Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies: Spanish Culture from Francisco Franco to Jesus Franco (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

DESPOTIC BODIES AND TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES

SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors

Despotic Bodies and Tr a n s g r e s s i v e B o d i e s

Spanish Culture from Francisco Franco to Jesús Franco

TAT J A N A P AV L O V I C´

S t at e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s

Publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and United States Universities.

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pavlovic´, Tatjana. Despotic bodies and transgressive bodies : Spanish culture from Francisco Franco to Jesús Franco / Tatjana Pavlovic´. p. cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5569-6 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5570-X (pb : alk. paper) 1. Arts, Spanish—20th century. 2. Popular culture—Spain—History—20th century. 3. Body, Human—Symbolic aspects—Spain—History—20th century. 4. Gender identity in art. 5. Arts—Political aspects—Spain. 6. Fascism and culture—Spain. I. Title. II. Series. NX562.A1 P39 2002 700'.1'0309460901—dc21 2002020091 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii Introduction, 1 Chapter One THE DESPOTIC BODY: Raza: Espíritu de Franco (1939–1952), 11 Chapter Two THE TRAUMATIZED BODY: Tormenta de verano (1952–1962), 49 Chapter Three THE AUTHORITARIAN BODY IN AGONY: El extraño viaje (1962–1975), 71 Chapter Four THE PERVERSE BODY: Fuego en las entrañas (1975–1985), 91 Epilogue TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES OF THE OTHER FRANCO, 107 Notes, 123 Bibliography, 147 Index, 155

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Francisca Alejano de Borreguero, Santiago Hermann, and Antxon Olarrea for many years of friendship and for introducing me to countless texts and films that form an essential part of the book. I am also grateful to Camillo Penna, Suna Ertugrul, Tom Wall, and Steven Shaviro for their friendship and for bringing to my attention several obscure theoretical texts. Their own relationship to theory and writing has been very important to me during the writing of this manuscript. I thank my Yugoslav, Turkish, and Russian friends for giving me an altogether different perspective on life, literature, and writing. They are always a reminder of my own roots, without which I would have given quite different readings of dictatorship, Spanish cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, the transition, and postmodernity. For not seeing a contradiction in the coexistence of a skyscraper penthouse and gazpacho, the modern fotonovela and fabada in Almodóvar’s films, and the never-ending complicity of our countries that display such an intriguing and schizophrenic relation to modernity and postmodernity. Many ideas incorporated into this book have resulted directly or indirectly from discussions with friends over the past several years. Thanks to Camillo Penna, the only other person that is capable of rewatching endless “Almodóvar marathons” and whose friendship is always present wherever we are scattered around the world. But above all this book could not have been written without the intense conversations, theoretical debates, and friendship of Anthony Leo Geist. I also thank him for helping to smooth out some rough spots in the manuscript, endless insights, and careful judgment. Fifteen years ago, upon my arrival in the United States, I heard of his passion for la movida, la novela negra, and Spanish cinema that inspired me to move to Seattle and study with him. This kind of “perfect” plan usually fails, but not always. Fifteen years later I thank him for his intelligence, knowledge, and kindness, which surpass the limits of friendship.

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Introduction

La mujer de España, por española, es ya católica. Y hoy, cuando el mundo se estremece en un torbellino guerrero en el que se diluyen insensiblemente la moral y la prudencia, es un consuelo tener a la vista la imagen antigua y siempre nueva de esas mujeres españolas comedidas, hacendosas y discretas. No hay que dejarse engañar por ese otro tipo de mujer que florece en el clima propicio de nuestra polifacética sociedad, esa fémina ansiosa de ‘snobismo’ que adora lo extravagante y se perece por lo extranjero. Tal tipo nada tiene que ver con la mujer española y, todo lo más, es la traducción deplorable de un modelo nada digno de imitar. Donde la mujer se conserva más mujer es en España. —Agustín Isern, in Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos Para mí era como si estuviera en el extranjero. Además, iba de rubia platino, así que extranjera totalmente. Los demás eran españoles. Había también yuppies y modernas, como hay ahora. Pero nosotras éramos divinas, los que teníamos el puntazo. —Fabio McNamara, in Luis Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez

The first of these texts is from 1943 and the second from the early 1980s. Both trace the intersection of femininity, sexuality, and national identity, but there is a radical difference between them. In the first text, gender and race unite to provide a deep center of subjectivity. In the second, on the contrary, there is no such center; both gender and nationality are performed, and their meaning is continually in flux. The first quote asserts the deep truth of the subject; the second celebrates the cult of the surface. The ideal of the Spanish

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INTRODUCTION

woman of the 1940s, deeply grounded within the “authenticity” of her culture, is replaced in the 1980s by a drag queen, playfully embracing all the “prohibited” traits of womanhood from four decades before, such as “adoring extravagance and dying for foreignness.” This book attempts to trace the movement from the first of these images to the second. The radical change from the first quote to the second one is not smooth, linear, or unproblematic. However, my reading does not pretend to be “linear” either. In the time span that this book analyzes (1939 to the late 1980s), there are many unexpected configurations, anomalies, and conflictual moments tied to the notions of gender and nation. Its configurations are convoluted, rife with contradictions, and filled with gaps and unfamiliar patterns, making the notion of a seamless evolution from “authentic” woman to drag queen unsustainable. Therefore, I incorporate unconventional and unsettling figures such as Jesús Franco, better known as Jess Franco, who has made low-budget horror, science fiction, thriller, muscle-man epic, and porno films since 1959. His presence among other, more canonical texts and figures complicates neat readings and problematizes notions of sexuality, gender, and the nation. While the regime was promoting the ideal of women based on the founder of the Sección Femenina of the Falange, Pilar Primo de Rivera1 (described by Eugenio D’Ors as a votive candle: “tiene todo lo de una lámpara votiva, la consagración inacabable, el ardor silencioso, la docilidad obstinada, el recogimiento llameante, la caricia a las tinieblas, el suave aceite, la pacífica luz” [Primo de Rivera, Recuerdos, 9]),2 Jesús Franco was creating fabulous and unusual heroines: women detectives, female vampires, lesbian guards, and women killers. Jess Franco plays with the gender conventions of the genres in which he worked and the times in which he lived. In his horror opus, he gave the audience Miss Muerte, a spider woman trapping and killing her victims in her web, and Melissa, a bloodthirsty, blind bird-woman, thus subverting the traditional horror film formula in which “the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds, and slime, [and] the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 234).3 The killer in Jess Franco’s opus is precisely the damsel that could not be more diametrically opposite to the “sparing, discreet, assiduous, diligent” model women of the 1940s or to the “votive candle” used to describe the feminine “qualities” of Pilar Primo de Rivera. In addition to unsettling the social hierarchy with its clear gender relations and focusing on the female body, Jesús Franco, read against Francisco Franco, also problematizes readings of dictatorship and masculinity. In multiple ways, he appears as almost the inverted, ironic figure of his namesake, Generalísimo Francisco Franco. The dictator’s interest in filmmaking, to the point of even scripting an autobiographical movie (Raza),4 is well known.

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Jesús Franco’s interest in horror, in pornography, and in the pulp imagery of superspies and musclemen can be seen as an effort to represent all that the Fascist government had officially repressed. His self-portrayals, in figures such as the crazed Catholic priest, might be regarded as an acting out of those aspects of Francisco Franco’s life that the official, whitewashed, cinematic version had deliberately left out. Jesús Franco’s films enact a return of Fascism’s repressed, the playing out of the delirium that that political order drew its energy from, but had to disavow in the name of normality, Catholic morality, and political and familial order. Besides the possibility of reading Jess Franco as the inverted, ironic figure of Francisco Franco, the dictator could also be read as a character in one of Jess Franco’s films; his last years in power and painful death contain all the conventions of the horror film. Various corporeal alterations and bodily fluids marked Franco’s end: marble skin, putrefying flesh, blood, saliva, sweat, and tears. Was not the dictator himself “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 269)5 with his uncontrollable bursting into tears,6 excessive and unstoppable bleeding and with the ticks that accompany Parkinson’s disease (endless trembling, shaking, involuntary movement of the eyelids, and so on)? Francisco Franco became monstrous, terrifying, horrific, and abject; a bloody dummy (“un pelele humano”) carried in the carpet to one of his last operations: La bajada de la cama de su cuarto, al no poder transportarlo en una camilla porque la escalera no permitía el giro, lo transportamos en una alfombra. . . . En el corto trayecto desde la puerta del palacio donde salimos, llevándolo en la alfombra, a la ambulancia me impresionó grandemente, era de noche. . . . Estábamos transportando en aquella ambulancia, atrévome a decirle, a un pelele humano, un señor envuelto en una alfombra, sangrando. Pero esa persona era el jefe del Estado . . . aquello que llevábamos era el generalísimo Franco. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 294)7

The end of Francisco Franco’s reign was marked by an abjection that was also anticipated by Franco’s loss of le trait unaire, “the unary feature: a point of symbolic identification to which clings the real of the subject. As long as the subject is attached to this feature, we are faced with a charismatic, fascinating figure; as soon as this attachment is broken, all that remains is dreary remnants” (Z+iz=ek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 2).8 Losing le trait unaire was also accompanied by Franco’s inability to accommodate rapid changes in his regime; “he was presiding over a machine whose inner workings were becoming a mystery to him” (Preston, Franco: A Biography, 688).9 In his 1961 end-of-the-year speech “he had described himself as the captain of the ship of Spain and the people as ‘the crew and the beneficiaries’ of his rectitude, virtues and skills as

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a navigator.” But as Preston points out “where the navigator was steering Spain was not clear” (Franco, 698). At the end of his reign, Franco’s despotic body was abject, cut off from Spanish reality, devoid of le trait unaire, and Jesús Franco was a marginalized body that constantly disrupted Spanish “official” culture, which disregarded him, creating his own horrific and extraordinary bodies. Francisco Franco and Jess Franco met through the body and through the abject, “the place where meaning collapses,” pointing out that “the social reality is nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 17).10 The fragility of the symbolic order that sustained the Franco dictatorship, the intricacies of Spanish society and culture, and the drastic changes occurring in less than forty years, as seen in the examples given above, are all imprinted on the body. Thus, this book follows Foucault’s suggestion of shortening one’s vision to “those things nearest to it—the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 89).11 History is written on the body, before it is realized in laws and ideologies. Foucault criticizes the traditional form of historical analysis that only contemplates “distances and heights: the noblest periods, the highest forms, the most abstract ideas, the purest individualities.” The task of genealogy is instead “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83). This book, then, is a Foucaultian genealogy of the last fifty years of Spanish culture and society, organized around a series of bodies and a series of dates. The dates are somewhat arbitrary, but they correspond to crucial moments of cultural transition, from Franco’s consolidation of power to the late-capitalist present. The bodies are those represented in works in various media—novels, films, and comic books—but they are also bodies that serve, as Foucault puts it, as the target and support of multiple relations of political power. Human bodies are not merely natural, biological entities; they are penetrated by culture through and through. The actions and representations of bodies are regulated and controlled by dominant power structures, but these same bodies can also be appropriated by subcultures and put to divergent and oppositional uses. In this study, my aim is not to write a history of various artistic genres but to show how the conflicts expressive of Spanish culture are inscribed and contested first in various genres and bodies. Besides centering on the body, the book also takes the postulate that “reality” must be constantly reinterpreted and thus juxtaposes such unlikely figures as Jess Franco and Francisco Franco. In Z+iz=ek’s words, it “looks awry” at Spanish culture, society, politics, and literature of the last six decades. It does so via the gaze determined by the metaphor of anamorphosis in which “a detail of a picture that ‘gaz’d rightly,’ i.e., straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinguished shapes once we look

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at it ‘awry,’ at an angle. . . . Precisely by ‘looking awry,’ i.e., at an angle, we see the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the ‘straightforward’ view that sees only an indistinct confusion” (Looking Awry, 11).12 For this reason I do not consider certain “obvious” texts from the period but include some obscure texts normally left out of Spanish literary history. The study combines a strong theoretical background together with a detailed study of marginalized texts (La fiel infantería), genres (the Spanish comedy known as comedia sexy celtibérica, la comedia desarollista de los años 60, or cine de reprimidos), and film directors ( Jesús Franco), several of which have never before been studied systematically. It also explores exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture together with texts that are considered “the highest spiritual product of a culture.”13 Thus Franco’s obsession with hunting and fresh-water fishing is as valuable as his political decisions in understanding the complexities of the regime and the bikini and the fascination with blondes as important as the economic theories of the times to comprehend the economic boom of the late 60s. In this way, the book seeks to elucidate the intricacies and details of Spanish culture from the period covered as well as trace its inevitable ambivalences. I focus on movements, transitions, processes, identities in flux, encounters of one body with another, departures, and dislocations. Theoretically, this study traverses different disciplinary frameworks: literature, film studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and history. It is indebted to Deleuze, Foucault, and Z+iz=ek. However, there is always a movement of “misappropriations” of their theories as well as reading them in light of various interpretations, especially by feminist and queer discourse. I also draw on Paul Preston’s research on Franco, Brian Massumi’s reading of the body of the despot, and Cathy Caruth’s reading of trauma and history.14 This study also complements and dialogues with several recent indispensable texts in the field of Spanish cultural studies, emerges from concerns for abandoning “the worn out tool of the generation concept,”15 and reframes theoretical approaches for understanding twentieth-century Spain. It is also highly personal. I take as my own Z+iz=ek’s assertion that “the theory serves as an excuse for indulging in the idiotic enjoyment of popular culture” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, viii). The choice of texts bears traces of my own taste and investments while bearing in mind that they are neither exhaustive nor representative of Spanish culture of the last five decades. The pleasures encountered in writing this book were as intense as the struggles; pleasures tied to explorations and readings of culture through bodies, skin, surfaces, desires, and affects and the struggles emerging from concerns not to overlook “the roles of singularity and chance” and not to reduce “particulars to generals, bizarre exceptions to representative patterns, specific practices to the predictable regularities of genre” (Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, viii).16 Every time

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I was tempted to succumb to that reductive analysis, I tried to follow Carlos Arias Navarro’s17 suggestion: “Yo diría que el demonio, que tampoco perdona al presidente del Gobierno, pues de vez en cuando me visita con sus tentaciones, como a todos los mortales, y me pretende fascinar con un panorama de molicie, de descanso, de bienestar. Pero el tema de España es . . . ¡tan fascinante!, el compromiso es . . . ¡tan trascendente! Que basta un papirotazo para que el diablo desaparezca” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 212). Thus my fascination with the culture explored was always stronger than the struggles its analysis entailed. Below, rather than summarizing chapters in detail, I will point out what I consider the crucial issues and moments of the periods and texts that they cover. The first chapter, “The Despotic Body: Raza: Espíritu de Franco,” analyzes texts from 1939 through 1952.18 This is the period of autarky, Spain’s economic, cultural, and ideological isolation under Franco’s regime, which ended with Spain’s integration into several international organizations. It centers on the political struggles between the most powerful factions of the postwar era, the Falange and the military, as well as on the intricacies of foreign politics, the need to negotiate between the Allied and Axis powers. The chapter discusses how the dictator is disseminated as the despotic body in political discourse, film, and literature. The boundary between Franco’s body and that of the entire country is unclear: “quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o España es Franco?” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 19).19 The despotic body of the dictator looms over everything: politics, culture, art, film production, and so on. Indeed, Franco was known as Caudillo de la Cultura. This insistence on “cultural production” is accompanied by profound antiintellectualism. Intellectuals were often described as “gente que ha fracasado en la vida; literatos sin lectores, filósofos sin discípulos, arquitectos sin obras, sin medio de vida y movidos por un rencor” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 51).20 In this climate of fear, isolation, and oppression, the intellectual is replaced by the warrior/writer, who becomes an incisive figure for understanding the decade. Franco himself was exalted by critics of the period precisely because he “reunía en su persona los atributos de tres grandes figuras de la literatura española: la espada del Cid, la vara del alcalde de Zalamea y la lanza de Don Quijote” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 612). This chapter also looks at Franco’s despotic body as the “body-as-motion, rather than the body-as-object,” that is, “defined by what and how many potential gestures/trajectories it incarnates” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 137). It also conceives nation as an infinity of irreducibly different component parts where “the unification drive leads only to disappearance and

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fragmentation: the physicality of the unifying body disappears, leaving only its image, which is then relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed, re-membered, and dismembered” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 95). Thus, in the second part, the chapter focuses on uncontrollable, transgressive, and alternative bodies (such as mutilated war bodies, bodies of defeated Republicans, hungry bodies, excessive bodies of estraperlo, abject homosexual bodies, women’s bodies, and transsexual bodies) that were obstinate elements threatening to pierce the imagined national body’s protective shield and unity. The second chapter, “The Traumatized Body: Tormenta de verano,” examines texts from 1952 through 1962.21 Spain’s acceptance into the UN led to hopes of a cultural opening that unfortunately never occurred. The metaphor for this decade is a character from Juan García Hortelano’s novel Tormenta de verano. It is a woman’s dead, naked body found on the beach. Her stark nakedness is much more shocking than her death. García Hortelano’s text is structured around this encounter with a dead body, the site of trauma that can find neither expression nor articulation. Written in 1961, Tormenta de verano seizes something essential of the previous decade: the 50s inability to articulate its traumatic awakening from years of fascist rhetoric, insistence on false optimism,22 and countless films “de gola y levita” that were “la mejor metáfora de envaramiento de régimen” (González Requena, “Entre el cartón piedra y los coros y danzas,” 52).23 The displayed, virile body that saturated the previous decade is painfully outdated, and the national body as fighting machine belongs to the past. Themes and obsessions of the 1940s were fading away, and Falangist vocabulary was becoming increasingly anachronistic. Even sporadic Falangist violence, as Preston emphasizes, “was a symptom of a death agony rather than of youthful vitality” (Franco, 651). The awakening from the traumatic 40s is accompanied by the desire to question and dismantle every aspect of the fascist discourse and get closer to the reality “hidden” behind it. Articulating the truth of Spanish reality was a project common to most filmmakers, writers, and artists of the period regardless of their ideological positions and political backgrounds. However, despite their relentless call for realism, the “truth” of the decade is paradoxically articulated in a different space, one that posits an intricate relation between knowing and not knowing. Thus the truth, “in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4). Paradoxically this generation, in spite of itself and its insistence on reality, articulates the truth of the decade precisely through indirect expressions and displaced obsessions that characterize most of its texts. The chapter also explores the tumultuous passage to capitalism under the technocrats. The dismantling of Franco’s cherished autarky was closely

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connected with the entry of the Catalan monarchist and professor of administrative law Laurano López Rodó into an economic scheme that “had meant the abandonment of every economic idea that the Caudillo had ever held dear and the uninhibited embrace of modern capitalism” (Preston, Franco, 666). Thus autarkic Spain was becoming technocratic, led by López Rodó, “a deeply religious member of Opus Dei,” and the very model of its values: “militant, quietly confident, hard-working and efficient” (Preston, Franco, 657). However, López Rodó’s and the technocrats’ entry into the new cabinet was not altogether smooth and was ridden by significant crisis, summed up in the telling name for the period, “disorientation,” “during which public debt, inflation and balance of payments problems continued . . . being largely the legacy of autarky” (Preston, Franco, 670). As in the previous decade, there were many contradictions and complexities in all the realms of culture, politics, and economics. The third chapter, “The Authoritarian Body in Agony: El extraño viaje” considers texts from 1962 to the death of Franco in 1975.24 Juan Bosch’s film Bahía de Palma, starring the ravishing German actress Elke Sommer, was shown in Spain in 1962. It was the first time in Spanish postwar history that a bikini was shown on the screen, and the lines formed to see the movie were endless, causing a notable uproar. The Seiscientos (Fiat 600), introduced in the mid-50s, became a mass phenomena by this time.25 Waldo de Mier, the author of España cambia de piel, wrote that “una población con automóviles sin rasponazos ni abolladuras es una población subdesarrollada” (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 158).26 The bikini’s first appearance on screen and the introduction of the car correspond to the opening up of Spanish borders and coincide with the First Plan de Desarrollo (Development Plan) elaborated by technocrats in collaboration with the World Bank. They are also simultaneous with Manuel Fraga Iribarne replacing Gabriel Arias Salgado as minister of information and tourism, who “with his short-cropped hair and natty suits, the can-do style and appearance of a busy American entrepreneur, was seen as someone capable of resolving the intractable problems . . . in a vertiginously changing society.”27 Thus apertura was tied to the change in both domestic and foreign politics, articulated in a complex motto, Spain is different,28 and tied to tourism and foreign investment. Bikinis and cars, symptomatic of the sexual liberation that went hand in hand with new consumer habits, reflect the time of economic boom, consumerism, and culture marked by a new (economic) vocabulary, such as “televisor, lavadora, financiación,” that was just then admitted to the Dictionary of Spanish Real Academy (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 156). Besides the Seiscientos, and its centrality to cultural and economic changes, another car marked the epoch profoundly: a black Dodge Dart (registration number PMM-161416) flying thirty-five meters through the air and

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shattering the body of the vice president of government Carrero Blanco. Carrero Blanco’s death anticipated “the death” that everyone was waiting for and intensified “una especie de euforia de la que todos participábamos nos inducía a creer que los días de Franco en el poder estaban contados” (Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa, 9).29 But in reality Franco’s end was not in sight. He ended up dying so slowly and painfully that even he himself would whisper at his death bed: “Dios mío cuánto cuesta morir” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 319). This chapter also centers on the phenomenon of the times, el destape (lifting the lid off ), embodying a Spain that was “dissipating” in sexual excess, political uncertainty, and inextricable changes. Contrary to the famous saying, absolutely nothing was “atado, y bien atado” as the Caudillo had “confidently declared on 30 December 1969 in what was to become the nautical catchphrase of his twilight years” (Preston, Franco, 748). This chapter looks at the way that two bodies that permeate this period intersect: a body of el destape (the revealing body) and a dictator’s dying body (the body wasting away). One body was dwindling as the other was emerging. Both of these bodies incarnate larger issues. Franco’s dying body reveals political uncertainties and the tumultuous end of the dictatorship, while the body of the destape is symptomatic of all that was repressed throughout his reign. In the fourth chapter, “The Perverse Body: Fuego en las entrañas,” the body is simulated.30 Franco finally died, and the “real” bodies and the “real” discourses of the past are replaced by its simulacra: “cuanto más plagiábamos más auténticos éramos” (Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa, 8).31 The chapter centers on the key texts from la movida.32 La movida madrileña was a cultural movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Accompanied by an outburst of creativity, the events from that period paved the way to the hedonism of the 1980s, advocating “pleasure as a new Spanish morality”33 and challenging traditional Spanish views on gender, sexuality, and the body. A number of musicians, painters, designers, filmmakers, and journalists met, exchanged ideas, collaborated on diverse projects, went to Almodóvar’s Super 8 performances, and listened to newly emerging Spanish music groups. La movida also stimulates the emergence of experiences that were until then regarded as intellectually inferior. The aesthetic pleasure of la movida departs from the sophisticated sense of taste of their predecessors. They embraced what terrified the intellectual crowd of the 70s: bad taste, poor imitation, and artificiality. La movida’s shock value, punk aesthetics, spontaneity, and irreverence were from the very beginning manipulated, tied to the Socialist Party (PSOE), (mis)appropriated, coated in nostalgia, denied, and disavowed. Kathleen Vernon and Barbara Morris see 1982, the year in which the Socialists came to power, as marking la movida’s “new, more self-conscious phase,” characterized by a “problematic relationship with the media” (Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, 8).34 Epps warns us that there is no such

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thing as a noncoopted phase and that from the very beginning la movida and Almodóvar were tied to a “marvel of marketing” because “constraining as it is, capitalism is also the condition of possibility of the style-conscious, fashionoriented, trend-setting vision of Almodóvar” (Epps, “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” 102).35 Thus, the chapter outlines the complexities of the political situation following Franco’s death and points up key issues of the tumultuous Spanish political transition from dictatorship to democracy. The final chapter, “Transgressive Bodies of the Other Franco,” analyzes the films by the exploitation filmmaker Jesús Franco. Despite being a monster with the camera, “a creature with two heads and three eyes, the inseparable union of the mind and the art of cinema” (Balbo, Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco, 11),36 he is curiously absent from all the books on contemporary Spanish culture. This marginalization is startling (since he has made over 150 films in a career that spans four decades) but also somewhat understandable (since the films are exploitation flicks of various genres, and they might not appeal to an academic audience). It is also comprehensible since Jess Franco made films that “display sensations that are on the edge of respectable” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” 267), and his opus largely focuses on “pornography, the lowest in cultural esteem and gross-out horror, next to lowest” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” 269). His work spans the entire period this book covers. He is a marginalized body that disrupted Spanish official cinema throughout his prolific career; the official body of cinema disregarded him, but he created his own extraordinary bodies: the pop-art body, the horror body, and the pornographic body. The horror body is the mutilated body. The science body merges uncontrollable with its surroundings; it is also endlessly enlarged and reshaped. The superhero’s body is idealized. The female body becomes an irresistible force of destruction, and so on. Franco’s bodies pose perpetual questions demonstrating that there is no natural body that does not involve a social and a cultural dimension; Franco’s transgressive bodies upset notions of order and hierarchy. As already mentioned, placing Jesús Franco’s opus side by side with other texts from the period that this book covers produces peculiar angles, illuminates unaccustomed patterns, and provokes unexpected configurations. His incorporation in my text is conceived as conceptual and theoretical exploration and experimentation. His figure helps us to rethink, reconceptualize, at times disentangle, and at times complicate the study of Spanish culture from 1939 to the present.

