic stuff of his films. In addition, his ‘heroes’, like the members of the comunidad, are generally at odds with modernity, unable or unwilling to adjust or adapt to it. The ‘mutants’ of Acción mutante reject the glossy culture of body consumerism; the priest in El día de la bestia brings mock mediaeval theology to late-twentiethcentury Madrid; and the abuelo (grandfather) in 800 balas clings tenaciously to a bygone era of Spanish film-making, recreating spaghetti westerns for audiences of five. In general De la Iglesia’s films side with those who cannot be assimilated to contemporaneity, but without endorsing outright their anachronistic stance: the stubborn communal values of Julia’s neighbours are a source of terror in La comunidad. This is why the mock ending in El Oso y el Madroño is so important: it firmly places Julia and Charly on the side of anachronism rather than contemporaneity. There is a complicated streak of nostalgia running through these films, then, but it is not undiluted. Instead, the proliferation of characters ‘out of time’ is part and parcel of De la Iglesia’s continuing engagement with Spain’s often conservative cinematic past (and in the case of Muertos de risa, its televisual past) and sceptical interrogation of its modernizing present. The politics of cutreficción

La comunidad, we are contending, is not a pure pastiche, but plunders selectively from Berlanga and the sainete costumbrista. For instance, La comunidad imitates the crowded frames typical of Berlanga, but not the long takes also associated with that director. It is not only this selectiveness which prevents the film from simply becoming what Fredric Jameson has called a ‘nostalgia film’, which recycles the styles of the past but is unable to reflect on the present (Jameson 1983, 116–18). With the fondness of surrealists for neologism, De la Iglesia once proposed a cinema of cutreficción (Aizarna 1993). As well as meaning, literally, fiction of decay or shabbiness (cutre: seedy, shabby; ficción: fiction), this term puns on putrefacción (putrefaction), and suggests an unhealthy fascination with corpses. Although it was a notoriously unorthodox surrealist, Georges Bataille, who meditated most fully on non-exquisite corpses, the surrealists in general were,

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according to Walter Benjamin, ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, in . . . objects that have begun to be extinct . . . when the vogue has begun to ebb from them’ (1997, 229). If we remember that in its day the sainete costumbrista was the cinema that most incisively interrogated the Francoist establishment, to invoke it through the mise-en-scène cannot be an innocent aesthetic gesture but must be an ideological one as well. When most are content to keep Berlanga in the past and treat him simply as an outmoded treasure – a ‘joya del cine español’ (Jewels of Spanish Cinema is the video series in which his films appear) – De la Iglesia resurrects the critique of progress at the heart of Berlanga’s cinema. Berlanga relentlessly demonstrated what the ‘developmental triumphalism’ (Hopewell 1986, 51–5) of the dictatorship left behind in the form of under-developed social reality. The aesthetics of cutreficción (La comunidad opens with a rotting corpse) treat the socalled advances of modern, European Spain with a similarly ironic detachment. It doesn’t take much imagination to see La comunidad as a rattling of the skeletons in the closet of Spain’s modernity and democracy. In the film can easily be found an allegory of Spain in the late 1990s when the remains of the Civil War victims were being unearthed while the Partido Popular’s centre-right politics enabled many to get away with money that was not theirs (investors, financial advisors, profiteers from the soaring housing market in cities). It also alludes to the gap between the goods that consumer culture offers (for instance in the television car advert that causes Julia and Ricardo to fight) and what can actually be obtained in a society where most Spanish people live with the constant threat of unemployment, inhabiting a world in which many people are dispensable (‘los que sobran’, as Ricardo puts it). There is no sentimentalization of those who are left behind by progress, though. In La comunidad, as in El día de la bestia and 800 balas, those anachronistic characters who are left behind by history are painted as politically reactionary. There is in La comunidad, therefore, more than a passing gesture towards issues or images that would belong in one of the cine social films that the Goyas so much like to encourage. And yet La comunidad, with its unholy mix of elements from horror as well as sainete costumbrista, could not be further from El bola. But those anxious critics who worry that the presence of horror will inevitably mean that social ills are explained away in terms of possession, reincarnation, bogeymen or haunting will not in fact find this the case in La

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comunidad. This film presents principal generic traits of horror without recourse to the supernatural. Horror in this foreclosed and yet modern Madrid resides in nothing otherworldly, but in the quotidian itself. Cutreficción, with its intentional juxtaposition of the march of progress with the flotsam and jetsam of the outmoded, is much better placed to make this social critique than any film of the cine social hamstrung by the conventions of realism. Notes 1 2

3 4

See Heredero and Santamarina (2002, 115). It is imperative to stress that these popular films have in Spanish culture the place reserved in Britain for the Ealing Comedies, with the added element that some of them are clearly amenable to a reading of subversion against the dictatorship of Franco, under which they were made. See Heredero (1999, 235–51); Triana Toribio (2003, 62–5). ‘Castizo’ is an adjective which indicates that something is ‘authentically’ Spanish, not ‘contaminated’ by foreign elements.

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800 balas (2002): undoing the ignominy of boyhood

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Back in March 1999, Álex de la Iglesia told journalist Milagros MartínLunas from El Mundo that the idea for Muertos de risa came to him on his way to the airport while scouting for locations for La máscara de Fu Manchú (The Mask of Fu Manchu) – the script on which he and Guerricaechevarría were working at that time and which was meant to be an ambitious and Hollywood-style co-production based on the classic thriller character Fu Manchu (Martín-Lunas 1999). Their financial backer was Andrés Vicente Gómez, continuing a partnership that had started in 1995, as we have seen in Chapter 2, with El día de la bestia. By July 2001, De la Iglesia was calling a press conference to announce that he was abandoning the Fu Manchu project due to a lack of agreement on budget (see, for instance, Monjas 2001) and severing links with Gómez.1 Producer-less and film-less, De la Iglesia formed his own production company, Pánico Films – whose birth was another announcement made at the same press conference – and moved to the front burner yet another idea for a script conceived while Fu Manchu was in gestation. The story goes that when De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría were scouting locations, this time in Almería, they came across the backdrop of numerous spaghetti westerns and Hollywood co-productions of the 1960s and 1970s in which the arid land of the southeast of Spain had stood in for the southwestern regions of the USA and Mexico. More importantly, they met several especialistas (stuntmen) who had remained in Almería to put on shows for tourists among the decaying sets of fabricated ‘western’ towns (see Olmedo 2002; ‘De la Iglesia 2004; Pánico Films/Sogepac 2002). From these encounters came the script for what in the words of the director was going to be ‘una producción pequeña y manejable’ (a small and manageable production) (Monjas 2001). Seemingly the progeny of disappointment and compromise, 800 balas, the first film produced by the brand new Pánico Films, is, for many reasons, the odd film out in De la Iglesia’s oeuvre. Carlos (Luis Castro) is a ten-year-old boy who has just moved with his widowed mother Laura (Carmen Maura) and paternal grandmother, Rocío (Terele Pávez) to a wealthy residential area outside Madrid. He only knows that his father died in an unspecified accident. Laura is a successful businesswoman who specializes in land-fordevelopment dealings; at the beginning of the film she and her business partner Scott (Eusebio Poncela) are trying to entice a US investor to build an amusement park in Spain by undercutting the

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offer of a Belgian group and taking advantage of the benign Spanish climate. Carlos discovers that his father died while working as an especialista in a spaghetti western in Almería and that his grandfather, Julián (Sancho Gracia), his father’s co-worker, is still there. The old stuntman, who blames himself for the death of his son, ekes out a living by putting on a Wild West show for a handful of tourists on abandoned film sets in the town of Texas-Hollywood. His collaborators are a group of hapless would-be stuntmen. Carlos decides to skip a school skiing trip and goes to Almería instead. He makes his way to Texas-Hollywood and meets Julián, who is reluctant to let him stay. However, Carlos comes in handy to bail Julián out of jail (using Laura’s credit card) and to buy supplies for a celebratory party. Soon Laura takes Carlos back home. Motivated by revenge, she decides to use the land on which the old sets are built for the amusement park project. Julián, betrayed by one of his comrades, dies defending his sets and his out-of-time existence, but with the full admiration of his grandson.

Cine con niño As we saw in the chapter on Acción mutante, when De la Iglesia and his team first set out to make cinema, they vowed to avoid what they saw as the most hackneyed subjects of decreto Miró era cinema: literary adaptations, the Civil War, and childhood (see Ordóñez 1997, 100). 800 balas reneges on this original filmic manifesto by casting a boy of about ten as one of its two central protagonists. When we expressed puzzlement at this decision De la Iglesia told us that it was inevitable to have this particular story unfurl through the eyes of a child.2 What is most important for our analysis is that this ‘need’ of a child for narrative focalization brings to the heart of the film a fully constituted conventional family, making 800 balas even more of an oddity among the films up to this point. The film’s Oedipal trajectory is established at the very outset, when Carlos, who has just moved to a luxury chalet with his mother and grandmother, finds a photograph of his late father dressed as a cowboy. His mother had no intention of letting him see the picture and is furious at his discovery. However, after the reprimand she tells Carlos that she loved the man in the picture and kisses her son goodnight tenderly. He takes the picture to his room and, at night, furtively, discovers that the image is in fact part of a folded publicity poster for the (fictitious) spaghetti western Dos rifles y una

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tumba (Two Rifles and a Grave) and that his father is not alone in the image. His grandmother, aware of the boy’s desire to know about his father, approaches stealthily from behind to tell him that the second cowboy is none other than his grandfather Julián. Armed with these two discoveries, Carlos is inspired to search for his (grand)father against his mother’s wishes. In the process he becomes the only character created by the team ‘Álex de la Iglesia’ who has a father, mother, grandmother and grandfather with a presence in the diegesis (although the father’s presence is restricted to a photograph and a prologue scene in which he dies). In the films by De la Iglesia, protagonists are unlikely to belong to a recognizable nuclear family or even to a conventional extended family; instead, they become members of dysfunctional ‘De la Iglesian families’ (Acción mutante) or find their life and limb threatened by groupings akin to families (La comunidad). De la Iglesia’s films do not, as a rule, have main characters with mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers. This is no small thing if we accept Marsha Kinder’s argument that Spanish cinema production of the opposition and of the transition, that is, the cinema immediately preceding the one under consideration here, was marked above all by its violent Oedipal narratives (Kinder 1993, 197–275). Violent, De la Iglesia’s films undeniably are, but as we have argued in the chapter on Perdita Durango, this is not Oedipal violence but the fantastic disarticulations of the pre-symbolic: before, if not ‘beyond the kindergartens of Oedipus’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 67). We are not claiming that blood relations are not represented at all in De la Iglesia, for we find them particularly when the characters are younger or depicted as infantilized. Yet, even in those cases, relations tend to be abbreviated to the minimum indispensable number. For instance, in Acción mutante the three boys inhabiting the planet Axturias have a grandfather in loco parentis, two of the ‘mutants’ are conjoined twins, and Patricia has a father with a penchant for pseudofascist uniforms, but as we discover in the party scene, her mother is dead. In El día de la bestia the heavy metal fan, José María, has a phallic gun-toting mother Rosario and a spaced-out grandfather whom he adores and looks after with a diet of amphetamines. Perdita Durango declares that she does not know who her parents were and does not care, although we do see a flashback to the violent death of her sister. Romeo Dolorosa is the grandson of a Caribbean witch and the son of a Spanish gentleman, while what is important about Rafaél (Crimen

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ferpecto) is not who gave birth to him but where (in the department store). Of the main characters in Muertos de risa, Nino lives with his mother even after becoming famous, but their relationship is marginal to the plot and one-dimensional. Within the larger family structure of the community association in La comunidad we find some smaller families. Armandito almost has as many relatives as Carlos because he has diegetic mother and father and, more crucially, Charly lives with his mother and we find out that his father thought of him that ‘he should have been drowned in the bathtub when he was born’. Moreover, he has befriended the deceased old football pools winner upstairs as a substitute grandfather. But no other character comes near Carlos’s collection of blood relatives. In a cinematic system where families are decisively de-nucleated, Carlos is remarkable for possessing a full set. As well as the amount of relatives to whom Carlos is tied, what is different in 800 balas is that all these parientes (relatives) display genuine affection and love for the boy at some point or other in the film. This again sits uncomfortably with familial relationships in the other films. Only Romeo Dolorosa can be considered as expressing genuine affection for a relative – his witch grandmother back in Petit Caribe – and as we have seen in Chapter 3, that affection is a necessary element in Romeo’s construction as a (relatively) conventional hero. Charly’s mother’s treatment of her son in La comunidad – cursing him, slapping him – is far more in keeping with the parental/filial/ fraternal exchanges of ‘affection’ among De la Iglesian characters. Contrary to what we might expect, Carlos’s ‘travesuras’ (naughtiness) such as climbing on the roof of the house or running away to Almería, do not provoke his mother or grandmother to wish they had drowned him in a bathtub. The opposite is entirely the case; his presence provokes emotional moments in the diegesis of the type we expect from the Oedipal melodramas of Stephen Spielberg, such as E. T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) or A. I. (2001). As we mentioned above, Carlos’s mother kisses him tenderly after scolding him and his presence inspires his grandfather to pick himself up from the floor, dust himself down and become a hero rather than stand in for one. We are calling this ‘Spielbergian’ because of a range of similarities with the Hollywood director: the sentimentality, the trademark Oedipal dramas, and the reliance on generic elements coded ‘masculine’ such as the adventure film and the western.3 It is our contention that as a result 800 balas is out of place in De la Iglesia’s oeuvre, in which characters are

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characteristically deflated and humiliated. In contrast, Spielberg’s films ‘cater’, in the words of Robin Wood, ‘to the wish . . . that what W. B. Yeats so evocatively called “the ignominy of boyhood” might have been a little less ignominious’ (1986, 178). Although this is diluted Spielbergism, to be sure, 800 balas nevertheless ‘surreptitiously reconstructs the image of the nuclear family’ (176) even while exposing the flimsiness of the entire structure. The restoration of the Father and the place of the Mother According to Freud (1991) the ‘family romance’ is a fantasy that children have about their actual parents when they cease to live up to the image of power and agency these progenitors inspired in early infancy. Children may dream of a ‘discovery’ unveiling their failing parents as impostors who have supplanted perfect parents of ‘higher social standing’ or ‘better birth’ (1991, 223). Carlos’s discovery is a textbook realization of this fantasy of parents less ordinary. His boring bourgeois life in the luxurious suburbs is transformed by the fact that his father died the dramatic death of a stuntman under the wheels of a stagecoach. In this coming-of-age tale, Carlos experiences what many literary and film heroes have discovered before him: in order to find your fortune and become a man you must leave the childhood home (mother and toy gun) and join your (grand)father and his gang with their stunt guns. Moreover, the all-male band of especialistas who become his new family could not be more dissimilar to the all-female household that he calls home. In escaping from the household of his mother and grandmother, Carlos takes flight from two things: (1) the ‘childhood home’, an affluent suburban house about which all he has to say is ‘¡Yo no quería venir!’ (I did not want to come here), adding ‘¡Esta casa es una mierda, no tiene piscina!’ (This house is crap, there’s no swimming pool!); and (2) wealth at the price of isolation – Carlos has no shortage of toys but there are no other houses in sight. Both wealth and isolation are courtesy of Laura, who is a successful businesswoman. Laura, like Julia in La comunidad, also played by Carmen Maura, represents modernity and progress, but unlike Julia not just aspiration but actual achievement. Laura is her own boss and a woman who from the outset of the film is independent and not subordinated to a husband either. In other words, it is the powerful rule of a feminized domesticity that Carlos sets out to escape.