Chapter One

The Despotic Body

Raza: Espíritu de Franco (1939–1952)

¿Quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o si España es Franco? —Ernesto Giménez Caballero, in Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos

“España es un país privilegiado que puede bastarse a sí mismo. Tenemos todo lo que nos hace falta para vivir, y nuestra producción es lo suficientemente abundante para asegurar nuestra propia subsistencia. No tenemos necesidad de importar nada, y es así como nuestro nivel de vida es idéntico al que había antes de la guerra” (Vázquez Montalbán, Los demonios familiares de Franco, 230).1 These words, pronounced by Francisco Franco toward the end of the Spanish Civil War, were assiduously anachronistic and deceptive. In reality the country was completely impoverished after the brutal three-year war. Besides that, the end of the Spanish Civil War on April 1, 1939, was the beginning of more than a decade-long isolation of Spain from the rest of Europe and the world (with the exception of the Axis powers). The isolation lasted until Spain’s acceptance to the UN in 1952. The isolation further impoverished the already stricken

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country ideologically and culturally, as well as economically. Franco’s statement marked the beginning of the winning side’s attempt to rewrite history. Even though the isolation of Spain was an imposed one, it went hand in hand with autarky, Franco’s ideology of isolationism. In this chapter I will discuss how the dictator is disseminated as the despotic body in political discourse, film, and literature. The rhetoric of Franco and his government during the postwar period was focused on discrediting all “foreign” values identified with the leftist forces and on returning Spain to its “real” roots. However, the xenophobic exclamation “que sea español nuestro amigo y nuestro criado y nuestra novia, que sean españoles nuestros hijos. Que no haya sobre la bendita tierra de España otras costumbres que las nuestras” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 29)2 embodies a very particular and exclusionary conception of “Spanish.” The belief in an “authentic” Spanish character and the binary opposition Spanish/foreign encouraged further distinctions such as Catholic/pagan, Nationalist/Republican, soul/body, depth/surface, or essence/artificiality. These tropes that derive from “the confrontation of the old with the new, of tradition with progress, of conservative with liberal, of Spain with ‘anti-Spain,’” as David T. Gies argues, “can be traced back to the late eighteenth century when this duality is conceptualized as ‘las dos Españas’” (“Modern Spanish Culture: An Introduction,” 3).3 Franco used these tropes of las dos Españas, modeling them to fit his ever shifting needs that depended on both internal political struggles and the complexities of world politics, especially the events surrounding the Second World War and the cold war. Despite Franco’s insistence on “authentic Spanish character,” seen through his incessant claim that “nuestra revolución hizo posible la vuelta de España a su verdadero ser” ( Jaime, Franco ha dicho, 44)4 Franco was always conscious that this “authenticity” had to be continuously constructed, negotiated, and redefined depending on the political agenda of the moment. In fact, the dominant ideology was never hegemonic; its position was always contested by conflicting political forces from within the “winning” side as well as by external threats from the remnants of the Republicans and other international forces. Inside the country the major renegotiation took place between the political factions of the Nationalist zone, within and between the Falange, the military, and the monarchists. Outside Spain, the exiles still had hopes of contesting Franco’s power during the 1940s, and there were several prominent maquis operations until as late as 1948.5 In foreign politics Franco needed to juggle between the Allied and Axis powers. The most problematic negotiation came with the realization that Hitler was losing the war and that Spain had to, and thanks to the cold war dynamics could, repackage its fascist past for the Allied victors. Franco’s internal and external struggle for power in the late 1930s and 1940s was inseparable from his relations with two other crucial figures from

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the Spanish political milieu: Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, nicknamed el cuñadísimo (the supreme brother-in-law); and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, killed by Republicans in 1938. While he was a director of the Military Academy in Zaragoza, Franco had already met Serrano Suñer, one of the brightest young lawyers working for Abogados del Estado. Later, in February 1931, “Serrano Suñer married Doña Carmen’s younger sister, Zita in Oviedo. The groom’s witness was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator and future founder of the Falange, the bride’s Francisco Franco. The marriage clinched the close relationship between Serrano Suñer and Franco out of which would be forged the Caudillo’s National-Syndicalist State” (Preston, Franco, 68). The personal encounter among these three figures: El Caudillo, el cuñadísimo, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, after his death known as el ausente, marked profoundly the political climate and Franco’s political maneuvers of that period. As if Franco took literally José Antonio’s ideas about family and politics while negotiating the ambiguous line between the personal and the political, “qué desaparezcan los partidos políticos. Nadie ha nacido nunca miembro de un partido político, en cambio nacemos todos miembros de una familia” (Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista II, 106).6 Toward the end of the civil war, Franco was still unaware of the fact that he had to make the passage from being a war general to being the head of a state, being oblivious about the need for a more complex vision for the future state should he win the war. Therefore Serrano Suñer, having “the talent and political credentials necessary to create the political machinery lacking in the Nationalist zone” (Preston, Franco, 254) was a crucial figure in envisioning the postwar Spanish state.7 After José Antonio’s murder, the cuñadísimo was critical in implementing the political program of el ausente, being a “bridge between Franco and many of the best and brightest of the Falange” (Preston, Franco, 254). Franco’s main hindrance, this lack of vision, was ultimately also his most important asset. Being porous, he was the perfect ruler to absorb all the others’ ideas and ideology. José Antonio’s lack of a program was tied to the dramatization and romanticization of politics through charged concepts of life, love, and death; an example is his statement that “people say we have no program. . . . When did you ever see matters of importance, eternal matters like love, life and death, organized according to a program?”8 Franco’s porous and mosaic-like “program” was his “determination to allow no single group to challenge his own firm grip on power” (Boyd, “History, Politics, and Culture 1936–1975,” 92).9 Falangists were needed as a sheer political force that (however ambiguously) supported Franco and gave him an ideological base for his National-Syndicalist State, but at the same time had to be kept at bay because of their possible overpowering effect and their political and social radicalness

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that was undesirable for Franco’s project and alien to his sensibility. Franco intuitively grasped the political power of the Falange and domesticated José Antonio’s vocabulary that then became one of the pillars of his postwar rhetoric. The mutation, permeation, appropriation, misappropriation, and misquoting of José Antonio was Franco’s political apprenticeship in dislocating and misusing a diverse array of discourses, a trait that he continued mastering in later years. The perversity of Franco’s relation to José Antonio emerged in his direct implication in José Antonio’s death. According to Preston’s research, Franco tried to abort José Antonio’s rescue from the Alicante prison and did not acknowledge his death as late as 1938: José Antonio Primo de Rivera was shot in Alicante prison on 20th November 1936. Franco made full use of the propaganda opportunities thereby provided, happy to exploit the eternal absence of the hero while privately rejoicing that he now could not be inconveniently present. . . . Franco used the cult of el ausente (the absent one) to take over Falange. All its external symbols and paraphernalia were used to mask its real ideological disarmament. (Franco, 196)10

Therefore the absent one is all too present in the Spain of the 1940s, be it in Franco’s domesticated version of his radical falangist ideas or via the array of political and literary texts of the period that were impregnated with implicit and explicit allusions to his concepts of living and writing “al aire libre, bajo la noche clara, arma al brazo y en lo alto las estrellas” (Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista II, 106).11 Serrano Suñer, so useful in domestic politics and in bridging incommensurable gaps between the Falange and Franco, also became a problematic figure later on because he stubbornly continued to show his overt adoration of Germans even when it was clear that Spain needed to dissociate itself from past complicity with the Axis powers. The popular song from the period captures Serrano Suñer’s dangerously rising power: “Miradle por donde viene/el Señor del Gran Poder/antes se llamaba Cristo/y ahora Serrano Suñer.” There were “signs that he [Serrano Suñer] might be trying to turn the Falange into a fully fledged Nazi Party for his own purposes [and] . . . Franco took measures to counter the surge of Falangist power” (Preston, Franco, 432). Serrano Suñer and José Antonio Primo de Rivera were also at the core of another crucial power struggle between the Army and the Falange. José Antonio was from the very beginning “wary about too great a co-operation with the Army” and feared that it would be “fashionable ideological decoration for the defense of the old order” (Preston, Franco, 193). This conflict between the army and Falange intuited by José Antonio in the 30s culminated on August 15, 1942, in the Basílica de Begoña scandal. As a result, the head of the army, General Varela, resigned after Franco did not give in to his demands, and Serrano

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Suñer was dismissed in September 1942 from his post as foreign minister: “The press maintained a deathly silence but Franco’s anxiety about the eruption of hostility between the Army and the Falange spilled over into a series of speeches. . . . The most revealing remarks were made on the 24th of August in La Coruña at a mass gathering where Franco praised the military spirit of the Falange and the Falangist virtue of the Army” (Preston, Franco, 467). By appealing to “the military spirit of the Falange” and “the Falangist virtue of the Army” Franco’s leadership position was finally in the process of being consolidated. While Franco was consolidating power inside the country, he still had to juggle several outside factors, especially when he dismissed Serrano Suñer from his post. In 1943 he was still convinced that he had the power to play off the Allies against the Axis. Franco approved sale of Spain’s biggest wolfram to the Third Reich, but the Allies retaliated with an oil embargo that pushed “the poverty-stricken Spanish economy further back towards the Middle Ages” (Preston, Franco, 511). Then, beginning in December 1944, his rhetoric changed as he tried to cater to the Allies. He began the “building-up of anti-Bolshevik rhetoric” (Preston, Franco, 524) and counted on cold war power dynamics for his own benefit. Franco even tried to deny that Spain had been allied to Germany or Italy once he realized that the Axis was definitely losing by claiming that “it is true that when Germany seemed to be winning the war, some members of the Falange tried to identify Spain with Germany and Italy, but I immediately dismissed all persons so inclined” (Preston, Franco, 537). These political manipulations were also imprinted on the body of the 40s, when in 1945 the previously obligatory Fascist salute was prohibited. Despite Franco’s attempts to reconstruct the recent past and to obliterate Spain’s support of the Axis powers, Spain was excluded from the United Nations “on the grounds of the origins, nature, record and Axis links of the Franco regime” (Preston, Franco, 540). Franco was left without solutions other than to embrace economic self-sufficiency once he had “convinced himself that he and Spain were under deadly siege” (Preston, Franco, 535): Franco himself virtually guaranteed the post-war economic difficulties of his regime by opting for autarky. . . . Franco’s economic naivety was striking. . . . He completed his own intensely simplistic ten-year plan for reviving Spain’s economic fortunes. Entitled “Foundations and Directives of a Plan for the Reorganization of our economy in Harmony with our National Reconstruction.”. . . The suffering which the Spanish people had to undergo throughout the years of hunger in the 1940s, in large part as a result of the economic decisions taken by the Caudillo, is incalculable. (Preston, Franco, 344)

Franco’s naivité, ignorance, and stubbornness was mirrored by his followers and the nation as a whole. The perception that the west “betrayed” Spain

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led to the anti–United Nations demonstration at Plaza de Oriente in Madrid. After Spain’s exclusion from the United Nations, on December 9, 1946, Spaniards chanted “Ellos tienen ONU, nosotros dos.”12 Spaniards were ready to embrace the chimerical ideas of self-sufficiency. Embracing the isolation of Spain was easy because, in Franco’s own words, it was God’s chosen country: “¡Qué hermoso es ser español! Por eso nos dice el Padre Esteban que España es la Nación más amada de Dios. Podrá el extranjero difamarnos, pero no puede robarnos gloria.”13 This affect of “god chosen” isolation promulgated by Franco to justify autarky permeated every pore of the society, be it political texts, film scripts, or elementary school readers: Nos pasa a los españoles como a nuestras flores y frutas. Las otras de Europa-las rosas de Holanda o las peras de Francia-tienen quizá más lúcida apariencia en los escaparates del mundo, donde se enseñan envueltas en papel de seda o con lazos de colores. Pero son sosas y sin olor. En cambio, con menos apariencia son más verdad, más honradas, más sabrosas y fragrantes las peras de Galicia, las naranjas de Valencia o las rosas y claveles de Sevilla. (Sopeña Monsalve, El florido pensil: Memoria de la escuela nacionalcatólica, 210)14

There was a conscious attempt to root the formation of this new forcefully homogeneous nation in a glorious and imaginary past. Since there was no possibility of territorial greatness and expansion (Spanish reality was economic misery at home and ostracism abroad), Franco’s political mission was spiritual rather than territorial. Franco was focused on the exaltation of spiritual greatness and superiority, trying to achieve hegemony and national unity through the patrimony that seemed to have belonged to everybody and to have transcended the boundaries of region, language, and class. In his discussion of traditional history in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Michel Foucault criticizes “historical tradition (theological or rational) that aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity—as a teleological movement or a natural process” (88). The attempt to absorb the singularity of the event into a continuity is constant in all the narratives of postwar Spain. Certain ambiguous and unwanted points of Spanish history are erased, while others are violently connected in order to construct a comprehensive view of history as a continuous development. Spanish postwar history is what Nietzsche labels “monumental history”: one that regards the past as an immutable and sacred object of knowledge. Its motto is “Let the dead bury the living” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 72). Such traditional historical analysis only “contemplates distances and heights: the noblest periods, the highest forms, the most abstract ideas” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 89).

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Monumental history was most visible in the twenty-year construction of the Valle de los Caídos, which began on April 2, 1940. Commemorating the Nationalist victory, the immense monument was superimposed onto the exposed and damaged Republican body: “The dimension of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices involved in victory . . . cannot be commemorated by simple monuments . . . the stones to be erected must have the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness” (Preston, Franco, 351).15 This strong redemptive and religious dimension of the project is best seen through the “erection of the immense cross which towered five hundred feet above it. The arms of the cross were the width of two saloon cars. It cost Spain as much as had Philip II’s Escorial in a more prosperous era” (Preston, Franco, 352). The Valle de los Caídos was a quintessential postwar ideological project with its nostalgic, oppressive, and dangerous romanticization of the national essence where “Muguruza’s task was to produce a monument that would link Franco’s era to that of the Catholic Kings, to Charles V and to Philip II” (Preston, Franco, 352). Geographical appropriations and misuses were as important as historical ones. Franco picked up from Spanish nationalist historiography “the idea of Castile’s centrality to the shaping of the Spanish nation” (Fox, “Spain as Castile: Nationalism and National Identity,” 29).16 Fox shows how this idea of Castile permeates so much writing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “affirming the historical originality of Castile as the unifying force of the peninsula and the creator of its culture” (32). This ideological, Castillian-centered view of Spanish history was reinforced in Franco’s case by his Toledo years spent absorbing this association of Spain and Castile as well as of Spain and imperial greatness: “A growing obsession with the greatness of imperial Spain made him receptive to Toledo as a symbol of that greatness. His later identification with the figure of El Cid may also have had its origins in his adolescent ramblings around the historic streets of the town” (Preston, Franco, 9). Franco’s constant ideological rewriting of history consisted of two equally disturbing parts; on the one hand, there was an attempt to construct a glorious past through the exclusion of unwanted historical events, and on the other hand, there was the inclusion of absurd and anachronistic historical events (such as the siege of Numantia17) in order to construct an illusory idea of Spanish origin and essence, by exerting violence on the meaning of “Spanish” and imposing domination hidden behind what appears as historical objectivity and “disinterestedness.” The conception of this traditional, Francoist history depends on false notions of origin and essence. It only allows a very narrow and restricted definition of Spanishness, and it conceptualizes history as essential rather then “accidental.” The concepts of origin and descent, as used by Franco, transmit a belief in descent as “category

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resemblance that pretends to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 81). Franco simulated a traditional genealogist, aggressively promoting “traditional and essential” Spanish values. Perversely enough, Franco often paradoxically occupied the place of the Foucaultian genealogist: “a genealogist that refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics . . . he finds that there is something altogether different behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 78). Even though he was effective in employing characteristics of a Spanish “collective psyche” and “national essence” so overwhelmingly theorized in the early part of the century for his scheme of nation building, there was still certain schizophrenia to Franco’s national project arising from its arbitrary character. The arbitrariness of the national project is especially seen through Franco’s sporadic identification with certain historical figures. Some figures were dearer to Franco than others, and similar to his slippery political negotiations, the arbitrary character of his ideological use of historical/political figures ultimately created a rupture in the attempted coherence of national unity. As we have already seen, certain historical events and periods were completely silenced, while others, like the Reconquista (led by the medieval hero El Cid) and the unification of Spain under the Catholic Kings, were overemphasized. On May 18, 1939, Franco, Caudillo de España, made his entry into Madrid, down the Avenida del Generalísimo Franco18 saturated by the red and yellow nationalist colors. His entry into Madrid (following a ritual observed by Alfonso VI in the Middle Ages) illustrates well the failure of his national project due to its excessiveness: In khaki military uniform but wearing the blue shirt of the Falange and the red beret of the Carlists, Franco presided. Behind the band of the Carabinieri, a battalion of Italian black-shirted Arditi marched with their daggers raised in Roman salute. . . . Therefore, for five hours, Falangists, Carlist Requetés carrying huge crucifixes, regular Spanish troops, Foreign Legionaries and Moorish mercenaries filed the rain-swept streets bearing the bullet-riddled flags of the Civil War. . . . Next day guns thundered as the Caudillo arrived to attend the solemn Te Deum service held at the royal basilica of Santa Barbara to give thanks for his victory. The choir from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos greeted him with a tenthcentury Mozarabic chant written for the reception of princes. Surrounded by the glorious military relics of Spain’s crusading past, including the battle flag of Las Navas de Tolosa, the great victory over the Moors in 1212, the standard used by Don Juan de Austria at the Battle of Lepanto in 1517, and the Señera of Valencia, Franco presented his ‘sword of victory’ to Cardenal Gomá, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of all Spain, who

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solemnly blessed him. The sword was then laid on the High Altar before the great crucifix of the Christ of Lepanto which had been especially brought from Barcelona. (Preston, Franco, 330)

This dangerous and nostalgic romanticizing of the national essence proliferates to the point of losing the meaning. Franco’s despotic body materialized simultaneously as Alfonso VI, El Cid, Don Juan de Austria, a military man, a Carlist, and a Falangist, while being sustained by the battle flag of Las Navas de Tolosa, tenth-century Mozarabic chants, the Señera of Valencia, and the great crucifix of the Christ of Lepanto. In these materializations the body of the leader “undergoes a process of infinitization, as if stricken by a compulsion to become coextensive with quasi-corporeal space. . . . Its surfaces stretch forever. . . . Its heights are higher, its permutations more numerous. It can see itself as ‘one’ would see it, occupying every pronoun position simultaneously. It can stand on every pedestal and don every flag” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 138). This process of infinitization and permutation of the Caudillo seen in his entry into Madrid marked the decade of the 40s, characterized by the “irruption of the State and the effacement of its subjects,” as well as the totalitarian phenomenon of blurring the boundaries between leader, country, and people (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 9). Franco’s body materializes in every-body, “si queremos ser dignos de esa redención y honrar a quien nos ha redimido, todos los españoles debemos hacer tres cosas: pensar como Franco, sentir como Franco y hablar como Franco, que hablando, naturalmente, en el idioma nacional ha impuesto la victoria” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana en la España de los 40, 28).19 As Giménez Caballero tellingly suggests, “¿quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o si España es Franco?” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 19). Inseparable from Spain, Franco illustrates the phenomenon of “melding image and body in a space where they cannot be separated.” Thus, Franco’s body is a body without an image: The difference of the body of the leader to itself is palpable. Anyone who has had a close encounter with a chief of State will attest to the profound impression of emptiness accompanying the presence of preeminent flesh. . . . The emptiness is the perception of the distinction between the virtuality of the body without an image and the actuality of its embodiments. The potential enveloped in the body without an image belongs to no actual body or image, even the leader’s. It is enacted in the passage from one body or image to the next. (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 141)

Franco himself already captured this notion of “body without an image,” when he defined dictator as “un producto atmosférico sin autor definido”

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(Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo: Perfiles desconocidos de un dictador temeroso e implacable, 32).20 Franco’s images multiplied in the 40s. The new coinage was minted on July 27, 1948, with the inscription: “Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios.” He was also proclaimed “the first worker of Spain” in “a staged rally of ‘workers’ in the Plaza de Oriente” (Preston, Franco, 560). On June 20, 1949, Franco was named Periodista de honor. Consciousness of this proliferation is seen from a telling prohibition that allowed only the display of images with máximo honor, “se advertía que la imagen del Caudillo podía ponerse en los escaparates pero con el máximo honor y sin mezclarlo, en manera alguna, con objetos industriales para su venta” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 7). This overwhelming presence of the Caudillo was simultaneously and paradoxically marked by his absence. Giménez Caballero wrote that Franco was a mysterious man who “nadie conoce bien de cerca-pero que todo un pueblo presiente” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 20). The monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote that “Franco is a man who says things and unsays them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always vague and never clear or categoric” (Preston, Franco, xix). This absence was sometimes quite literal, especially since “at innumerable moments of crisis throughout his years in power, Franco was simply absent, usually uncontactable while hunting in some remote sierra” (Preston, Franco, xviii). Deeply entrenched in the “entrails of Spain” and at the same time proliferating uncontrollably, Franco’s body is “trapped in a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that have no synthesis” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 8). Being often described as “defensor de la cultura clásica” and “Caudillo de la Cultura,” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 610) Franco’s presence was overwhelmingly felt in the field of cultural production. Franco’s interest in cinema, painting, architecture, and the arts is marked by continual activity in these matters. He incessantly wrote, scripted, acted, filmed, argued, and attacked in the press, thereby embodying the notion of “culture as a form of struggle” (Graham and Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies, vii).21 His love for cinema predates the scripting of his famous film Raza. “He became a member of the tertulia of the politician and writer Natalio Rivas” (Preston, Franco, 52) while living in Madrid in 1926, and at Rivas’ invitation he appeared in La Malcasada together with Millán Astray. He also loved to emphasize that his real passion was painting. This passion was shared with Carrero Blanco and his artistic sensibility with Doña Carmen, who “listed her greatest love as music and her greatest dislike as ‘the Moors’” (Preston, Franco, 58). Millán Astray also emphasized that “architecture was Franco’s secret vocation, having designed various buildings for the Legion” (Preston, Franco, 352). It was thus not surprising that the construction of the Valle de los Caídos was Franco’s foremost obsession for almost two decades.

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Franco, the “Periodista de honor,” spent quite a lot of time writing. One of the most interesting characteristics about Franco’s early journalistic pieces is its self-referentiality, especially noticeable in his creation of the pseudojournalistic character of Jakim Boor. Writing in Arriba he published several articles ranting against masonry (la masonería): Franco indulged his vanity to the extent of writing about himself in the third person underlining the worldwide Masonic hatred of “our Caudillo” and the fact that people of Spain were “with Franco to the death.” To strengthen his cover, it was announced in the press that Franco had received “Jakim Boor” in an audience. The articles were collected as a book in 1952 and, for the rest of his life, Franco remained convinced that all the copies had been bought up by freemasons to prevent it being read. (Preston, Franco, 564)

He used a vast range of pseudonyms, each of them connected in some way to his longing for imperial greatness, some megalomaniac project he was captivated with, or his conflictive responses to various political and historical forces he was confronting at the time. Besides Jakim Boor, a pseudonym created for “fighting” masonry, he was at times Juan de la Cosa (a navigator who guided Columbus in his “discovery” of America), Hispanicus, Ginés de Buitrago (a pseudonym that was also used by Carrero Blanco), Macaulay (one he used to attack Britain), and so on (Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo, 20). His pen names proliferated as fast as his most current obsessions. His obsession with writing was also stunning, keeping in mind his poor writing skills and inability to conceptualize the complexities of the subjects that he wrote about: La escritura del general contenía faltas de ortografía-expiando por espiando, caterba por caterva, Godet por Goded-, de semántica y de sintaxis. Su tosca traducción de los nombres alemanes-“Furer,” “Frankfor,” “Guering”-acompaña críticas generalizadas y recetas políticas y económicas de gran simpleza como “presupuesto nivelado,” “estabilización del cambio de la peseta” que ponen de relieve su gran intuición por primaria que ésta fuese. (Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo, 23)

His “success” as a journalist and a man of letters was due to the impoverishment and isolation of the literary scene in postwar Spain. This impoverishment was quite literal since “a causa de las penurias económicas las plumas estilográficas se compraban a plazos que se extendían hasta seis meses” (Pope, Novela de emergencia: España 1939–1954, 108).22 But it was above all ideological; just a couple of weeks after the official end of the civil war, on April 30, 1939, the student Falangist organization (el SEU) organized a public burning of “harmful” books:

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Han hablado con palabras de domingo los camaradas del SEU: Con esta quema de libros contribuimos al edificio de la España: Una, Grande y Libre. Condenamos al fuego a los libros separatistas, liberales, marxistas; a los de la leyenda negra; a los de romanticismo enfermizo, a los pesimistas, a los de modernismo extravagante, a los cursis, a los cobardes, a los pseudocientíficos, a los textos malos, a los periódicos chabacanos. (Rodríguez-Puertolas, Literatura fascista española I, 52)23

In this climate of isolation the rising generation of Spanish writers was cut off from both their immediate literary tradition and contemporary European writing. This situation was also complemented by profound antiintellectualism. Intellectuals were often described as “gente que ha fracasado en la vida; literatos sin lectores, filósofos sin discípulos, arquitectos sin obras, sin medio de vida y movidos por un rencor” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 51). Franco himself gave voice to this repudiation of the intellect; in a telling scene from Raza, one of the brothers attacks his best friend for his neglect of the art of “reading old Spanish stones.”24 Perhaps the most telling moment that shows this profound antiintellectualism occurred on October 12, 1936, in Salamanca, during the celebration of el Día de la Raza, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America. A series of speeches stressed the importance of Spain’s imperialist past and future. Francisco Maldonado de Guevara described the Civil War in terms of the struggle of Spain, traditional values and eternal values against the antiSpain of the reds and the Basques and Catalans. . . . [W]hen Unamuno spoke, it was to counter the frenzied glorification of the war and the repression. He said that the civil war was an uncivil war, that to win was not the same as convince (vencer no es convencer). . . . Unamuno pointed out the necrophiliac inanity of the slogan “Long live death.” Millán Astray shouted “Death to intellectuals” to which Unamuno replied that they were in the temple of intelligence and that such words were a profanity. With shouting and booing rising to a crescendo and Unamuno being threatened by Millán Astray’s armed bodyguards, Doña Carmen intervened. With great presence of mind and no little courage, she took the venerable philosopher by the arm, led him out and took him home in her official car. Such was the ambience of fear in Salamanca at the time that Unamuno was shunned by his acquaintances and removed at the behest of his colleagues from his position in the University. Under virtual house arrest, Unamuno died at the end of December 1936 appalled at the repression, the “collective madness” and the moral suicide of Spain. Nevertheless, he was hailed at his funeral as a Falangist hero. (Preston, Franco, 192)

This event, enacted by important figures of the times—Millán Astray (Franco’s mentor in his formative period during the Legion years), Doña Car-

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men, and Miguel de Unamuno—summarizes crucial, constitutive elements of Franco’s future state. It commemorates the Day of the Race (race and its simplifications being a crucial concept in Francoist ideological apparatus). It suppresses plural elements (Basques and Catalans), introduces fear (Unamuno being shunned by his acquaintances), and proposes death to intellectuals, but simultaneously appropriates intellectual figures (Unamuno hailed as a Falangist hero). In this climate of fear, isolation, and oppression, the intellectual is replaced by the warrior/writer, who becomes an incisive figure for understanding the decade. Franco himself was exalted by critics of the period precisely because he “reunía en su persona los atributos de tres grandes figuras de la literatura española: la espada del Cid, la vara del alcalde de Zalamea y la lanza de Don Quijote” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 612). From the very beginning defined by his African, imperial, military mission, Franco repeated frequently that “esa regeneración de España por la espada, sería sólo un primer paso para españolizar el mundo” (Vázquez Montalbán, Los demonios, 50). Franco’s despotic body was “best defined as privileging of maleness in collective symbolization and the preeminence of the masculine voice in collective ideation” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 137), marking the period with its notions of masculinity and its bellicose spirit and history. The warrior/writer exalted themes of patriotism, strength, discipline, honor, virility, courage, heroism, Falangist militarism, and nationalism. A literary scene saturated by military, patriotic discourses reinforced the cultural isolation of Spain, setting the ideological tone of the new state. Thus the figure of hombres mitad monjes y mitad soldados, noble warriors embodying an exaltation of militarist expansion, emerges in its full force: En España encontráis hoy un oasis de paz y cristiandad gracias al esfuerzo de sus hijos. Hubo un tiempo de una Iglesia militante en España, con aquellos hombres mitad monjes y mitad soldados, combatientes y defensores de la fe: aquello se fue esfumando con el paso de los siglos; pero llegó un momento de nuestra Patria en que la masonería y las fuerzas del mal sumieron a la nación en el estado más catastrófico que pueda imaginarse. Y entonces, gracias a Dios, resurgieron aquellos hombres que, con el brío y el espíritu de monje-soldado, tomaron parte en nuestra Cruzada, y gracias a sus sacrificios, en esta hora tan difícil del mundo, España se encuentra tranquila, con fe y fortaleza para defenderse de todo cuanto venga. (Vázquez Montalbán, Los demonios, 218)

Franco personified better than anyone else this ideal. He was almost never seen in public without his uniform. He was above all a military man and only after that a family man, and he never ceased to emphasize that his utmost

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duty was to serve his country first. He made sure that it was well known that he “aplazó por dos veces su boda requerido por exigencias del servicio a la Patria” while his wife was “muy mujer por su actitud pasiva y el espíritu de sacrificio; Franco fue su primer novio y también el único” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 27). Franco significantly appropriated this concept of hombres mitad monjes y mitad soldados from José Antonio. The trope was also already embodied by Giménez Caballero, during his “performance” in the Salamanca cathedral, where he “subió al púlpito, en tinieblas, vestido con un capote militar provisto de capucha, que se caló como si fuera un monje, para imprecar a Madrid” (Ridruejo, Casi unas memorias, 157).25 Franco goes further, tying this concept of mitad monje, mitad soldado to the Almogávares.26 The exaltation of austerity and bellicose spirit that the Almogávares embody often lead Franco to talk incessantly about these “elected warriors”: “cuando en España surge un voluntario para el sacrificio, un héroe para la batalla o un visionario para la aventura, hay siempre en él un almogávar.”27 All of these ideas, characterizing the 1940s, had already emerged in the Diario de una bandera, Franco’s personal diary of the days in the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco.28 Diario de una bandera was above all imprinted by Millán Astray’s influence—thirteen years older than Franco—and his glorification and romanticization of discipline, hardship, violence, sacrifice, and death. Its presumptuous title alludes to and suggests Franco slowly merging with the nation. In this diary of the flag “body, family, and country share a common substance that unites them but at the same time seems to exist on a higher plane than they” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 90). This incipient fusion is also seen through Franco’s proliferating copies of it later on, “suggesting an awareness of the value of a public presence in the longed-for transition from hero to general” (Preston, Franco, 34). Two episodes from Diario de una bandera especially call attention and show Franco’s contradictory and complex nature. The first is about a young officer in Morocco meeting his long lost father.29 “A young officer in Morocco is crossing the street when a grizzled veteran soldier salutes him. The officer goes to return the salute, their eyes meet, they look at each other and embrace in tears. It is the officer’s long-lost father” (Preston, Franco, 5). Eyes that meet, the apocryphal story of the long-lost father, and two men embracing in tears are all sites of emotional signification. A soldier is caught in the moment of vulnerability; the effect of the story combines melodramatic materialization of sentiment colored by a trace of hysteria. The hysteria of the masculine subjects in the legion is noticed by Preston when he emphasized that “in his speech of welcome to the first recruits, a hysterical Millán told them that, as thieves and murderers, their lives had been at an end before joining the Legion. Inspired by a frenzied and contagious fervor,

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he offered them a new life but the price to be paid would be their deaths. He called them “los novios de la muerte” (Preston, Franco, 28). In the second story a young legionary ruthlessly killing Moors replaces the one that was so exposed and vulnerable in his father’s embrace: Pocos momentos después, llegan a la posición las otras unidades; el pequeño Charlot, cornetín de órdenes, trae una oreja de moro, ‘Lo he matado yo’, dice enseñándola a los compañeros. Al pasar el barranco vio un moro escondido entre las peñas y encarándole la carabina, le subió al camino junto a las tropas; el moro le suplicaba: ‘¡Paisa no matar, paisa no matar!’-¿No matar?, ¡Eh!, marchar a sentar en esta piedra, y apuntándole descarga sobre él su carabina y le corta la oreja que sube como trofeo. No es ésta la primera hazaña del joven legionario. (Franco, Diario de una bandera, 613)

Young Charlot triumphantly cuts off the Moor’s ear after discharging an entire clip of his rifle into his body. The severed ear recalls a common practice of the Spanish Foreign Legion appropriating parts of the enemies’ body during the Moroccan years. This story has a historical reference, most likely referring to the 1921 massacre of Spanish soldiers at Dar Drius, where Franco deciding to take revenge returned “the next morning with his volunteers carrying as trophies the bloody heads of twelve harqueños (tribesmen).” Severed and displayed bloody heads, ears, and other cut up pieces of body—the ruthlessness of the second story matches in its intensity the naked emotions of the first one. Los novios de la muerte oscillate between aggression and vulnerability. Masculinity dissolves, be it through tears and embraces or through killing the other that Theweleit reads in terms of “the externalization of the fear of ego-dissolution.” These two episodes from Diario de una bandera uncannily reveal Franco’s contradictory nature: on the one hand his well known cruelty and on the other his somewhat less mentioned insecurity (inferiority complex, traumatized, childish personality); his propensity for both killing and weeping (bursting uncontrollably into tears). This contradiction crystallizes in the Duquesa de la Victoria’s visit to Morocco in 1922. As a tribute from the Legion she was given “a basket of roses in the center of which lay two severed Moorish heads” (Preston, Franco, 29). Two severed Moorish heads arranged together with roses once again embodies Franco’s own perplexing sensibility: aesthetics and death; beauty and blood; love for painting (naturaleza muerta) and killing. Franco himself and those who surrounded him were always emphasizing his intense link with military identity and the war. He explained his departure from Morocco thus: “There’s no shooting. This war has become a job like any other. . . . Now all we do is vegetate” (Preston, Franco, 37). Franco’s military identity, in one form or another, lasted until his death. In the memoirs written by Vicente Pozuelo Escudero, Franco’s doctor who took care of him for

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the last 476 days of his life, we read that he succeeded in curing Franco’s depression by playing him military band songs from his active martial era. Franco’s moribund body only functions by simulating long gone military times and marching to his favorite Civil War tunes: Sus ojos se hicieron más brillantes; apretó los labios, levantó la barbilla; estiró los hombros. Me pareció que se ponía marcial. Su cara se alegró. Se había producido el milagro . . . se trataba, sobre todo, de preguntarle cosas, de hacerle contar algo que le volviera a sus grandes, a sus primeros tiempos militares. (Pozuelo Escudero, Los últimos 476 días de Franco, 39)30

Dependence on war, its glorification, and desire for its perpetuation was still strongly felt during the Second World War, as well as in its aftermath. The very first NO-DO31 from January 4, 1943 characterizes the war as beautifully impressive spectacle: El arte de la guerra presenta a veces espectáculos tan bellamente impresionantes como éste. Un destacamento de esquiadores se desliza por las heladas cortaduras de Dombay-Ulgen. . . . Un grupo de choque soviético se aproxima cautelosamente al amparo de las montañas. . . . Los cazadores alpinos se lanzan vertiginosamente a ocupar sus posiciones: es el maravilloso deporte de la muerte. (Rodríguez Martínez, NO-DO, catecismo social de una época, 178)32

It was also envisioned as an element of progress: “la guerra es un elemento de progreso. ¡Es absolutamente necesaria! Los hombres necesitan la guerra. La guerra es absolutamente precisa e inevitable. La siente el hombre con un imperio intuitivo, ancestral, y será en el porvenir lo que fue en el pasado . . . ¿Los pueblos sin guerra?” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 38). Finally there is a desire for its infinite perpetuation: “¿por qué las guerras finalizan tan bobamente en la paz y no concluyen iniciando otra guerra? Las guerras piden, deberían pedir siempre más guerra” (Castillo-Puche, El vengador, 14).33 The three instances cited above—the dying body revived by war, the man that thrives on war, and the war that should always ask for more war—capture and articulate the Spanish “essence” in the 40s, the national body as a fighting machine. The despotic military body, the soldier, the writer, and the nation are arrested in a perpetual space of war, producing texts saturated by indistinguishable affects of pleasure, killing, death, dread, and horror. This obsession with war was brilliantly captured in Ricardo Fernández de la Reguera’s novel Cuerpo a tierra34 about fighting a perpetual war without any enemy. All of the above war obsessions culminated in a paradoxical definition of peace given by Radio Nacional, emphasizing that peace is not “un reposo cómodo y cobarde ante la Historia. La sangre de los que cayeron por la Patria

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no consiente el olvido, la esterilidad ni la traición. Españoles, alerta. España sigue en pie de guerra contra todo enemigo del interior o del exterior” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 5).

CINEMA

Several films made in the 1940s could be classified as “patriotic war films” and were used as an ideological vehicle of the newly established regime. Two other genres heavily invested in the formation of the new state were, for example, el cine de misionarios y los musicales folclóricos.35 Thus, the film production of the 1940s was diverse and is not reducible solely to the “patriotic war film.” In this chapter, however, I am interested in how this particular genre merged with Franco’s despotic body and the national body as fighting machine.36 “Patriotic war films,” such as Luis Peña’s Harka (1940), José Luis Sáenz de Heredia’s Raza (1941), and Juan de Orduña’s A mí la legión (1942), and Franco’s own ideological agenda were interlinked through a shared conception of history, war, and military duty; in the film circles in the 1940s it was repeatedly exclaimed “We must have a cinema of cavaliers and noblemen. El Cid must be a worthier figure in Spain than Don Juan” (Molina-Foix, New Cinema in Spain, 2).37 Harka, Raza, and A mí la legión can be read as one (dis)continuous narrative demonstrating Benedict Anderson’s claim that “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Imagined Communities, 6).38 Raza, Harka, and A mí la legión, saturated with clichés of the “glorious” Spanish past and characterized by a solemn and exaggerated tone, are the cinema of heroes and ideals, patriotic and military actions, and distorted historical views. The “official” history depicted on the screen legitimized the establishment of the new state. Its vision of history was presented by selected flashbacks and the historical “continuum” expressed by the repetition of selected details. Hence, it was always extracted and isolated from its real historical context. It served to summarize the past, to unite it, and to affirm it by freezing history into a permanent and static form. Such films served as a continuous narrative of national progress, with its emphasis on national destiny, power, conquest, sacrifice, hero worship, and exaltation of militarism. These films, set in their own glorious and imaginary past, and dissociated from their real cultural and social milieu, concealed all the pressing issues of the postwar, such as hunger, poverty,39 domestic relations, and social and class conflicts. Martín Gaite comments that the younger generation avoided them because “los jóvenes de postguerra sabíamos muy bien que una película española o nos iba a contar una historia heróica de las que venían en los libros de texto o nos iba a enlazar las delicias de un amor sacrificado y decente” (Usos amorosos, 33).

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The patriotic films from the 1940s blur the boundaries between aesthetics and ethics, conceptualizing aesthetics in terms of moral issues: “casi todo lo que se escribía en la prensa por los años cuarenta, tratara de cine, de modas o de decoración de interiores, tenía tono de sermón” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 31). Actors were also part of this fight for “moral” cinema since “los actores españoles manifestaban una manera de ser nacional obsesionada por la transcendencia” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 32). All of these ideas were theoretically debated in Primer Plano, an influential film journal favored by the regime. José López Rubio, an actor interviewed by Fernando Castán Palomar in Primer Plano, summarizes the importance of this “heroic genre”: Yo creo que hay que ir al género heroico, la historia y la aventura. No la aventura estúpida, sino la que es capaz de despertar optimismo en la juventud. . . . Por eso lo interesante para la producción española es dar con el propio espíritu nacional. Para esto la base histórica es ineludible. ¿No se escribieron los dramas de capa y espada para exaltar el sentimiento caballeresco? Pues haga el cine ahora la exaltación de estas virtudes de la raza, felizmente avivadas. . . . Es obligación que no queda reducida para el área peninsular.40

Raza was acclaimed as both the prototype and the culmination of this heroic genre. As the regime critic Fernando Méndez-Leite observed, “Raza acertó ya en su título para lograr llegar al límite de cuanto puede exigirse a un film de su género” (Méndez-Leite 424).41 Even though it was well known that Franco himself wrote it under the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, critics praised the modesty of the author, who did not reveal his real name: “seudónimo que encubre la modestia y, al par, interesante personalidad de un gran patriota” (Méndez-Leite, Historia del cine español, 424). Raza was filmed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, a director closely linked to the regime42 and a cousin of civil war martyr (founder of the Falange) José Antonio Primo de Rivera. If Franco was known as the “defensor de la cultura clásica,” José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, director of Raza, was described by Adriano del Valle as “un nuevo Pygmalión”: Ya conocéis la fábula antigua de Galatea y Pygmalión. Pygmalión, escultor de los mejores mármoles pentélicos, modeló Galetea. La mayor gloria del escultor Pygmalión no fue la de modelar un busto. Fue la de modelar un alma. . . . Y he aquí un nuevo Pygmalión-José Luis Sáenz de Heredia-y una nueva Galetea de celuloide: la Cinematografía española. Ahora encontró nuestro cine su voz entrañable y su alma nacional. Nuestros mejores realizadores serán aquellos que doten de un alma genuinamente española a nuestro cine. Si el cine es el lenguaje universal por excelencia, el esperanto de los ojos, démosle, desde España, alma de largo metraje a nuestro ser español, a

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nuestra verdad frente al mundo, a nuestras pasiones humanas y a nuestra espiritualidad firmemente católica. Y porque nuestra Galatea de celuloide, esto es, nuestra Cinematografía, encontró en José Luis Sáenz de Heredia su Pygmalión, nos reunimos esta noche quienes tuvimos fe en que el milagro llegaría. (Guarner, 30 años de cine en español, 21)43

Franco praising Sáenz de Heredia, and Sáenz de Heredia stating that “Franco es el mejor actor que he dirigido” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 611) returned the “lost, authentic” soul to Spanish culture, literature, and cinema in a collaborative effort where Pygmalión met the “defensor de cultura clásica.” Raza was first screened on January 5, 1942, in the Palacio de la Música de Madrid. Several ministers and high government officials were present, among others Ramón Serrano Suñer. Franco did not come to the opening, but he saw it in El Pardo, rumors being that “se le saltaron las lágrimas pero tan sólo comentó: ‘Sáenz de Heredia, usted ha cumplido’” (Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo, 252). Raza was dedicated “To the youth of Spain, whose blood paved the way for our rebirth.” The dedication itself bears the mark of Franco’s persistent appropriation of José Antonio. However, while rebirth for José Antonio meant a “return to barbarian virility,” for Franco it meant a “return to purity in the sense of Puritanism” (Labanyi, Myth and History, 37). Raza tells the story of Captain Pedro Churruca, his wife Isabel de Andrade and their four children ( José, Pedro, Jaime, and Isabel). Captain Churruca has a distinguished military ancestry, including one Admiral Damián Churruca who died in the battle of Trafalgar. Despite his dedication to family, his sense of duty comes first. In this spirit, and soon after the beginning of the film, the Captain is summoned to battle and dies defending Cuba, one of the last Spanish colonies, in 1898. After his death, the narrative cuts to the mid-1930s when the children of Captain Churruca have grown up. José (played by Alfredo Mayo) follows in his father’s footsteps as he joins the military; Isabel marries José’s best friend; Jaime heeds a religious calling; and Pedro, the black sheep of the family, becomes an atheist deputy and aligns himself with the Republican forces. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, José joins the Nationalist troops, but is captured and imprisoned by the Republicans and condemned to death. He dies by firing squad, but when his girlfriend Marisol reports to collect his remains, he is miraculously resurrected. His brother Padre Jaime is not so lucky. Republican forces savagely murder him alongside his spiritual brethren from the convent. After a long collaboration with the Republican side, Pedro, the treacherous black sheep brother, undergoes a change of heart and decides to give his troops’ secret attack plans to the Nationalists. The Republican army puts him to death but his political conversion compensates for his tragic end.

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The film closes with José marching among the Nationalist troops, commemorating their ultimate victory in the Civil War, while Marisol, his sister, and his nephew proudly watch from the cheering crowds. The family of Captain Pedro Churruca is everything that Franco’s family was not, but that he wanted it to be. It is difficult not to recognize Franco’s mother in the virginal, sacrificial Isabel de Andrade, Franco’s problematic brothers in Churruca’s brothers, and above all Captain Pedro Churruca as Franco’s own father. Whether he was replaying patricidal fantasies (Captain Churruca’s death in military combat) or constructing imaginary and melodramatic reunions (Diario de una bandera), Franco’s texts were filled with tensions arising from this compulsive focus on the father figure. Franco hid and embellished his father’s not exactly “exemplary” life; he was a drinker and a gambler who had abandoned his family to live with his common-law wife and illegitimate son and who “en los últimos tiempos vivía ebrio e insultaba a su hijo, ya Jefe del Estado” (Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo, 248). With the exorbitant military funeral lavished on his natural father, who conveniently died in the 1940s, Franco succeeded in interpolating his recalcitrant parent into the script’s imaginary, perfect family,44 thus matching patriotic fanaticism with the intensity of the family trauma. According to Marsha Kinder, “this version of the Oedipal narrative denies all erotic rivalries, for sexuality is totally repressed, its energies displaced to a patriotic fanaticism” (Blood Cinema: Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, 200).45 Ambiguous boundaries between the family unit and the nation are intentionally played out both on the screen and in Franco’s personal life. Raza is more than just an apocryphal, fictional autobiography; text (film) and life are so closely merged as to make it impossible to distinguish between reality and fiction. Franco is simultaneously erasing and rewriting Spanish history, while obsessively recounting his own family story. Sáenz Heredia employs historical narrative, war, melodrama, and romance to magnify and juxtapose struggles and tensions in the personal and the public spheres (individual, family, nation). Melodramatic conventions complement well this particular moment in Spanish history marked by a threatening and unstable social environment and ideological crisis since they operate on the principle of dichotomizing the world and stressing the division between the two Spains. Family members are divided along political lines to the point where familial and national boundaries blur completely. There is a thorough imbrication of nation, family, and individual in these times of reconfiguring the nation. External conflict (war) is replaying itself within the borders of the family itself; then in turn the family crisis serves to point out the crisis in the existing broader social structure. José and Pedro, each embodying one of the two Spains, are central to the film. Their ideological rift is highlighted by a detailed description of their

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drastically different lives. Sáenz de Heredia shoots many parallel scenes from their lives, with military time/space coordinates set against bourgeois time/space coordinates. The worldly, passing things such as money and material luxury that Pedro acquires are contrasted with José’s spiritual possessions, such as military glory and his self-sacrifice for the nation. Despite material goods, Pedro is suffocated in his social environment, while José’s virtue is timeless and inspirational. José does not hesitate to die for his country, echoing Franco’s words to his nation that “nuestro deber es morir” (Vázquez Montalbán, Los demonios, 62). José’s personal sacrifice has heavy-handed religious undertones culminating in his shooting, death, and miraculous revival.46 His reappearance from the dead is “a miracle of faith, light, and cinema” (Affron, “Identifications,” 114).47 José and Marisol represent this blind faith in the Falangist cause that is rewarded by his resurrection and their reunion. Thus national epic and political struggle are fully harmonized with a heterosexual romance. Isabel’s young son has an important function in Raza as well. In the last scene of the film, while pointing to his uncle José in the victorious parade, he asks his mother “¿cómo se llama esto, madre?” Her answer, “esto se llama raza, hijo mío,” ties several generations together in a narrative closure; soldiers who already gave their lives for the nation (Pedro Churruca); one who has just returned from the fighting ( José); and a future soldier (the inquisitive little boy) who already has a chance to experience indirectly the spirit of the race. The ending emphasizes the Imperial Spanish past and a possible imperial future that unites all of the above historical moments. In this way the Battle of Trafalgar and the crises from 1898 up to the Civil War are presented as an unbroken historical continuum. A mí la legión, directed by Juan de Orduña in 1942, revolves around themes similar to those discussed in Raza: patriotism, heroism, military loyalty, and male friendship. The action begins in Northern Africa where Mauro, a recently arrived legionnaire, and an old timer named El Grajo strike up an instant friendship that marks the beginning of a deepening relationship. Their friendship passes through several trials and is severely tested when Mauro is accused of a murder. El Grajo discovers the real murderer, an infamous Jewish usurer, which only intensifies their bond. Shortly afterwards an unexpected event separates them, when Mauro receives a mysterious letter and disappears without a trace. A couple of years later, El Grajo, while wandering through the imaginary land of Eslonia, is asked by a group of armed men to assassinate the King. He refuses but afterwards while watching a parade he realizes that the king of Eslonia is none other than Mauro himself. The flashbacks from their time together in the Legion glisten before his eyes as he foils the assassination plot. Rewarded by becoming Mauro’s right-hand man, they spend happy days together in his palace reminiscing about their years in the Legion. Their idyl-

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lic existence is interrupted once more by the outbreak of war and El Grajo’s decision to return to the Legion. However, his days in the Legion are simply not the same as those glory days when he fought alongside Mauro. Mauro feels the same. Missing both the excitement of war and the bond with El Grajo, he secretly returns to the Legion. The film’s closing shot is a long embrace at their final reunion in the Legion just prior to their departure for the front. Once again, the narrative is driven by the recurring separation and reunion of the main characters. This time the action is centered solely on two male heroes, El Grajo and Mauro. They are famililess, solitary, nonconforming individuals, with no ties to anything but the Legion. Their uprootedness is the source of their mystique, as well as of the tensions in their personal relationship. Their bond has all the narrative conventions of buddy films: seduction of the young Mauro by the older and more experienced El Grajo; the murder accusation that interrupts their happiness; Mauro’s secret abandonment of the Legion; reunion after many years of separation; another abandonment; and a final reunion at the front. The intense physical intimacy between El Grajo and Mauro is never manifested overtly, but viewers are nevertheless always conscious of a charged sexuality (the camera lingers on several naked bodies of soldiers and concentrates on their hugs, touches and ardent physical proximity). Mauro and El Grajo’s relationship exemplifies the thin line between homosocial and homoerotic male-male relations. Thus the glorified traumas of national martyrdom are saturated with intense and ambiguous male relationships, paradoxically showing dissonance within a collectivity. All the underlying tensions left unexpressed in A mí la legión surface more intensely and overtly still in Harka. Directed by Carlos Arévalo in 1941, Harka is set in Northern Africa and is dedicated to the memory of the heroes of the Moroccan War (1919–27) who died trying to restore the imperial greatness of Spain. The main characters are Captain Valcázar (Alfredo Mayo)48 and his young lieutenant Carlos (Luis Peña). Captain Valcázar embodies 1940s Falangist virtues: a charismatic leader who repudiates the intellect and glorifies self-sacrifice. From the very start the Captain becomes a surrogate father to Carlos. Captain Valcázar’s grandiose vision of hardship, life, personal sacrifice, and history, is summed up in their unit’s motto: “tener más corazón que el harqueño más bravo de Harka.”49 His constant lectures on past history serve to create a sense of destiny and common purpose aimed toward the future. Captain Valcázar and Carlos become closer and closer as each day passes and this new bond is strengthened in several battles where they are comrades-in-arms. The strong intimacy between the characters is emphasized through close-ups of their bodies, hands, arms, and eyes as they talk under the stars or near the fire.

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Despite enjoying being in the legion, Carlos decides to return to his fiancée Amparo and his civilian life in Madrid. His hardest task is to convey this decision to his Captain. Himself tormented by presentiments that Carlos will leave for the capital, Captain Valcázar goes to the bar and waits in desperation. He refuses vehemently to dance with a girl and when Carlos finally comes and tells him “tengo algo que decirte,” he replies “ya lo sé.” The Captain then reproachfully remarks: “creí que eras como yo.” Carlos’s ambiguous question: “¿Tú no has querido nunca; no sientes la necesidad de cariño, ternura; eres de bronce?” prompts Captain Valcázar to get up, smash the glass and storm out of the bar. This tense, key moment in the film is accompanied by flashbacks to their first encouters, thus stressing even further the strong emotional bond already established. The second part of the film centers on Carlos’s new life in the capital, contrasting his civilian life in Madrid and that in the Harka. Captain Valcázar’s free spirit is compared to Carlos’s entrapment in the material world of his family, fiancée, and repressive values of his surroundings. This time his Madrid life is filled with unease.50 During a grand dance party, Carlos suddenly remembers Captain Valcázar and abruptly leaves the bewildered Amparo alone on the dance floor. Unable to bear his life in Madrid without the Legion, he returns to Africa. Upon his return to the Harka, Carlos is further shaken by the news of Captain Valcázar’s death and replaces him as leader of the unit. The film ends with Carlos shredding Amparo’s photo into pieces, thus breaking completely with his civilian past and embracing his military identity alone. The insistence on military identity in these films replays Franco’s already mentioned postponement of marriage to Carmen Polo. It was well known that Franco’s defect was his love for Africa. Even the chaste Doña Carmen complained that “he likes Africa too much and he studies books which I don’t understand.” His own return to Africa in 1923 strikingly resembles Carlos’s story: A journalist remarked sycophantically “how the brave Legionnaires will rejoice at his appointment!” Franco replied “Rejoice? Why? I’m an officer just like . . . ,” only to be interrupted by a passing ex-Legionnaire who said “say yes, that they will all rejoice, of course they will rejoice.” Like a hero of romantic fiction, Franco replied with a modest laugh, saying “Don’t go overboard. Yes, you’re right, the lads care for me a lot.” (Preston, Franco, 39)

What is interesting about all the three films is the way they problematize the fragile boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual; masculinity and femininity. In Harka, “proper” homosociality is resolved through the death of Captain Valcázar, since “the death of one or both friends works to

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suppress questions of homosexual desire at a point where the narrative has run its course and the audience is wondering what these men will do next” (Babuscio, “Buddy Love: Men and Friendship in Films,” 24).51 Even though they take place before, after, or during wars, the three films are not really centered on action but on “emotions which in melodrama serve as the links between melodramatic episodes” (Durgnat, “Ways of Melodrama,” 138).52 Through the insistent use of close ups the everyday military space and quotidian reality is transformed into a site of emotional signification. A traditional melodramatic use of frequent close-ups of the anxious heroine characterizes the shots of the male couples from Harka and A mí la legión, calling attention to the gendered subject of melodrama. There are also several narrative strategies in play enhancing the hero’s suffering, where suffering as a familiar terrain of melodrama fits perfectly into the promotion of that ennobling suffering so much emphasized by Franco and Doña Carmen.53 Excessive and romanticized Falangist vocabulary matches perfectly that of the melodrama where “emotions are like clubs which characters swing about their heads and knock each other (and often themselves) out with” (Durgnat, “Ways of Melodrama,” 137). It is as if José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s well-known clichés of stars, land, and virility were meant to be recited aloud in the Spanish postwar film: in those distant colonial lands around a fire. The three films can constructively be read against Franco’s apochryphal biography. The rigid postwar ideals and the values of the postwar era were exemplified, embodied, and symbolized in Franco, his life, his military and political career, and his family. However, by exploring Franco’s life, his speeches, his scripting of Raza, his family pathologies, and so on, I am not attempting to establish a simplistic cause-effect relation. These texts and subtexts are all “effects of a common dynamic that is contained neither in the concept, nor in the texts, nor in the events, but is located in their interstices, inhabiting the space of their interrelation” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 12). In her memoirs Pilar Primo de Rivera recalls the day that Raza was shown to an all-female audience. The audio broke down, but it did not impede the screening since they all knew the script by heart: “Un día en que se proyectaba la película Raza se estropeó el sonido y hubo que suplirlo con la participación vocal de las profesoras, que, como la habían proyectado cientos de veces, se la sabían de memoria” (Recuerdos de una vida, 242). Paradoxically, this imaginary totalitarian unity of the regime claimed by Pilar Primo de Rivera has quite the opposite effect. Women’s bodies are caught in an “idiotic enjoyment” that is not as harmonious and congenial as it might appear at first. The text is “replayed to exhaustion, and this endless repetition changes a lovely melody into a painfully disgusting parasite” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 128).