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Carlos therefore sets forth on a trajectory with a well-established pedigree: Laura and Rocío’s functions in the narrative owe much to various cinematic predecessors, for instance, to the way in which women in the US western are ‘passive symbols in the active hero’s dilemma of choice’ (Kuhn with Radstone 1990, 423) between the freedom of the wilderness and the shackles of civilization. Women who stand between male characters and freedom abound in the film and not exclusively among Carlos’s and Julián’s relatives. Other men in the film have an equivalent relationship to the women in their lives: for instance, Arrastrado (Enrique Martínez) has a seven-year relationship with Jacinta (Ane Gabarain), who plays one of the ‘saloon girls’ and wants him to take her to the cinema instead of spending time with his mates, and Cheyenne (Ángel de Andrés López) is married to bartender Juli (Gracia Olayo) who mocks his acting career (his freedom) and pesters him to get a proper job. Both Jacinta and Juli engage in the familiar stereotypical activities of nagging and undermining men as well as being the providers of food and drink, and are each placed behind a bar. Another stereotype from westerns, and more typically from Italian westerns (see Frayling 2000, 129) are the prostitutes who provide their services as solace for the warriors, an opportunity for Carlos to be confronted with sexual difference – ‘Si quieres puedes tocarme las tetas’ (If you want you can touch my tits) offers Sandra (Yoima Valdés) – or an ear for Julián’s drunken woes, in the case of big-bosomed Ángeles (Berta Ojea). Ángeles also functions as the diegetic excuse for Julián to tell Carlos how his father died. Laura is also an immediately recognizable figure from another cinematic convention: the patriarchal mother who embodies and imposes the law in the absence of the father. This image, albeit present in many world cinemas, is central to Hollywood and shares characteristics of the mothers in the films of the Lucas-Spielberg cycle so archly assessed by Robin Wood (1986, 162–88). Closer to home, this domineering mother-of-the-law resonates strikingly with a range of mothers in Spanish cinema of the last years of the dictatorship and early transition (from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s). As Marsha Kinder has argued, in this epoch, the mother who becomes head of the family due to the absence of the father was a scapegoat for a generation of film-makers who poured onto images of mothers their abhorrence of the dictatorship. These mothers were held culpable for the violence perpetrated by the regime and in reaction to it: prime examples are Martina (Lola Gaos) in José Luis Borau’s Furtivos (1975), Mamá in

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Carlos Saura’s Ana y los lobos (1972) and Mamá cumple 100 años (1979), and Tatín’s mother (María Luisa Ponte) in Gutiérrez Aragón’s Camada negra (1977). When these mothers are murdered, as they so often are, the killing is generally given narrative justification as an essential step on the protagonist’s escape from the repression of the childhood home, as in the case of Martina’s execution by her son in Furtivos. Marsha Kinder famously asserts that no other national cinema features as many matricides as the Spanish (1993, 232) (see also Gámez Fuentes 2004). Obviously, Laura survives 800 balas unscathed by matricidal impulses, and is in fact less like those phallic, hardened, or castrating mothers of the 1970s and early 1980s than the parodic Rosario in El día de la bestia or Dolores in La comunidad. Instead, Laura can be read as an updated version of the mother who was an ‘embodiment of the dictatorship period’ (Gámez Fuentes 2003, 38). The modern and selfreliant Laura shares with her predecessors the identification with the Law in the absence of a diegetic father. And like those predecessors, she is an obstacle to her son’s desire for knowledge about the past and stands in the way of his following in father’s footsteps. Rather than

9 The predations of modernity: Eusebio Poncela and Carmen Maura as Scott and Laura in 800 balas

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representing the dictatorship, though, this phallic mother stands in for modernity and expansionist capitalism, as is made clear when she is shown in moments of melodramatic villainy, for instance, when she hatches the Machiavellian scheme to ensure that the commission to build Adventure Land comes to her construction company, or when deciding to build precisely on the site of Texas-Hollywood. The drama could not be painted more plainly: a feminized modernity threatens to eradicate a forgotten and emasculated masculinity. Unlike the phallic and distant mothers of Saura, Gutiérrez Aragón and Borau, of course, Laura shows affection for her son, and expresses fear particularly after the boy manages to make his way onto the roof, at which point Rocío warns sinisterly, ‘lo lleva en la sangre. Tú ya sabes a quién ha salido . . . Acabará ocurriendo una desgracia’ (It is in his blood. You know whom he takes after . . . It will all end up in tears). Lines such as these also underscore the presence of a mocksentimental melodramatic mode in 800 balas. They evoke the dialogue from 1940s and 1950s iconic Spanish melodramas (for instance Malvaloca [Marquina, 1944], Vidas cruzadas [Lucia, 1952]) where destiny and fate, evoked with the same type of sinister language, dictated the outcome of the characters’ actions. This seems largely out of place in a film by De la Iglesia, even taking into account the ironic tone which inflects Pávez’s performance. What is more, Carlos and Laura shed genuine tears over the dead body of Julián: this is almost unthinkable in any other film by De la Iglesia, with the possible exception of the concluding frames of Perdita Durango. In this mildly melodramatic world, then, what is it Carlos hopes to find in the masculine traditions of the (grand)father once he has escaped the clutches of the mother and grandmother? It is the restoration of the value, if not absolute authority, of the figure of paternity. Robin Wood, when introducing a similar type of restoration of the father at work in George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg’s films of the 1980s, states that this strategy is ‘the dominant project, ad infinitum and post nauseam, of the contemporary Hollywood cinema’ (1986, 172). Julián’s arrival into Carlos’s world completes Carlos’s ‘missing’ pieces, and in effect suggests that under patriarchy families headed by women cannot but produce incomplete subjects. Carlos’s story is ‘completed’ through his interactions with Julián. As we mentioned earlier it is Julián who tells the story of the death of Carlos’s father and it is through Julián that at the end of the film Carlos is finally inserted into a tableau that at least resembles a traditional patriarchal

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heterosexual family: in the closing shots we see the boy grouped over his grandfather’s coffin with his mother and the stand-in for his grandfather, ‘Clint Eastwood’. There is a vaguely saccharine symmetry here, for Julián was supposedly once Eastwood’s stand-in, as stunt double in the Sergio Leone trilogy A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Robin Wood tells us that the end of Spielberg’s E. T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) finds an equally contrived way of producing a father for the woman-headed family at the heart of the story: a scientist working in Elliott’s house. The group are manoeuvered into a traditional family composition ‘like a posed photograph’ about which Wood comments: ‘For Spielberg it doesn’t really matter that the scientist has no intimate relationship with the mother, as his imagination is essentially presexual: it is enough that he stands in for Elliott’s missing father’ (1986, 176). The same could be argued about the climactic image of 800 balas at Julián’s funeral. It is vital that Carlos has not been restored to his mother alone, but in addition this scene vindicates Julián in death. While others, including Cheyenne and sceptical tourists, have mocked Julián for his repeated claims to friendship with Eastwood, Carlos kept the faith and trusted in his grandfather. ‘Yo era amigo de tu abuelo’ (I was friends with your grandfather) affirms the Eastwood figure; ‘Lo se’ (I know) replies a beatifically smiling Carlos. The film as a whole tells us that mothers, though well-meaning, are not to be trusted; the final images tell us that blind faith in the (grand)father will eventually be rewarded. There is of course no way of knowing whether diegetically this tall deep-voiced figure with the characteristic hat is the ‘real’ Eastwood, or yet another stand-in, because his face is obscured. It hardly matters though, for the message is, better a substitute father than a real mother. The Spielberg-like melodrama of 800 balas introduces another foreign element into the normal format of De la Iglesia’s films. The typical De la Iglesian character is submitted relentlessly to a range of humiliations and deflationary moments that hardly square well with the ‘persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue’ (Brooks 1985, 11–12) that marks melodrama, with its unequivocal heroes and heroines. In this sense, 800 balas should be grouped with Perdita Durango, whose relatively traditional hero and heroine, as we argued in Chapter 4, are more visitors to than inhabitants of the De la Iglesia universe. The standard De la Iglesian ‘hero’ is a failure, aesthetically deficient, and subjected to all the ‘ignominies of boyhood’ (precisely

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without ever being played by a child actor). Clearly the intention in 800 balas was to place Julián firmly in this camp, for De la Iglesia declares ‘le sacamos viejo, acabado, borracho, gordo, mentiroso’ (We show him old, wasted, drunk, fat and a liar) (Pánico Films/Sogepaq 2002). And yet, Julián is in essence a good man who is persecuted by forces which are bent on the destruction of his harmless world of play and make believe. Despite the attempts to de-glamourize him, Julián in the end becomes heroic. He may be beaten up in a bar, dropped in a watering trough, mocked by all and sundry, but all these things are pinpricks compared with the elevating force of his relationship with his grandson, of his dramatic death, and perhaps most importantly, of the way in which he is shown through the adoring eyes of his grandson. As a heroic hero he can show an ‘indulgence in strong emotionalism’ (Brooks 1985, 11); for example, at one point he delivers to Carlos a monologue about the tough moments in life and how it is important to enjoy good times (De la Iglesian characters usually live by that motto rather than delivering speeches about it). Carlos’s faith in him makes Julián’s supposed mediocrity and corruption forgivable and idealizes his achievements. The published script of the film underscores this intention. When in the final moments of the film Julián is shot – a moment that is shown by multiple TV monitors recording the siege of the Texas-Hollywood village – the script reads: ‘Carlos ve morir a Julián como el héroe de una película’ (Carlos sees Julián die like the hero in a film) (De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría 2003, 161). Here is where the unusual inclusion of the child has a decisive impact on the meanings of the film: without Carlos’s point of view could Julián’s demise be so idealized? Julián’s death as a cinema hero is linked iconically with a reel hero (Clint Eastwood), and the decision which leads to this death, to buy 800 real bullets and resist the eviction order, is taken while seeing himself inhabiting the place of another cinema hero – when he is reminded that he was the stuntman for George C. Scott in Patton (Schaffner, 1969). There is a suggestion, then, that this death is forged in delusion, in over-identification with an illusory image world, and therefore not far removed from the final moments of the hallucinating José María in El día de la bestia. However, Julián’s death in 800 balas, like so many other things in the film, is slightly off kilter when compared with the other films. Death, maiming and mutilation are of course not uncommon in De la Iglesia, but would-be moments of glory are mostly undermined and the characters are more likely to die

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‘muertos de risa’. Take for example José María’s death scene in El día de la bestia. He falls off the scaffolding while fighting the (imagined) Devil on the incomplete Torres KIO, laughing hysterically throughout and the process is over and done within seconds. Just as typically, Juan Abadie in Acción mutante and Don Antonio in Crimen ferpecto die without dignity, meat cleaver lodged in skull long after their deaths in parodic imitation of St Peter Martyr. These iconic deaths are far from the valiant hero’s end of Julián who looks his duel adversary in the eye (Cheyenne in stereotypical villainous black attire) and taunts him: ‘¿Quieres que me acerque más?’ (Do you want me to come closer?). Then he demands that Cheyenne kill him: ‘Hazle un favor a un amigo, aunque sólo sea por una vez en tu vida’ (Do a friend a favour for once in your life). These scenes are shot following the conventions of the duel in Westerns with high-angle shots of the two duellists facing each other against the dust and the view in low angle of one duellist through the other’s open legs. The De la Iglesia team, who rarely spurn an exaggerated exit wound and take such delight in the disarticulated ‘body in pieces’, decline to indulge themselves here. Instead, we see Julián fall backwards in slow motion and are shown his body in the dust in extreme long shot. Shortly afterwards a grief-stricken Carlos hugging his fallen hero and a tearfully repentant daughter-in-law provide us with our emotional cues, if the music has not done so already. Finally, it is worth considering the star persona of Sancho Gracia. The information provided in the pressbook (see Pánico Films/Sogepaq 2002 and repeated in many of the pre-premiere articles about the film) serves to remind the audience of elements of Gracia’s star persona which work against his believability as a standard De la Iglesian protagonist. Three very popular television series of the 1970s – Curro Giménez, Los camioneros (The Lorry Drivers) and Los tres mosqueteros (The Three Musketeers) – established for Gracia a distinct star persona. In these series he was in turn a good and attractive young man forced to become a highwayman (Giménez), an honest and hardworking lorry driver (in Los camioneros), and in his role in Los tres mosqueteros, as D’Artagnan, he embodied the courage of confronting unfair rulers who put ‘good men’ on the wrong side of the law. He may be shown as ‘old, wasted, drunk, fat and a liar’ in 800 balas but the above-mentioned traits are indelibly attached to his star persona in Spain. Moreover, another element of this star persona that 800 balas does not even attempt to undercut is his charisma and status as a sex symbol. Indeed, Gracia’s rapid success in the 1960s can be attributed,

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according to Aguilar and Genover, to his ‘typical Latin attractiveness’ (1996, 257). His once-upon-a-time sexual appeal is capitalized on by the plot: he is often shot surrounded by attractive women sparely clad (for instance Sandra) and is shown in an extended scene telling anecdotes about his sexual conquest of Raquel Welch to an uncomprehending but amused North African agricultural worker. We can conclude by saying that much as the pressbook tries to convince us otherwise, the fact is that Gracia’s Julián resists deflation and undermining and what we have is a contradictory characterization out of which Julián still emerges idealized. ‘Hablar del cine dentro del cine’ (Talking about cinema within cinema) Thus far we have largely been reading 800 balas against the grain, critiquing its Spielberg-style social conservatism, and chastising it for not fitting into the mould of the other films. However, this is only part of the story in what is, after all, a plural text, and we would be remiss if we did not also take note of its ambitious dialogue with a marginalized moment in the history of Spanish cinema and its fleeting but significant engagement with an urgent social issue in Spain, immigration. As we recounted at the beginning of this chapter, 800 balas was supposedly inspired by the stories of the stuntmen still working on the old western sets in Almería. De la Iglesia tells us, ‘Todos tenían algo que contar’ (They all had stories to tell) (Olmedo 2002, 94 and Pánico Films/Sogepaq 2002). The film is, in part, a homage to the hundreds of Spanish and Italian stuntmen who were employed to carry out the jobs that the US stars ‘could not or would not do’ – as Julián puts it in the film – and by association to the many Spanish and Italian actors who, often with Anglicized names (see Frayling 2000, 198), played the adversary, the villager or the henchman but rarely the hero, in these European westerns.4 In doing so, 800 balas takes as its fictional subject matter a participant who has frequently been upgraded in De la Iglesia’s fictions from minor roles to centre stage: the ‘actor secundario’ (the classic case being Álex Angulo). In fact, the band of hapless men that Julián leads are even less than ‘actores secundarios’: they are in training to become especialistas for cowboy films in a land where these films will never be shot again. They even lack the transferable skills to move on. Like so many De la Iglesian characters they are stuck out

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of time. In concentrating on these professionals who carry out hidden or unacknowledged work the film addresses a little-mentioned chapter in the history of film-making in Spain. As we have argued, this concern is present in many of the films, which have sought inspiration in Spanish television and cinema history either through casting and performances (as in La comunidad) or by telling stories featuring characters of Spain’s televisual past and present (Muertos de risa, Acción mutante and El día de la bestia). 800 balas, though, is the most explicit in its aim, as De la Iglesia puts it in the pressbook, ‘para hablar del cine dentro del cine’ (to talk about cinema from within cinema) (Pánico Films/Sogepaq 2002). Co-productions and subproductos To make a film about film-making is not remarkable in itself; indeed, it is virtually compulsory for any director with the slightest pretensions. What makes 800 balas of special interest as meta-cinema is its concentration on a very specific, and generally neglected, aspect of Spanish film history: the collaboration of Spanish film workers with foreign film industries, often on low-prestige productions, and usually as junior partners, both financially and artistically. 800 balas is not alone in this desire to revisit the sometimes murky history of Spanish co-productions; at least two other films from the turn of the millennium have shown an interest in the history of transnational Spanish cinemas, although in very different modes. The first is Fernando Trueba’s openly nostalgic costume drama La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams) (1998), which dramatizes the Hispano-Film Producktion adventures of Benito Perojo, Florián Rey, and Imperio Argentina in Germany in 1937–39. In UFA studios in Berlin and using German technicians, the Spanish ‘talent’, barred access to film-making facilities in Spain controlled by Republicans, made a series of folkloric films under the auspices of Hispano-German economic collaboration, including Carmen, la de Triana (Florián Rey, 1938). Torremolinos 73 (Pablo Berger, 2003), meanwhile, tells the story of a struggling Spanish couple in the mid-1970s (Candela Peña and Javier Cámara) who make a living by becoming director and main star respectively in home-made pornographic films which triumph in Scandinavian countries. In the end, the reluctant pornographers end up working with a Scandinavian crew in the tourist resort of Torremolinos, producing sex films which allude to the notorious export versions made in Spain in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Monterde 1993, 41–3; Torreiro 1995, 335).