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The antinomies covered over by the imagined unity of national identity emerge through intrusion of various “suppressed subjects” (such as a homosexual figure). Thus the seemingly monolithic narratives of Harka, Raza, and A mí la legión are fragmented, filled with lapses and illogical gaps, emphasizing the “capacity to flesh out the unnatural aspects of social reality, to articulate cinematically how the reality itself is a collective cultural fantasy” (Schatz, “The Family Melodrama,” 166).54 This collective cultural fantasy is full of emotions ranging from seduction, betrayal, abandonment, extortion, murder, and revenge, to jealousy, obsession, compulsion, and misdirected desire. Above all, it is imbued with hysteria that is not solely a character trait, but a formal property of the texts themselves: The undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the action . . . is expressed in the music and in certain elements of the miseen-scène, which do not just heighten the emotionality of an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for it. The mechanism here is strikingly similar to that of the psychopathology of hysteria. In the melodrama, where there is always material which cannot be expressed in discourse or in the actions of the characters furthering the designs of the plot, a conversion can take place into the body of the text. It is not that the characters are often prone to hysteria, but that the film itself somatises its own unaccommodated excess, which thus appears displaced or in the wrong place. (Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” 272)55

The persistent, insidious hysteria of Harka, Raza, and A mí la legión was unnoticed when the films were released, but now in retrospect seem to ‘haunt’ the narrative. “A denial of body for a timeless idea” manifests itself through some other venue such as the hysterical masculine subject or the feminization of his protégé. Hysterical narratives mirror Franco and his politics. If we apply Foucault’s suggestion of shortening vision to “those things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 89), Franco’s own body would then emerge as residuum, remnant, and surplus (marked by hysteria, excess, performativity, and travesty). Franco’s despotic body, besides traits coded as masculine (cruelty, coldness, propensity for killing) was also marked by a hardly ever mentioned femininity. The dictator’s body was shattered by hysterical weeping, jealous outbursts directed against Ramón Serrano Suñer and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, obsessive retelling of the paternal trauma, and pathological blushing and shyness. Mussolini’s ambassador Roberto Cantalupo56 described him as “icy, feminine and elusive” (Preston, Franco, xx) and the Catalan novelist and journalist Juan Ferragut said “when he is praised he blushes like a girl who has been flattered” (Preston, Franco, 37). He was known for “a gentle manner, a soft voice, a propensity to weep, an enduring sense of deprivation, a

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tone of self-pitying resentment” (Preston, Franco, 6). Others remarked: “His eyes are the most remarkable part of his physiognomy, typically Spanish, large and luminous with long lashes” (Preston, Franco, 168). Whitaker, the distinguished American journalist, focused on Franco’s hands “like a woman’s and always damp with perspiration” (Preston, Franco, 168). Franco’s propensity for both killing and weeping, his growing appetite and expanding body, his feminized-shrieky voice, and so on, disturbed preconceived boundaries of the dictator’s despotic body. Franco’s despotic body is the “body-as-motion, rather than the body-as-object” that is “defined by what and how many potential gestures/trajectories it incarnates” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 137).57

LITERATURE

Contradictions captured in 1940s film production also materialize in fiction as a surplus of the forced postwar unity, since “wherever there is a drive for unity, there will be a driving tension between presence and absence, immanence and transcendence, the utopian past and its contemporary return” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 135). The conquest, sacrifice, hero worship, glorification of militarism, and so on, exalted in patriotic war films and Spanish society permeate the literary scene as well. As emphasized by Rafael García Serrano: “No es nada para nosotros la Literatura, ni el Arte, ni la Música. Nada nos importa pasar por el Mundo sin dejar otra huella que la de las botas de clavos” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 508).58 Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s Javier Mariño and Rafael García Serrano’s La fiel infantería, both texts from 1943, echo the national obsessions listed above.59 They are illustrative of their times, participate in the formation of the nation but at the same time are ridden by incongruous moments (sexual anxieties, bodily tensions, uneasiness about masculinity), thus creating dissonance within the national project by exposing its denaturalized and constructed character. Rafael García Serrano is a writer/warrior, his writing inseparable from Falangist causes, where the Falange is “la mujer joven, virgen, desnuda, rodeada de fusiles y sangre” (Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista española II, 268).60 Infatuated with Falange he stated, “Yo sirvo en la literatura como serviría en una escuadra. Con la misma intensidad y el mismo objetivo. Cualquier otra cosa me parecería una traición” (Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española I, 237). García Serrano describes his book La fiel infantería, written in 1943, as a recollection of armed tourism: “recorríamos España en alegre turismo armado. El turismo que precisamente le estaba haciendo falta a España” (57). This work is partially autobiographical: hero’s wartime

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experiences mirror García Serrano’s patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia. Mario, the main character, is an uncommitted individual, who slowly gains political consciousness and starts fighting for the cause. It is a Falangist bildungsroman, starting with an uncommitted individual gaining a firm vision of purpose and the future. This vision of the future starts with a war against soiled society resembling the Olympic Games, with its “condecoraciones de guerreros y poetas caídos del cielo en medio de una sociedad manchada que no sabía más que comer, celebrar elecciones y acostarse con prostitutas” (29). It is accompanied by the confusion of war and sex metaphors, where people in the trenches “siempre aguardaban la batalla con la impaciencia de un encuentro amoroso” (29). After joining the military Mario walks around the streets displaying his Falangist shirt, “su título de hombría” (31) and longing to kill because “nada satisface más en combate que vaciarle una ametralladora a un objetivo humano detrás de los arbustos” (71). This desire recalls Franco’s own writing about the young legionnaire’s cutting of the moor’s ear and bragging about it in front of his fellow soldiers (“lo he matado yo”). Many implicit and explicit references and myths surrounding Franco’s Moroccan years saturate the book. Mario is wounded, but he “sólo reconoce un tipo de heridas: las menores. Cualquier otra cosa es un pasaporte al otro mundo” (37). This stoic acceptance of pain resembles Franco’s own dismissal of a wound that almost killed him.61 After countless battles and contemplation of war, the book ends with Mario’s final and firm conversion to the Falangist cause, accompanied by the realization that he is just a part of a larger, extraordinarily powerful and meaningful historical process: A la hora de marcar el paso tras la música, borracho de banderas y de historia-esa historia familiar del abuelo que murió en la otra guerra o del padre que tiene una cruz-loco de virilidad, el hombre piensa que nada hay comparable a ser soldado y dar la vida por la Patria, sí, pero también por la dulce muchacha que le abraza o que le da un vaso de vino o pan o una mirada húmeda. (44)

Thus, at the end of the novel, an individual (Mario), merges into and becomes a battle unit. He becomes what Klaus Theweleit calls “the new combat machine” that represents “a new unified concentration of energy by means of the consolidation of a number of warriors into one deindividualized and mechanized unit” (Male Fantasies, 153).62 This spectacle of power and virility is accompanied by the music of a military band greeting General Mola. Transcending present time and space: “Miramos hacia adelante, con los ojos húmedos y llenos de la emoción de siglos. ¿Acaso el hombre de Flandes, arrogante en batalla, no había conocido un día similar, con su bigote todavía mojado de

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cerveza o de la rubia burguesa de kermesse? ” (40), the nation and the individual merge. Common soldier and general, as well as several generations of the same family (grandson, father, and grandfather) are unequivocaly tied through battle, women, and drinking. Here Franco’s Almogávar meets the man of Flanders in the timeless, imaginary, and eternal space of Spanish glory that decontextualizes the particularity of the Spanish Civil War. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, a more sophisticated and complex writer than Rafael García Serrano, also had tumultuous ties with the Falange. Torrente Ballester dedicates the first version of Javier Mariño, written in 1943, to Dionisio Ridruejo as a “prueba de amistad y camaradería.” Their relationship mirrors Ridruejo’s own ambiguous relationship to the regime63 and the gradual weakening of his infatuation with the Falange. Javier Mariño is a Falangist novel of conversion in which the hero, unsure of his political orientation, goes to Paris, and after several trial periods finally embraces the Falangist cause. The novel is partially autobiographical since Torrente Ballester himself spent some time researching in Paris while he was active in the Falange. It is a political and sexual coming of age novel. The novel opens with Javier Mariño’s departure for Paris motivated by personal and political decisions. He is leaving both his political past and two women behind: María de la Victoria: “que era un poco obra suya: tranquila, seria, virtuosa. Y a un hombre siempre le gusta acercarse a una niña en trance de ser mujer, y conducirla, casi educarla” (19) and María de las Mercedes: “su coquetería que era un producto refinado de la civilización. Era un final de raza” (17). The crucial theme of the novel, is articulated immediately. Javier Mariño obsessively centers on the movement of desire and the struggle with the erotic forces that are trying to engulf the protagonist: “El hombre debe dominar su pasión y los sueños. El mundo del deseo es peligroso. El hombre es una cosa pequeña y turbia; pero puede ser claro y excelso” (27). In Paris Javier stays with Carlos Bernández, his old acquaintance, and Carlos’ girlfriend, Irene. Lascivious and decadent Carlos is the incarnation of Javier’s worst fears: “Dotado de una absoluta carencia de energía, vivía exclusivamente para el vino y los placeres sexuales, que tomaba donde se hallasen, sin preocuparse mucho de si el vino o la mujer eran añejos o deteriorados” (40). Carlos’s living space, as disturbing as Carlos’s personality, inundates Javier: “En la pared, sobre la cama revuelta, la fotografía de una talla florentina y una Virgen de Botticelli; debajo, justamente, un dibujo lascivo, y dos más en el testero de enfrente. Y sobre la cama, ordenadamente colocados, una serie de grabados pornográficos” (43). Irene is the biggest threat to Javier: she is an immoral, erotic woman triggering the chaos of stimuli that threaten to destroy him. His hatred is so intense that he even desires to kill her: “Era la mujer más desagradable que había visto en su vida, y de buena gana la mataría” (47). Irene is a base woman, the direct opposite of Javier’s two girlfriends, María

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de la Victoria and María de las Mercedes, perfectly illustrating Theweleit’s claim that “women who don’t conform to the ‘good woman’ image are automatically seen as prostitutes, as the vehicle of ‘urges’ and men take the offensive before these women can put their horrible plans into practice” (Male Fantasies, 171). Unable to bear the degeneration and decay surrounding him, Javier attempts to move out to the Spanish house on campus, a building reminiscent of El Escorial. Once on the street he feels purged of the inner turmoil, but as soon as he looks around him, he realizes that this moral decay is not limited to Carlos’s room. Sex is everything and everywhere: “Muy cerca de él, una pareja se entregaba al amor desvergonzadamente. Estaban abrazados, las manos de ella en la cintura de él, las del hombre en las nalgas de la hembra. Se unían las bocas en besos largos y lascivos. Es un asco, pensó” (85). Upon moving out of Carlos’s apartment Javier decides to purify himself by erasing that episode of his life, ardently recalling the two pure women he left behind in Spain: “Cuando estuvo dentro comprendió que necesitaba lavarse de todas las impurezas que la compañía de Carlos e Irene habían arrojado sobre su espíritu. Le hubiera gustado en aquel momento estar con María de las Mercedes, tan delicada, o contemplar la transparente pureza de María Victoria” (92). Javier’s contemplation of women echoes the 1940s insistence on the purity of Spanish women (abnegada, cristiana) illustrated by Eugenio D’Ors’s description of Pilar Primo de Rivera (the sister of the Civil War martyr Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Sección Femenina of the Falange and the ultimate model for womanhood in Spain) as “una lámpara votiva” (see p. 2). Politics and womanhood are inseparable; Irene still haunts Javier’s dreams, not only because she is a woman with no morals but also because she belongs to Communist circles in Paris. Her sexuality and her political orientation are significantly fused into one. The second part of the book focuses on Magdalena, whom Javier first encountered at a Communist Party meeting. She becomes the center of Javier’s obsessions until the end of his stay in France. Magdalena is a friend of Irene’s, but unlike Irene she does not represent a total menace to Javier. Even from the first moment he sees underneath Magdalena’s “apparent feminine aggressivity” a desire to become a “traditional” woman. That is precisely why he gradually lets go: “Su mundo sentimental, hasta ahora sumiso, andaba revuelto y turbio, con extraños gérmenes de debilidad” (128). Javier illustrates well the thesis that “men have never tired of fashioning expressions for the violent force by which man feels himself drawn to woman, and side by side with his longing, the dread that through her he might die and be undone” (Horney, “The Dread of Woman,” 44).64 After many trials and tests “Javier sintió que la amaba, y temió que la ocasión le hiciera perder su frialdad, y con ella su defensa” (227), deciding that Magdalena could even become his wife.

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The biggest obstacle in accepting Magdalena was that she had had a lover before Javier. His anxieties about Magdalena’s previous sexual experience spring from his family history, literature, folk tradition, and so on, and are grounded in both his own moral convictions and archaic ideas of women’s sexual freedom: ¿Y por qué no hacerla la mujer que le daría hijos en tierra nueva? Pero estaba el honor. Magdalena no era virgen, y él era español. Había muchos españoles que se habían casado con mujeres desdoncelladas. Era siempre una tragedia. En el derribo de un palacio madrileño se encontrara una mujer emparedada. El esqueleto conservaba todavía restos de un velo nupcial. Su marido le había matado la misma noche de bodas porque ella lo había engañado. Pero Magdalena no lo engañaba. Se lo había confesado. También en esas condiciones algunos españoles se habían casado, o enamorado. No sabía de ninguno, pero lo había visto en algunas comedias. Pero si en la vida práctica un hombre se encuentra en un caso igual, no llora ni se emociona. Y si está enamorado, se desgarra el alma y sigue. De lo contrario, es un cornudo. (276)

Masculinity, violence, honor, tragedy, virginity all intersect in this curious mixture of contemporary sensibility, anachronistic notions of women promoted in Franco’s Spain, and the Golden Age conception of honor. These exuberant and outrageous thoughts on womanhood are intensified with the introduction of Antoine, whom Javier meets while visiting Magdalena’s aunt’s house in the countryside: Pero repentinamente la finura de la mano enjoyada, el modo como lo había tendido, la delicadeza de la garganta, las pantorrillas depiladas que el pijama, subido al desgaire, dejaba entrever, y un perfume penetrante, aunque sutil, que Antoine despedía le hicieron concebir una sospecha, solución inesperada a una interrogante que desde hacía doce horas mantenía en la inconsciencia, sin atreverse a formularla: Antoine era sodomita. (246)

The homosexual figure, usually barred from the ideal of national community (yet indispensable for the formation of its identity precisely as the excluded figure), appears with full force toward the end of Javier Mariño. Unorthodox forms of desire and sexual experimentation are unacceptable in the times of anxiety that accompany the formation of the nation. Antoine renders visible what is unspeakable: la finura de la mano enjoyada, la delicadeza de la garganta. He is a combination of “innate” traits as well as the artificiality of jewelry and perfumes. Javier violently abhors any of Antoine’s feminine traits—his refined hands, his delicate neck, his strong perfume—wanting to disfigure his beautiful face, obliterating anything feminine or androgynous:

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¿Debo pegarle? o podía, simplemente, encajarle un puñetazo en la mandíbula, sin previa explicación, y ponerlo luego en el pasillo, o bien decirle con su voz más firme: ‘Usted, señor, es un sujeto repugnante, y antes de echarlo de mi cuarto voy a romperle un hueso y alterar por una temporada la sucia belleza de su rostro! (247)

Antoine shatters Javier’s desire for control, making him experience “an epistemological gap, a space, a void, in maleness itself—a gap in which, in the end, as it were, there is nothing to be seen, and no assurance, therefore, that the visual display of masculinity’s phallic ensign can suffice as evidence of the heterosexuality” (Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet,” 279).65 When Javier disrobes, he imagines Antoine is watching him. Magnified by Javier’s imagination, Antoine opens up pleasure in the discovery of his “perversion,” pleasure in the disclosure of the word sodomite, indulgence in detailed descriptions of perfumes, ankles, necks, jewelry, and so on. The more that Javier needs to preserve his body rigidly against the chaos of surrounding disorder, the more he is assaulted by incoherence and endless turmoil. Antoine is the voice acusmatique,66 “the voice which transgresses the boundary outside/inside, since it belongs neither to diegetic reality nor to the external vocal accompaniment, but lurks in the inbetween space, like a mysterious foreign body which disintegrates from within the consistence of ‘reality’” (Z+iz=ek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 120). Antoine’s presence is the culmination of all the temptations that Javier had experienced in France. He is a bewildering fusion of Carlos, Irene, and Magdalena: “es un ser vil para quien el hombre no es más que un receptáculo de sensaciones y la vida un conjunto de placeres; no perdona ocasión de satisfacer los anhelos más bajos de su sensualidad” (252). Javier’s confusion magnifies as the gender ambiguity around him increases, and he is assailed by figures of effeminacy and decadence, fitting Theweleit’s claim that threats to fascism are often envisioned as “a socialist youth of indeterminate gender” (170). After his return from the countryside to Paris, Javier, marked and profoundly affected by his experience with Antoine, decides to break with his “foreign” experience, corrupt friends, and Magdalena, who “conveniently” gets sick. In order to convince himself to leave Magdalena Javier forces himself to watch her most repulsive bodily functions and is assailed by the sum of her bodily secretions (blood, excrement, filth, bodily juices). Magdalena becomes an abject figure threatening Javier’s sense of a unified self, the abject that does not “respect borders, positions, rules,” that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4).67 Desire and forbidden excitations turn into disgust:

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Es una idea antigua y perversa: cuando alguien quiere desamorarse de una mujer, la imagina entregada a funciones elementales, y la imagen amada no resiste. Pero ellas son distintas. Si es el hombre el doliente, es ella siempre la que le ayuda y limpia. . . . Voy a verla en la más desoladora intimidad, sin ocasión de disimulo. Me parecerá menos adorable, llegaré a tenerla asco. Dentro de cinco días ya no amaré a Magdalena. La fuerza espiritual puede redimir muchas funciones naturales y hacer de la comida o del amor funciones elegantes, pero no pasa de ahí su dominio. Un hombre puede contemplarse sin asco; una mujer delicada, no. Magdalena se tiene asco, y sabe que yo también se lo tendré. Si me ha aceptado a su lado es heroicamente, sacrificándose. Cuando haya recobrado la salud me habrá perdido. (340)

Javier Mariño has two different endings.68 In the first edition (1943) Javier Mariño returns to Spain to volunteer for Franco’s forces, liberating himself from a love affair grown uncontrollable. In the second version (1985) Magdalena is redeemed through spiritual conversion, becoming an infantilized, asexual, nurturing wife in Buenos Aires, uncannily resembling the purity of his former Spanish girlfriend, María de la Victoria: “Ahora Magdalena era otra mujer. No había en sus ojos rastro de amargura, y el pasado era como una pesadilla que empieza a olvidarse. Parecía adolescente, casi infantil” (381). Magdalena’s “nightmarish past” (her erroneous political affiliation and her excessive sexuality) has to be forgotten, so Javier can recover his name and destiny. Torrente Ballester’s excessive and complicated configuration of sexuality and nationalism inadvertently shatters the illusion of “organic” national and sexual identity, denaturalizing it and exposing its constructed character. He introduces a homosexual figure that less explicitly had already appeared in the postwar narrative and cinema. The feared confusion of the boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality infects the entire social body. In all these narratives of the nation, what is excluded reemerges as the fracture (fissure) within national identity, articulating the insistence of postwar Spain on, as Benedict Anderson formulates, “a deep, horizontal comradeship.” Franco’s nation favors: a distinctly homosocial form of male bonding. . . . Typically represented as a passionate brotherhood, the nation finds itself compelled to distinguish its “proper” homosociality from more explicitly sexualized male-male relations, a compulsion that requires the identifications, isolation, and containment of male homosexuality. (Parker et al. , “Introduction,” 6)69

The mitad monje/mitad soldado (warrior/writer) needs to hold himself together as an impenetrable entity, a body with fixed boundaries where disease, (homo)sexuality, and women’s bodies are “a threatening intrusion in the unisexual world of war. Women’s bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that

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can engulf ” (Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 13). It is interesting to note that around the same time period (early 1940s) Padre Figar precisely captures women’s engulfing traits in his conception of cinema: El cineasta es el forjador de vida universal, cosa que no alcanza ni la novela, ni el teatro, ni la Prensa. El cuarto poder es el cine. Como sea el cine, así serán las costumbres. El hecho es tan cierto que nuestro pueblo, impermeable a toda influencia extranjera, ha sido vencido por el cine. Nuestra mujer, severa y rígida, cultivadora como ninguna otra de la propia honra, se ha dejado arrastrar por la frivolidad y el desaliño de las mujeres de otras naciones. Esta pérdida de entereza y equilibrio ha robado a su persona los mayores valores que poseía. . . . Hasta el momento, habiendo nacido el cine en otras naciones, no ha sido fácil la asepsia moral de nuestro porte. Caímos en el garlito, dimos el dinero y el aplauso fervoroso, y quedamos corrompidos. Lo mismo que hace la mujer mala con nuestra juventud: ofrecerle la visión de telas suaves, belleza postiza y aromas exquisitos y cargarle al final con dolencias repugnantes e incurables.70

The newly established community violently obliterates its multiple and dissonant voices. The isolated, homogenized Spain established its limits by separating “microbios malignos de un organismo sano” (Primo de Rivera, Obras completas I, 128).71 National unity, as Massumi writes, “oscillates between paranoia and hypochondria.” However, the despotic body was also a source of disruption and challenge: “Any drive to unity is necessarily a drive to dominion and necessarily fails. There is always a remainder and an excess of power: an object of regimentation that escapes, a subject of regimentation that recedes” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 154).

CONCLUSION

One of the most dazzling and telling metaphors of the isolated postwar Spain was Gutiérrez Soto’s 1947 Universidad Laboral de Gijón, which was built without an avenue to access it. The isolation of postwar Spain was coupled with forced homogenization within the country. There was an attempt to convert a sexually, economically, and racially heterogeneous group into a homogeneous modern nation where in “religious and moral life, only Catholic religion and morality were allowed; in politics, only the politics of the National Movement were tolerated; sexually, only the sexuality of Catholic marriage was permitted; intellectually, only Thomism was countenanced; regionally, only one region was allowed to exist—Madrid” (Rodríguez, “Forty Years of Spanish Culture,” 67).72 The goal was to construct a unified nation that would erase and absorb economic, linguistic, and political differences.

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These differentiations and demarcations of difference were constantly negotiated and riddled with contradictions. In the midst of the historical fragility, instability and upheaval of the 1940s, there was a crisis of signification. Republican symbols (with its utopian and socialist dimension) were erased and turned into Nationalist ones over night: “Hoces, martillos, banderas republicanas, No pasarán, gente vestida de obreros reemplazan yugos, flechas, camisas azules, las banderas nacionales, gente vistiéndose como gente de orden, la corbata pasa a ser prenda imprescindible y lo mismo el sombrero” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 8). In the midst of this crisis of signification the despotic body was marking the limits of this imaginary, harmonious Spain. The exhumation of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s body and its circulation around Spain was a literal reminder of the despotic body coming to power, the disciplinary regime of national identifications, and blind compulsion to create an illusion of “organic” national identity. He was exhumed in Alicante in November 1942 and reburied in El Escorial, “in a massively choreographed nation-wide operation, for ten days and ten nights, a torch lit procession escorted José Antonio’s mortal remains in a five-hundred kilometer journey” (Preston, Franco, 346). Nation is an infinity of irreducibly different component parts, and “the unification drive leads only to disappearance and fragmentation: the physicality of the unifying body disappears, leaving only its image, which is then relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed, re-membered, and dismembered” (Massumi and Dean, First & Last Emperors, 95). While Franco circulated José Antonio’s body through Spain, he also ironically created a space for other bodies to manifest themselves: uncontrollable, transgressive, and alternative bodies that were obstinate elements threatening to pierce the imagined national body’s protective shield and unity. Some of the uncontrollable, implacable bodies were mutilated war bodies, bodies of defeated Republicans, hungry bodies, excessive bodies of estraperlo, abject homosexual and women’s bodies, and transsexual bodies. MUTILATED BODY The fragmented body of the postwar was dismembered but the exhibition of mutilated parts of the body was strictly prohibited: “Está terminantemente prohibido-y esto lo pone en conocimiento de todos-que los Caballeros Mutilados de la categoría que sean, absolutos, permanentes y útiles; los privados de la vista o de sus miembros, hagan jamás y en parte alguna, pública ostentación de sus mutilaciones, moviendo a excesiva compasión o solicitando dádivas u otros obsequios” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 40).

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REPUBLICAN BODY Kristeva writes that “one can be more or less a man to the extent that one is more or less a citizen, that he who is not a citizen is not fully a man. Between the man and a citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (Strangers to Ourselves, 97).73 Perversely and paradoxically, Spaniards were divided into Spanish and foreigners (Spaniards stained by a Republican past). The Republican is simultaneously an inner and outer figure, the scar simultaneously belonging and not belonging to the social body. It is a visible, painful reminder of incongruities in the national project disrupting national identity from within. The Republican body was quite literally annihilated in the postwar era. Scarring and death uncannily merged in the construction of the Valle de los Caídos, where “twenty thousand Republican prisoners were employed, and fourteen died, along with many who lost limbs in accidents or were afflicted with silicosis” (Preston, Franco, 352). Pierced flesh and severed limbs; the materiality of the scar inscribed into the flesh “is not only a signifying trace—its materiality also evokes the disfiguring marks on the body imprinted by national identification” (Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk,” 228).74 HUNGRY BODY The postwar body was also hungry. There was a “shortage of essential goods, especially clothing and shoes. Starvation, a massive increase of prostitution, and epidemic of diseases, including some not seen in the Mediterranean since biblical times, became the daily reality of the so-called años de hambre” (Preston, Franco, 345). The list of rationed food was endless: “carne, tocino, huevos, mantequilla, queso, bacalao, jureles, aceite, arroz, garbanzos, alubias, lentejas, patatas, boniatos, pasta para sopa, puré, azúcar, chocolate, turrón, café, galletas y pan,” as well as given out in absurd combinations that highlighted the hungry body and its suffering: “En Madrid la primera semana de enero se le daban: un cuarto de litro de aceite, un cuarto de kilo de arroz y un cuarto de kilo de jabón. En Barcelona, la segunda semana de marzo de 1940, una persona tenía derecho a comprar 300 gramos de azúcar; un cuarto de litro de aceite; 400 gramos de garbanzos y un huevo” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 49). At the same time there was glorification of hunger. In Elisabeth Mulder’s novel Preludio a la muerte, Marion, an American living in Lausanne, explains to her friends that “tener hambre es bonito. Y sufrir de querer cosas que no se pueden comprar. Y correr libre por las calles sucias, pobres, apestosas, y salir a vender periódicos sin haberse desayunado” (Pope, Novela de emergencia, 97).

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Thus the hungry body became even more visible either through the novela rosa’s ideological rendition of suffering and hunger or through the regime’s absurd economic proposals such as those epitomized by the Falangist civil governor of Málaga, José Luis Arrese, who proposed to Franco several “original” ideas for dealing with the economy “ranging from designs for cheap housing to the extraordinary claim that the famine could be eased by feeding the people dolphin sandwiches (bocadillos de carne de delfín) and bread made from fish meal (harina de pescado)” (Preston, Franco, 411). The hungry body is also contrasted with its leader. While most of his nation was starving, Franco’s well-known austerity was rapidly diminishing, and Franco’s body was quickly expanding: “Los cambios se dejan notar en su fisionomía. Ya como director de la Academia de Zaragoza, el general experimenta un notario ensanchamiento que no hace más que estropear aún más su pequeña figura. El bienestar familiar y la comida casera se dejaron notar enseguida” (Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo, 249). Queipo de Llano captured it cruelly when he called him “Paca la culona” (fatty Francine) (Preston, Franco, 335). BODY OF ESTRAPERLO The hungry body was inseparable from the body of estraperlo that fed it.75 It was endlessly deformed, reconfigured, and disfigured. It was monstrous, distorted by “sacos de veinte y treinta kilos de harina, en forma de macutos, colocados a la espalda y tapados con un mantón” and by “depósitos de latón con aceite, que se adaptan perfectamente a la espalda y cintura” (Martínez, Vida cotidiana, 66). Women’s bodies were transformed to simulate pregnancy and their clothing used to conceal more black-market goods, such as “solomillos (y depósitos) rodeando la cintura” as well as “planchas de tocino, colgando de la cintura y colocadas entre las piernas” (Martínez, Vida cotidiana, 66). TRANSSEXUAL BODY María Torremadé/Jordi, a transsexual who literally appropriated and assumed the masculinity so glorified and celebrated in the decade, was a winner of several national championships in track and field. S/he disturbed and threatened 1940s rigid gender divisions and forced the Sección Femenina to redefine its politics. After the former female athlete became a married man “la Sección Femenina prohibió la práctica del atletismo a las mujeres, actividad que se recuperó de modo sistematizado casi veinte años después” (Martínez, Vida cotidiana, 147). In the 1940s Giménez Caballero wrote a somewhat cryptic description of Franco: “España sólo se moverá otra vez con ímpetu en la historia por el sím-

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bolo de Franco. No sólo porque ve en él su guía providencial, sino porque al cabo de seis años, ya sabe quién es el HOMBRE de paso lento y firme, de entrañas implacables y de rostro impasible” (Martínez, Vida cotidiana, 20). Franco’s entrails, indistinguishable from Spain itself, were relentless and could not be placated. The impassive face of the despot contradicts his implacable entrails; the nation was written in the continual slippage produced by the tension between these two gestures. Reworking the despotic body was a source of disruption, challenge, pain, and pleasure, and ironically/marvelously enough it was indeed implacable and uncontrollable.

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Chapter Two

The Traumatized Body

Tormenta de verano (1952–1962)

En principio, lo peor fue que la muchacha, además de muerta, apareciese desnuda en la playa. —Juan García Hortelano, Tormenta de verano

The gradual renunciation of autarky, Spain’s acceptance into the UN, industrialization, and opening up to foreign investment led to hopes of a cultural, economic, and sexual opening that unfortunately never occured. The metaphor for the decade between 1952 and 1962 is a character from Juan García Hortelano’s novel Tormenta de verano.1 It is a woman’s dead, naked body found on the beach. Her stark nakedness is as shocking as her death. The sudden appearance of the corpse on the beach disrupts what is otherwise a quiet, boring summer holiday. This naked corpse is never openly mentioned. “¿La has visto?” (26) is barely pronounced, secretly whispered, but above all observed in great detail: La muchacha probablemente había usado en alguna época de su vida un tono claro, casi blanco, para maquillarse los labios. A pesar de las nubes, crecía la luz y la piel de la chica se hizo más amarilla y más tensa. Me hipnotizaba

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aquella dureza de las comisuras de la boca, levantadas, sin relación con las mejillas, ni con los párpados. Le habían limpiado la arena del pelo y, bajo la sábana, se alzaba la pirámide de sus manos cruzadas sobre el pecho. (34)

This body encountered on the beach is a subject of endless speculations, caught in the movement between desire and repression, attraction and repulsion, fascination and disinterest. It also articulates various obsessions and above all this dead, naked body looks back.2 Suspending time and motion, the corpse functions as Barthes’s punctuating effect. It is an arresting detail that emerges from the novel: It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it refers to the notion of punctuation . . . for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of dice. A photograph’s punctum is the accident which pricks me. (Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 26)3

García Hortelano’s text is structured around this encounter with a dead body, the site of trauma that can find neither expression nor articulation. Written in 1961, Tormenta de verano seizes something essential of the previous decade, the 50s inability to articulate its traumatic awakening from years of fascist rhetoric, insistence on false optimism,4 and countless films “de gola y levita” that were “la mejor metáfora de envaramiento de régimen” (González Requena, “Entre el cartón piedra y los coros y danzas,” 52). The displayed, virile body that saturated the previous decade is painfully outdated, and the national body as fighting machine belongs to the past. The themes and obsessions of the 1940s were fading, and the Falangist vocabulary was becoming increasingly anachronistic. Even sporadic Falangist violence,5 as Preston emphasizes, “was a symptom of a death agony rather than of youthful vitality” (Preston, Franco, 651). There were still traces of an insistence on courage, virility, and sacrifice, but as Gombrowicz explains in Polish Recollections, “when certain customs are about to be finished, they become afflicted with a kind of sclerosis—the living content escapes from them and only the rigidity of ‘pure form’ remains” (Plonowska Ziarek, “The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk,” 222). The official inauguration of the Valle de los Caídos on April 1, 1959, exemplifies Gombrowicz’s theory. Franco’s speech about the heroism of fallen nationalist soldiers, twenty years after the 1939 victory, “was triumphant and vengeful” (Preston, Franco, 679), but nevertheless “such ceremonies were nostalgic flashbacks to a Spain that was about to disappear” (Preston, Franco, 680). As Martín Gaite notes, “predicar ya la

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alegría joseantoniana como antídoto de la apatía reinante era intentar curar el cáncer con aspirina. La juventud española de la nueva hornada empezaba a tener algo que decir al respecto y se atrevía a formular reproches a sus moldeadores de conciencia” (Usos amorosos, 34). The youth that Carmen Martín Gaite talks about was nevertheless labeled “la generación frustrada, desaprovechada, domesticada, enmudecida, quemada, frenada, silenciada” (Marsal, Pensar bajo el franquismo: Intelectuales y política en la generación de los años cincuenta, 48).6 Antonio Lago Carballo points out that the central problematic of people of this generation was that they were “una generación frenada por los que por haber hecho la guerra se han sentido jóvenes para siempre” (Marsal, Pensar bajo el franquismo, 194), and even more distressing was that the winning side “querían perpetuarse en nosotros y eso no podía ser. Franco lo repetía continuamente: la obra predilecta del Régimen. Esto éramos nosotros: los que debíamos continuarlo; pero eso no pudo ser porque nosotros nos negamos” (Marsal, Pensar bajo el franquismo, 80).7 This refusal of “perpetuation” was articulated in the telling “Manifiesto de las generaciones ajenas a la Guerra Civil.”8 Instead, the awakening from the traumatic 40s was accompanied by the desire to question and dismantle every aspect of the fascist discourse in order to get closer to the reality “hidden” behind it. Articulating the truth of Spanish reality was a project common to most filmmakers, writers, and artists of the period regardless of their ideological positions or political backgrounds. From the left, film director Juan Antonio Bardem’s diagnosis of Spanish cinema as “políticamente ineficaz, socialmente falso, intelectualmente ínfimo, estéticamente nulo, industrialmente raquítico” was matched by falangist Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui’s demands for “un cine revolucionario, religiosamente exacto, políticamente válido, socialmente educativo y estéticamente valioso.”9 There were other highly colorful and suggestive formulations. The Salamanca manifest proposed to endow substance on this uninhabited body (“dotar de contenido a este cuerpo deshabitado”) since Spanish cinema was “a cinema of painted dolls and its problem was not having any problems.” Writers were as categorical as filmmakers in their judgment. Literary and film demands overlapped. Thus it is not surprising that Muñoz Suay, one of the key intellectual forces behind the Salamanca congress, praised the realism of “nuestro camarada Jesús Fernández Santos” and that Basilio Martín Patino emphasized that “lo que se pretendía transformar o mejorar no era sólo el cine, sino una realidad más global.” Ignacio Aldecoa states that a novelist is “testigo de excepción,” Sánchez Ferlosio in El Jarama proposes “ver, simplemente, lo que sucede allí,” and Juan Goytisolo enunciates their collective task as follows: Todos los escritores españoles sentíamos una necesidad de responder al apetito informativo del público dando una visión de la realidad que

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escamoteaba la prensa. En cierto modo, creo que el valor testimonial de la literatura española de estos años reside en esto. Este es el origen y el historiador futuro tendrá que recurrir al análisis de la narrativa española si quiere colmar una serie de vacíos y de lagunas provocadas por la carencia de una prensa de información veraz y objetiva.10

This call for getting closer to Spanish “reality” reached its peak with Juan Antonio Bardem and Ignacio Aldecoa’s projects. Bardem remembers, “Mi idea era hacer un gran fresco del mundo del trabajo español a través de una serie de películas: una sobre los segadores, otra sobre los carboneros, los mineros, los pescadores” (Fernández, El neorealismo en la narración española de los años cincuenta, 108). Aldecoa proposes an almost identical project: “Después de la trilogía de los pescadores quiero hacer la del hierro. Primer libro, la mina. Segundo, el trabajo en los altos hornos; tercero, la utilización de las herramientas. En líneas generales, mi propósito es desarollar novelísticamente, en la medida de mis fuerzas, la épica de los grandes oficios” (Fernández, El neorealismo en la narración española de los años cincuenta, 136).11 Paradoxically, the “truth” of the decade, despite its relentless call for realism, was articulated in a different space, one that posits an intricate relationship between knowing and not knowing. Truth, “in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4). This generation, in spite of itself and its insistence on reality, articulated the truth of the decade precisely through the indirect expressions and displaced obsessions that characterize most of its texts. Characters in its novels exhibit considerable emptiness. Javier, one of the main characters from Tormenta de verano, remarks that his wife “era un extraño ser que me hablaba desde el otro lado de la mesa” (40). That emptiness stands in sharp contrast with hidden obsessions: “me hipnotizaba aquella dureza de las comisuras de la boca, levantadas, sin relación con las mejillas, ni con los párpados” (García Hortelano, Tormenta de verano, 34). Death, nakedness, and desire troubled, disturbed, and above all marked an inability to articulate themselves throughout the 50s. Several novels from the 50s show two common traits: on the one hand, nothing ever overtly happens except the endless “narración de naderías,” and on the other, they pay close attention to minutiae of language.12 Ignacio Aldecoa, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jesús Fernández Santos, and Ana María Matute all share these tendencies and views on “reality.” In Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama, another crucial text from the period, nothing happens.13 It chronicles a simple Sunday excursion by the river, which takes place on an endless, boring summer day. Like Tormenta de verano, El Jarama is a novel marked by death, another float-

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ing and disturbing corpse. Even before the tragic drowning of one of the characters, death lurks in every page. Fiction and life intermingle since the river Jarama was a site of ten thousand republican and seven thousand nationalist deaths. Death and violence haunt the text through its traumatic return. Sánchez Ferlosio and most of the 50s “generation” were children during the war, and even though most of them did not participate directly, they were subjected to violent, traumatic experiences, events that are “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4). The traumatic experience is displaced onto devouring Nature, above all the river and the sun, and articulated between the objective mode and the excessive, overwhelming details that transform “objective” narration into a series of surreal moments: Un bosque prieto de piernas rodeaba sus cuerpos como una empalizada, limitando un recinto muy ajustado. Paulina sentía sus pantorillas hundidas entre las piernas de la gente, en un húmedo rozarse de pies que se mezclaban en la arena. Alzó los ojos y miró con agobio hacia arriba, a las caras de los que estaban de pie, por encima de ellos, rodeándolos en un ceñido semicírculo, abierto tan sólo a la parte del río. . . . Sintió Paulina de repente un unánime impulso en torno suyo, y todo el bosque de piernas se ponía en movimiento. (Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama, 282)14

The Spain of this generation was caught between the 40s mode (in vocabulary, morality, and so on) that persisted into this decade despite its anachronism and a not yet articulated “reality,” since in the aftermaths of a traumatic event what “returns to haunt the victim is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 6). This striking vacuum in Spain during the passage from the autarkic 40s to the technocratic late 50s was well captured in the demand to “endow substance into the uninhabited body of cinema.” Juan Goytisolo’s Fiestas captures this epochal passage, “a la izquierda, la fachada era de ladrillo sin revoque y se cuarteaba ligeramente hacia el terrado. Al final de la guerra habían inscrito en ella una leyenda: POR EL IMPERIO HACIA DIOS, en gruesos caracteres negros, pero el calor y las lluvias la habían desfigurado. Ahora lucía un cartel flamante: BEBA COCA-COLA, que anunciaba una hermosa mujer de pelo rubio y cara sonrosada” (39).15 But the passage that Goytisolo describes from “POR EL IMPERIO HACIA DIOS” to “BEBA COCA-COLA,” was tumultuous, complex, and ridden with contradictions. The heat and rain that disfigured the legend have left turbulent traces. Spanish history is written between these two spaces; it is a “history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference), permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11).

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Economists ingeniously termed this period “decenio bisagra,”16 emphasizing the switch from the postwar insistence on the moderación, restricción, racionamiento, amortización, requisición, acaparación, and camuflaje to: las aspiraciones de los nuevos burgueses y de sus hijos, de los cuales se había de hacer cómplice la publicidad, se orientaban hacia la consecuención de los pequeños placeres materiales que propicia la sociedad de consumo, desde poder veranear hasta adquirir un cochecito funcional, una nevera o una lavadora. Los conceptos autárquicos del nacional-sindicalismo, con su perenne referencia al heroísmo y a la tradición, empezaban a sonar como una música anticuada, aburrida e inoperante. (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 213)

There were many other cultural, economic, and political changes. Student unrest became more and more pronounced and was depicted in literature and cinema for the first time since the war (Muerte de un ciclista).17 Gasógeno18 was a past; biscúter 19 was fabricated in 1954 by SEAT, laying the road for the Seiscientos, which appeared in June 1957; and the first TV program was aired on October 28, 1956. José María García Escudero became the Director General de Cinematografía y Teatro in 1951, the Salamanca congress took place in 1955 opening possibilities for film school students to undermine official rhetoric, and Joaquín Ruiz Giménez, the minister of education (1951), promoted progressive politics with his liberal team.20 All these changes show that Spanish institutions were definitely passing through a severe crisis of meaning and searching for new parameters. But all these announced changes never completely materialized. They were curtailed, and the cultural, political, and economic opening was deferred again. Liberal ministers were dismissed, students and artists were arrested,21 a progressive, left-wing film journal Objetivo closed, and IIEC (film school) experienced significant setbacks when in September of 1956 Victoriano López García was replaced as director by authoritarian José María Cano Lechuga. International politics experienced profound changes as well. For the first time since winning the war, there was an international legitimization of the dictatorial regime: Spain was admitted to UNESCO on November 17, 1952, signed a Concordat with the Vatican on August 27, 1953, and was finally admitted to the United Nations in December 1955. With the usual flattery Franco was proclaimed in the Spanish press as “‘Caudillo of the West,’ the only truly great man of the twentieth century, a giant by the side of such dwarves as Churchill and Roosevelt” (Preston, Franco, 626). The title was disproportionate and inflated since the aid was really “limited to projects of an infrastructural kind with military significance”22 (Preston, Franco, 623) and above all, these key economic and political events were, paradoxically, the downfall of the Caudillo and the introduction of significant changes in the very nature of his regime:

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Economic aid came with conditions which meant that, in the medium to long term, he would have to admit changes in the very nature of his regime. Beyond the high-sounding rhetoric, there were practical conditions, in terms of establishing a realistic exchange rate for the peseta, balancing the state budget, restoring confidence in the financial system, all of which struck at the very existence of his cherished system of autarky. (Preston, Franco, 624)

The dismantling of Franco’s “cherished autarky” was closely connected with the entry of the Catalan monarchist and professor of administrative law Laurano López Rodó into an economic scheme that “had meant the abandonment of every economic idea that the Caudillo had ever held dear and the uninhibited embrace of modern capitalism” (Preston, Franco, 666). Thus autarkic Spain was becoming technocratic, led by López Rodó, “a deeply religious member of Opus Dei,” and the very model of its values: “militant, quietly confident, hard-working and efficient” (Preston, Franco, 657). However, the entry of López Rodó and the technocrats into the new cabinet was not altogether smooth and was ridden by significant crisis, summed up in the telling name for the period, disorientation, “during which public debt, inflation and balance of payments problems continued . . . being largely the legacy of autarky” (Preston, Franco, 670). These tumultuous years, and the passage to capitalism under the technocrats, was closely reflected by Franco’s own family. On the one hand, Franco and his kin still continued to uphold the austerity and autarky so valued in the 40s, but on the other hand, what they praised in public was crumbling in private. Franco “did not womanize, did not smoke, he drank wine in moderation at meal times and did not gamble beyond a small-scale,” but the self-proclaimed austerity in those matters was “counteracted” by enormous expenses paid for his hobbies such as hunting and fresh-water fishing. His obsession, “the other woman,” was the Valle de los Caídos (Preston, Franco, 631) on which he had spent “the equivalent of 200,000,000 British pounds” (Preston, Franco, 679). Doña Carmen, known as Doña Collares was much more “traditionally” wasteful. As Preston remarked, “The meanness and acquisitiveness of La Señora became legendary. It has been claimed that the jewelers of Madrid and Barcelona set up unofficial insurance syndicates to indemnify themselves against her visits. She was equally fond of antiques. In La Coruña and Oviedo, jewelers and antique-dealers often shut up shop when it was known that she was in town” (Preston, Franco, 597). This “family” expenditure culminated in the wedding of Franco’s daughter Nenuca on April 10, 1950. She married Dr. Cristóbal Martínez Bordiu, a society playboy from Jaén: The preparations and the accumulation of presents were such that the press was ordered to say nothing for fear of provoking unwelcome contrasts with

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the famine and poverty which afflicted much of the country. The wedding was on a level of extravagance that would have taxed any European royal family. Guards of honor, military bands, hundreds of guests including all members of the cabinet, the diplomatic corps and a glittering array of aristocrats, took part in a full-scale State occasion. The ceremony, which took place in the chapel at El Pardo, was reported, but the press failed to mention the gifts. Editorial comments praising the austerity of the occasion were, however, laughably at odds with the coverage, on the other pages, of the banquet offered at El Pardo for 800 people. (Preston, Franco, 595)

Dr. Cristóbal Martínez Bordiu became Marqués de Villaverde soon after the wedding, and he perfected and “modernized” the excessive habits of his newly acquired family. He illustrated the contradictions of an uninhibited embrace of capitalism mixed with the anachronistic “Francoist families,” autarkic habits that were dying hard, and corruption that has been regarded by Franco himself “as a necessary lubrication for the system that had the advantage of compromising many with the regime and binding them to it” (Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975, 96).23 Together with his uncle and godfather, José María Sanchiz, Martínez Bordiu formed the so-called Villaverde clan, making a fortune with property speculations and mirroring the country’s hectic economic growth, speculations, and mismanagements. Martínez Bordiu, soon after the wedding known as Marqués de Vayavida (what a life) rapidly made lots of money taking advantage of his new position. He had: an exclusive license for importing Vespa motor-scooters from Italy, at a time when Spain had little foreign currency for imports. The machines were in a standard green and, in Madrid, his nickname changed to the Marqués de Vespaverde. A so-called Villaverde clan emerged, headed by Martínez Bordiu’s uncle and godfather José María Sanchiz. Soon they controlled considerable banking interests. Sanchiz made a fortune for the Villaverde clan with property speculations and import-export licenses. (Preston, Franco, 596)

In the political arena the ushering in of a new era was marked by another excessive gesture, as well as by the anachronism of outmoded dictatorial display of power. The first U.S. ambassador, Stanton Griffis, appointed by Truman, was given a lavish reception: Three red and gold eighteenth-century coaches each drawn by six horses carried the Ambassador and his staff to the Palacio de Oriente. They were escorted by two hundred lancers of Franco’s Moorish Guard in red tunics and white cloaks, astride black horses, a platoon of buglers in orange uniforms and white cloaks, mounted on white horses, and a squadron of armed police. A delighted Griffis acknowledged the cheers of the crowd which lined the streets. (Preston, Franco, 606)

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Griffis was thrilled by his host’s excessiveness. Franco reciprocated by emphasizing that Griffis was “the best ambassador imaginable.” Both “Lequerica and Franco had been delighted with the uncritical Griffis and found him an amiable collaborator” (Preston, Franco, 617). Griffis was a perfect candidate for ambassadorship at this complex moment of transition in Spanish history since “he was not a professional diplomat but an investment banker with interest in the entertainment business, including Paramount Pictures and the Madison Square Garden boxing arena” (Preston, Franco, 604). While Griffis was entertained and entertaining, quite different struggles were going on inside the country as a result of increasingly pronounced tensions between the desired “apertura” and the well-known rigidity of several sectors of the regime. The frivolity and outrageous displays surrounding Griffis were counteracted by Arias Salgado’s austerity. Gabriel Arias Salgado, the minister of information and tourism from 1951 until 1962, was a critical figure in curtailing airs of change: “una garantía de ortodoxia y de firmeza en la censura, y para los núcleos más activos de la disidencia cultural, una barrera en contradicción con los impulsos hacia la liberalización económica y con la imagen de España que se pretende proyectar hacia el exterior” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 28). Well into the 50s he continued to insist upon “salvar almas para el cielo,”24 promoting aggressively his moral convictions, especially noticeable in regard to the new Junta de Clasificación y Censura. He miraculously survived several crises of cabinet and was not replaced until 1962, when Fraga took his post. The popular slogan of the period illustrates their differences: “Con Arias Salgado todo tapado con Fraga hasta la braga” (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 248). His well-known nonsense ranged from comments on sexuality to those on politics and the economy. He remarked in 1956 that a novel was only worth publishing “si marido y mujer, en un matrimonio legítimamente constituido, podían leérsela el uno al otro sin ruborizarse mutuamente y, sobre todo, había insistido, sin excitarse” (216).25 Both dangerous and tragicomical, he managed to encounter diabolic intrusions in just about every sphere of life: Stalin viaja con frecuencia y no se dan explicaciones acerca de adónde va. Pero nosotros lo sabemos. . . . Se va a la República de Azerbaidján, y allí, en un pozo abandonado de las perforaciones petrolíferas, se le aparece el Diablo, que surge de las profundidades de la Tierra. Stalin recibe las instrucciones diabólicas sobre cuanto hay que hacer en política. Las sigue al pie de la letra, y esto explica sus éxitos pasajeros. (Rodríguez Martínez, NO-DO, catecismo social de una época, 20)

It is only appropriate and ironic that his dying of a heart attack is simultaneous with a big scandal caused by Buñuel’s 1961 film Viridiana.26

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Arias Salgado’s radical austerity was somewhat soothed via José María García Escudero, another critical figure involved with cinema in the 50s. Despite his closeness to the regime as a deputy colonel of the air force, he was nevertheless a welcome break from Salgado. At times he wrote a column titled “Tiempo” for the Falangist Arriba, “donde aborda con cierta frecuencia temas cinematográficos, pero él mismo confiesa que no había pisado hasta ese día un solo cine-club y que los problemas de la economía cinematográfica le eran, en aquel momento totalmente ajenos” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 39). However, despite his “limited” film background and ideological position, he introduced several crucial changes into the hectic and undefined film practices (industry, censorship, etc.). Despite never having been completely radical in his demands for changes, García Escudero championed such controversial films as Surcos 27 and called for dismantling the “cine de gola y levita.” He exemplifies well the inner contradictions of Franco’s regime. Heredero calls him “víctima de las contradicciones abiertas por su tímida tolerancia aperturista en las estructuras fosilizadas del concubinato entre la industria y la administración” (Las huellas del tiempo, 41). He resigned because of pressures that Arias Salgado put on him after the Alba de América scandal. His departure and return to the post of Director General de Cinematografía y Teatro thus forms a significant parenthesis of the 50s. Despite his forced resignation in 1952,28 his reforms articulated in “Normas de Protección y Regulación de la Cinematografía Española” profoundly marked censorship, subventions politics, and the film industry in general, at a time when, as Ana Mariscal remarked, films were censored because “los censores habían visto una intención muy ambigua en mi mirada” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 62). García Escudero marks the decade by his telling absence.29 As already mentioned, several films and the scandal that surrounded them played meaningful roles in the contradictory and complex economic, political, and institutional changes that were occurring at the time of the passage from the autarkic 40s to the technocratic late 50s. This is especially apparent in the collapse of “historical” cinema as produced by CIFESA (La Compañía Industrial Film Española S.A.) that embodied autarkic principles, and by a surge of Spanish neorealism that contested it and replaced it. Alba de América, despite its “success” in obtaining national interest category, “cierra, con gran fracaso de público, la serie histórica de Juan de Orduña y marca el principio de la crisis y decadencia de CIFESA” (Ballesteros, “Mujer y Nación en el cine español de posguerra: Los años 40,” 63).30 CIFESA was so closely related to the regime’s ideological projects that its decline was simultaneously the cause and the symptom of the end of the autarkic period, “a estas alturas ya es evidente, en cambio, la decadencia de una corriente nostálgico-patriótica que declina en sintonía con la reorientación internacional de

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la dictadura y que expresa en clave manierista el rearme ideológico de la autarquía” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 176).31 Films of the 1950s started to reflect, parody, and rework the pervasive cinema of the previous decade. In Esa pareja feliz, Lola Gaos literally collapses through the stage while parodying Aurora Batista in the historical epic Locura de Amor. Thus, this scene converts “el ciclo autárquico y caudillista del cine histórico bajo toneladas de ese cartón-piedra” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 19) in a citation and an empty repetition of the past. Pepe Isbert, the mayor in ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! comically echoes Franco’s speeches and clichés: noble pueblo, ejemplar raigambre, and so on, from the balcony of the main plaza; Muerte de un ciclista gives glimpses of the student protests of 1956, and so on. CIFESA’s historical epics were replaced by “inebriation with neorealism”32 most intensely articulated in the Salamanca encounters of May 1955: El cine español vive aislado. Aislado no sólo del mundo sino de nuestra propia realidad. Cuando el cine de todos los países concentra su interés en los problemas que la realidad plantea cada día, sirviendo así a una esencial misión de testimonio, el cinema español continúa cultivando tópicos conocidos y que en nada responden a nuestra personalidad nacional. El cine español sigue siendo un cine de muñecas pintadas. El problema del cine español es que no tiene problemas, que no es ese testigo de nuestro tiempo, que nuestro tiempo exige a toda creación humana.33

In January of the same year, Cine-club del SEU de Salamanca, led by Basilio Martín Patino, published a text (Boletín del cine-club) that pointed to the problems that were later elaborated during the Salamanca congress: “Desde nuestra ciudad-desde cualquier ciudad española-, amar al cine es desvanacerse en el vacío de la añoranza, de lo prohibido, de la sucia rutina.”34 The Salamanca congress, with its telling motto, El cine español está muerto. ¡Viva el cine español! crystallized what was in the air and articulated theoretically what was already present in film practices. Starting with Esa pareja feliz and Surcos through El cochecito and Plácido, various directors were indeed endowing substance into the uninhabited body of Spanish cinema. The obsessiveness of Don Anselmo’s (Pepe Isbert) efforts to obtain his own motorized wheelchair in order to hang out with his disabled friends in El cochecito points to the multiplicity of issues afflicting Spanish society. Don Anselmo’s wheelchair is “appealing as a model of American capitalism with its promises of mobility and autonomy,” plus, it “fulfills” the desire “to get [a] share of the benefits promised by industrialization” (Kinder, Blood Cinema, 111). However as Kinder points out “the motorized wheelchair is revealed to be a narrative and ideological apparatus that promises mobility, pleasure, and freedom while actually bringing regression, dependence, and impotence”