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La niña de tus ojos, 800 balas, and Torremolinos 73 thus share an interest in co-productions of films that were less than respectable, for reasons either of politics, aesthetics or morality. They also all depict their Spanish protagonists as naïve, and therefore subordinate, in the face of the economic or cultural might of their collaborators. In the apologist La niña de tus ojos the Spanish stars are political innocents who gradually come to understand the wickedness of the Nazi regime and are exonerated of any responsibility; in 800 balas Julián has been a small cog in the huge Hollywood machine, and his lack of realism about financial matters is in distinct contrast with Laura and her Disneyworld-style venture; while it is Danish sexual knowledge that introduces the Spanish ingénues of Torremolinos 73 to the modern world. However, at the same time as imagining Spanish collaborators in co-productions as mildly exploited, in the latter two films at least, there is a distinct utopianism about the possibilities of opening up Spain and Spanish film-making beyond its parochial borders. Not only is Julián’s friendship with Eastwood a constant refrain in 800 balas, but one of the performers in Texas-Hollywood is an Italian actor who came to Almería in hope of work on spaghetti westerns only to be thwarted by unanticipated and unprecedented rainfall. Finally, all three of these films notably concentrate on the problems of financing, making it clear that Spanish participation in the business of cinema is contingent on foreign investment. They therefore remind us that co-productions and other transnational ventures have played a decisive role in the history of a film industry beset by economic weakness and constantly ‘in crisis’. Not only did European westerns provide an injection of cash and employment in the 1960s and 1970s, but perhaps more significantly the big-budget epics of Samuel Bronston – such as King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1960), El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961), 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964) and Circus World (Henry Hathaway, 1964) – became training grounds for Spanish film professionals. Between 1964 and 1968, over 50% of all Spanish films were coproductions of one sort or another (Torreiro 1995, 339). As 800 balas makes clear, the foundations of such an enterprise are precarious and when foreign investment is withdrawn, many figures like Julián will find themselves on the breadline. As a result of their absolute centrality to Spanish film-making, these exploitations of Spanish soil and talent met with some strong criticism at the time. Even before their moment of absolute ascendancy, José María García Escudero, the influential

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film critic and politician, noting that co-productions made up 25% per cent of the national production in the early 1960s, warned that this was a false boon: En lo económico no es argumento válido, en cambio, la experiencia nada halagueña de películas donde nuestra aportación se reduce al paisaje, algún capital, elementos técnicos insignificantes o artistas cuyos nombres suelen figurar con letras grandes en las carteleras de casa pero que en las de fuera no pasan de la letra chica – y eso cuando aparecen. (1962, 100) The economic argument [for co-productions] is not valid in relation to the unpleasant experience of films where our contribution consists solely of the landscape, a little capital, insignificant technical contributions or artists whose names often appear in big letters at home but abroad in small letters – and that is when they do so at all.

Traditionally – since before the 1960s which García Escudero discusses – the aims of the co-production are and were to ‘share the risk of the investment and to widen the market through endowing [the film] with dual or multiple nationality’ (Otero 1999, 25). In the case of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s this partnership held the promise of realizing that elusive dream of breaking into the US market or the Spanishspeaking market across the Atlantic (see Triana Toribio 2003, 28–31 and Torreiro 1995, 338–40). 800 balas shows that the dream did not come true by revealing the cost and waste of such ‘collaborations’ that indeed discard locations and local talent when the genres go out of fashion, although it also suggests that one can subsist quite happily on anecdotes and memories, as long as there is a doting grandson around. Location, ‘location’ For García Escudero (1962), too often is Spain no more than a location, and a location that represents something other than itself at that. Although 800 balas fondly reminisces about the ways in which Andalucía stands in for other places in, for instance, Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) or Patton, it also goes to some lengths to emphasize Spain as a location in its own right. In fact, ‘location’ in 800 balas operates at more than one level and is one of the main concerns of the film. In the post-prologue sequence, Laura and Scott are shown plotting how to beat an impressive Belgian bid for the theme park Adventure Land (Scott has arranged for the Belgian plans to be stolen). In all respects this rival bid is better except for one: it is raining in Belgium, a reminder of the financial fiasco of ‘ese Eurodisney pasado

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por agua’ (that waterlogged Eurodisney) in Paris. Rather than compete by providing a higher-quality park, Scott suggests playing the trump card of the Spanish location: ‘Bajar el presupuesto doscientos cincuenta kilos y vender sol. Sol de justicia, sol español’ (We cut the budget by 250 million, and sell them the sun. A blazing sun. A Spanish sun). It is the same solar calculus that so benefited cinema investors who, as Casimiro Torreiro explains, had at their disposal in Almería cheap labour, indirect grants and tax breaks from the government, since at the time it was an unindustrialized area of high unemployment euphemistically declared by the dictatorship ‘zona industrial preferente’ (1995, 334). When a planned site in Valencia falls through, Laura seizes on the land occupied by Texas-Hollywood as an alternate location for the theme park and thus precipitates the film’s climactic showdown between simulated worlds old and new. We have reiterated again and again in this book that De la Iglesia’s cinema is non-realist, even anti-realist in its outlook. One of the main identifying features of realism, of course, is shooting on location. Social realism, what is more, prides itself on revealing to its audiences locations that would otherwise remain unseen – preferably economically deprived ones – as well as meditating on contemporary reality. By these measures, 800 balas has surprisingly strong social realist credentials. The prologue, which features the botched ambush of a stagecoach, admittedly plays with the ambiguity of setting, for the profilmic elements clearly signal ‘western’, without revealing whether or not the location filmed is in the United States. Soon enough there are signals in the dialogue and in road signs to clear up any doubts, and from that point on the desert of Tabernas does not stand for anything but itself. We are shown the expensive new motorways built with the assistance of European money in order to transport the fruits and vegetables of Almería to northern Europe and therefore catch a glimpse of contemporary Europe’s ‘great engineering projects’ whose purpose ‘is to make the territory more dynamic, in order to increase the transit speed of people and goods’ (Virilio 1997, 79, emphasis in original). We also see the still under-developed infrastructure in the shadow of the superhighways in the form of dirt tracks, and are introduced to the Wild West town by way of a pitiable entrance booth and toothless gatekeeper whose appearance and performance suggest he has been plucked, cinéma vérité style, from the local population. The region’s continuing economic dependence on tourism is also plainly shown, since the once-upon-a-time stuntmen are ‘abocados a tirarse desde una

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10 Shooting on ‘location’: ‘Texas-Hollywood’ in Almería in 800 balas

ventana para que les vean los turistas alemanes’ (obliged to throw themselves out of windows for the entertainment of German tourists) (Pánico Films / Sogepaq 2002, 72). Since it is often the ambition of social realism to represent those aspects of society which have been left behind, the ‘poblado del Oeste’ is obviously an appropriate choice of location. There is, however, an added complication in 800 balas in that this genuine ‘location’ (a derelict industrial site, if you like) was originally a set, standing in for something or somewhere else. 800 balas thus turns a fake location into a real one. Texas-Hollywood is still a movie set, but since it is no longer substituting for any number of generic US or Mexican towns, it is a movie set that has become a true Spanish location. If 800 balas participates in the traditions of social realism, then, it is at an angle to the orthodox conventions. Cine social, as it is preferably known in Spain, normally proceeds on the assumption that the filmic text is saturated by the real, where nothing in the story, set, mise-en-scène, performances or soundtrack is allowed to work against the supposed authenticity of the images. 800 balas does not take this saturation approach but instead presents us with shards of contemporary social reality, shards which are positioned awkwardly next to filmic material best classified as generic: moments of comedy, melodrama, western, spectacle. This tactic of juxtaposition, inherited from surrealism, can be found in miniature in the scene where an emblem of contemporary Spain, the ALSA bus on a new superhighway, is brought to a halt by a group of would-be cowboys on horseback, pure cinematic ciphers.

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Perhaps the most striking instance of the film’s location intruding into the plot is in the scenes involving immigrant labourers. By the virtues of non-natural irrigation and many kilometres of plastic, the ‘real’ Almería, once a desert which stood in for Death Valley, is now Europe’s vegetable garden, tended by workers principally from North Africa. Although its protagonists are primarily concerned with maintaining an imaginary wilderness, by calling our attention to this artificial garden, 800 balas makes a connection between the earlier cinematic exploitation of this landscape and the contemporary agricultural exploitation. In both cases, the human labour, whether indigenous or immigrant, costs little and can be discarded when a cheaper alternative is found. The plot detour involving immigrant labourers is introduced on a fairly flimsy premise. After paying Julián’s bail using Carlos’s Gold credit card, the ‘cowboys’ stock up for a party and return to their village on horseback via the motorway; Carlos is riding with his grandfather. At the top of a hill they stop and look over a ‘sea of hothouses that cover Almería. It looks like a white plastic ocean’ (De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría 2003, 70). Julián tells the group that he is going to hire some artists and rides towards the hothouses. In the next shot he is inside one of the hothouses and we see medium shots of immigrant workers rising up from harvesting tomatoes to listen to Julián, who asks, ‘¿Alguno de ustedes estaría interesado en trabajar en el maravilloso mundo del espectáculo?’ (Would any of you be interested in working in the wonderful world of show business?). In the next shot, the script tells us we see Julián being followed by ‘dozens of delighted Moroccans [sic], cheering Julian in Arabic’ while the foremen chase them berating Julián. He replies to them that this is a casting, that they needed ‘Indians’ for their cowboy show, and adds, ‘¡Esto es un país libre, y si estos señores prefieren hacer el indio, usted se calla y se jode!’ (This is a free country and if these gentlemen prefer to make fools of themselves you shut up and get lost!). The bridging music to the next scene – the destructive all-night party back in Texas-Hollywood – has a distinctly North African flavour. The immigrants, dressed up now as Indians, join with gusto in the festivities, and one, monosyllabic but beaming contentedly, has an audience with Julián. With morning they disappear from the town and from the plot. In its casting of extras from the local area, then, 800 balas parallels quite self-consciously the working opportunities of Spanish ‘actors’ in the shadow of American stars in the co-productions of the 1960s and 1970s.

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In the context of a national film production which ‘has seen an escalation in the propagation of ethnically loaded images, rhythms and stories’ (Santaolalla 2002, 56), 800 balas is only one instance of this aspect of contemporary Spanish reality making it into film narrative. Since the early 1990s – when Montxo Armendáriz shot his critically acclaimed Cartas de Alou (1990) – the presence and plight of North African and Sub Saharan workers whose existence has transformed the geographical, economic and social landscape, particularly but not exclusively, of southern Spain, has become an aspect of everyday existence that has generated a very diverse filmic address: from the politically incorrect satire of the opening scene of Torrente: El brazo tonto de la ley to the earnest meditation on Almería’s transformations in Chus Gutiérrez’s Poniente (2003). 800 balas was, in fact, shot against the same backdrop and at the same time as Poniente, so it is worthwhile comparing the two. In marked contrast to 800 balas, Poniente concentrates primarily on the exploitation of Almería for agriculture, and does so in a social realist mode that we have characterized as ‘saturated’ by the real. Telling the tale of a woman who returns to her native Almería to take charge of her father’s agricultural enterprise, it is an auteur’s response to the manifestations of racism and xenophobia in the town of El Ejido and is steeped in pessimism with regard to the communication and understanding between the host and immigrant communities. Gutiérrez is careful to give one of the main roles in the film to a North African/Spanish actor (Farid Fatmi who plays Adbembi) and therefore provides this community with a voice in the diegesis. Meanwhile, De la Iglesia invents a fantasy in which ‘Esto es un país libre’ and even the immigrant workers can choose to leave the hothouses to ‘hacer el indio’, while the attentions of the police are directed towards the native Spanish. None of these characters is developed or given a speaking part much beyond uttering a few affirmatives. This does not sound very promising, we admit, as an engagement with a contemporary social issue. How do we find a way of reading the brief appearance of Almería’s current workforce in a story about an earlier workforce? We could start by noting that the exploitation of and violence against immigrants creeps into other scripts by De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría. In El día de la bestia it is clearly immigrants who are the target of the violence of the right-wing group Limpia Madrid; Perdita Durango dramatizes the perils and difficulties of illegally crossing the Mexico–US border; and lastly in

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Crimen ferpecto there is the anomalous image of Chinese workers hidden in cramped rooms right next to the department store’s shiny shop floor. Keeping in mind these instances and our argument that social reality intrudes in the form of shards into De la Iglesia’s films, it is important to remember these films’ debt to genre cinema, and that in openly borrowing from popular forms they do not promote themselves as art cinema (unlike Gutiérrez’s products). As is appropriate to genre film, social or economic problems are provided with fantastic solutions: the fantasy of agency that enables the North African workers to leave their tomatoes behind and join the party matches the fantasy of magical border-crossing mobility in Perdita Durango. Any other treatment would of necessity take us onto the Poniente terrain of disillusionment and pessimism about the relationships between immigrant communities and the host communities in Spain. Notes 1

2 3

4

De la Iglesia explained: ‘Siempre se concibió Fu Manchú como un proyecto caro, ya que no se podía hacer la película por menos de veinte millones de dólares, pero en las últimas conversaciones que tuve con Andrés Vicente Gómez el presupuesto se quedaba en la mitad . . . por lo que decidí que era mejor no hacerlo, ya que la idea era tener veinte millones de dólares para que este thriller de acción clásico pareciera que había costado cincuenta’ (Monjas 2001). Unpublished interview with the authors (De la Iglesia 2003). 800 balas itself acknowledges this unlikely debt. When Carlos arrives in Texas-Hollywood he enthuses to the taxi driver that it’s ‘just like Spielberg’, and much later during the final showdown when his car is damaged in the melee the taxi driver demands, ‘Who’s going to pay for this?! Spielberg?!’. In addition, in an interview with the authors, De la Iglesia claimed that when he met with Spielberg in Los Angeles the American director expressed admiration for the film. See Pánico Films / Sogepaq (2002).

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Crimen ferpecto (2004): the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène

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Crimen ferpecto, Álex de la Iglesia’s seventh feature film as director and second as a producer with Pánico, was released in October 2004 and by the end of the year had recouped at the box office most of its budget of 4.5 million euros. After the venture into meta-cinematic territory with 800 balas and its exploration of Spanish film-making history, Crimen ferpecto returns to the black comedy of El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa and La comunidad. Rafael (Guillermo Toledo), an egocentric and womanizing salesman, is manager of the ladies’ section of Yeyo’s, a large department store modelled on El Corte Inglés. He competes with Don Antonio (Luis Varela), manager of men’s wear, to become floor manager, but eventually loses out. During an argument with Don Antonio in the changing-rooms, Rafael accidentally murders his competitor, observed by an unseen witness. He tries to dispose of the body, but it goes missing, hidden by the witness, Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), an unattractive shop assistant who has a crush on Rafael. Lourdes helps to dismember the body and burn it in the store’s furnaces and then blackmails Rafael into becoming her boyfriend and eventually husband, all the while taking control of affairs in the ladies’ section and planning her own line of clothing based on clown outfits. Meanwhile, Inspector Campoy (Enrique Villén) closes in on the two conspirators. Desperate to free himself from Lourdes, Rafael, with the help of the ghost of Don Antonio, plots and executes a ‘ferpect crime’, involving the faking of his own death, the incrimination of Lourdes, and the immolation of the entire department store. Five years later, Rafael runs a small tie shop around the corner from Yeyo’s, and Lourdes has triumphed with her ‘moda payaso’ – clown fashion. In many ways the film is a compendium of the earlier films, with its sudden violence, explicit and exaggerated misogyny, vicious and nonetoo-innocent children, characters as mannequins and mannequins as characters, the parody of television, and a climactic conflagration. In addition the film recycles images and motifs from the earlier films. The ‘mina perdida’ (lost mine) of Acción mutante returns here as a fairground ride, just as the malfunctioning elevator of La comunidad comes back as a central plot device. In Acción mutante Álex is followed everywhere by a brother with a meat cleaver in his forehead, while in Crimen ferpecto Rafael is shadowed by Don Antonio in a similar condition. Other images echoed include the neck-braces worn in Acción mutante and Perdita Durango, the selecting of knives in Perdita, and the head and body thrust into a void where water rains down (from El día de la bestia). The new developments in technique

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in the film are above all at the level of soundtrack. Although voice-over had been employed as a framing device in Muertos de risa, Crimen ferpecto uses Rafael’s first-person narration throughout; and the female public-address announcements made in the department store are also a notable vocal accompaniment to the film. In its recapitulations of aspects of the other films, Crimen ferpecto is perhaps most interesting as a confirmation of a distinct visual style. We will therefore concentrate here on the artistic direction of Crimen ferpecto as a way of thinking about the use and significance of mise-en-scène in the seven films as a whole. Place As we explained in the introduction, De la Iglesia began his film career as an artistic director on Mama (Pablo Berger, 1988) and Todo por la pasta (Enrique Urbizu, 1990) and meticulous attention to the semiotics of sets, setting and props has continued to be a marked feature of his cinema. The responsibility for this aspect of all seven feature films has fallen to José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri) and Arturo García (Biaffra), with the former concentrating on the construction of sets and the latter on their decoration. In fact, much of the recognizable ‘look’ of the films emerges from a consistency in the artistic direction. We might isolate three recurring features: 1 The ‘cutre’ (shabby) aesthetics we have already discussed in relation to Acción mutante and La comunidad, and which can be found, variously, in Rosario’s dilapidated pensión in El día de la bestia, in the Florida nightclub in Perdita Durango, the peripatetic Teatro Argentino of Muertos de risa, and in the dusty and disintegrating town of Texas-Hollywood in 800 balas. By way of emphasizing the shabbiness and darkness of these primary fictional locales, each film also tends to present at least one space as a counterpoint. These are clean, modern and usually brightly lit environments which we are clearly intended to see as antipathetic to the cutre protagonists’ modus vivendi. These spaces, or what they represent, are often destroyed at some point during the narrative. They include the hall in which the wedding party takes place in Acción mutante, the TV studio in El día de la bestia, the clinically white adjoining suburban houses in Muertos de risa, and the house and office of Laura in 800 balas. In La comunidad, the impossibly pristine apartment

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appropriated by Julia performs this role, although in this case the protagonist identifies herself with the modern space rather than the decrepitude of the building outside the flat; a trait, which, as we will see, she shares with Rafael in Crimen ferpecto. 2 Excess and incongruity at the level of the object world. As Joaquín Fortea economically puts it in relation to the santero altar in Perdita Durango, with its indiscriminate mixing of articles and symbols from Christianity, voodoo, African religion and popular culture, ‘horror vacui . . . is the key to [De la Iglesia’s] visual style’ (1997, 5). Cluttered, even baroque, interiors can be found in all the films, with a multitude of often small objects filling every possible space. The prototype for these spaces might be the mercería of Todo por la pasta, with its goods piled high and even the glass door filled with an assortment of combs and hair clips. In Acción mutante there is the gothic home of the dysfunctional and motherless Axturian family, its walls papered with bits and pieces cut from magazines and ceiling hung with sausages like a butcher’s shop; and in El día de la bestia Cavan’s apartment, where hardly an inch of wall space is left free from primitive masks. When we do encounter a blank space such as Bruno’s empty and unfurnished house in Muertos de risa, the vacuum is ultimately filled with near-hysterical efficiency by wild graffiti. De la Iglesia describes 800 balas as a ‘Marmitako western’ (marmitako is a type of Basque stew with diverse ingredients), and the fondness for mixing visually incongruous elements once again reveals the debt this cinema owes to surrealism. More importantly, this almost mannerist style, with its emphasis on ornamentation and visual clashes, constitutes a clear resistance to the seamlessness of the visual world offered up by realism. A movement away from the protocols of realism is also evident in the third recurring feature. 3 A preference for building sets over shooting locations unmodified. If one of the conventional ways in which film-makers brandish their social realist credentials is by shooting locations as they find them, the films of Álex de la Iglesia in contrast trumpet their artificiality by relying heavily on constructed environments. Writing about the making of El día de la bestia, De la Iglesia explains that Arri y Biaffra son especialistas en convertir escenarios naturales en decorados. O sea que, al final, nos hubiera salido igual de caro montarlo en un estudio . . . uno de los graves problemas que tuve con mi productor fue que, cuando terminó de ver la película, me dijo: ‘¿Dónde te has gastado el dinero, cabrón? . . . Pero no entiendo. ¿Y los decorados?’ me

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preguntó. Cuando le dije que esos eran decorados, me dijo: ‘Te has gastado el dinero en hacer un decorado cutre, que parece que te has ido a una pensión rodarlo’. No sé, hay una especie de política de que si haces un decorado tiene que ser un palacio de mármol. Rodar en un decorado te da unas posibilidades visuales mucho mayores. (Vera 2002, 26) Arri and Biaffra are specialists in turning locations into sets. In the end it would have been just as costly to build it from scratch in a studio . . . but this raised one of the biggest problems I had with the producer, who, after seeing the film, said ‘Where did you spend the money, you bastard? . . . I don’t understand. Where are the sets?’ When I told him that they were sets, he said to me, ‘You’ve blown all the money building shabby sets when it looks like you’ve gone to an actual pensión to film it.’ I don’t know, there is a sort of politics which says that if you’re going to build a set, it has to be a marble palace. But filming on a set gives you many more visual possibilities.

Among the many specially manufactured ‘cutre’ sets to be found in De la Iglesia’s films, we might point to the Virgen del Carmen spaceship in Acción mutante and the staircase and elevator of La comunidad (the construction of which the DVD carefully chronicles). Except for brief excursions into the desert landscape of Aragon and into a Madrid bar, these two films are both almost entirely studiobound. Of course, while the opposition between location and studio is quite firm, the one between location and constructed set is not. It would be more precise to say that De la Iglesia’s films regularly blur this latter boundary, for when shot on ‘location’, they invariably reconstruct that location to suit the demands of the film. This is a cinema, then, which pulls against the ‘ontology of the photographic image’ identified by André Bazin. According to Bazin, the cinema has a privileged relation to the real, and ‘enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction’ (1967, 14). We find instead in these films a working on, a distortion, or a fabrication of fictional worlds, into which, as we have argued in the previous chapter on 800 balas, shards of social reality strikingly intrude. All three of these recurring features of De la Iglesia’s mise-en-scène are in evidence in Crimen ferpecto. The centrepiece in terms of artistic direction is the meticulously rendered department store, Yeyo’s, a perfect example of the tendency to shoot on location but to convert the location into a set. De la Iglesia needed an actual department store with escalators, which would have been too expensive to build from scratch, and eventually found an empty one in Seville. Inside the shell of this

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empty department store was built the entire retail space, including all the goods on display therein (Martín 2004, 12). Yeyo’s is a pastiche of El Corte Inglés, complete with sales counters; perfume, sporting goods and home furnishings sections; shoe and suit displays; departmentstore carpet; colour-coordinated sales and offers banners; and special units and signs devoted to labels, some real (Camper, Ermenegildo Zegna), some invented (Mob, Pandemónium). All this is illuminated by the shadowless light reserved for the commodity in contemporary consumer culture. Of course, this set is far removed from the poorly lit, cutre environments in which De la Iglesia’s team specialize, but that is precisely because it is one of those counterpoint spaces found in all the films (and therefore destined for destruction). More so even than in La comunidad, where much of the action unfolds in the glossy apartment, in Crimen ferpecto the modern rather than the cutre space predominates. The film marks a shift, then, from the ‘rusty’ aesthetics of Acción mutante, the black of El día de la bestia, the organic browns and ochres of La comunidad and the dusty yellow of 800 balas into a colour palette of bright white punctuated by the synthetic red and orange of the carpets and the rebajas (sale) signs. This is not to say that the trademark cutre environments are not on show here, but that the protagonist, like Julia in La comunidad, identifies himself wholeheartedly with the non-cutre space. Of course, like Julia in La comunidad, Rafael is really a desgraciado, except that he doesn’t know it, so convinced is he of his own charms and elegance. His destiny in the film is to be gradually dragged into shabby, neglected rooms: first, the basement storeroom of Yeyo’s where Don Antonio sends him to dispose of old mannequins as a form of humiliation; then Lourdes’ family home; and finally the conjugal apartment they share, its decoration only half-completed. In coordination with this Dantesque journey downwards in social status from the perfectly ordered consumer utopia of the department store, horror vacui takes hold, starting with the cluttering of mannequins, legs and arms akimbo, in the basement of Yeyo’s, and culminating with the room of Lourdes’ catatonic father, a collector of ‘cosas pequeñas’ (little things) whose absurd collection fills every nook and cranny of his study. The film, then, takes Rafael from the restrained baroque of the commodityon-display in the department store to the final rococo resting place of the consumer good in a collection where it is stripped of any use-value. We could elaborate even further on De la Iglesia’s claim that his artistic direction team has a special talent for reconstructing locations

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11 Rafael in Yeyo’s basement surrounded by clutter (and mannequins again) in Crimen ferpecto

as sets. Their special skill lies in reconstructing as sets environments which in reality are already sets of one sort or another. Put another way, they specialize in the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène. This is not just the postmodern game of self-reflexivity, of calling attention to film sets as film sets rather than ‘reality’, although we do find this sort of playfulness in Acción mutante, when Manitas, dressed up as a fisherman, dissembles to deep-space police in front of a rickety theatrical ‘flat’ depicting a fishmonger’s stall, which is promptly folded up at the end of the interrogation. Not mise-en-scène as mise-en-scène, then, but mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène. De la Iglesia’s cinema presents us with many spaces which are already laid out to-be-lookedat, where spectatorship is already implied or shown within the diegesis. This is nothing new in cinema history, which boasts countless nightclub sequences, or scenes set in theatres. Closer to home, the films of Pedro Almodóvar provide an abundance of such examples. In De la Iglesia such scenes in nightclubs or theatres predictably enough unfold in down-at-the-heel settings and/or against a backdrop of violence: Santiago Segura’s Nino Bravo homage at the opening of Muertos, or the Mexican wrestling in Perdita, or again in Muertos, Nino and Bruno’s debut at the perilous Teatro Argentino. In Arri and Biaffra’s artistic direction, though, it is not nightclub and theatre stages, but television studios that take precedence in the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène. Acción mutante energetically satirizes the codes and

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conventions of cheerful and high-tempo news broadcasts, while for El día de la bestia and Muertos de risa entire TV studios were constructed. More notably, the films also stray further from these familiar territories, and into spaces where the diegetical audience is less traditionally or recognizably constituted as an audience. For example, in Perdita Durango it is religion which takes centre stage, in the shape of the barn and its accompanying altar where Romeo carries out his frenetic rituals. The invocation of the Devil in El día de la bestia also exploits the theatricality of religious rituals, although in this case the spectators are also participants. But perhaps the most subtle of all such sets which are already sets in De la Iglesia’s films prior to Crimen ferpecto is the show apartment in La comunidad. The immaculately produced miseen-scène of the apartment is not destined for the sort of audience found in a nightclub or theatre, but for the abstract gaze of consumption. It is a mise-en-scène calculated to enlist the desire of the looker, who must imagine her or himself as potentially the active protagonist within the space. It is, in other words, the mise-en-scène of advertising and of the furniture showroom. It is easy to forget – although not for those who design their layout – that department stores are also theatres and that their displays of consumer goods are in fact the careful staging of the commodity. It is easily forgotten because this theatre, unlike the classical one, collapses the traditional separation between stage and auditorium, instead encouraging the audience to circulate ‘freely’ within the theatrical space. Just as La comunidad recreates the theatrics of real estate, so Crimen ferpecto simulates that of modern retail culture. In this context it is also worth remembering that in 2002 De la Iglesia shot two advertisements for FNAC, the communications superstore which sells newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, videos and DVDs. FNAC’s frontage on Calle de Preciados in Madrid provides the exterior shots of Yeyo’s, and its principles of display are exploited in the design of the film and video section of Yeyo’s. (The advertisements themselves, set inside a FNAC store, were considered too violent and were banned by Televisión Española.) This scrutiny of retail spaces carries with it a keen diagnosis of the fate of mise-en-scène in a culture of hyperconsumption, or what Guy Debord (1994) called the ‘society of the spectacle’. It may in fact be, as La comunidad and Crimen ferpecto suggest, that the many and various ‘theatres of the commodity’ found in contemporary consumer culture have comprehensively displaced those more conventional forms of mise-en-scène such as the theatre, the cinema,

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the stadium. In Spain, full entry into Europe and unhindered access to its markets and goods has meant a rapid acceleration in its modes of consumption since the early 1990s. One of the great beneficiaries of this boom has been the El Corte Inglés department store, founded in 1935 to sell children’s clothing, but which, since 1985, has expanded fourfold, going from sixteen to sixty shops in Spain (plus one in Portugal), in the process taking over (in 1995) its main direct competitor, Galerías Preciados, and purchasing (in 2001) the nine ailing Marks and Spencers outlets in Spain (Hernández 2005, 56). Walter Benjamin, in analysing the cultures of consumption of nineteenth-century Paris, called department stores – along with arcades, wax museums, casinos – ‘dream houses of the collective’, in the sense that they embodied the utopian aspirations of a rising bourgeoisie (1999, 390, 405, 415). El Corte Inglés, whose mass-produced goods contain a utopian promise of middle-brow respectability, successfully caters to, or regulates, the tastes of a rapidly growing Spanish lower middle class, participation in which was severely limited if not suffocated during most of the twentieth century. In Crimen ferpecto there are two miniature dramas based around the purchase of fur coats which crystallize the class relations operative in the modern Spanish department store. In the first of these retail scenes, the salesman is Rafael, desperate to outsell Don Antonio in the competition to become floor manager. He spots an elegantly dressed woman in trouser suit and pashmina browsing but not buying and he tells us in voice-over that ‘Este tipo de señoras son escasas en este clima’ (Ladies like this are scarce in this climate). Nevertheless, his irresistible charm prevails, and the woman buys a mink coat for 12,000 euros. Shortly afterwards, the woman’s cheque bounces and as a result Rafael loses the sales competition with Don Antonio. As it turned out, she was indeed not right for the climate of Yeyo’s. In the second scene, Lourdes’ collection of ugly friends have now replaced Rafael’s bevy of beauties as sales assistants, and Rafael’s voice-over tells us that sales have risen 20%. Meanwhile we see what is clearly intended to be a vulgar woman (copious gold necklaces, pearls around her neck) cackling delightedly as one of the new assistants holds a fox-fur (not mink) coat up to her in front of a mirror. Between laughs the woman utters, ‘Es pre-fecto, p-perfecto, vamo perfecto.’ The transposition – prefecto for perfecto – signifies that this is an uneducated woman, and because of that an ideal customer for Yeyo’s. In a country where taste and distinction is still highly stratified, of course, the established middle classes or upper

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middle classes would still go to a specialist fur shop, a peletería, to purchase such a coat. According to Benjamin, ‘For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was only scarcity which taught them that.)’ (1999, 43). The carefully manufactured and solicited desires of the ‘masses’, Benjamin suggests, have a predecessor in a rather more unruly set of demands for mere subsistence. In Crimen ferpecto this reverse face of mass consumption finds expression in clothing labels such as ‘Mob’ and ‘Pandemónium’, and in the riotous frenzy of the crowds gaining entry to the sales and fleeing the climactic fire. In the opening scenes of Crimen ferpecto we are treated to Rafael’s brightly illuminated dream of an elegant world of consumer gratification, but the shifting tectonic plates of class relations in contemporary Spain only become evident in obscurity, at the level of his nightmare which follows. The construction of sets which are already sets – the mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène – then, presents an opportunity to analyse the allpervasiveness of a culture in which the commodity is always on display and there is therefore no ‘off-set’. And just as the films regularly convert locations (in Crimen ferpecto an empty department store in Seville) into elaborately decorated sets, so when they truly go ‘on location’ to recognizable parts of Madrid or elsewhere, they often choose sites which are in fact sets in the first place. On two occasions in Crimen ferpecto Rafael and Lourdes visit the Parque de Atracciones in the west of the city, braving the terrors of the Ghost Train and riding on the ferris wheel. The entire Parque, of course, is a prefabricated leisure environment just as the selling floor of Yeyo’s is one. That is, even on location, the setting is openly artificial rather than ‘natural’. The two other films which involve the most shooting on location, Perdita Durango and 800 balas, also follow this logic. 800 balas is shot primarily in the desert of Almería and in the town of Texas-Hollywood in that desert. As we have explained in the chapter on 800 balas, that town was purpose-built in the 1960s as a film set for the many spaghetti westerns shot in Spain in the period, so that 800 balas is paradoxically shot on location, but on an already existing set. Much of Perdita, meanwhile, is shot in the desert of the American southwest and in Las Vegas. If we take into account that the whole film is engaged in a mythologizing of Mexico and the United States, then it becomes clear that Las Vegas and the desert, although ‘real’ places, are, from a European perspective, or indeed from the perspective of cinema in