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(Blood Cinema, 115). The couple from Esa pareja feliz returns to normality after living a “dream” day obtained via winning a radio contest sponsored by Jabón Florit, capturing the Salamanca postulate of turning the eye onto everyday Spanish reality. All these gazes turned toward Spanish reality were accompanied by doses of atrocious humor.35 They illustrate “la vida cotidiana, los problemas, las ilusiones y las frustraciones de una pareja de españolitos medios, de modesta y humilde clase trabajadora, atrapada en la precariedad fantasiosa de los sueños como subterfugio para evadirse de un entorno insatisfactorio, grisáceo y carente de horizontes” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 320). In Bardem’s Muerte de un ciclista the class struggle is problematized when “the close-up (of the main protagonists, a bourgeois couple) immediately sutures us into identification with the bourgeois killers, María José and Juan, who are individualized in the singulative, rather than with the anonymous cyclist whose face and corpse we never see and who always remains representative of the working class in the iterative” (Kinder, Blood Cinema, 75). In El Pisito a couple schemes to obtain an apartment by the young man’s marriage to an old widow who will die and leave her place to them. The plan fails miserably since the widow is delighted with her new, young husband and seems to rejuvenate rather than get closer to death. In a similar vein Plácido, the protagonist in the movie of the same name, becomes the victim of a Christmas campaign with its ingenious motto Siente un pobre a su mesa. Plácido is reduced to a beggar in order to pay installments of a motorcycle which he felt obliged to rent for such a “charitable” campaign, demonstrating well “la implacable radiografía de la España franquista-retrógrada, subdesarollada, egoísta y endogámica” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 334). The above-cited films and their directors were closely linked to the Salamanca postulates/assertions on the rejuvenation and redefinition of Spanish cinema. However, there was also, as Heredero points out, a significant amount of “promiscuidad genérica” and “no es en absoluto extraño que la temática piadosa se viste con ropajes históricos, que los niños protagonicen musicales, comedias, melodramas o películas religiosas, que las monjas se pongan a cantar, que las folclóricas se desplacen por los escenarios del pasado o que la religión y la política anden en contubernio por los fotogramas de más de un título” (Las huellas del tiempo, 163). There were also other crucial changes in the complex film production of the period, such as the radical transformation of the relations between the church and cinema. Nieves Conde’s Balarrasa, filmed one year before Surcos, in 1950, was an exemplary film in which “un teniente de la legión, juerguista, jugador y pendenciero, decide dedicarse a Dios después de que una bala republicana mate al compañero con el que antes se había jugado la guardia” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 194). Balarrasa, “cuyo protagonista cambia

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su uniforme militar de la Legión por la sotana clerical” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 192), exemplifies well the passage from the Falangist 40s to the National-Catholic 50s. Connected to this phenomenon, a new figure emerges, the Christian film critic, who was to modernize the previously rigid relations between church and cinema.36 Carmen Martín Gaite’s Entre visillos touches upon this theme.37 Julia, a main character, experiences pleasure exclusively through cinema. Her pleasure vanishes as soon as the lights in the cinema come on, and guilt and shame return “verá, padre, que algunas veces cuando he ido al cine, me excito y tengo malos sueños” (82). Her confessor reproaches her for going to the movies, warning that “no vuelvas mucho al cine, hija. Hace siempre algún mal” (84). This priest figure exemplifies the moralistic discourses on the corrupting force of the images of cinema reminiscent of countless other postwar discourses. But the Christian critic from the 50s no longer had a solely negative posture. He articulated much more complexly his relation to images: Frente al mundo de la cinematografía . . . nuestra postura meramente negativa hasta ahora nos ha granjeado, por desgracia, una reacción de recelo, de antipatía y hasta de desdén. Nos han visto siempre con la censura en la palabra o en el escrito, amenazando siempre con el auto de fe, con el antema inquisitorial. Han creído que no entendemos de otra cosa que de aplicar la tijera a sus películas o de lanzarles la dureza de nuestro juicio severo. Y han sacado la consecuencia de que los católicos no somos capaces de hacer nada más. . . . Hay que deshacer este recelo y conquistarnos la simpatía de ese mundo. ¿Cómo? Saliendo de nuestra actitud retraída, extendiendo los brazos hacia su campo. Hemos de demostrarles que somos capaces de mucho más. (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 50)

Keeping in mind all these layers, richness, and the heterogeneity of films, critics, and movements, I will look at the epoch with its political, economic, sexual realities through one of the possible prisms, one of the films that reflected Salamanca postulates, ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! Rejecting historical epics, Berlanga made what could be called one of the first innovative postwar productions. ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! explores the myths and realities of Francoist Spain, Spanish bureaucracy, and American financial aid to Spain, especially configured around the expectation of the arrival of the Marshall Plan that would usher Spain and Villar del Río, the Castilian village depicted in Berlanga’s film, into an exciting new period. Berlanga’s film also problematizes notions of artificiality and reality, modernity, the construction of gender, and history. Berlanga’s complexity lies in his critique both of Hollywood and of Francoist folklorismo, as well as his idiosyncratic neorealism.38 The opening sequence of the film, a long shot of a bus on a dirt road entering the town of Villar del Río, is a prototype of a typical postwar village.39

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This Castilian village mirrors countless others equally lost in time: forgotten, postwar Spanish places. Fernando Rey’s voiceover accompanies the camera gliding past the plaza, the fountain, the church, the school, and the town hall, from whose balcony long, grandiose speeches are made. Soon it becomes clear that nothing functions in this village. The town clock always reads 3:10 because funds for its repair are lacking. Time stands still in other respects as well. For example, the school still displays a map showing the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, everything is stagnant: the water in the town fountain is supposedly fresh, but it rarely flows. The center of village life is the cafe that also serves as the town’s grand casino, its cabaret, and its bus station. The town’s inhabitants are as stereotypical and as mired in the past as their surroundings: the town priest reads Rosas y Espinas; 40 Juan has too little money and too many kids; Don Luis is the hidalgo without stain—and without money; Don Pablo is the mayor who also owns half the village; loafers hang out in the barbershop discussing the hopes of the local soccer team to ascend to “the first group of the second class of the third category.” And let’s not forget Juan, el pregonero (the town crier) who announces all the important news, as well as advertising local entertainment such as bullfights, dances, and above all the Saturday afternoon film, which is almost always an American Western. Their existence is interrupted by the arrival of Lolita Sevilla, “la máxima estrella de la canción andaluza,” and Manolo, her manager, who boasts of international experience. There is also an announcement of an arriving American delegation that will lavishly reward the town that best receives them. As soon as Don Pablo (the town’s mayor) and the villagers hear about the arrival of the American delegation, they hold a town meeting to discuss ideas about receiving the Americans. Many outlandish suggestions are made. The doctor proposes building a triumphal arch with “HOLA” spelled out in big letters; the barber suggests holding a carrera de sacos, a lottery, or having women throw flowers at the arriving Americans; the town inventor suggests lighting up the fountain: “hay que darle visualidad con surtidor hidrométrico; dentro del agua instalar bombillas de doble filamento y chorritos de colores.” The commissioner, who announced the visit, orders Don Pablo to welcome the Americans by showing them the best that Spain has to offer: “El pueblo debe arder en fiesta, niños con banderitas, fuegos artificiales y Ud. debe hablarles desde el balcón de agricultura, cosecha e industria.” When the baffled mayor complains that the town has no industry to speak of, the bureaucrat replies that “da lo mismo, sólo saben inglés y no lo entenderían de todos modos, pero ellos tienen dólares y son generosos y traerán ferrocarriles para parar un tren.” It is difficult to resist reading these excessive suggestions in light of Franco’s belief in fictitious gold discoveries that revealed the fantasy of autarkic self-sufficiency, especially since the heart of the film is an economy of isolation and scarcity:

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Shortly after the announcement of the apocryphal gold discoveries, in early 1940, Franco announced that Spain would soon be self-sufficient in energy and a rich petroleum-exporting country. The basis of the claim was a bogus synthetic petrol allegedly invented by an Austrian, Albert Elder von Filek, who had persuaded Franco that by mixing water with plant extracts and other secret ingredients, the distilled product would be a fuel superior to natural gasoline. . . . Filek was granted the waters of the river Jarama and land on its banks to build a factory. The Caudillo’s chauffeur was part of the sting and convinced him that his own car had been running on the fuel. . . . Eventually, the fraud came to light and von Filek was imprisoned along with the chauffeur. (Preston, Franco, 348)

Berlanga critically questions the discrepancy between government rhetoric and the actual political and economic situation at the moment brilliantly raising many important issues.41 The villagers’ outlandish proposals contrast sharply with the economic conditions of the village. The inventor rhapsodizes endlessly over his “surtidor hidrométrico” when the village clock does not even work; the villagers fantasize about industry when the railway does not even reach them. This reflection on economic realities and illusions is parodied most fiercely in the movie’s theme song Coplillas de las divisas: Los yankis han venido olé salero, con mil regalos y a las niñas bonitas van a obsequiarlas con aeroplanos. El plan Marshall llega del extranjero para nuestro nido. Traerán divisas para quién toree mejor corrida y medias y camisas para las mocitas más presumidas. Americanos vienen a España gordos y sanos viva el tronío de este gran pueblo con poderío olé Virginia

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y Wichitá y viva Texas que no está mal. Os recibimos, americanos, con alegría olé mi padre, olé mi suegra y olé mi tía. The copla (Coplillas de las divisas) was the perfect medium for reflection on Spanish economic realities since it was already connected to the phenomenon of industrialization, of “la realidad social de una España que se desplazaba del agrarismo al protoconsumismo del biscuter y del Fiat Topolino” (Moix, Suspiros de España: La copla y el cine de nuestro recuerdo, 13).42 “Coplillas de las divisas” brilliantly satirizes both Americans and Spaniards, and at the same time Berlanga mocks the form by providing his own new lyrics satirically heightening the contradictions in the coplas’ ostensibly political role. Thus “Coplillas de las divisas” highlights the misunderstanding between the two countries, as well as Franco’s ignorant comments on money (divisas) and the economy during the transition to technocracy that culminated in his opposition to devaluation of the peseta “because he distrusted the good intentions of foreigners and believed that Spain could solve her problems alone . . . and he could not see why the rate should be changed and so permit Americans to buy more with dollar in Spain than Spaniards could buy in the United States” (Preston, Franco, 677). Berlanga’s parody has many historical, political, and economic resonances. The scenario from “Coplillas de las divisas” mockingly evokes Franco’s other statements at the time. Franco made many strange explanations for Spain’s acceptance of American economic aid and for allowing foreign military presence, as is witnessed in his assertion that “si nosotros tenemos que bailar, bailemos con la más guapa y la más rica” (“Los pactos con Los Estados Unidos,” 1953). By feminizing America, Franco sought to reverse the image of Spanish dependency on foreign aid.43 The most outlandish of all the proposals to welcome Americans in ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! is the total transformation of the village from Castilian into an Andulusian one since “España se conoce en América a través de Andalucía y toreros, gitanas y cante flamenco han borrado la fama de todo lo demás y busca de nosotros folklore.” This part of the film begins with Don Pablo’s speech to the villagers, which is filled with Francoist clichés: “noble pueblo, vuestro orgullo y coraje, entusiasmo y heroísmo, ejemplar raigambre” and ends with Don Pablo’s words, “seamos optimistas, han venido tiempos mejores,” to which the villagers all reply, “¡Viva Andalucía!”

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The transformation of the village begins with Manolo44 giving the men lessons in the art of bullfighting, while Carmen Vargas teaches flamenco dancing to the women. This transformation is completed with the erection of Potemkin-style facades. Manolo remarks, “la calle del Rocío echámela más pa’ delante, venga.” These transformation scenes are a key sequence in the film. Berlanga plays with the usual stereotypes of Spaniards as impulsive and passionate yet charmingly backward. He shows that these clichéd images are ironically held in common by both Hollywood and official Francoist cinema (with its invocation of the pandereta, las folklóricas, la España andaluza, preindustrial). Thus, through this surreal preparation for the arrival of the American delegation, Berlanga deconstructs the dichotomy between artificiality and reality (the “real,” “authentic” Spain that Franco sought to preserve) through transformation of the typical Castilian village to a stereotypical Andalusian one. Besides a critique of false “Hispanicity” and false andalucismo, Berlanga de facto questions the very notion that there could be such a thing as a true Andalusian or true Spanish character. For Berlanga the idea of Spanishness is always already a simulacrum. The notion of returning to Spanish essence through neorealism and the rejection of Hollywood is as absurd to him as is Franco’s demand to return to an authentic Spain by making epic films. The preparation for receiving the Americans is underlined with the assumption that the villagers will get to ask for whatever they need or want the most. Thus, toward the end of the film, Don Pablo lines up the villagers and gives each of them the opportunity to ask for one present (but only one) from the Americans. Order breaks down, as everybody gets excited, asking for many different things all at once. This sequence inverts the film’s earlier metaphors of economic prudence, replacing them with images of unlimited Bataillean expenditure. The only exception to this craziness is the priest who keeps on vainly repeating that spiritual values are more important than material ones. He does this in language parodying the typical discourses of the period: No queremos el progreso, el romántico y liberal, capitalista y burgués, judío, protestante, ateo y masón progreso yanqui. Preferimos el atraso de España, nuestro atraso, el que nos lleva a considerar que ante unos valores fundamentales deben sacrificarse los intereses materiales. . . . Bendito nuestro atraso. (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 29)45

As might be expected, the Americans never show up. Their cars simply zoom through the village, not stopping. Thus the Americans remain purely imaginary. The villagers’ own real transactions leave them even poorer than they were before because they have to return all the things they purchased on credit. The failure of the scheme to seduce the Americans is Berlanga’s comment on the entire economy of dependency in which America and Spain are

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mutually entangled. In this sense, Berlanga foresees many later developments in Spanish-American relations. Berlanga’s comments on economy, dependency, and “authenticity” are tied to the exploration of the film genre itself. Commissioned as an españolada46 and drawing upon the figure of folklórica, ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! cleverly departs from the genre, thereby exploring its subversive potentials. Folklóricas such as Lola Flores, Carmen Sevilla, and Paquita Rico had publicity and glamour in the full Hollywood style, drawing immense crowds and stopping traffic on the Gran Vía. They were simply, as Moix remarks, “el perejil de todas las salsas” (Suspiros de España: La copla y el cine de nuestro recuerdo, 21). The figure of the folklórica is at the heart of Spanish popular culture of the period and thus lends itself to Berlanga’s simulation and exploration of the “real” Spain. The copla was used as a weapon of Francoist ideology in the promotion of “true Spanishness,” but the genre also lends itself to subversive appropriations as much as to ideological manipulation. Berlanga captures this ambiguity of the copla in order to fully explore its ranges and possibilities. Casting Lolita Sevilla (Carmen Vargas) in the main role, Berlanga shows the complexity of relations between women, sexuality, and the copla and captures the potential subversivness of the copla as an expression of an otherwise forbidden sexuality. The copla was one of the few media for the expression of excess, the prohibited desire, pleasure, and sexuality. The female audiences really enjoyed the coplas for their transgressive potential. Terenci Moix writes in his memoirs, El peso de la paja: Memorias: El cine de los sábados, that his mother was a consumer of both Harlequin romances and coplas, because they shared a recurrent “tema de la pasión” (129).47 He adds that “mamá fue consumidora voraz de romances fatales, preferiblemente los que demuestran cómo la voluntad o las artimañas de una hembra de ley pueden llegar a dominar al macho, cuando no a destruirlo. Era adicta a las adúlteras a todo riesgo” (129). Carmen Martín Gaite describes her secret adolescent fantasies and her attraction to the verses of Conchita Piquer similarly: No solían tener nombre ni apellido aquellas mujeres . . . cuerpos provocativos . . . se las sentía mucho más de carne y hueso que a los otros enamorados que se juraban amor eterno a la luz de la luna. La luna, en estas historias, sólo iluminaba traiciones, puñaladas, besos malpagados, lágrimas de rabia y de miedo . . . aquellas mujeres no se despedían de un novio a las nueve y media en el portal de su casa . . . una pasión como aquélla nos estaba vedada a las chicas sensatas y decentes de la nueva España. (Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás, 152)48

Carmen Vargas is the only female who has access to the cafe, an almost exclusively male space. Even though Carmen is a sexual object, through the sexual subtexts of her songs, she is the sole woman in the film to be an active and

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desiring subject. From the very beginning, the men continually make comments about her legs, but Berlanga also mockingly deconstructs this objectification when, for example, Don Pablo, waking up from the dream, finds himself caressing the bedpost, which he had mistaken for the leg of Carmen Vargas. Her character thus reproduces the duplicity found in the coplas themselves. Carmen Vargas has a mobility denied to the other female characters, all of whom, unlike her, are stuck in their small village. Her sex appeal and her provocativeness on the stage rupture traditional ideas of female behavior and challenge the conservative messages on the regulation of women’s bodies. Lolita Sevilla is in a certain sense a predecessor to Sarita Montiel who “dejó constancia que el sexo era posible” (Galán, “Cine español, 1950–1961,” 229) a few years later in El último cuplé.49 Sarita Montiel carried the ambiguity seen in Carmen Vargas much further. The excessive sexuality permeating such unforgettable numbers as “Fumando espero” were in part responsible for her tremendous popularity. She was noticed for “su forma casi susurrada de interpretar las canciones y de jugar con los sobreentendidos eróticos de las letras, su exhibicionismo insinuante y puritano a la vez, su manera de utilizar la mirada, su coqueteo con los placeres prohibidos” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 127). During Arias Salgado’s era, the body was covered (todo tapado), and any revelation of flesh was censored. However, Franco’s government was simultaneously torn between two incompatible wishes: the desire to please the external free market with its values (desarrollo capitalista y apertura económica) and at the same time to preserve control over traditional morality. The insistence on the covered body was crumbling under the pressure of projecting a somewhat more liberal image abroad in order to attract foreign tourists. This image was about to become synonymous with uncovered bodies, bikinis, and beaches. This paradox was seen in the films of the period, which were actually shot and edited in two different versions, one for domestic consumption, and one for international export. As Galán observes, “se rodaban apasionados besos para el exterior y sólo sonrisas tiernas para los espectadores españoles” (“Cine español, 1950–1961,” 216). This split personality is highlighted by the film director Julio Coll, who recalls that “nuestro Ministerio de Información y Turismo funciona como dos ministerios que se contradicen. Uno que vigila y otro que fomenta el turismo. El uno prohibía que sacásemos el dos piezas en la pantalla y el otro fomentaba el turismo que tenía el dos piezas. Así que uno se preguntaba ¿Cuál de las dos me quito?” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 29). The entangled problematics of a gradual redefinition of sexuality vis-à-vis foreignness and nakedness and the new articulation of sexuality and the economy and politics are central themes in Hortelano’s Tormenta de verano. The body obsesses the entire village and summer resort. The nakedness of the dead woman is automatically associated with the foreigners who vacation in the

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area: “Yo creo-dijo Santiago-que la chica debía de estar en algún camping, que llegó por mar. Hace unos días, Claudette y yo nos cruzamos con una canoa a unas diez millas de la costa, en la que iban tres o cuatro parejas y todos desnudos” (27). This naked, foreign body is immediately associated with pornographic films that are clandestinely shown in the summer resort: “Una de las que vi. No duraba más de un cuarto de hora, pero allí se hacía de todo. Y qué mujeres, madre mía, qué mujeres” (59). Contradictions and connections among secrecy, cinema, pornography, and sexuality were carried to the extreme by the producer Ignacio F. Iquino, who in 1954 had already included Carmen Lirio nude in a foreign version of La pecadora: Poco a poco va perfeccionando el sistema y al año siguiente, haciendo compatible su puesto como presidente de la Junta Económica de Cinematografía del Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo con estos métodos para burlar las leyes españolas, ya contrata a actrices extranjeras, más acostumbradas a desnudarse delante de la cámara, a fin de incorporar a los personajes que lo precisen, como sucede en Camino cortado con la alemana Laya Raki. Así se llega hasta 1961, fecha de nuevo escándalo, cuando su Juventud a la intemperie (interpretada por la bailarina de strip-tease francesa Rita Cadillac) es descubierta mientras se proyecta en Bélgica con varios añadidos y bajo el título de Le reine du strip-tease, al mismo tiempo que en Francia se llama Les insatisfaits. (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 66)

Michael Taussig, in his chapter “Pity Those Weak in Lying,” explores the relationship between secrecy and community in “Franco’s regime of (un)truth.”50 He gives an example of a progressive school in Madrid that continued to function as a coeducational institution despite Franco’s prohibition of coeducation: In the Franco years, when the inspector arrived for his routine visit the principal would invite him for coffee and press a concealed button. As they sipped their coffee they pretended not to hear the scraping of furniture and pounding of feet on the floor above, and when, after a decent interval, the inspector arrived at the classrooms, to find boys and girls in separate rooms, the entire charade was passed as satisfying the law. As the years went by and the system of corruption itself became corrupt, there would be no scraping or rapid pattering of feet. The inspector would be shown a classroom with boys on one side, girls on the other, a teacher in the center at the front of the room, and a curtain running down the middle. (71)

Taussig adds that this story is “a remarkable image, and one we could well use as the arch-scheme for thinking through the power of charade and of public secrecy sustaining the regime. . . . It is precisely because it is built on charade that the regime lends itself with such perfection to stage like, theatrical images like this one” (71). Berlanga captured that same “regime of untruth” with his

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Potemkin-style facades, false Andalusians learning the art of bullfighting and flamenco, and cheap hats and outfits purchased on credit that transform Castilians into Andalusians before being forsaken, thrown, and dissolved in the village river.

CONCLUSION

This chapter attempts to examine some crucial currents and events that mark the period between Spain’s admission to UNESCO on November 17, 1952, and the First Development Plan in 1962. In the midst of all the decade’s fluctuation and change, Franco himself, despite his apparent achievements, started to lose touch with Spanish reality: “The cabinet reshuffle of February 1957 was to be one of the great watersheds of Franco’s political career. It marked the beginning of his transition from active politician to symbolic figurehead” (Preston, Franco, 665). As in the immediate postwar period, Franco continued blaming economic problems on Communists and Masonic elements, while his regime was profoundly changing, modernizing, and leaving him behind since “the new appointments had meant the abandonment of every economic idea that the Caudillo had ever held dear and the uninhibited embrace of modern capitalism. That in its wake would bring huge foreign investment, massive industrialization, population migration, urbanization, educational expansion, the social consequences of which were to turn Franco and Falangism into historical anachronisms” (Preston, Franco, 666). Franco, less and less in touch with reality, increasingly drifted into his hobbies such as “hunting, fresh water and deep-sea fishing, golf, watching endless westerns in the private cinema in El Pardo, painting, and developing his large estate at Valdefuentes, where he grew wheat, potatoes and even tobacco” (Preston, Franco, 627). As in the previous decade, there were many contradictions and complexities in all realms of culture, politics, and economics. The imaginary Americans from ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! zoomed through Villar del Río, never fulfilling their promise. The entire decade seemed to have lived in an anticipation that was never fulfilled. As Berlanga’s narrator remarks with tenderness and bitter irony, “los habitantes vuelven a la normalidad cotidiana y feliz.” Spain, about to enter into a tourist boom, was still caught in a space between “said and unsaid,” bound to what remained unknown, filled with moments of oppressive stillness and entrapment, silence, and dead, floating bodies. But this “daily, contented normality” was agitated and disturbed; new spaces were carved out, “el cuerpo deshabitado” was starting to become inhabited and was emerging from the trauma of the postwar decade. As we have seen in the texts of Ignacio Aldecoa, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jesús Fernández Santos, Ana María

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Matute, Luis García Berlanga, and Juan Antonio Bardem, there was a direct attempt to redefine oppressive postwar discourses and practices, but this direct, “realist” voice was overtaken by another, “a voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnessed a truth that they themselves cannot fully know” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3).51 Unsaid was as revealing as said and contrary to the demand to “impartially” document reality,52 the more surreal and fictitious the moments, the closer one got to rendering the “truth of reality.” Thus, the “truth of the decade” often emerged in the strangest and most unexpected places, such as in a significant amount of unclassifiable, inexplicable, and bizarre moments/films: En la España católica del Concordato y de Arias Salgado resulta que, en ese mismo cine controlado de forma casi paranoica por la dictadura, uno puede tropezarse con alucinaciones surrealistas de Jean Cocteau, apologías de la homosexualidad, alegatos contra la pena de muerte, reivindicaciones de la locura, amores incestuosos o insólitas lecturas de la Guerra Civil desde el bando de los perdedores. (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 279)53

Sympathetic killers, exuberant café singers, and old widows rejuvenated by fraudulent marriages were the screen memories of the 50s, and “like the analyst’s quest for the forgotten trauma of which the screen memory is but a displacement, the critic’s search for substantial meaning is lengthy and complex” (Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, 137).54 Despite an attempt to suppress them, these intense images and memories originate from Franco’s “regime of (un)truth,” undermining its anachronistic insistence on the values that even those closest to the regime no longer upheld. This time period ended with the greatest lie of all: that of the Caudillo’s own immortality. In the spring of 1960, rumors in Madrid that Franco had suffered a heart attack were so widespread that an official denial was issued by his household (Preston, Franco, 685). Rumors of the Caudillo’s mortality were announcing yet another crucial passage in Spanish history, that of Franco’s slow and interminable dying and agony, which deeply marked the following decade and were accompanied by the gradual and final decomposition of his regime.

Chapter Three

The Authoritarian Body in Agony

El extraño viaje (1962–1975)

“Adelante hombre de seiscientos la careterra nacional es tuya” —Pop song from the 1960s La flebitis de Franco a comienzo del verano había introducido un elemento lúdico macabro de conversación y orgía. Agotamos las reservas de champán del supermercado de la carretera de la playa, dispuestos a que la noticia del fallecimiento no nos sorprendiera sin burbujas. Y en vista de que el Caudillo se resistía a abandonarnos, fuimos consumiendo las botellas con una sed histórica un tanto draculina, sed que tuvimos que prolongar un año y medio porque el dictador decidió no morirse hasta noviembre del año siguiente. —Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Los alegres muchachos de Atzavara

Juan Bosch’s film Bahía de Palma, starring ravishing German actress Elke Sommer, was shown in Spain in 1962. It was the beginning of a new era. It was the first time in Spanish postwar history that a bikini was shown on the screen. The film caused a notable uproar: the lines formed to see the movie 71

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were endless, “llegando a fletarse autobuses en los pueblos para ir a verla a las capitales donde se pasaba” (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 236). El Dúo Dinámico sang 1000 bikinis; Los Pepes, El turista y la gachí; and Los Stops, El turista 1 999 999.1 The car, introduced in the mid-50s, had become a mass phenomenon by this time.2 Waldo de Mier, author of España cambia de piel, wrote that “una población con automóviles sin rasponazos ni abolladuras es una población subdesarrollada” (Sol y sombra, 158).3 The radio waves were saturated by “car” songs such as the popular “Adelante hombre de seiscientos la careterra nacional es tuya.” Gracita Morales was terrorizing madrileños with her Citroen 2 CVs in Sor Citroen, and Las Monjitas del Jeep were not willing to be bypassed by a progress and economic boom either.4 The bikini’s first appearance on screen, bringing the increased visibility of the body, corresponds to the opening up of Spanish borders and coincides with the First Plan de Desarrollo5 (Development Plan) elaborated by technocrats in collaboration with the World Bank. It is also simultaneous with Manuel Fraga Iribarne replacing Gabriel Arias Salgado as minister of information and tourism, who “with his short-cropped hair and natty suits, the can-do style and appearance of a busy American entrepreneur, was seen as someone capable of resolving the intractable problems . . . in a vertiginously changing society.”6 Thus apertura was tied to the change in both domestic and foreign politics, articulated in the complex motto Spain is different7 and tied to tourism and foreign investment. Bikinis and cars, symptomatic of the sexual liberation8 that went hand in hand with new consumer habits, reflect the time of economic boom, consumerism, and culture marked by a new vocabulary, such as “televisor, lavadora, financiación” that were just then admitted to The Dictionary of the Spanish Real Academy (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 156). Even though there were warnings against consumerism, “por modestos que sean vuestros ingresos, no caigáis en el lamentable error de contraer deudas” (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 160), the desire to own (automóvil, frigorífico, radio, televisor, vivienda) and spend was rapidly becoming an integral part of Spanish culture, accompanied by “una amplia movilidad de recursos humanos. Irrumpe el turismo masivo, la salida de los emigrantes españoles” (de Miguel, La España del desarrollo, 82).9 Besides the Seiscientos and its centrality to cultural and economic changes, another car marked the epoch profoundly, a black Dodge Dart (registration number PMM-161416) flying thirty-five meters through the air and shattering the body of the vice president of government, Carrero Blanco. His death anticipated “the death” that everyone was waiting for and intensified “una especie de euforia de la que todos participábamos [y que] nos inducía a creer que los días de Franco en el poder estaban contados” (Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa, 9).10 But in reality Franco’s end was not in sight. He ended up dying so slowly and painfully that even he himself would whisper at his death

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bed: “Dios mío cuánto cuesta morir” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 319). Juan Goytisolo tellingly envisioned Franco as a character from the 1944 historical epic Inés de Castro as a cadaver presiding over the throne perpetuated by inertia “más allá de la muerte”: La imagen del dictador moribundo pronunciando su grotesco discurso te trajo a la memoria el drama de Inés de Castro, contemplado en tu niñez en el cine: cadáver instalado solamente en el trono, revestido con los atributos de su autoridad, recibía también el homenaje silente de los cortesanos, hechizados por el símbolo de un poder inmóvil que parecía perpetuarse por inercia más allá de la muerte . . . como si asistieras a la agonía de quien fue de verdad el cabeza monstruoso de tu familia. (En los reinos de taifa, 83)

Franco was dying slowly, the country was changing rapidly, and his living cadaver could not contain excess any longer. The appearance of the bikini, together with the larger issues it embodied (tourist boom, sexuality) indicated an irreversible opening of Spain to Europe, and the Generalísimo’s wasting away allowed it while still casting his confining shadow over it. A phenomenon of the times, el destape (lifting the lid off ), embodies a Spain that was “dissipating” in sexual excess, political uncertainty, and inextricable changes. Contrary to the famous saying, absolutely nothing was “atado, y bien atado,” as the Caudillo had “confidently declared on 30 December 1969 in what was to become the nautical catch-phrase of his twilight years” (Preston, Franco, 748). This chapter looks at the way that two bodies that permeate this period intersect: a body of destape (the revealing body) and a dictator’s dying body (the body wasting away). One body was dwindling as the other was emerging. Both of these bodies incarnate larger issues. Franco’s dying body reveals political uncertainties and the tumultuous end of the dictatorship, while the body of the destape is symptomatic of all that was repressed throughout his reign. Franco’s prolonged dying was laden with surreal moments as seen in one of his last operations improvised in El Pardo on November 2, 1975, narrated by his surgeon, Alonso Castrillo. Franco was sick and began to bleed rapidly. The bleeding was faster than the capacity of transfusion, “se le transfundía, pero sangraba; se transfundía más, pero sangraba más.” Thus he needed to be transported on a trolley from his living quarters to an improvised operation room, a first-aid station of the guard at El Pardo: La bajada de la cama de su cuarto, al no poder transportarlo en una camilla porque la escalera no permitía el giro, lo transportamos en una alfombra. . . . En el corto trayecto desde la puerta del palacio donde salimos, llevándolo en la alfombra, a la ambulancia me impresionó grandemente, era de noche. . . . Estábamos transportando en aquella ambulancia, atrévome a decirle, a un

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pelele humano, un señor envuelto en una alfombra, sangrando. Pero esa persona era el jefe del Estado . . . aquello que llevábamos era el generalísimo Franco. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 294)

Upon arriving at the first-aid station, Franco was laid naked on the operating table and covered with a dirty yellow rag: “yo fui a buscar algo para taparle, encontré una toalla amarilla, sucia, abandonada en un rincón. Con eso le cubrí” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 294). To top it all, just before the operation, the lights in the improvised operation room unexpectedly went out: “Entonces aquellos cables que estaban por los suelos con el agua que se escapaba, con los líquidos del aspirador, empiezan a echar chispas, se hace un cortocircuito y nos quedamos a oscuras. Se apagó la luz. Estaba Franco con la tripa abierta, con la luz apagada y en un quirófano improvisado” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 295). This intense, surreal image of Franco with his stomach open and a long trail of blood oozing behind him while he was carried in a carpet to the improvised operation table was matched by the intensity of the factions that waited, feared, and anticipated his death, apprehensive about the political and economic changes that would follow the dictators’ death. As Franco’s end was approaching several political factions that wanted power or wanted to stay in power were succumbing to panic. Franco’s own son-in-law, Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiu, embodies this hysterical fright. While hunting in Ciudad Real he “seized the machine-pistol of one of the Civil Guards who were escorting the party and, shouting: ‘we have to be ready. They’ll be coming for us . . .’ had started wildly pumping bullets into a nearby rock” (Preston, Franco, 776). Carlos Arias, a president of government, was as impulsive and aggressive when he threatened Juan Carlos de Borbón with artificially prolonging Franco’s life for political purposes: “Franco no ha muerto, ¡y que no olvide que le tenemos hibernado a 33 grados!” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 312). Repressed violence, confusion, fear, and aggression seen through threat of hibernation, demented violent outbursts, trails of blood, and political tensions that accompanied an anticipation of irreversible changes were simultaneous to another phenomena: that of a country laughing at film and TV screens that were filled with semi-naked suecas in scarce undergarments and Spanish men “reprimidos y casi siempre en calzoncillos” (Coello, “Un actor bajito, pero muy largo,” 133)11 pursuing them relentlessly and unsuccessfully. These excessive, pathetic images were products of el destape and indicative of the cultural changes of the period and are above all associated with landismo,12 a subgenre of Spanish comedy whose characters “encajaban en una época socioeconómica determinada, en la que había un cierto desarollismo electrodoméstico, con una comedia de costumbres de consumo, y esto correspondía a una cierta liberalización sexual. Y digo cierta porque todavía en esta época estábamos muy

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reprimidos. Era la encarnación, el símbolo de la represión nacional” (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 29).13 Landismo, despite its pejorative14 connotations, problematizes gender dynamics, probes masculinity, touches upon rapidly changing women’s roles, explores abrupt mutations of mass culture and its relationship to sexuality, and encompasses all the anxieties tied to those changes. The two bodies discussed in this chapter, incarnated by Landa and Franco, are not chosen arbitrarily. Politics and sexuality intersect profoundly. Franco himself, persuaded by Carrero Blanco,15 believed that the threat of Marxism and erotic subversion were tightly entangled. He could not tolerate “fotografías de mujeres semidesnudas o en actitudes insinuantes.” Upon seeing a dossier on Spanish “liberalization,” Franco dismissed Pío Cabanillas,16 the most liberal minister in the Arias cabinet, for “allowing” nudity on the pages of Spanish newspapers and his lenient attitude toward el destape: Franco was given a dossier of Spanish magazine pages containing advertisements for beach-ware and camping equipment featuring bikini-clad models skillfully interleaved with pages of foreign soft-pornography to give the impression that such material was published in Spain. (Preston, Franco, 771)

Franco’s shock of suggestive poses of seminude women was accompanied by his disbelief and shock at other rapid changes: cultural, political and economical. The First Development Plan is a good example of Franco’s inability to participate in announced changes. When Navarro Rubio proposed it on December 19, 1960, “Franco agreed to it with great reluctance,” believing that the “American government was totally in the hands of freemasons who would open the door to Communism” (Preston, Franco, 690), a statement that had become meaningless from years of repeating it incessantly. Franco, unable to accommodate changes, “was presiding over a machine whose inner workings were becoming a mystery to him,”17 seen in his speeches that were “soporifically anodyne” (Preston, Franco, 688). In the1961 end-of-the-year speech: “he had described himself as the captain of the ship of Spain and the people as ‘the crew and the beneficiaries’ of his rectitude, virtues and skills as a navigator.” But as Preston points out “where the navigator was steering Spain was not clear” (Franco, 698). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage with all the events that I consider crucial in the period examined. I will look at certain events that are exemplary of changes of such tumultuous times as the end of a long dictatorship. One of the most telling events illustrating rapid political, social, economical, and cultural changes was a celebration of “Twenty-Five Years of Peace” in 1964 which articulated several issues of the period that I am discussing and was symptomatic of the era in several ways. It placed Fraga into a spotlight and showed his rising importance. Fraga was the architect of this

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slogan marking the anniversary of the end of the Civil War. While pleasing Franco with this “anachronistic” gesture, he was really determined to usher Spain into a new era. On January 23, 1964, Fraga drafted two important documents, a call for political reform (the draft program for a political association) and the draft for a press law. Even though Franco asked coyly “for what country is Fraga writing these projects?” (Preston, Franco, 774), his importance in profoundly affecting Spain’s changes cannot be underestimated. Twenty-Five Years of Peace also demonstrated Franco’s stubborn refusal to step down or entertain the end of his rule and unwillingness to name a successor. When Franco was presented with a medal to commemorate the event, “he said that he looked forward to a similar ceremony in another twenty-five years time” (Preston, Franco, 716). Needless to say, he would have been ninety-seven if the Fifty Years of Peace celebration were to take place. “Throughout 1963 and 1964, Franco had been bombarded from all sides of the regime with suggestions for the Ley Orgánica del Estado,” but his inmovilismo (resistance to change) manifested in reluctance to resolve the succession. He finally designed Juan Carlos, Príncipe de España, his successor on July 21, 1969, despite his convictions that “once a successor was named, there would be a rush of opportunists eager to ingratiate themselves with the nominee, something which could only diminish his power” (Preston, Franco, 726). Twenty-Five Years of Peace showed an insistence in conceptualizing Spanish society as a peaceful one (in terms of the past, present, and the future), thus misrepresenting the situation in the country that was anything but serene. The slogan Twenty-Five Years of Peace echoes Franco’s habit of referring to Spain as a peaceful forest, while in reality tensions were everywhere, not the least of which was the new cabinet. There was a battle in these last years of dictatorship, in a phrase attributed to López Rodó, to “furnish Franco’s head with ideas” and “the distance between the Falange and the technocrats was to be the greatest source of tension within the regime in Franco’s last years” (Preston, Franco, 695).18 Other great sources of tension in the “peaceful forest” were the church and the military. The church was seen as “abandoning” the regime and accused more and more of being “desleal y desagredecida” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 239), and the creation of the UMD (Unión Militar Democrática) was seen as “democrática y antirrégimen.” Finally, the greatest source of tension was the unrest that accompanied economic growth as seen in the strikes of 1962 and the growing social tensions. The anxieties in the tense Spanish society, facing the vertiginous changes that began in 1962 with the announcement of the First Development Plan, were accumulating and culminated a decade later in the unexpected assassination of Carrero Blanco on December 20, 1973.19 A black Dodge Dart carrying Carrero Blanco on the same trodden path that he took daily to hear the

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morning mass at 8:55 in the Jesuit church on Serrano Street blew up: “La explosión ha hecho volar al Dodge Dart, de casi mil ochocientos kilos de peso, por encima de la fachada del edificio y lo ha hecho caer en el interior de la casa hasta estrellarse, con sus tres ocupantes dentro, contra una de las azoteas” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 15). The intensity of the event and the magnitude of the explosion were followed by a silence that was as profound. The country was paralyzed by fear intensified by an absolute lack of commentary on the event.20 The tension of the day was finally broken by an official announcement at 7:00 PM. Paralyzing fear shortly afterward transformed into violence predicting the uneasy moments that would unfold in Spain from Carrero’s death to that of Franco. The stunning fact was that the very same day of his death, Carrero had called for a cabinet meeting (reunión de gobierno) to discuss the political situation of the country, which he planned to start with a personal statement: Máxima propaganda de nuestra ideología y prohibición absoluta de las ideologías contrarias. . . . Dura represión y, en la medida que sea posible, recuperación; con respecto al resto de la población [no subversiva] formación, educación y ejemplo. . . . Se trata de formar hombres, no maricas, y esos melenudos trepidantes que algunas veces se ven [por la televisión] no sirven ni con mucho a este fin [de formación]. La televisión tiene que defender el espíritu de nuestro Movimiento, la virilidad, el patriotismo, el honor, la decencia. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 18)

In an ironic twist Carrero’s call for repression delineated lines along which Spain would eventually disintegrate. Envisioned as the continuation of Francoist Spain, the statement was in reality a predicament of the end of the dictatorship. Carrero’s funeral was marked by “desorganización, protocolo, violencia y esperpento” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 42). This demonstrated the major conflicts that would afflict Spain in these last two years of Franco’s: for example, conflict between church and regime seen in the last desperate attempts of bunker (inmovilistas) to violently attack the disloyal church, with slogans such as “Tarancón al paredón” and “Justicia para los obispos rojos ” illustrated with a silhouette of a hanged bishop (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 42). While almost everyone was aware of the intensification of problems and the sweeping changes that Carrero’s assassination brought, Franco seemed aloof and had a delayed reaction to his death. He was sick with “gripe, tiene fiebre y está moralmente destrozado” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 50), hardly made any comments when he heard about the death, and did not appear at the mass. However, a day later he called Consejo de Ministros and right after condemning the assassination and briefly reflecting upon the loss and what it meant for him, he broke into tears: “Fue un llanto sin ruido. A

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Franco le ganó la emoción y las lágrimas empezaron a deslizarse silenciosamente por sus mejillas. Fueron unos segundos tan sólo, que a todos nos parecieron interminables” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 51).21 After the funeral Franco greeted Carrero’s widow and again broke into tears but this time in front of the whole country: Franco rompe a llorar de nuevo. Quienes en ese momento están viendo la televisión reciben una impresión fortísima: nunca jamás los españoles habían visto llorar a Franco. Al día siguiente, los periódicos publican la fotografía del llanto del jefe del Estado. La imagen fija de aquel instante causa un impacto tremendo en todo el país. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 57)

From that time on, Franco’s own tears and blood marked the dictatorship’s end. After Carrero’s death changes were intense and rapid. As Prego points out this uncontrollable bursting into tears “deja como una huella imborrable la certeza de que Franco es ya un anciano moralmente debilitado y, por lo tanto, políticamente manejable” (Así se hizo la Transición, 57).22 Franco had to name Carrero’s successor, and he chose Carlos Arias as president of the government over some other, perhaps wiser possibilities, since Arias “fue duro en los tiempos duros. Ahora que los tiempos son agitados y contradictorios, Carlos Arias va a ser su fiel reflejo: será un gobernante contradictorio y agitado” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 78).23 With this nomination Franco significantly retreated from active involvement with the government.24 Having already been away from the “realities of Spain” Franco finally verbalized his absence in a striking phrase: “Me han cortado el último hilo que me unía al mundo” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 52). This remark encouraged other equally surreal and poetic statements indicating the rapidly approaching end of the regime. Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, upon his departure on January 4, 1974, from the post of vice president of government, pronounced a “sorprendente exposición bucólico-regional”: En las tardes abiertas de cielo raso, cuando el sol luce con toda su fuerza los asturianos sabemos que, a la caída de la tarde, las nieblas y las nubes surgirán de las entrañas de la tierra. . . . En esos atardeceres los valles, las montañas y senderos se hacen peligrosos. Hay quien dice que entre la densa niebla cabalgan las brujas. Sólo los altos picachos, erguidos, cubiertos de nieve, logran liberarse de las nieblas. Y no siempre. Los asturianos sabemos también, es un saber ancestral, que de la olla hirviente del corazón vivo pueden surgir nieblas que turben la cabeza. Por eso se nos enseña a tener embridado el corazón, sujeto y en su sitio. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 76)

The “dense fog, witches, and dangerous paths” of Fernández-Miranda’s speech indicated the confused and turbulent times that followed Carrero’s

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death and that Arias incarnated/reflected. Despite Arias’s claim that “Vivimos tiempos difíciles. Pero no seremos derrotados por la confusión” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 128), the very nature and composition of his cabinet was “confusing” since it was a tense mixture of reformistas and inmovilistas, “a curious rag-bag of hard-liners and progressives” (Preston, Franco, 764). Arias was originally promoted to president of the government by conservative factions, but once in power, he promoted apertura. Arias’ apertura, also known as espíritu del 12 de febrero, was short lived and immediately counteracted by the gironazo, named after José Antonio Girón de Velasco, which wanted to “salvar a la patria de la confusión, del odio y de los enfrentamientos desoladores” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 128).25 The spirit of gironazo was conceptualized in retired General García Rebull’s denouncement of political parties as “the opium of the people” and politicians as “vampires” (Preston, Franco, 767). Apertura and gironazo were both the logical outcome of Arias’s government and personality. The victory of gironazo (the hardliners) was seen as a return to violence, and dureza, as illustrated by a series of executions that preceded Franco’s death and the end of the regime. Salvador Puig Antich, a Catalan anarchist, was executed on March 2, 1974, by strangulation (garrote vil) along with Heinz Chez, “a criminal without connections to politics” (Preston, Franco, 766). Thus “the spirit of February the 12th” turned out to be “una cáscara vacía envuelta en retórica” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 102). The execution of Puig Antich and Heinz Chez was followed by another eleven executions approved by Franco, who seemed unmoved by the outcry in the rest of Europe: “el grito unánime en Europa entera es éste: ¡Franco, fascista, asesino!” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 250). Franco decided to go ahead with the executions despite European protests, the clemency request by Pope Pablo VI, and Franco’s own brother Nicolás’s objections. Nothing could dissuade him from his decision. On September 27, seventeen ambassadors left Madrid, and Franco and Spain enclosed themselves in a rhetoric that resembled the autarkic period: “Sabemos quiénes somos y que tenemos razón, aunque nadie en el mundo nos comprenda. No nos importa quedarnos solos. Orgullosamente, doloridamente, hidalgamente solos” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 257). This autarkic rhetoric culminated on October 1, 1975, in a Plaza de Oriente celebration (Día de la Victoria). The masses chanted slogans such as “España, defenderemos tu dignidad hasta morir” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 262) and sang the Falangist “Cara al sol” with patriotic zeal. Several chants resembled Spanish protests against the UN during the 50s, such as the insensitive “Ea, ea, ea, Europa se cabrea” (given that eleven people were being executed). The event was reminiscent of old Falangist days, as illustrated by Franco’s reclaiming of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s famous phrase, “Evidentemente, el ser español vuelve a ser una cosa

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seria en el mundo.” It was also a “historic day” since it was the last time Spaniards would see Franco alive. These last images were once again images of the dictator in tears: La apoteosis final llega en el momento en que Franco sale por segunda y tercera vez al balcón para saludar a la muchedumbre. El jefe del Estado lleva gafas oscuras . . . éste es el momento en que Franco rompe a llorar. La emoción ha podido con este hombre de 82 años que, cuando abandona el balcón y entra en los salones se echa en brazos del cardenal primado de Toledo, monseñor González Martín, y entre ellos se queda llorando desconsolado, sin contenerse. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 263)

Through “limit” experiences of death (executions), bodily fluids (tears), and excessive emotions (uncontrollable embraces), the leader merged again with his country like in the “good, old times,” when his entrails were undistinguishable from the entrails of Spain. This last symbiosis with “his” country was seen in his last words to the nation: “I beg forgiveness of everyone, just as with all my heart I forgive those who declared themselves my enemies even though I never thought of them as such. I believe that I had no enemies other than the enemies of Spain” (Preston, Franco, 779). In Franco’s regime of (un)truth his own dying was a secret almost until the very end. As in Carrero’s case, Spaniards were not told anything about his grave state until finally on October 24, “León Herrera cuenta a los periodistas la primera y maquillada versión oficial de la salud de Franco” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 283). The country was kept from knowing that Franco was literally bleeding slowly and painfully to death. Prego’s book gives a detailed account on all the operations and interventions; the most dramatic and surreal being one on November 2,26 already mentioned during the introduction to this chapter, in which the bleeding was faster than the capacity of transfusion: the bloodsoaked carpet in which Franco was carried downstairs, dirty rags covering his naked body, lights that went out, an operating table from 1914, and finally his miraculous recuperation from this rudimentary operation.27 This miracle could not be repeated, and on November 15, after a two-hour operation by Dr. Hidalgo (this time in the Francisco Franco Hospital), it became clear that “ya no hay nada que hacer. Franco es un cuerpo muerto con un cerebro vivo del que todavía saca fuerzas para susurrar: Dios mío, cuánto cuesta morir” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 319). He was still “living,” or better said, a “living corpse,” with “fría y marmórea piel” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 319).28 Franco’s long-expected death was officially announced at 5:25 A.M. on November 20, 1975, when he was disconnected from the life-support machinery. His death was caused by “enfermedad de Parkinson. Cardiopatía isquémica con infarto de miocardio anteroseptal y de cara diafragmática. Ulceras digestivas agudas recidivantes, con hemorragias masivas reiteradas.

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Peritonitis bacteriana. Fracaso renal agudo. Tromboflebitis ileo-femoral izquierda. Bronconeumonía bilateral aspirativa. Choque endotóxico. Paro cardiaco” (Pozuelo Escudero, Los últimos 476 días de Franco, 244). Besides the surreal elements, Franco’s bloody and painful ending also had some tragicomic traits: “On November 23, while the funeral cortège was still en route between Madrid and Cuelgamuros, one of the waiting mourners fell into the grave and was rendered unconscious. Considerable difficulty was experienced getting him out before he could be taken to hospital” (Preston, Franco, 780). This tragicomic episode brings us to the second part of this chapter; tears, blood, executions, and unstoppable change were simultaneous with the moments of laughter that filled living rooms and film theaters while viewing Amor a la española, Los subdesarollados, ¿Por qué te engaña tu marido?, ¡Vente a Alemania, Pepe!, No desearás al vecino del quinto, Guapo heredero busca esposa, Préstame tu mujer, Tío, ¿de verdad vienen de París?, No desearás a la mujer del vecino, Pisito de soltero, Ligue Story, and others. In short, Spaniards were laughing at comedia sexy celtibérica (also known as la comedia desarollista de los años 60, cine de destape, destete, cine de reprimidos, las comedias de conquistadores y paletos) and its obsession with sex, jealousy, adultery, foreign women, and imagined “saturation” with sexual encounters. These themes were carried to the extreme in landismo, incarnated by Alfredo Landa, who reflected “en muchos aspectos, la frustración del español medio en el campo profesional, social, sexual, en el de convivencia y el económico: todos” (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 30). Landismo is yet another look at the Spain of apertura, relentlessly showing the confusions of a rapidly changing society. The negotiation of the old and the new is at the core of most of these films: Aventuras y desaventuras de los celtíberos dedicados al dulce y apasionante deporte de la caza de la extranjera. El coto de la caza es Torremolinos . . . sus calles y sus hoteles aparecen llenos de miles de muchachas . . . casi parecen ir uniformadas: bikini, short, minifalda . . . el mito amoroso de la mujer nórdica y encima lo monas que están con el uniforme. . . . El gran tema de la película es el enfrentamiento de la mentalidad, costumbres e ideas preconcebidas del hombre medio español respecto a la mujer extranjera, todo ello enormemente divertido y absolutamente sincero. (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 125)

Beautiful, voluptuous foreign women that are the objects of this “sweet and passionate hunt” are contrasted to a Spanish male protagonist that was usually “oficinista, trabajador de pequeña industria, empleado de banco, oficio técnico-manual-en definitiva, un mediocre español, con traumas sexuales diversos; además es bajito, feo, un poco calvo, simpático, reprimido y tímido” (Freixas, “Comedia Cinematográfica española: 1961 a 1977,” 49).29 The protagonist is usually confronted with a new situation that interrupts his routine

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such as “viaje al extranjero, del pueblo a la ciudad, despertar a una nueva realidad, ímpetu sexual al descubierto” (Freixas, “Comedia Cinematográfica española: 1961 a 1977,” 49). His sexual awakening is most of the time accompanied by and depends on the myth of a promiscuous sueca.30 Masculinity is at the core of the films, since one of the main premises is that foreign women go to Spain in search of “producto nacional.”31 Landismo centers above all on virility, obsessively repeating the same character: “el personaje de celtíbero apaletado, de insaciable fogosidad, que se llevaba al tálamo a forasteras de toma pan y moja” (Vizcaíno Casas, “Un todoterreno genial,” 89).32 Landismo is thus on the one hand caught in endless repetition of stereotypes and cheap humor but on the other hand, by focusing so relentlessly on masculinity, it reveals the social construction of masculinity and desire. It also illustrates the problematics of the mythologized social ideal of masculinity seen in Carrero’s demand to form “hombres y no maricas” and defend a spirit of Movimiento: “la virilidad, el patriotismo, el honor, la decencia” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 18). Landismo brilliantly picks up on anxieties (changes in notions of masculinity) that Carrero’s demands reflect, and the genre shatters those demands by carrying virility, patriotism, and masculinity to its extremes. The protagonist is often pathetic, and his eagerness to perform both masculinity and national identity destroys the desired effect. In Amor a la española Paco teaches Ingrid about Spanish culture: “la castañuela-muy de España,” “Paco torero-mostrar como se usar las banderillas,” “en España las mujeres no pagar.” Thus, the masculinity of landismo demonstrates its absurdity and becomes an “embarrassing orgy of humiliation and abjection” (Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 112) that dissolves into inadequacy. Sex is central but never explicit. It is sublimated into the frenzy of oneon-one combat and verbal assaults between men and women. Unlike American screwball comedy with “its sensuous surface and its provocative subtext” (Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s, 13)33 that rested on similar principles, landismo presents the “embarrassing surface.” This “surface of embarrassment” is manifested in a series of comic situations, extreme awkwardness, and fantasies of endless sexual activity contrasted to the reality of anxious and incompetent lovers. These embarrassing clichés are visually marked by Alfredo Landa’s legs, which were an icon of these comedies, assigned the same embarrassing function: “Alfredo tiene las piernas un poco arqueadas, como de haber montado a caballo. Entonces, cuando le sacaban en calzoncillos pues siempre era carcajada segura” (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 66). In several films masculinity is so excessive that the body gets literally exhausted by sex. In Vente a Alemania Pepe, Pepe is a victim of a stereotype that “el hombre español significa servicio permanente.” His friends warn him that