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general, simply America as ‘set’. Along the same lines, one might want to think about the use made in El día de la bestia of the Schweppes sign in Plaza del Callao. This sign is a recognizable landmark in Madrid, but like the American desert and the lights of Las Vegas in Perdita, it is also already a sign, and not just a place or a thing. The climactic scene of El día is set in and around another highly recognizable, although more recent landmark, the Torres KIO on the Plaza de Castilla. The characteristic inward-leaning shape formed by the two towers over the Paseo de Castellana is turned by the film into the mark of the Devil, so that the Torres are as much a message as a building. In the society of the spectacle, everything is always already saturated with secondary signification. Performance Since so many of Álex de la Iglesia’s characters inhabit theatrical or other forms of sets, it naturally follows that many of them are performers. Among these there is a distinct line of showmen, taking in Ramón in Acción mutante stirring up his troops to the cause of ‘mutant action’; Professor Cavan histrionically travestying scenes from The Exorcist on his programme La zona oscura in El día de la bestia; Romeo even more histrionically performing santero rituals in Perdita Durango; the television double act of Nino and Bruno in Muertos de risa; and the retired stuntman and his entourage recreating the Wild West for small groups of Japanese and German tourists in 800 balas. At the level of mise-en-scène this emphasis on play-acting impacts particularly noticeably on the use of costume. In these films, costume overtly announces itself as such, often clashing with the surrounding environment. In realism, the dominant mode of cinema, costume signifies, to be sure, but in such a way that it is continuous with its surroundings: entire agencies are devoted to providing period clothing for historically based drama, and when the setting is contemporary, every possible measure is taken to ensure that clothes match locale. Costume, then, carries an immense semiotic burden in realism, but only in order that it be, to all intents and purposes, invisible. In the cinema of De la Iglesia, in contrast, costume is generally highly visible and often fails to match with setting. For instance, we find priest’s vestments worn in a heavy-metal record shop (El día), a Darth Vader costume mixed in with muted domestic clothing (La comunidad), and cowboy outfits sported on a modern motorway

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(800 balas). Furthermore, the films are full of costumes so ostentatious and garish that they could never be found in conventional illusionist cinema: the brash women’s dresses at the wedding party in Acción mutante; the various costumes Nino and Bruno use for their act in Muertos de risa, culminating in Nino’s enormous rabbit suit; the sea of clown costumes in the epilogue of Crimen ferpecto. ‘Dressing up’ is often considered frivolous and is separated off from the quotidian, but in this cinematic universe, it is the quotidian. Two further traits tend to mark these characters who live on sets. 1 More often than not, the showmen are charlatans who dress up in order to deceive. That is, they participate in the long comic tradition of gulling whereby the artful, by appealing to lust, vanity or greed, manipulate the credulous. Starting with Acción mutante, in which Ramón exploits the political gullibility of his band of radicals as a means to his own enrichment, the seven films provide many examples of talented performers duping a captive audience. In El día de la bestia, there is the sham TV occultism of Professor Cavan and his eventual replacement (El Gran Wyoming), while Gran Wyoming’s character in Muertos de risa (Bruno) turns from guller to gulled when he is tricked into thinking he may be shot for political activities by two friends dressed up as policemen. And in Perdita Durango, Romeo, like Professor Cavan, puts on a convincing spectacle of the supernatural for those who are willing to believe it (including the film’s audience, as we have argued in the chapter on Perdita). 2 While they may perform in order to gull or gain an advantage, they find the boundary between performance and non-performance increasingly unstable. So, inside his apartment and away from his television programme, Professor Cavan is secular and sceptical, leading a decidedly un-occult life. When his domestic space is invaded by the believer Father Berriartúa, he at first insists that his TV role is just an act, but gradually gives in to the priest’s perspective. By the climax of the film he is back in his TV studio playing the role of occultist in absolute earnest. In Perdita, meanwhile, Romeo can never seem to decide whether santería is authentic or just a way of mesmerizing credulous police and other audiences, as the following exchange with Perdita suggests: Romeo taps ashes from a cigar in the bath P: I wish you wouldn’t do that.

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R: Why not? It scares evil spirits away. P: I don’t believe in that voodoo bullshit. I doubt if those people did either. R: It’s not voodoo, it’s santería, it’s not the same. P: Little magical tricks, Latin bullshit? R: But it works, you saw it. P: Yeah, but for how long? You know, people are not that stupid. R: Do you have a better idea?

Romeo’s incapacity to keep his own identity separate from an assumed role is made material at the film’s end when his death morphs briefly into the death of his hero, Burt Lancaster, in Vera Cruz. Finally, to give just one more example, in 800 balas, Julián begins as a world-weary small-time showbusinessman all too aware of the material constraints under which he works, but becomes so dangerously over-identified with the part he is playing that he drags his troupe into a showdown with police and dies in a duel with a co-performer.

La comunidad and Crimen ferpecto are special cases of the above pattern. Julia in the former and Rafael in the latter are not performers in the same sense as Cavan, Romeo, Bruno or Julián. Nor do either of them wear a costume that overtly announces itself as such (although Julia’s smart suit does, as we have argued in Chapter 5, clash with the clothes of the other characters). As salesman and woman, they are both, however, in the business of gulling, and carry out their professions, as we have already argued, in spaces which are effectively theatrical sets (within the diegesis). And both become radically over-identified with their sets, turning them into homes. We never see the apartment Julia actually lives in, but we conclude that it bears no resemblance to the immaculately presented and fully furnished one she begins the film by showing to a young couple. Once she has frightened this pair off with an outrageous and invented price for the apartment, she quickly makes herself at home in the sort of space which she is clearly excluded from by her class position. The rest of La comunidad hinges on Julia’s attempts to abscond with the dead man’s lottery winnings, but it could be argued that the money is only a subsidiary sign of what the apartment itself represents and that her main desire is to hold onto her new home against all comers (including in the process murdering the building manager and seeing off two more sets of possible tenants). As an estate agent, Julia is just an intermediary between a vendor, a commodity and a potential buyer, and is therefore in a classically

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alienated position vis-à-vis the thing she sells. The set she performs on is an outward mark of her own subordination. However, by moving into the apartment, by making use of something whose exchange-value she is only meant to display, Julia at a stroke collapses the gap of alienation. The severity of her transgression against the logic of the commodity is made clear by the violence and communal disintegration that it precipitates. In his opening monologue in Crimen ferpecto, Rafael, speaking in an apartment we never see again in the film, tells us that ‘Esto no es mi hogar’ (This isn’t my real home), and when Don Antonio fires him, he protests that ‘¡Ésta es mi casa!’ (This [Yeyo’s] is my home!). Even more so than Julia in La comunidad, Rafael is over-identified with the space that he performs in as salesman. He even tells Roxanne that he was born in Yeyo’s: ‘My mum went into labour in accessories, buying a purse. There was no time to call an ambulance . . . She never got out of here. Just like me. I’ll live and die here. It’s my destiny.’ Orphaned into retail, Rafael has an organic relation with the department store. The suit he wears, Don Antonio reminds him, belongs to the store, and when he plans his escape to Puerto Rico he grabs a small suitcase from a luggage display and fills it with shirts from the store. In the premature celebration of his promotion to floor manager, Roxanna (Kira Miró) and he disport themselves at night in the closed store, availing themselves of the store’s evening dress; enjoying its caviar, lobster and champagne; dining with its household goods; and having sex in a bed display. Price tags dangle conspicuously from the sleeve of the tuxedo Rafael has borrowed and from the glasses the pair toast with. Like Julia in La comunidad, then, Rafael makes use of objects which in the mise-en-scène of selling are meant only for display. Through this short-circuiting of exchange-value, Rafael presents us with a mock image of non-alienated man, totally at one with his environment (and in stark contrast to the humiliated trainee salesman of the film’s prologue). The artificial symbiosis of salesman and store is underscored by Rafael’s voice-over, which regularly invokes the language of nature programmes (‘I saw it on a documentary on Channel 2’) to suggest that Yeyo’s is in fact a ‘habitat’ in which he is the desirable dominant male. Of course, subsequent events in the film only confirm that this naturalization is an impossible fantasy and that ‘An inferno rages in the soul of the commodity, for all the seeming tranquility lent it by the price’ (Benjamin 1999, 369).

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Anachronism More than one reviewer has noted the close family resemblance between Crimen ferpecto and La comunidad which we have been emphasizing here. De la Iglesia himself remarks, ‘[Crimen ferpecto] Tiene cosas de La comunidad, puesto que se desarrolla en un espacio cerrado y también tiene un crimen’ (‘It shares things with La comunidad, such as the way it unfolds in an enclosed space and involves a crime’) (Fierro 2004, 26). The enclosed space in La comunidad, though, was a means of shutting out modern Madrid, whereas here, the enclosed space of the department store, at least for the first twothirds of the film, shuts out a not always modern Madrid. In this sense, Crimen ferpecto is simply La comunidad turned inside out: the neighbours of the latter are anachronistically trapped in the past, while the protagonist of the former willingly incarcerates himself in an idealized consumerist present. It is important, then, that the epilogue of the film finds Rafael in the anachronistic environs of the Pasaje Montera, off the Calle Montera, which runs adjacent to the Calle Preciados down to the Puerta del Sol. In his tiny tie shop tucked away in an arcade, we are led to believe that simply by growing a beard, Rafael has to all intents and purposes vanished, even though he is only two streets away from the site of Yeyo’s. He is now part of the anachronistic parallel world of La comunidad and so has become invisible to the rest of Madrid. It is appropriate that Rafael finds himself in an arcade, since arcades are an archaic form of modern commercial display, predating, anticipating and ultimately displaced by department stores. The actual Pasaje Montera now houses sex shops and one of the ubiquitous ‘Compro Oro’ (Gold Bought) shops found in and around Puerta del Sol and Plaza Callao, and therefore represents the traces of an altogether different form of economy based on barter rather than the price tag. In fact, the street scenes in Calle Preciados pointedly feature a man carrying a sandwich-board for one of these ‘Compro Oro’ shops, a man who is eventually trampled by panicked shoppers streaming from the blazing Yeyo’s. Just as the arcade is an architectural reminder of an earlier stage of modernization in the very shadow of modern consumer capitalism, so the sandwich-board is an archaic and anachronistic foil to the profusion of labels and signage found in Yeyo’s. The man with his sandwich-board is also another example of the way that social reality slips into De la Iglesia’s films in the form

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of shards that stand out against an often fantastic fictional world. Nor is it an accident that the action of both Crimen ferpecto and La comunidad is mainly restricted to the commercial and retail epicentre of Madrid (when the characters in La comunidad reach the rooftops in the film’s climax, we see that the location is in Calle Alcalá just east of Puerta del Sol, whilst the epilogue is set in a bar in Calle de la Bolsa, just southwest of Sol). What both films record, from opposing points of view, is the uneasy co-existence, at the very heart of Spanish economy and society, of two overlapping cultures. And both films are critical of the rhetoric of progress, but without ever turning to nostalgia in their charting of the uneven ‘development’ of modern Spain. Much of El día de la bestia also unfolds in Plaza del Callao and along Calle de Preciados, including the massacre of Santas amongst the Christmas shoppers on Preciados. Consequently, these three films can be productively taken together as a Madrid trilogy devoted to critiquing contemporary urban Spain at a moment when its self-satisfaction is high. Because the films proceed in comic-gothic mode and make use of the jarring juxtapositions of surrealism, it is sometimes hard to see this critique, since the rights to critique have been so successfully reserved by realist modes. But the vision of realism is singular, uniform, and unable as a result to see the very asymmetries and contradictions that the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia relentlessly exposes.

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Conclusion

I In Freaks en acción, Jordi Sánchez Navarro argues that Álex de la Iglesia is unique among his generation of film-makers in the way that he straddles two models of the contemporary Spanish director: ‘los autores . . . llamados a redefinir el futuro del cine español y los de la tradición del cine de explotación de los géneros marcadamente populares’ (those auteurs . . . called to redefine the future of Spanish cinema and those who work within the markedly popular genres’ (2005, 8–9). We are not certain what Sánchez Navarro means when he writes of a group of directors ‘called’, as if to a mission, nor do we agree that De la Iglesia is necessarily a special case in contemporary Spanish production. However, we have been consistently making the case for De la Iglesia as a film-maker whose work pulls in two directions at once. In our introduction we used the potentially oxymoronic term ‘popular auteur’ to describe this duality, and cited the hatchet-in-thehead as marker of it. Sánchez Navarro notes that De la Iglesia’s films address an audience fluent in ‘la televisión, el comic de superheroes y el humor costumbrista de los tebeos de Bruguera, el sentido de la aventura de Tintín, el cine de género, Hitchcock y Star Wars’ (television, superhero comics, the costumbrista humour of Bruguera’s comic strips, the sense of adventure of Tintin, the cinema of genres, Hitchcock and Star Wars) (9). We agree, and would add that familiarity with the avant-gardes of the twentieth century does not go amiss either. After all, when Rafael in Crimen ferpecto looks for inspiration in film history to plot his perfect crime, he takes home Buñuel as well as Hitchcock. It is one of the hazards of writing about contemporary film that while the writing must stop at some point, the film-making does not.

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Although we obviously cannot comment on them in detail, De la Iglesia’s two projects immediately after Crimen ferpecto – the television movie La habitación del niño and the feature-length Oxford Crimes – appear to further illustrate the bifurcation in the director’s work. The former is part of a six-film series of Películas para no dormir (Films to Keep You Awake), which pay homage to the television series of the 1970s, Historias para no dormir (Stories to Keep You Awake), already affectionately referenced in El día de la bestia. Here again, then, is evidence of a commitment to popular forms and to horror in particular, as well as the dedication to revisiting the history of Spanish television that we saw in Muertos de risa. But this is not a haphazard return to television for De la Iglesia: it is a prestige affair financed by Filmax International with other contributions by recognized big-screen directors such as Enrique Urbizu and Mateo Gil. Oxford Crimes, meanwhile, is a literary adaptation based on the novel The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez, and will be filmed in English with a British cast. It is a thriller, and is therefore firmly rooted in a popular genre, but at the same time the plot revolves around the complex mathematical calculations of an Oxford don, and therefore presumably has certain philosophical pretensions, if only in the mock-philosophical mode of El día de la bestia. De la Iglesia’s short film, El código (2006), also inhabits this territory, with its mocking, jocular ‘interview’ with Leonardo da Vinci (Manuel Tallafe). II Without knowing too much in detail about the projects after Crimen ferpecto, then, it is possible already to see continuities with earlier work. However, continuity is too often discovered through the suppression of discontinuities. We began this book bullishly, promising to break with the accepted idea of the Spanish film auteur, and offering the cinema of Álex de la Iglesia as the proof of the poverty of the doxa of art cinema and its aesthetic sidekick, the cine social. It would seem pointless to desecrate one monument only to erect another. Even at this late stage, it might be worth risking the suggestion that the films we analyse in this book do not, on a number of counts, make up a coherent whole. If we want to claim that Acción mutante and El día de la bestia exemplified an exuberant engagement with autochthonous and Hollywood genre cinema and a disenchanted suspicion of modernity at a critical moment when Spain was rapidly modernizing

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and ‘integrating’ with Europe, then we must also recognize that that moment may have passed. Oxford Crimes will be De la Iglesia’s second foray, after Perdita Durango, into filming outside Spain and in English. When De la Iglesia went to Mexico to make Perdita Durango, he was following the well-trodden path to Latin America of Spanish film-makers seeking to work outside Spain. But it would seem that different trajectories are now opening up as Spain becomes increasingly connected to global economies. There are still those who would defend the purity of ‘Spanish cinema’ and others who speak of the need to ‘redefine the future’ of that cinema. However, the example of Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and the results of the 2006 Goyas suggest that something else is happening. Isabel Coixet, who not too long ago had been chastised by some for filming in North America and in English, was awarded the best director prize, and her film The Secret Life of Words / La vida secreta de palabras (2005), which is entirely in English, took the prize for best film. The global conditions which allow for such transnational film-making as The Secret Life of Words and Oxford Crimes are not necessarily a cause for celebration. That these conditions did not exist in 1993 means that the director who works under them in 2006 is, in crucial ways, not the same director as in 1993. Oxford Crimes, financed by Tornasol films rather than Pánico, may be an attempt to appeal to a more middle-brow international market and to shift away from the now consolidated audience for De la Iglesia’s work domestically. After the failure of the Fu Manchu project, Oxford Crimes may also be a renewed effort on the director’s part to become an ‘international’ film-maker. Not that this is a zerosum game. As Amenábar has shown with Mar adentro, it is possible to participate in both these markets. III In our introduction, and then again at various points along the way, we have tried to identify those aspects of the cinema of ‘Álex de la Iglesia’ which bear the marks of collaboration. As we reach the end of this book, it is worth remembering again that Jorge Guerricaechevarría is co-scriptwriter on all the feature films, that Arri and Biaffra took responsibility for all the artistic design, and that the departure of Santiago Segura and Álex Angulo from the performing team after Muertos de risa has impacted powerfully on the products released under the director’s name. Indeed, it would be an extraordinary film

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that was not the end result of immense collective labour. The same cannot be said about intellectual labour in the humanities, where the model of the lone scholar still predominates. No one ever really works alone, but it is perhaps still surprising to find three names on the cover of what is, we concede, a slim volume. ‘How do you divide the work up?’, we are often asked, as if division were bound to be at the heart of academic collaboration. The fact of the matter is, none of us could have written this book on our own. We shared an enthusiasm for the films, but each of us brought distinct expertise and knowledge to the project, and with them different critical imperatives. If the book had been driven by just one of those imperatives, it would have been immeasurably the poorer for it. Instead, the pooling of our skills has lead to a synthesis which embraces cultural and film theory, the study of popular cinema and television, and an understanding of Spanish film history and its industrial and cultural contexts, with an emphasis throughout on detailed textual analysis. We were also very lucky to live and work in a city which hosts an annual Festival of Spanish and Latin American cinema: ¡Viva! at Cornerhouse in Manchester not only gave us access to the wide variety of contemporary Spanish film production, but to a lively culture of debate around Spanish cinema. Writing and working outside Spain, we enjoyed a detachment and a freedom to write about matters not always thought worthy of attention inside Spain. But we also think that one of the strengths of this book is its awareness of the Spanish context and of debates about cinema going on within Spain, an awareness that is often absent in anglophone academics removed by as much as an ocean from their object of study. The logistics of the sort of collaboration we have engaged in here can sometimes be tricky, but they are negligible in comparison with those faced by film-makers. In any case, the difficulties of intellectual cooperation, in our experience, are integral to its rewards.

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Sources Data are from IMDb and Filmoteca Española (www.mcu.es). Audience and box-office details are as of 14 August 2005 but do not include video, DVD and television sales or sales abroad.

As art director Mama (Pablo Berger, 1988) Tu novia está loca (Your Girlfriend Is Crazy) (Enrique Urbizu, 1988) (poster designer) Todo por la pasta (Enrique Urbizu, 1991) Amor impasible (Iñaki Arteta, 1992)

For Euskal Telebista Detrás del sirimiri (Behind the Sirimiri) (1988) Doctor Livingstone, supongo (Doctor Livingstone, I presume) (1990)

For TVE and Euskal Telebista Inocente, Inocente (1993)

TV movies La habitación del niño (The Baby’s Room) 2005 Production company: Filmax Películas para no dormir Series for Tele 5 (February 2006) Leading players: Leonor Watling, Javier Gutiérrez, Sancho Gracia, Terele Pávez, Asunción Balaguer

As director and co-scriptwriter Mirindas asesinas (Killer Mirindas) (SP) 1991, 12 mins Producers: Jorge Oscar Guerricaechevarría, Matilde de la Iglesia

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Budget: 800,000 pesetas Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia Music: various Art direction: Álex de la Iglesia, José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Leading players: Álex Angulo (Tubular Killer), Saturnino García (customer), Ramón Barea (bullfighting fan client), Óscar Grijalba (customer)

Enigma en el bosquecillo (SP) 2000, 5 mins Production company: Screenplay: Manuel Tallafe and Álex de la Iglesia Leading players: Manuel Tallafe (Mozart), Javier Jordán (Salieri) Released: Compressed Film Festival (www.notodofilmfest.com)

Interactive video game Marbella antivicio (Marbella Vice) (Sp) 1994

Feature films Acción mutante (Mutant Action) (Sp) 1992 [1993], 90 mins (Spain 80% / France 20%) Production company: El Deseo, SA and CIBY 2000 Producers: Agustín Almodóvar (exec.), Esther García Budget: 400,000,000 pesetas Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: Carles Gusi Special effects: Olivier Gleyze, Ives Domenjoud, Jean Baptiste Bonetto, Bernard André Music: Juan Carlos Cuello, Def Con Dos and others Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Pablo Blanco Leading players: Antonio Resines (Ramón Yarritu), Álex Angulo (Álex Abadie), Frédérique Feder (Patricia Orujo), Fernando Guillén (Orujo), Enrique San Francisco (Luis María de Ostolaza), Juan Viadas (Juan Abadie), Karra Elejalde (Manitas), Saturnino García (Quimicefa), Jon Gabella (Chepa), Ramón Barea (Blind Shepherd), Alfonso Martínez (M. A.), Santiago Segura (Ezequiel) Premiere: 3 February 1993 (Madrid and Bilbao) / 5 February 1993 (Barcelona) Audience: 368,180 Box office: €989,807.73 El día de la bestia (Day of the Beast) (Sp/It) 1995, 103 mins (Spain 80% / Italy 20%)

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Production company: Iberoamericana and Sogetel (Spain) / M. G. SRL (Italy) / Canal + (Spain) Producers: Andrés Vicente Gómez (exec.), Antonio Saura, Claudio Gaeta (delegate), Fernando de Garcillán, Leo Pescarolo, Luciano Martino (assoc.) Budget: 300,000,000 pesetas Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: Flavio Martínez Labiano Special effects: Reyes Abades Digital effects: Daiquiri Music: Battista Lena, Def Con Dos and others Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Teresa Font Leading players: Álex Angulo (Padre Berriartúa), Armando de Razza (Profesor Caván), Santiago Segura (José María), Terele Pávez (Rosario), Nathalie Seseña (Mina), María de Gracia Cucinotta (Susana) Premiere: 20 October 1995 Audience: 1,416,712 Box office: €4,367,321.16 Prizes: Spain 1996, Premios Goya (six prizes): Best Director; Best First Time Actor (Santiago Segura); Art Direction; Sound; Make-up and Hair; Special Effects Main Prize of the Festival de Cine Fantástico ‘Fantastic Arts’ de GérardmerLorraine Belgium 1996, Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film BIFFF: Méliès d’Or for Best Film

Perdita Durango (Mex/Sp) 1997, 126 mins (Spain 50% / US 30% / Mexico 20%) Production company: Lolafilms SL / Sogetel (Andrés Vicente Gómez) /Mirador SA de CV (Mexico) in association with Canal + (Spain) / Sogepaq SA / IMCINE (Mexico) Occidental Media Corp. co-production Producers: Fernando Bovaira, Miguel Necoechea, Pablo Barbachano, Max Rosenberg (exec.), Marco Gómez (assoc.) Budget: 1,200,000,000 pesetas Screenplay: Barry Gifford, Jorge Guerricaechevarría, David Trueba, Álex de la Iglesia. Based on the book 59° and Raining: the Story of Perdita Durango. Photography: Flavio Martínez Labiano Special effects: Dan Lester Digital effects: Daiquiri, Juan Tomicic Music: Simon Bowswell Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra), Ana Solares, Salvador Parra, Andrew Bernard Editing: Teresa Font

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Leading players: Rosie Perez (Perdita Durango), Javier Bardem (Romeo Dolorosa), Harley Cross (Duane), Aimee Graham (Estelle), Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Adolfo), Don Stroud (Marcello ‘Mad Eyes’ Santos), Demián Bichir (Catalina), Santiago Segura (Shorty Dee), Carlos Bardem (Reggie San Pedro), Alex Cox (Agent Doyle), James Gandolfini (Special Agent Woody Dumas), Harry Porter (Sheriff Tyrone ‘Rip’ Ford) Premiere: 30 October 1997 Audience: 779,816 Box office: €2,573,606.73 Prizes: Spain 1998, Premios Goya (two prizes): Best Production Director; Best Makeup and Hair Belgium 1998, Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film BIFFF Spain 1998, Premios Fotogramas (one prize): Fotogramas de Plata for Best Actor (Javier Bardem)

Muertos de risa (Dying of Laughter) (Sp) 1998, 106 mins Production company: Lolafilms SA / Sogetel (Andrés Vicente Gómez) with the participation of Telecinco Producer: Luis Gutiérrez (exec.) Budget: Information not available Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: Flavio Martínez Labiano Special effects: Antonio Molina, Juan Ramón Molina, Manuel F. Floriano Digital effects: Esfera, Félix Bergés, Telson Music: Roque Baños Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Teresa Font Leading players: Santiago Segura (Nino), José Miguel Monzón (El Gran Wyoming) (Bruno), Álex Angulo (Julián), Carla Hidalgo (Laura), Jesús Bonilla (Military member in coup d’état), María Asquerino (Nino’s mother), José María Íñigo (himself), Uri Geller (himself), Antonio Resines (himself), Víctor Manuel (himself), Massiel (herself) Premiere: 12 March 1999 Audience: 1,669,917 Box office: €6,299,097.15 Prizes: Spain 2000, Festival de Cine de Comedia de Peñíscola (Alicante) (one prize): Premio Calabuch for Best Actors (Santiago Segura, José Miguel Monzón [El Gran Wyoming]) La comunidad (Common Wealth) (Sp) 2000, 107 mins Production company: Lolafilms SA (Andrés Vicente Gómez) with the participation of Antena 3 and Vía Digital

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Producers: Juanma Pagazaurtundua (exec.), Marco Gómez (assoc.) Budget: Information not available Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: Kiko de la Rica Special effects: EFE-X (Julio Navarro, Raúl Romanillos, Pau Costa) Digital effects: Félix Bergés / Daiquiri Music: Roque Baños Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Alejandro Lázaro Leading players: Carmen Maura (Julia), Eduardo Antuña (Charly), María Asquerino (Encarna), Jesús Bonilla (Ricardo), Marta Fernández Muro (Paquita), Paca Gabaldón (Hortensia), Ane Gabarain (Karina), Sancho Gracia (Castro), Emilio Gutiérrez Caba (Emilio), Kiti Manver (Dolores), Terele Pávez (Ramona), Roberto Perdomo (Oswaldo), Manuel Tejada (Chueca), Enrique Villén (Domínguez), Eduardo Gómez (García) Premiere: September 2000 Audience: 1,601,861 Box office: €6,709,857.51 (highest takings of 2000) Prizes: Spain 2000, San Sebastian International Film Festival (one prize): Concha de Plata for Best Actress (Carmen Maura); also film opening the official section Spain 2000, Premios Fotogramas (two prizes): Fotogramas de Plata for Best Actress (Carmen Maura); Best Director (Álex de la Iglesia) Spain 2001, Premios El Mundo al Cine Vasco (four prizes): Best Director (Álex de la Iglesia); Best Script to Scriptwriters (Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría); Best Actress (Ane Gabarain) Spain 2001, XV Premios Goya (three prizes): Best Actress (Carmen Maura); Best Supporting Actor (Emilio Gutiérrez Cava); Best Special Effects Spain 2001, Premios de la Unión de Actores de Madrid (Actors’ Union of Madrid) (three prozes): Best Film Actress (Carmen Maura); Best Supporting Actor (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, Terele Pávez Premios del CEC (Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos) (Film Scriptwriters’ Club) (three prizes): Best Actress (Carmen Maura); Best Supporting Actor (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba); Best Editing

800 balas (800 Bullets) (Sp) 2002, 126 mins Production company: Pánico Films, Álex de la Iglesia / Sogecine, with the collaboration of ICAA and Gobierno Vasco Producers: Juanma Pagazaurtundua (exec.), María Angulo (assoc.) Budget: 800,000,000 pesetas Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: Flavio Labiano Special effects: Juan Ramón Molina, Rafael Sorlozano

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Digital effects: Félix Bergés / Daiquiri Music: Roque Baños Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Alejandro Lázaro Leading players: Sancho Gracia (Julián), Ángel de Andrés López (Cheyenne), Carmen Maura (Laura), Eusebio Poncela (Scott), Luis Castro (Carlos), Terele Pávez (Rocío), Enrique Martínez (Arrastrado), Luciano Federico (Enterrador), Ramón Barea (Don Mariano), Manuel Tallafé (Manuel), Gracia Olayo (Juli), Cesareo Estébanez (Andrés), Eduardo Gómez (Ahorcado), Eduardo Antuña (Taxista), Berta Ojeda (Ángeles), Ane Gabarain (Jacinta), Yoima Sánchez (Sonia), Alfonso Torregrosa (Jefe Policía), Juan Viadas (Monitor) Premiere: 18 October 2002 (Madrid) Audience: 407,337 Box office: €1,783,533.44 Prizes: Spain 2003, XVII Premios Goya (one prize): Best Special Effects (Juan Ramón Molina, Félix Bergés, Rafael Sorlozano)

Crimen ferpecto (Ferpect Crime) (Sp) 2004, 106 mins (Spain 90% / Italy 10%) Production company: Pánico Films, Sogecine and Planet Pictures (It) with the collaboration of TVE SA, Canal+ and Euzkadi ITB Producers: Juanma Pagazaurtundua (exec.) Budget: €4,750,000 Screenplay: Álex de la Iglesia, Jorge Guerricaechevarría Photography: José L. Moreno (Moti) Special effects: Molina Efectos Especiales Digital effects: Félix Bergés / Daiquiri Music: Roque Baños Art direction: José Luis Arrizabalaga (Arri), Arturo García Otaduy (Biaffra) Editing: Alejandro Lázaro Leading players: Guillermo Toledo (Rafael), Mónica Cervera (Lourdes), Luis Varela (Don Antonio), Enrique Villén (Inspector Campoy), Fernando Tejero (Alonso), Javier Gutiérrez (Jaime), Kira Miró (Roxanne) Premiere: 22 October 2004 (Madrid) Audience: 859,478 Box office: €4,247,191.24 Prizes: France 2005, 15e Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Nantes (one prize): Best Actor (Guillermo Toledo)

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As producer Play Dos hombres sin destino (Two Men, No Destiny) Madrid, Barcelona: Teatro Borrás (6 April to 8 May 2004) Salamanca: Teatro Liceo (23–24 July 2004)

Other films cited (in alphabetical order) Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997, Sp) Aitor: la piel contra la piedra (Julio Medem [in production] 2006 or 2007, Sp) El amor perjudica seriamente la salud (Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health) (Manuel Gómez Pereira, 1997, Sp) Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987, US) ¡Ay Carmela! (Carlos Saura, 1990, Sp) Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973, US) Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991, US) Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1991, US) The Believers (John Schlesinger, 1987, US) Las bicicletas son para el verano (Bicycles Are for Summer) (Jaime Chávarri, 1983, Sp) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, US) Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, US) Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983, Sp) Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974, US) Después del sueño (After the Dream) (Mario Camus, 1992, Sp) Don’t say a word (Gary Fleder, 2001, US) El milagro de P. Tinto (P. Tinto’s Miracle) (Javier Fesser, 1998, Sp) El Sur (The South) (Víctor Erice, 1983, Sp) Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, 1960, US) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973, US) Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996, US) Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1981, US) Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming [and George Cukor; Sam Wood], 1939, US) La guerra de papá (Daddy’s War) (Antonio Mercero, 1977, Sp) The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004, US) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984, US) Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993, Fr/Sp) La niña de tus ojos (The Girl of Your Dreams) (Fernando Trueba, 1998, Sp) La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Pelota Vasca: Skin against Stone (Julio Medem, 2003, Sp) La petición (Pilar Miro, 1976, Sp) Los otros (The Others) (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001, US/Sp)

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Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1996, US) Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973, US) Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004, Sp) Misterio en la isla de los monstruos (Mystery on Monsters’ Island) (Juan Piquer, 1977, Sp) Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994, US) Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987, US) Ransom (Ron Howard, 1996, US) Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973, US) Spaceballs (Mel Brooks, 1987, US) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983, US) The Secret Life of Words (La vida secretra de palabras) (Isabel Coixet, 2005) The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990, US) Torremolinos 73 (Pablo Berger, 2004, Sp/D) Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (Torrente, the Stupid Arm of the Law) (Santiago Segura, 1998, Sp) Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella (Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella) (Santiago Segura, 2001, Sp) Vacas (Cows) (Julio Medem, 1992, Sp) La vaquilla (The Heifer) (Luis G. Berlanga, 1985, Sp) Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1953, US) Vera, un cuento cruel (Vera, A Cruel Tale) (Josefina Molina, 1973, Sp) Viaje al centro de la tierra (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) (Juan Piquer, 1981, Sp) Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990, US)

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Index

800 balas (2002) actors 12 Almería 140, 157–8, 170 anachronism 24, 136, 137 Basque allegiances 28–9, 29 childhood theme 141–4 cinema within cinema 151–9 costume 171–2 father and mother 144–51 film location 154–9, 170 funding 28 gender 30, 144–51 generally 139–59 genre 8 Goya prize 121 heroism 148–51 images 29, 91, 139, 146, 156 immigration 157–8 incongruity 164 inspiration 140, 151 Labiano collaboration 10 mannequins 20 marginality 81 masks 20, 21 mock sentimentality 147 modernity 23, 24, 144, 146, 147 music 13 odd film out 140, 143–4, 151 Oedipal narrative 32, 89, 141–4 police 91 scenario 140–1

sex 90 shabbiness 163 social realism 155–9 success 11 theatricality 171 violence 106

Acción mutante (1993) actors 11, 12, 124 aesthetics 131 Almodóvar influence 34, 43–5 anachronisms 24, 25–6 baroque interiors 41 body in pieces 86, 87, 88, 162 building sets 167 cinema of sequestration 80, 81, 82 collaborators 10 comedy 41–2, 63 costume 172 critical reception 18–19 cult movie 12 disability 34, 49–50 dysfunctional families 142 film noir 34, 42 gender 31, 44–50, 90, 93 generally 34–51 genres 34, 37, 39–42, 178 Goya prize 121 grand guignol 41, 45–6 hatchet killings 2, 150, 162 horror movie 42

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198 images 1, 33 incongruity 164 individualism 51 lost mine theme 34, 50, 162 mannequins 20, 22, 41, 46 marginality 81 masks 21, 89 Miró decree context 37–8 mise-en-scène 41, 43 modernity 23, 24, 44 music 13, 43 non-heroism 135–6 pastiche of slasher films 43 police 91 politics 49–51 poster 49 rape 47, 90 rejection of tradition 35–9, 141 scenario 34 science fiction 8, 39–42 shabbiness 163, 165, 166 studio sets 165 television 38, 39, 46, 73, 113, 152 terrorism 28, 34, 46 theatricality 171 violence 37, 41, 45–6, 90, 106 voyeurism 47 western genre 34, 42 action cinema 18 actors attitudes to 87 Basque country 11–12 La comunidad 12, 121–5 departures 179 improvisation 88 performances 171–4 secondary actors 151–2 Spanish reference book 125 speed 19 stars 12, 88–9, 107, 150–1 Aguilar, Carlos 125, 151 Aizarna, Santiago 136 Aldrich, Robert 83 Allen, Woody 41, 63 Allinson, Mark 56–7, 58, 69

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Index Almería 140, 157, 158, 170 Almodóvar, Pedro Acción mutante and 34, 43–5 actors 123 choral comedies 131 Francoism and 36 frivolity 16 Iglesia’s work with 10–11 Kika 15, 43–4, 45, 73, 115 Maura and 12 men 45 Miró decree and 37–8 mise-en-scène 167 movida 25 popular auteur 4 sexuality 90 women 44, 45 Amenábar, Alejandro 5, 39, 48, 72, 121, 179 Amor impasible (1992) 8 anachronism 24–6, 136, 137, 175–6 anarchic comedy, Muertos de risa 104–8, 109 Andersen, Bibi 44 Andrés López, Angel de 145 Angulo, Alex 11–12, 12, 19–20, 54, 64, 65, 67, 86, 89, 99, 124, 151, 179 Ansola González, Txomin 37 anti-realism Acción mutante 38 Almodòvar 11 building sets 164–5 El día de la bestia 59 excess and incongruity 164 gothic mode 176 hatchet jobs 3–4, 22 Perdita Durango 95 Antuña, Eduardo 132 Appadurai, Arjun 24 Armendáriz, Montxo 72, 158 Arniches, Carlos 125–6 Arrizabalaga, José Luis (Arri) 10, 100, 101, 102, 131, 163, 164–5, 167, 179

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

Arroyo, José 84, 90, 95, 121, 134 art-house cinema 4, 5, 7, 178 Artaud, Antonin 88 Arteta, Iñaki 8 artificiality 164–5 Asquerino, Maria 123 auteur cinema 4–7, 14, 79, 178 automata 22 Azcona, Rafael 126 Aznar, José Maria 57 Baños, Roque 13 Barcelona Olympics 25, 26, 101 Bardem, Javier 80, 82, 85, 85, 89 Barea, Ramón 11, 29 baroque interiors 17, 41, 164, 166 Basque country actors 11–12 allegiances 26–9, 87 collaborators 10 kitsch 20, 27 terrorism 28, 46, 58 Bataille, Georges 136–7 Bazin, André 95, 165 Beckett, Samuel 89 Bellini, Giovanni 2 Bellmer, Hans 22 Benjamin, Walter 59, 72, 137, 169, 170, 174 Berger, Pablo 8, 14, 98, 152, 163 Bergès, Félix 120 Berlusconi, Silvio 74, 75 Bermejo, Alberto 55 Bigas Luna, José Juan 78 Bird, Brad 9 black comedy Crimen ferpecto 162 El día de la bestia 59, 63–4 esperpento 4, 63, 88 sainete costumbrista 126, 127, 177 Spanish tradition 59 blockbusters 5 Boal, Iain 26 body in pieces 23, 86–93, 125, 150, 162 Boixeda, Joan 55

199 Bollaín, Icíar 120 Bond films 39 Bonet Mojica, Lluis 55 Bonilla, Jesús 116, 133 Borau, José Luis 121, 145, 147 Bosch, Juan 61 Boswell, Simon 13 Brecht, Bertolt 13 Bronston, Samuel 153 Brooks, Mel 41 Brooks, Peter 149 Brooks, Richard 61 Brown, Andy 68–9 Bruguera 177 Bruzzi, Stella 103 building sets 17, 164–5 Buñuel, Luis 61, 177 Cage, Nicholas 83 Cahiers du cinema 6, 14 Calleja, Pedro 98, 100, 101, 103 Calvo Sotelo, Leopoldo 115 Cámara, Javier 152 camera movements, speed 19 Camus, Mario 36, 123 Canals, Cuca 78 Carillo, Mary 127 Carpenter, John 41 Carrero Blanco, Admiral 110 cartoons 38 Casanova, María 121 Cassen 127 Castro, Luis 90, 140 Catherine, Saint 2 Catholicism 57–8, 60 Caws, Mary Ann 23 Cerdán, Josetxo 54, 59–60, 60, 61, 63, 67, 73, 74 Cervantes, Miguel de 57 Cervera, Mónica 162 Chávarri, Jaime 35 childhood 800 balas 141–4 rejection of theme 36 Spanish film theme 35 CIBY 2000 43

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200 Cima de Conegliano, Giovan Battista 2 Civil War 35–6, 98, 137 Clark, T. J. 26 clowns 2–3, 21, 172 código, El (2006) 178 Cohan, Steven 93 Coixet, Isabel 179 collaboration 179–80 collaborators 7, 10, 10–14, 102, 163 Colomo, Fernando 63 comedy Acción mutante 41–2, 63 action comedies 18 comedia madrileña 62–3 comedia rosa 131 La Comunidad 63 El día de la bestia 57, 58–9, 62–8, 106 genteel comedy 62 Hollywood 45, 62 Miró decree 37 Muertos de risa 104–8, 109 retro 100 sainete costumbrista 125–32, 137, 177 screwball comedy 45 sentimentalism 39 vaudeville 106–7 see also black comedy comics 9, 37, 88, 177 Compitello, Malcolm Alan 60 comunidad, La (2000) actors 12, 121–5 anachronisms 24 body in pieces 125 castrating mother 146 collaborators 10, 11 colours 131–2, 166 comedy 63 commercial vs critical success 119 common property 117 consumer society 23 costumbrismo 2000 125–32 costume 171 cutreficción 136–8

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Index decay 120, 130–1, 136–8, 163, 165 DVD 165 elevator theme 162, 165 enclosed space 175 families 142, 143 frame composition 128–9, 136 generally 119–38 genres 8, 120, 137 Goyas 120–2 horror movie 120, 137–8 images 119, 128 immaturity 6 incongruous images 23 Madrid 28, 133, 134, 135, 138, 175, 176 marginality 81 masks 20 mise-en-scène 126, 130–2, 134, 137, 168 modernity 120, 131–2, 133, 137, 144, 166 music 13 non-heroism 135–6 police 91 publicity 15, 123 scenario 120 sex 90 ‘Spanishness’ 122–3 studio sets 165 theatricality 173 two endings 132–6 consumer society 23, 24, 31, 121, 137, 169, 170 Conway, Madeline 49–50 Cook, Pam 102 Cooper, Gary 83 Cornerhouse, Manchester 180 corpses 136, 137 corruption 28, 51, 57, 59, 117 Costa, Jordi 23, 98, 100, 101, 103, 135 Costa, Pau 120 costumbrista see sainete costumbrista costume 800 balas 171–2 Crimen ferpecto 171–4

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

El día de la bestia 70–1, 171, 172 Muertos de risa 101–4, 172 costume drama 121, 152 Cox, Alex 87–8 Crafton, Donald 62, 107 Craig, Edward Gordon 88 Creekmur, Corey 82–3 Crimen ferpecto (2004) actors 12 anachronism 24, 175–6 baroque interiors 166 Basque allegiances 28 body in pieces 87, 89 cinematic inspirations 177 cleaver killing 2, 3 consumer society 23 costume 171–4 department store set 165–6, 168–70, 174 family 142–3 first-person narrative 163 funding 28 gender 31, 162 generally 161–76 genre 8, 162 images 161, 167 immigrants 159 Madrid 28, 170, 175, 176 mannequins 20, 162, 166, 167 masks 21 mise-en-scène 163–74 music 13 performances 171–4 place 163–71 police 91 recapitulation of other films 162–3 scenario 162 sex 90 shabbiness 166 success 11 television 162 theatricality 173 violence 2, 3, 162 Cross, Harley 80 Cruz, Penélope 48

Page 201

201 Cucinotta, Maria Grazzia 30 cutreficción 136–8, 163–4, 165, 166 cyborgs 22, 41 dadaism 5, 22 Dali, Salvador 16, 22 Davis, Hartley 107 Deacon, Philip 73 Dean, James 83 Debord, Guy 168 decay see shabbiness and decay Def Con Dos 13, 43 deflation 82–6, 148–9 Deleuze, Gilles 142 Delibes, Miguel 36 Demme, Jonathan 80 Dent Coad, Emma 69 department stores 168–70, 174 desencanto 36 Deseo, El 10, 43 Detrás del sirimiri (1988) 8, 10 día de la bestia, El (1995) actors 11, 12, 124 anachronisms 24, 137 anarchism 58 anti-realism 59 awards 54, 55, 121 Basque allegiances 28 black 166 body in pieces 86–7, 125 building sets 164–5 castrating mother 146 Catholicism 57–8, 60 cinema of sequestration 80, 81, 82 cinematic contexts 60–2 collaborators 10, 11, 140 comedy 57, 58–9, 62–8, 106 commercial success 54, 78 corruption 59 costume coding 70–1, 171, 172 critical reception 55–60 cult movie 12 death scene 150 drugs 66, 67–8, 72, 84, 149 DVD 16, 17, 61–2

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Page 202

202 esperpento 63 family 142 generally 54–75 genres 8, 56–7, 178 horror film 57, 59, 61 iconic goat 21, 61, 67 images 53, 71 immigrants 158 incongruous images 23 Madrid 28, 51, 57, 60, 171, 176 mannequins 20, 125 marginality 81 masks 20, 66, 67, 164 mise-en-scène 66, 168 modernity 23 music 13, 68–9 non-heroism 135–6 parody 59 pastiche 62 police 91 politics 56, 57–60 publicity 15 re-used images 162 reading signs 56 satanism 11, 58–9, 61 scenario 54–5 science fiction and 56–7 sexual politics 30 shabbiness 163 subcultures 68–72 television 57, 59, 61, 73–5, 113, 152, 178 theatricality 171 tradition 23 vigilantes 55, 58, 70–1 violence 57, 62, 65, 90, 106 Díaz-Cano, Pedro Javier 79, 108 Díaz Yanes, Agustín 57 dilapidation see shabbiness and decay directors, teams 10 disabled 49–50 D’Lugo, Marvin 130 Doctor Livingstone, supongo 9 Dos hombres sin destino (2004) 9 Douglas, Michael 48

Index Drake, Phil 116 dysfunctional families 142 Eastwood, Clint 148, 149, 153 Elejalde, Karra 11 Eliot, T. S. 6 Enigma en el bosquecillo (2000) 8 Erice, Víctor 35 Ernst, Max 22 esperpento 4, 63, 88 ETA 28, 46 European Union 25, 169, 179 Euskal Irrati Telebista 28 excess 42, 164 Exorcist, The 61, 62, 73 families 142–9 fathers 144–51 Fatmi, Farid 158 Fernán-Gómez, Fernando 4, 63, 123, 126, 127, 130 Fernández-Muro, Marta 123 Fernández-Santos, Elisa 120 Fernández-Valenti, Tomás 5–6 Ferreri, Marco 63, 126, 127, 130 film noir 34, 42 Filmax International 178 Fleder, Gary 80 FNAC 8, 168 Font, Teresa 95 Ford, John 79 Fortea, Joaquín 95, 164 Fox, Claire 94, 95 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel 110 Francoism 1970s reforms 110 Catholic dissent 58 celebration of disappearance 25, 131 childhoods 35 frivolity and 16 mothers and 145–7 Muertos de risa 98, 108–12 re-examination 35–6 sainete costumbrista and 137 violence 145–6

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

Franklin, Bruce 40 Frayling, Christopher 145 Freud, Sigmund 59, 83, 91, 144 Fu Manchu 11, 21, 117, 140, 179 Gabaldón. Paca 123 Gabarain, Ane 145 Gámez Fuentes, María José 146 Gandolfini, James 87 Gaos, Lola 145 García, Saturnino 11, 64 García, Txema 79, 108 García Berlanga, Luis 4, 36, 63, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137 García Escudero, José María 153–4 García Otaduy, Arturo (Biaffra) 10, 100, 101, 102, 131, 134, 163, 164–5, 167, 179 Geller, Uri 113, 114 gender 800 balas 30, 144–51 Acción mutante 31, 44–50, 93 Almodóvar’s women 44, 45 clothing 103 Crimen ferpecto 31, 162 sexual politics 29–32 women’s genres 45 Genover, Jaume 125, 151 genre cinema Acción mutante 34, 37, 39–42, 44–5 El día de la bestia 56–7 Hollywood 7, 79, 122, 178 Miró decree 37 women’s genres 45 see also specific genres ghost stories 39 Gifford, Barry 78, 81, 84, 86, 87, 93 Gil, Mateo 178 goats 21, 61, 67 Gómez, Andrés Vicente 11, 54, 78, 140 Gómez, Eduardo 127 Gómez Pereira, Manuel 39, 63 González, Felipe 57

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203 Gooden, James 94 gothic modes 176 Goyas 120–2, 137, 179 Gracia, Sancho 12, 90, 110, 116, 123, 133, 141, 150–1 Graham, Aimee 80 Grainge, Paul 112 grand guignol 41, 45–6, 124–5 graphic art 9 Guattari, Félix 142 Gubern, Román 110 Guerricaechevarría, Jorge 10, 35, 78, 87, 98, 109, 140, 149, 157, 179 Gutiérrez, Chus 6, 158, 159 Gutiérrez Aragón, Manuel 146, 147 Gutiérrez Caba, Emilio 120, 121, 123

habitación del niño, La (2005) 9, 178 Hall, Stuart 68 hallucinations 67–8, 149 Hark, Ina Rae 93 hatchet jobs 2–4, 6, 22, 150, 162, 177 Hathaway, Henry 153 Hawkins, Screamin’ Jay 85 Hawks, Howard 79 Headcrash 13 Hearst, Patty 48 heavy metal 68–9, 71, 72 Heredero, Carlos 41, 44, 46, 63, 122, 126, 131 heritage films 101, 109, 121 Herman, Edward 75 Hernández, Santiago 169 heroism 148–51 Hidalgo, Carla 30 Hidalgo, Manuel 19 high culture 36 Historias para no dormir 61, 62, 178 historical films 35–6, 98 Hitchcock, Alfred 16, 134, 177 Hobsbawm, Eric 25 Hollywood cinema action cinema 18 comedy 62 genre cinema 7, 79, 122, 178

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204 inspiration 5 patriarchal mothers 145 robots 22 satanic horror films 61, 73 screwball comedy 45 sentimentalism 143 Spanish attitudes 4 studio system 79 values 32, 57 violence 56, 57 westerns see westerns women’s genres 45 Hopewell, John 63, 126, 127–8, 137 horror movies Acción mutante 42 La comunidad 120, 137–8 conventions 3 El día de la bestia 57, 59, 61 Hollywood satanic horror films 61, 73 projects 178 Spanish cinema 36, 37 women 46 Hoskins, Andrew 116 housing 130 Howard, Ron 80 Huete, Lala 102, 103 Ibáñez Serrador, Narciso 61, 62, 100, 101 Iberoamericana-Lolafilms 11, 16, 54 Iglesia, Álex de la coherence of work 178–9 collaborators 10–14, 98, 102, 163, 179–80 film career 8–9, 163 filmography 181–7 popular auteur 4–8, 17, 177 projects 178 relocation 9 retrospectives 5 self-portrait 15–16 star persona 15–17 television work 8–9 theatre work 9 see also specific film titles

Index illusionism 2, 22 immigration 157–9 improvisation 88 incongruity 23, 164 Incredibles, The 9 individualism 51 Íñigo, José María 113, 114 Inocente, Inocente (1993) 9 internationalism 179 Jameson, Fredric 136 Jarry, Alfred 88 Jean, Marcel 22 Jefferson, Tony 68 Jenkins, Henry 106–7 Jesuits 58 jevis 13, 69, 72 Jordan, Barry 36, 42, 63, 90, 108, 113 Juan Carlos, King 115 Keaton, Buster 65 Kercher, Dona 98 Kinder, Marsha 35, 36, 57–8, 59, 60, 90, 142, 145, 146 King, Geoff 65 kitsch 20, 27 Krutnik, Frank 62 Kuhn, Annette 145 Labiano, Flavio Martínez 10 Lacan, Jacques 86, 89 Lakunza, Rosana 15, 113 Lancaster, Burt 83, 173 Lang, Fritz 7 Larreta, Carlos Roldán 27, 28 Las Vegas 170–1 Lázaro Reboll, Antonio 103 Le Cain, Maximilian 88 Lean, David 154 León de Aranóa, Fernando 72 Leonardo da Vinci 178 Leone, Sergio 148 Limón, José 94 literary adaptations Perdita Durango 78

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

rejection of theme 36 Spanish cinema 35, 36 Lolafilms 11, 16, 54 López Perea, Carlos 37 López Vázquez, José Luis 127 Lorey, David 82, 94 Lotto, Lorenzo 2 Lucas, George 145, 147 Lucia, Luis 147 Lynch, David 78 Lyne, Adrian 45 McChesney, Robert 75 McRobbie, Angela 68 Madrid cinematic representation 127 La comunidad 28, 133, 134, 135, 138, 176 corruption 28, 51, 57 Crimen ferpecto 28, 170, 175, 176 cultural capital of Europe (1992) 25 El día de la bestia 28, 51, 57, 60, 171, 176 housing 131 Madrid Trilogy 28, 176 real estate developers 23, 24 sainete costumbrista 126, 127 Malick, Terence 83 Mama (1988) 8, 10, 163 Mañas, Achero 121 Manchester 180 Mann, Anthony 153 mannequins Acción mutante 20, 22, 41 Crimen ferpecto 20, 162, 166, 167 El día de la bestia 20, 125 mise-en-scène 19–23, 89 Manver, Kiti 123 Marbella antivicio (1994) 8, 10, 12 Markiegi, Estíbaliz 10, 71 Marqués de Riscal bottles 21 Marquina, Luis 147 Marsh, Steven 4 Martín, Rodrigo 18, 166 Martín-Lunas, Milagros 140

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205 Martínez, Enrique 145 Martínez, Guillermo 178 Martínez, Oscar 94 Martínez Lázaro, Emilio 63, 72 martyrdom 2, 150 Marxism 50 masks Artaud on 88 El día de la bestia (1995) 20, 66, 67, 164 mise-en-scène 19–23 Perdita Durango 21, 89 Masó, Pedro 36 Masson, André 22 Mast, Gerald 62 Matta, Roberto 22 Matthews, Joseph 26 Maura, Carmen 12, 107, 120, 121, 123, 130, 132, 140, 144 Medem, Julio 7, 15, 26–7 Mercero, Antonio 35 Mexico, Perdita Durango 93–5, 158, 159, 170, 179 micro-politics 50 Mirindas asesinas (1991) 8, 10, 11, 19–20, 27, 124 Miró, Kira 174 Miró, Pilar 78–9 Miró decree 37–8, 39, 45, 141 mise-en-scène Acción mutante 41, 43 artistic responsibilities 14–15 La comunidad 126, 130–2, 134, 137, 168 costume 171–4 Crimen ferpecto 163–74 El día de la bestia 66, 168 excess and incongruity 23, 42, 164 Iglesian style 17–19, 163–74 masks and mannequins 19–23, 89 mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène 167–71 Muertos de risa 108, 164, 167, 168 place 163–71

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206 shabbiness see shabbiness and decay theatricality 168 modernity 800 balas 23, 24, 144, 146, 147 Acción mutante 23, 24, 44 anachronisms 24–6 La comunidad 120, 131–2, 133, 137, 144, 166 metropolitan modernity 28 sexual politics 30–1 Spain 25, 26, 44, 60, 176, 178–9 tradition vs modernity 23–4 Molina, Josefina 78–9 Monjas, Chusa 140 Monterde, José Enrique 46, 152 Montero, Rosa 25, 46 Moreno, Mikel 121 Morgan-Tamosumas, Rikki 36, 42, 63 mothers 144–147 movida 25, 69, 124 Movie 6 Muertos de risa (1999) 1970s period 98, 100–4 actors 11, 12, 99, 124 anachronism 24, 136 anarchic comedy 104–8, 109 collaborators 10, 11 corruption 117 costume 101–4, 172 family 143 flashback 99, 105 generally 97–117 genre 8, 98 iconic goat 21 images 97, 99 Madrid trilogy 28 mannequins 20, 21, 22 marginality 81 masks 21 mise-en-scène 108, 164, 167, 168 modernity 23 music 13 police 91, 104, 111 politics 108–112

Index scenario 99–100 sexual politics 30 shabbiness 103–4, 163 television 98, 101, 112–17, 152, 178 theatricality 171 tradition 23 vaudeville 106–7 violence 105–6 voice-over 163 muñecos 20 music Acción mutante 13, 43 collaborators 13 El día de la bestia 13, 68 Perdita Durango 13, 84 Nair, Parvati 4 Naschy, Paul 61 Navarro, Julio 120 Neale, Steve 62 Negu Gorriack 13 neo-liberalism 25 neo-realism 126 New York, 1939 World’s Fair 22 Nimri, Najwa 48 Nouvelle Vague 14 O’Donnell, Hugh 113 Oedipal myth 32, 89, 141–2 Ojea, Berta 145 Olayo, Gracia 145 Olmedo, V. 140, 151 Omen, The 62, 73 Ordóñez, Marcos 14, 37, 63, 89, 141 Ossario, Armando de 61 Otero, José 154 Oxford Crimes 178, 179 Oxford Murders, The 178 Page, Brett 107 Palacios, Fernando 60–1 Palma, Rossy de 44 Pánico Films 11, 140, 179 paracinema 59 Paris 22, 169

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

parody 59, 100 Partido Popular 60, 137 pastiche 43, 62 Pávez, Terele 12, 23, 30, 54, 87, 123, 124, 125, 140 Payne, Stanley 109–10 Películas para no dormir (2006) 9, 178 Peña, Candela 152 Penley, Constance 48, 93 Penn, Arthur 83 Perdita Durango (1997) actors 12, 87–9, 124 anti-realism 95 Basque allegiances 27, 28 body in pieces 86–93, 125, 162 cinema of deflation 82–6 cinema of sequestration 80–2 collaborators 10, 11 commissionned work 75, 78–80 DVD 84–5 failure 78 family 142 flashbacks 83–4, 92 generally 77–95 genre 8 heroism 135–6, 148 iconic goat 21 images 77, 85 incongruity 164 literary adaptation 78 location 170, 179 mannequins 20 masks 21, 89 Mexico–US frontier 93–5, 158, 159, 170 mise-en-scène 167 modernity 23 music 13, 84 police 91 rape 80, 83, 92 script 78 sex 91–3 shabbiness 163 theatricality 171, 172–3 violence 106, 142

207 Pérez, Rosie 78, 80, 82, 87 performances 171–4 Perojo, Benito 152 Perriam, Chris 89 Peter Martyr, Saint 2–3, 150 Piña, Begoña 121 Piñeyro, M. 72 Pleasure Fuckers 13 Polanski, Roman 61, 120 police 91, 111 politics Acción mutante 49–51 cutreficción 136–8 desencanto 36 El día de la bestia 56, 57–60 micro-politics 50 Muertos de risa 108–12 post-Franco 51 Tejero coup 115–17 Poncela, Eusebio 140 Ponga, Paula 131, 135 Ponte, María Luisa 127, 146 popular auteurs 4–5, 6, 11, 17, 177 porn films 37, 152 post-structuralism 6 postmodernsim 50 Preston, Paul 115 PRISA group 11 PSOE 36, 37, 51, 57, 58, 60 psychoanalysis 6 publicity 15 puppets 21, 88, 125 Querejeta, Elías 7 Quintero brothers 126 Radstone, Susannah 145 rape 47, 80, 83, 90, 92 Ray, Nicholas 153 Razza, Armando de 54 realism Bazin on 165 building sets and 164–5 costume 171 gothic mode and 176 hegemony 3

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208 neo-realism 126 rejection see anti-realism social realism 121, 134, 138, 155–9, 164, 178 Redondo, Maite 78 Renoir, Jean 7 Resines, Antonio 89 retrospectives 5 Rey, Florián 152 Rica, Kiko de la 10 Riesner, Charles 65 Roach, Jay 100 road movies 93 Roberts, Shari 82, 93 robots 41 Rodríguez, Maria Pilar 74 Rohmer, Eric 63 Romanillos, Raúl 120 romanticism 7 Rooney, David 55

sainete costumbrista 125–32, 137, 177 saints, iconography 2–3 Sánchez, Juan Luis 79 Sánchez Bella, Alfredo 110 Sánchez Navarro, Jordi 177 Santamaría Amat, Rene 18, 63, 122 Santaolalla, Isabel 158 Sargeant, Amy 101 satanism, El día de la bestia 11, 58–9, 61 Saura, Carlos 5, 7, 15, 36, 121, 123, 146, 147 Schaefer, Claudia 58–9, 64 Schaffner, Franklin J. 149 science fiction Acción mutante 34, 39–42 American genre 40 El día de la bestia and 56–7 women 46 Sconce, Jeffery 59 Scott, George C. 149 Scott, Ridley 34, 40 screwball comedy 45

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Index Segura, Santiago 5, 12, 17, 39, 47, 54, 71, 72, 83, 99, 99, 102, 104, 114, 124, 167, 179 Selznick, David O. 79 sentimentalism 39, 143, 147 sequestration 80–2 sex absence of sex 90–1 Mexican clichés 93–4 sexual politics 29–32 see also gender sex films 37, 152 shabbiness and decay Acción mutante 163, 165, 166 aesthetics 17, 163–4 comedia costumbrista 131 La comunidad 120, 130–1, 136–8, 163, 165 Crimen ferpecto 166 men 30 Muertos de risa 103–4, 163 sets 165 Sheen, Martin 83 Silverman, Kaja 46 Siniestro Total 13 slapstick El día de la bestia 62–8, 65, 106 Muertos de risa 107 slapstick violence 45, 62 tradition 21 slasher films 43 Smith, Paul Julian 15, 23, 43–4, 45, 73, 84 social realism 121, 134, 138, 155–9, 164, 178 Socialist Party see PSOE Sogetel 11, 54 Solo, Han 41 Sozieda Alkolica 13 spaghetti westerns see westerns Spain cinema see Spanish cinema context 180 film locations 154–5 housing 130

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Index

1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111

modernity 25, 26, 44, 176, 178–9 Tejero coup 115–17 see also Francoism; politics Spanish cinema 800 balas and 151–4 Annual Festival, Manchester 180 black comedy 59 cine social 120, 121, 134, 137, 138 co-productions and subproductos 152–4 commissioned works 78–9 dichotomy 4 future 177, 179 Goyas 120–2, 137, 179 matricides 146 melodramas 147 Miró decree 37–8, 39, 45, 141 nuevo cine español 123 obsession with past 98 post-Franco era 35–6 re-organization 37 sainete costumbrista 125–30 scholarship 6, 7 science fiction 39–40 sex 90 sex films 37, 152 themes 35–6 transition films 123, 142, 145 violence 56 speed 19 Spielberg, Steven 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151 spoofs 41 Stam, Robert 5 Star Wars 20, 122, 177 Stephens, Harvey 73 Stone, Oliver 83 Stone, Rob 7 Stott, Andrew 65 Stroud, Don 83 structuralism 6, 7 subcultures, El día de la bestia 68–72 Sugar Ray 13 surrealism 5, 22, 72, 136–7, 156, 176 Symbionese Liberation Army 48

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209 Tallafé, Manuel 28, 178 Tanner, Alain 63 Tejada, Manuel 123 Tejero Molina, Colonel Antonio 115, 116 television Acción mutante 38, 39, 46, 73, 113, 152 Crimen ferpecto 162 critique of modernity and 26 El día de la bestia 57, 59, 61, 73–5, 113, 152, 178 Francoist control 108 Historias para no dormir 61, 62, 178 mise-en-scène of mise-en-scène 167–8 Muertos de risa 98, 101, 112–17, 152, 178 public memory and 98, 112–14, 116 Spanish 1970s 113 Spanish changes 26, 46, 73 terrorism 28, 34, 46, 58 theatricality 168 thrillers La comunidad 120 project 178 Spanish cinema 39 structure 134, 135–6 Tintin 177 Todo por la pasta (1991) 8, 163, 164 Toledo, Guillermo 12, 162 Tornasol 179 Torrado, Ramón 60 Torreiro, Casimiro 152, 154, 155 Torrente series 12, 39, 102, 103, 104, 158 Torres, Augusto 54 tradition modernity and 23–4 rejection of tradition 35–9, 41 transition films 123, 142, 145 Triana Toribio, Núria 37, 63, 124, 154 Trueba, Fernando 63, 78, 102, 121, 152 Tu novia está loca 8 Tunstall, Jeremy 75

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210 United States Mexico and 93–5, 158, 159, 170–1 public memory 112 see also Hollywood cinema Urbizu, Enrique 8, 124, 163, 178 Uribe, Imanol 121, 124 Valdés, Yoima 30, 90, 145 Valle-Inclán, Ramón Maria del 63, 88 Varela, Luis 162 vaudeville, Muertos de risa 106–7 Vera, Cecilia 55, 71, 165 Verhoeven, Paul 45 verisimilitude 3 Villén, Enrique 162 violence 800 balas 106 Acción mutante 37, 41, 45–6, 90, 106 Basque violence 28 Crimen ferpecto 162 El día de la bestia 57, 62, 65, 90, 106 Francoism 145–6 grand guignol 41, 45–6 hatchet jobs 3–4, 6, 22, 150, 162, 177

Index Hollywood films 56, 57 Muertos de risa 105–6 Perdita Durango 106, 142 slapstick violence 45, 62 Spanish films 56 sudden violence 19 Virilio, Paul 155 voyeurism 47 Warhol, Andy 63 Watts, Michael 26 Welch, Raquel 151 westerns 34, 42, 145, 150, 151, 153, 155 spaghetti westerns 24, 136, 140, 141, 145 Williams, Raymond 72 Wollen, Peter 85 women see gender Wood, Robin 144, 145, 147, 148 Wyoming, El Gran 12, 16, 99, 99, 101, 124, 172 Yeats, W. B. 144 Zemeckis, Robert 101 Zulueta, Iván 123 Zumalde Arregui, Imanol 54