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“no se descansa nunca en Alemania,” and he is reduced to repeating, “Yo españolito, fuerte, toro” or “Yo español, flamenco, bravo, olé.” In ¡Simón, contamos contigo! Simón inherits an elixir that can get him the love of any woman. When a famous actress comes to the village, Simón gives her the elixir, and he becomes a village celebrity overnight. The city council converts him into a tourist attraction. They overuse him and he falls sick because of the excess of sex and foreigners.34 The maleness that landismo problematizes is often seen through the prism of inadequacy, be it sexual or economic. Economic shortcomings and discrepancies are a major source of humor. In the significantly entitled Los subdesarollados Julio and Timoteo head the I.I.S.S. (International Investigation Spanish Section), which specializes in adultery. Their technique for catching infidels consists of “constancias audiovisuales, retratos robots, huellas dactilares, pruebas antropométricas.” Their office is a storage room that belongs to the company in which they hold their meager day jobs. Their secretary is made of cardboard. In the classic of the period, Amor a la española, a car, an icon of masculinity, has a similar function of demonstrating economic shortcomings and small and unimpressive means. The dream of owning a fancy car and driving with a beautiful, blond Swedish woman is contrasted with 600s full of dull and nagging family members and their everyday problems. A beautiful Swedish woman in a sports car turns into the nightmare of a suegra in a Seiscientos. In Amor a la española Paco, the main character, takes Ingrid, a voluptuous Swede, for a sightseeing tour in his Fiat 600. Repeating obsessively “Yo fast” unfortunately does not take him far because his car breaks down repeatedly. The economically deprived protagonist is also infantilized: “embarrassment and abjection are the direct consequences of subordination, of being assigned a low position in the social hierarchy and being compelled to take orders” (Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 108). The exaggerated impersonations of masculinity lead themselves to multiple subversive readings through their embarrassing debasement. The ending usually tries to smooth over these discrepancies and returns to the status quo, where the main protagonist “una vez finalizando el período de libertad acostumbra a casarse con la novia que le espera” or “en el caso del presunto adúltero, volverá al hogar familiar con el rabo entre las piernas: todo ha salido mal, como el hogar no hay nada” (Freixas, “Comedia Cinematográfica española: 1961 a 1977,” 49). These “recuperated” endings are epitomized in the already mentioned Amor a la española. The film centers on the encounter between Ingrid, a beautiful, tall, Swedish woman, and Paco, a character encarnating “el españolito medio, de voraz apetito sexual insatisfecho,”35 who meet at the airport where Ingrid had some problems with her ticket, but “Paco resolver problema, nada molestando, no preocupar, Paco invitar tomar café.” Their encounter and

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attraction depends on their difference; Paco emphasizes that “¡españoles gentiles con mujer, galantes!” while Ingrid answers, “eso no acostumbrar a Suecia, menos galantes.” A few days later they run into each other again at Torremolinos, but this time their encounter is less amiable. The problem is Ingrid’s friend Marjori, who loves “producto nacional” and drags her to “los bailes inmorales.” Thus Ingrid obtains a bad reputation, and angry Paco wishes that “pudiera hacer yo que cambiesen de moral los extranjeros, sobre todo las estranjeras; cuanto tendrías que aprender las extranjeras de los españolas-en la decencia.” A few more misunderstandings end up in Paco’s marriage proposal “casar de blanco y en la iglesia de mi pueblo, con cura y todo, los españoles somos muy difíciles de entender, he aprendido que se puede ser como tú y ser una buena chica.” The film ends with a close-up of Paco telling Ingrid that “una estupenda consequencia de turismo es intercambio de ideas.” This supposed “intercambio de ideas” ends in a traditional Spanish marriage in the village church with Ingrid wearing a white dress. All these comedies have a similar ending; after exploring the “difference,” they return to the traditional ways. Most of the films are cinematographically uninteresting, and ideologically they reaffirm the status quo: “La voluntad de mejora acaba en el matrimonio y resulta ilusorio todo intento de abandonar la situación conyugal” (del Amo, Comedia cinematográfica española, 383).36 Transgressive topics and traditional endings are also problematized in landismo by flirting with topics of homosexuality. According to Mariano Ozores and Alonso Millán, the homosexuality that Spanish comedy (landismo) “explored” pushed censorship to its limits by introducing the character of the “maricón” for the first time in the history of Spanish cinema: En aquel momento todos teníamos una preocupación enorme: llegar al límite de la censura. Entonces, claro, qué pasaba . . . que en esta comedia se nos ocurrió aquello del maricón, que nunca había salido en cine, y entonces se hizo. Fue un éxito del productor Frade, que hizo todo lo posible para que eso pasara la censura, que no era nada fácil. Y costó bastante. En aquellos tiempos lo del maricón era muy llamativo. (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 23)

Despite the claim that those films pushed the limits, they stayed within the bounds of cheap humor and predictable, traditional endings. A potentially charged theme therefore stayed within the limits of conventionality. The most famous film with the character of a maricón was No desearás al vecino del quinto, one of the biggest box office hits in the history of Spanish cinema. It is estimated that 30 percent of Spaniards saw it. No desearás al vecino del quinto is set in a provincial Spanish city. Andreu, the town’s gynecologist, fails in his business because jealous husbands will not let their wives go to him. In the meantime the dressmaker, Antón, is getting richer and richer from his booming business. He triumphs because he wears a ponytail and owns a little white

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poodle. Doctor Andreu is in Madrid, and to his surprise he sees Antón, without his wig and surrounded by several beautiful women. Antón confesses to him that “he is not really.” They both go to his Madrid apartment, which is across the hall from the apartment that belongs to foreign flight attendants. Upon Antón and Andreu’s return to the town, the gossip begins. Jacinta, Andreu’s girlfriend, is desperate to save her boyfriend from such horrible fame. But instead she finds out Antón’s secret and reconciles with Andreu after taking a brief, humorous revenge on both of them. Despite clichés in both plot and iconography (white poodle, pony tail, exaggerated femininity), critics claimed that Landa “supo sacar el papel dignamente a flote, sin incurrir en reprobables excesos, tan frequentes en las versiones zafias de los chicos gay” (Vizcaíno Casas, “Un todoterreno genial,” 89). Alfredo Landa himself explains why the film was so successful: El tema del maricón era tabú en España. Un día estaba en Pamplona y fui con un primo mío a ver la película. Había una serie de señores delante y oíamos sus comentarios: ‘¿Y ése es de Pamplona? ¡Valiente maricón! ¡Hay que joderse! ¡Cuando le vea algún día por la calle le voy a dar dos hostias!’ Porque como somos allá muy. . . . Y de repente dio la vuelta el asunto, decían: ‘¡Ah, coño, que no era maricón! ¿Has visto que tío más cojonudo? Cuando le vea le voy a saludar. . . .’ (Garci, “Encuentro con Alfredo Landa,” 177)37

The deployment of the figure of maricón and its supposed subversiveness is at the end recuperated by the dominant structure, and landismo reinforces the status quo as “a kind of comic catharsis prevents social tensions from accumulating to a dangerous level; a symbolic challenge to the ruling values helps to defuse a real one” (Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 110). The focus on homosexuality is nevertheless interesting. It ties the figure of the homosexual with the newly emerging discourses on masculinity in Spanish popular culture of the transition. A series of strange moments and comments illuminating these changes appear on and off the screen. In his homage to Landa, Luis María Delgado, a director who was crucial to the phenomenon of landismo asks a rhetorical question: “¿Creéis que un hombre se puede enamorar de otro hombre sin ningún atisbo de homosexualidad? Pues sí, queridos: yo estoy enamorado de Alfredo. Desde que nos conocimos, hace ya muchos años, sentí el flechazo” (Delgado, “Sir Alfredo,” 150).38 Ramón Fernández claims that “en No desearás al vecino del quinto Landa le dio al pueblo un sistema de actuar que estaba en el inconsciente colectivo, que todos habían visto y que probablemente llevaban en la capacidad de sentir, de vivir y de integrarse en esa historia” (Recio, Alfredo Landa, 55). The first one of these two ambiguous statements claims that a man could fall in love with another man without being a homosexual and the other that Spanish people (pueblo) have the capacity to feel, live, and integrate themselves into the story of a man who

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fakes homosexuality. Extreme ambiguity in these statements points to anxieties within the Spanish culture at large regarding gender and showing the oscillation between the attraction and discomfort with the subject. The figure of a homosexual occupies a specific spot in the popular imagination and charts the progress of disintegration and reconfiguration of the nation caught in a tumultuous and transitional moment. On February 19, 1975, Article 9 of the new censorship norms redefined norms for nudity stating: “Se admitirá el desnudo siempre que esté exigido por la unidad total del film, rechazándose cuando se presente con intención de despertar pasiones en el espectador normal o incida en la pornografía” (Freixas, “Comedia Cinematográfica española: 1961 a 1977,” 53). According to Freixas these redefined norms in the year of the dictator’s death signaled the end of landismo. Landismo was over, and el destape (lifting the lid off ) took a quite different form from this moment on. Juan Miguel Lamet claims that “el cine de destape dice más del franquismo que todas aquellas herméticas, abstrusas e ininteligibles películas que tanto excitaban a la progresía de entonces” (“No somos de piedra,” 105).39 Without sharing such an extreme judgment, this chapter nevertheless finds interest in the body of destape. The appearance of landismo in the last years of dictatorship has various explanations. On the one hand, it was “la expresión simbólica de una sociedad que por fin podía respirar y divertirse.”40 (de Miguel, La España del desarrollo, 82). On the other hand, “se palpaba la parodia de una realidad miserable, de una sociedad frustrada hasta el delirio-la falsa apertura del franquismo” (Alonso Ibarrola, “‘Landismo’ viene de Landa,” 79).41

CONCLUSION

This chapter looks awry at el destape, Franco, and the texts and events that marked their intersection. “Precisely by ‘looking awry,’ i.e., at an angle, we see the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the ‘straightforward’ view that sees only an indistinct confusion” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 11).42 Benefits of looking awry are illustrated in Fernando Fernán Gómez’s El extraño viaje, which explores strangeness and weirdness emerging underneath Franco’s dying body and announces the strange voyage happening from the mid-60s to Franco’s actual death. The film is ladden with dark humor reminiscent of the 50s classics scripted by Fereri and Azcona. It depicts Spain in the mid-60s, awakening to the sexual liberation, tourism, foreign influence, and advent of modernity that was slowly reaching the village where the story takes place. The arrival of the visiting dance band and its lead singer, Fernando, disturbs somewhat the serene routine of the town. Fernando, a handsome, young man is an outsider marked by more unrestrained sexuality.

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Modernity is also entering the town store, where besides regular underwear they start selling silk stockings. However, the swimming suit is still a commodity that one needs to buy in Madrid. Two Spains, the old and the new, coexist in the village, as represented by two female protagonists, Angelines and Ignacia. Modernity is incarnated in Angelines, who dances the twist alone, goes to Madrid to spend weekends, and owns a swimming suit. Ignacia, however, is the representative of established customs. Being an old maid, she regularly attends church, dresses only in black, and never attends any entertainment in the village. She takes care of her childish, slightly idiotic siblings, Venancio (played by Jess Franco, the subject of the epilogue of this book) and Paquita. Her favorite expression, repeated to the point of saturation, is “En este pueblo hay que guardar las formas.” One day the owner of the store realizes that someone is stealing silk underwear, bras, and corsets. Everyone suspects Angelina, but nothing is ever proven. The peaceful existence of the villagers is shattered once again when Ignacia is found dead in a barrel of wine.43 As the story of the crime unfolds, we find out that Ignacia was killed by her infantile siblings and her estranged lover Fernando. The resolution of the crime unfolds in flashbacks. Fernando, soon after his arrival in the village, engaged in strange bedroom encounters (“perverse” sex) with Ignacia. He was also the thief who stole women’s underwear and stockings, while Ignacia was a voyeur who got off by watching him crossdress. Ignacia, the domineering spinster, literally becomes dominatrix. The murder of the most traditional woman in the town in El extraño viaje illustrates the intricate detours of sexuality and death. The town is thus ushered into modernity combining quite unexpectedly elements central to this chapter: bikinis, sexual excess, and tensions between the old and the new. The appearance of being a model household changes suddenly with the denouement and the disclosure of the “family” secret. There is discord and disproportion between the story and its retelling. The denouement of the story “bestows on an ordinary object the aura of anxiety and uneasiness” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 117). Ignacia’s household is a perfect example that anything can become “uncanny” (unheimlich) at any given moment; the boring, oldfashioned household turns into a perverse space saturated by excesses of sex, various “perversions,” and demented siblings. With the disclosure of the crime we suddenly realize that the scene, the film, and the culture from which it emerges are complicated by the multiplication of gazes. First there is a dull, provincial village like countless others in Spain during the 60s; we see it with “a normal view that sees nothing but a trivial everyday object, [it] is literally a gaze capable of seeing nothingness, i.e., of seeing an object ‘begot by nothing’” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 9). The appearance of the corpse, a dead woman in a barrel of wine, is looked at by the gaze determined by the metaphor of “a glass surface sharpened, cut in a way that

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causes it to reflect a multitude of images. Instead of the tiny substance, we see its ‘twenty shadows’” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 11). Finally all the tumult that coexists with and underneath the official “reality” is seen in the third gaze, as determined by the metaphor of anamorphosis, “the logic of which is quite different: a detail of a picture that ‘gaz’d rightly,’ i.e. straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinguished shapes once we look at it ‘awry,’ at an angle” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 11). Franco was finally dead,44 and his corpse was exhibited for two days after his death in the chapel in the Palacio de Oriente. Countless Spaniards went to see the corpse, some of them to make sure that he was, indeed, dead: Por allí pasan todos los tipos humanos imaginables. La inmensa mayoría de quienes acuden a la capilla ardiente lo hacen con el ánimo de dar su último adiós al hombre que consideran su caudillo y a quien estarán eternamente agradecidos. Otros muchos quieren sin más rendir un homenaje respetuoso al jefe del Estado que gobernó España durante cuarenta años. Algunos, sobre todo jóvenes aspiran a comprobar con sus propios ojos que el dictador que ha subyugado las libertades políticas en España durante más de cuatro décadas está, efectivamente, muerto para su satisfacción personal y política. . . . La cámara de televisión que durante dos días seguidos retransmiten el acontecimiento en directo desde el palacio de Oriente recogen unas escenas trágicas, otras grotescas, otras emocionantes o inexplicables. Por allí desfila, al completo, la España de entonces, con todos sus colores y todas sus variantes. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 331)

In his last words to “his nation,” Franco said that “desea abrazar a todos los españoles para gritar junto a ellos por última vez, en los umbrales de su muerte “¡Arriba España! ¡Viva España!”45 Excesses symptomatic of the last years of dictatorship show a shattering of that oppressive embrace that Franco insisted on until his last breath. Embraces were broken by violence, betrayals, tears, executions, as well as by laughter, by conspicuous consumption, the car, and the bikini, by common Spaniards with Fiat 600s driving on the “careterra nacional” and by the infamous Dodge Dart PMM-161416. Despite these moments indicating change, many were suspect of what they saw as “falsa apertura de franquismo.” After all masculinity rested reassured, a sueca still had the possibility to be decent, and homosexuality only existed as a pretext to get women (there existed solely the capacity to “act homosexual”). This scenario fits with Goytisolo’s suspicion of “modernización que engorda pero sigue muda” (Goytisolo, Reivindicación del conde Don Julián, 44). However, the bikini came off the screen and stopped being the exclusive property of suecas and of the male imagination when a group of Spanish women from Zaragoza (1973) disrobed and brought the “war of bikinis” home to a local swimming pool:

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Resulta-nos explica una de las manifestantes-que nosotras ya llevábamos el “bikini” puesto, pero disimulado con una blusa por encima. Dos comenzaron la guerra, quitándose la blusa. Vino el encargado y les llamó la atención. Y entonces nos pusimos así hasta medio centenar. Minutos después se habían sumado a la protesta todas las mujeres, aunque vistieran el bañador tradicional. Llamaron a la Policía y todo quedó resuelto. Nos salimos con la nuestra y consiguimos bañarnos en “bikini.” (Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra, 223)

Spanish women were bathing in bikinis, and Spaniards were watching films with “homosexual” characters as main protagonists.46 Despite white poodles, ponytails, and effeminate men, a new space was created, and different affects were emerging on and off screen: “primero viene el cuerpo desnudo; luego, la verdad desnuda” (de Miguel, “La España del desarrollo,” 84). The politics of human bodies proved to be complex, unpredictable, and extremely ambiguous. The events, films, and texts analyzed intersect and communicate the inescapable ambivalence of the last years of Franco’s dictatorship, mapping its affective intensities.

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Chapter Four

The Perverse Body

Fuego en las entrañas (1975–1985)

PATTY: ¿Tengo alguna ideología? PEDRO: Te gusta follar y que la gente te admire. PATTY: Quiero decir si soy socialista. PEDRO: No, pero no te importaría hacértelo con Felipe González. PATTY: Entonces, en cierto sentido soy socialista. Porque con Fraga, por ejemplo, no me acostaría, ¿verdad? PEDRO: No. PATTY: ¿Y con Tamames y Enrique Curiel? PEDRO: Con ésos sí, incluso con los dos a la vez. PATTY: ¿Crees que debería proponérselo? PEDRO: No creo que aceptaran. Tienes demasiado desparpajo para los hombres de izquierdas. —Pedro Almodóvar and Patty Diphusa, Patty Diphusa y otros textos

Simultaneously perceptive and frivolous, this dialogue between Patty Diphusa and Pedro Almodóvar from “Yo, Patty, intento conocerme a mí misma a través

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de mi autor” outlines the complexities of the political situation following the death of Franco and points to key issues of the tumultuous Spanish political transition from dictatorship to democracy. With symptomatic nonchalance the dialogue problematizes the fragile boundaries of the Spanish political stage: Felipe González and his Spanish Socialist Party, Fraga and his rightwing aspirations,1 and Tamames and Curiel, ex-members of Spain’s Communist Party. Pedro Almodóvar, an over-the-top film director, and Patty Diphusa, Almodóvar’s fictitious internationally known porn star, sketch both the complicity of political opposition with Francoist structures and the connections among performance, pleasure, fucking, and politics. Almodóvar wrote his Patty Diphusa columns for La Luna de Madrid from 1983 to 85.2 It was later compiled in a book, Patty Diphusa y otros textos, where besides the original columns there were several loose pieces written by Almodóvar for the Spanish press from 1979 to 1989. Around the same time period Almodóvar also wrote Fuego en las entrañas, illustrated by Mariscal in comic-book form and published in El Víbora’s Colección Onliyú. A self-described “sex-symbol internacional, o estrella internacional del porno” and “embajadora de placer” (31), Patty Diphusa (which means aghast, bewildered, perplexed) gives and receives pleasure while roaming the streets of Madrid, the city of desire and “space of infinite possibilities” (D’Lugo, “Almodóvar’s City of Desire,” 8).3 She writes her columns for La Luna, never sleeps, and “pertenece a ese tipo de mujeres que protagonizan la época,” whose fame reaches “Africa, Portugal, Tokyo, Soho and the Rastro” (15).4 The Patty Diphusa column was significantly entitled “I, Patty Diphusa.” The insistence on capital I (YO) reveals “la modernidad como un atributo individual.” That is precisely why she asserts “odio a esta ciudad en la que todo el mundo está esperando a que YO diga ALGO para ponerlo de moda” (70), problematizing modernity in a country with “personajes autodenominados ‘modernos’ sin ser aún un país moderno” (Pérez del Solar, “Vidas ejemplares: Algunas aproximaciones,” 41).5 The reference to the Rastro ties Patty to the movida, while both arbitrary and deliberate connections to Africa, Portugal, Tokyo, and Soho echo the movida’s sensibility and pleasure in incongruous juxtapositions and the dislocation of center and margins. Product and creator of la movida, Patty Diphusa is also inseparable from the transition since “el país ha cambiado mucho en los últimos días. A nadie le extrañará que una mujer X exponga sus puntos de vista en una publicación mensual” (Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa y otros textos, 16). La movida madrileña was a cultural movement of the late 1970s and early 80s. Accompanied by an outburst of creativity, the events from that period paved the way to the hedonism of the 80s, advocating “pleasure as a new Spanish morality” and challenging traditional Spanish views on gender, sexuality, and the body.6 A number of musicians, painters, designers, filmmakers,

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and journalists met, exchanged ideas, collaborated on diverse projects, went to Almodóvar’s Super 8 performances, and listened to newly emerging Spanish music groups.7 La movida’s shock value, punk aesthetics, spontaneity, and irreverence8 was from the very beginning manipulated, tied to the Socialist Party (PSOE), (mis)appropriated, coated in nostalgia, denied, and disavowed. Vernon and Morris see 1982, the year in which Socialists came to power, as marking la movida’s “new, more self-conscious phase” characterized by a “problematic relationship with the media.” Epps warns us that there is no such thing as a noncoopted phase and that from the very beginning la movida and Almodóvar were tied to a “marvel of marketing” because “constraining as it is, capitalism is also the condition of possibility of the style-conscious, fashion-oriented, trend-setting vision of Almodóvar” (“Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” 102).9 Finally, Colmeiro, in a significant rephrasing of the notorious pacto del olvido, emphasizes that Almodóvar’s La flor de mi secreto, filmed in 1995, “rompe el pacto de silencio con el gobierno socialista” (“Del rosa al negro,” 127).10 Hence Patty Diphusa, inseparable from the transition and la movida that she incarnates, is problematically placed between a radical redefinition of desire and its commodification. She was immortalized on the screen in Laberinto de pasiones by one of the icons of la movida, Fabio McNamara. Together with Almódovar, Carlos García Berlanga and Bernardo Bonezzi, Fabio McNamara formed the band The Black Kiss Dolls that soon afterward became the famous Duo Almodóvar-McNamara. Fictional as Patty Diphusa is real, he reinvented himself continuously belonging to “una clase de personajes que hacen obra de arte de sí mismos, aunque a veces les cueste la salud. Era una mina de inspiración.” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 149). His claim that Andy Warhol, on first arriving in Madrid, told him enthusiastically “You are a star” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 322) also places him between the factual and the fabricated, fitting Almodóvar’s own “disregard for traditional notions of verisimilitude” (Vernon and Morris, Post-Franco, Postmodern, 15). In Laberinto de pasiones Fabio McNamara exclaims, “No money, baby. No car, no ‘girl,’ no drugs, no vice, no rimmel. I’m hysterical” (¡Estoy histérica!). Right afterward he writes a come-on to Riza Niro, the heir to the throne of Tirán, “Sí me gustaría hacerte pheliz (taylor) esta tarde.” Brad Epps observes that “the note is untranslatable because the style is as important as the message” resembling “Fabio’s speech, an effusive, polyglot babble of Spanish, English, and French: ‘¡Qué overdose!’ ‘lipstick,’ ‘moving on,’ ‘un shocking’” (“Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” 104). While both less deprived and less hysterical than Fabio in Laberinto de pasiones, the Patty Diphusa of Almodóvar’s columns still suffers similar stylistic “disorders”: the text oscillates between “vulgarity” familiar from Pepi, Luci,

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Bom and senseless babble and at the same time offers a significant redefinition of several Francoist notions. Patty Diphusa’s columns are simultaneously capricious, amusing, and hilarious, as well as offensive, excessive, and disturbing. Indulging in camp and outrageous style, pleasure in superficiality, kitsch, homoerotic desire, and unrestrained fantasy, her text and its meaning are inseparable from its nonmeaning. Taking to the limit the notions of the work of literature as a form of life and of life as a fictional construction, it mixes to the point of indistinguishability truth, lies, copy, simulacrum, cliché, film, “real life,” and writing. The text exposes its seams and discontinuities, and the effect is a constant dislocation of meaning. The disruption and discontinuity also originate from the fact that Almodóvar, forgetting where he ended the column, often never returned to a character or continued an episode. Uncontainable and inconclusive, Patty Diphusa’s columns resist any monolithic reading, be it feminist, leftist, queer, or otherwise. A feminist reading will find pleasure in the redefinition of sexuality and be disturbed by several rape scenes; leftists could attack it for frivolity and banality but would nevertheless recognize its problematizations of those terms and its connotation during the Franco years. In this aspect it lends itself to similar debates that surrounded Kika, Pepi, Luci, Bom, and ¡Átame!. Underneath the apparent banality and vulgarity of Patty sucking cocks, getting sentimental upon hearing from a man that hers was the first pussy he had ever eaten, and filming photonovels such as Twin Pigs, she chronicles the cultural sensibility of her time. Despite the claim that “no teníamos memoria e imitábamos todo lo que nos gustaba” (7), Patty’s vocabulary turns around the Francoist lexicon of restraint and undermines its disdain for excess and announces the problematic passage from modernity to postmodernity through engagement with frivolity, uselessness, sex, pornography, and authenticity. It also breaks the boundaries of high and low, finds pleasure in kitsch, gives a housewife the same access to pleasure as a drag queen, and delights in the impertinent fusion of pop characters with tradition. Patty Diphusa, “superficial out of profundity,”11 is a terrorist of frivolity. Her idol is her best friend Mary Von Ética because “la principal virtud de Von Ética es su inutilidad”: “sólo puede fumar, tomar copas y reírse en las fiestas. A eso llamo YO reducir tu existencia a lo esencial” (Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa y otros textos, 18). She reiterates Almodóvar’s love of frivolity, already present in his early writing.12 Frivolity, used as a term of opprobrium, is one of the key words of the francoist lexicon. It recalls all the variations of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s conceited lines “ser español es una de las pocas cosas serias que se puede ser en el mundo” (Obras completas, 137) and echoes Ridruejo’s scorn for “euforia frívola.” Permutated, disassociated from Falangist rhetoric, appropriated, and overused, this insistence on frivolity nevertheless persisted. At the end of his reign, Franco significantly revisited this phrase in his speech

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at the Plaza de Oriente on October 1, 1975, where he exclaimed that “evidentemente, el ser español vuelve a ser hoy una cosa seria en el mundo” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 262). Besides reacting against disdain for frivolity during the Francoist era, movida’s love for frivolity is also a political stance that separated them from the direct political involvement of the previous generations.13 The political strategies of the postwar era were transcendental and exceedingly utilitarian, be it Franco’s recreation of Spanish empire, the 1960s generation’s Marxist discourse, or ultras desire to return to the betrayed “essence” of Francoism. Even though they come from utterly different perspectives, both the leftist and the rightist denunciations of la movida 14 were essentially based on the same thing: la movida’s frivolity precisely reelaborated by movida into strategy (the terrorism of frivolity): La frivolidad era una cuestión de hacer terrorismo. Había que hacerlo, porque la cultura, en aquel momento, estaba minada de transcendencia. La mejor manera de atacarla era utilizar lo frívolo, profanar un poco el altar de lo transcendente, colocando encima la frivolidad. (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 334)

The terrorism of frivolity also created a new type of intellectual; “la estética del marxista con su trenca” was replaced by “un tipo de intelectual más frívolo y menos clásico y la creación de una pequeña cultura sin grandes obras ni grandes maestros” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, i). Madrid, quite explicitly and deliberately denominated “the most amusing city in the world” in Laberinto de pasiones, is as amusing, as deliberately promoted, and as present in Patty Diphusa y otros textos. From the party in a chalet de Puerta de Hierro, a rape scene in la casa de Campo, a night visit to Mercamadrid, comments on problems of transportation in Madrid, and encounters with other movida characters, Patty, never sleeping and frantically active (as a “typical girl of the epoch”), explores Madrid, a true labyrinth of passions and desires. Her experience is marked by “overdose,” especially regarding drugs and sex (according to her she does not engage in sex only in one column, “Esta vez no echo polvo”).15 The humor of Madrid as “the most amusing city in the world” lies in repackaging the Francoist motto Spain is different. The slogan and its mutations (Spain, everything under the sun, etc.) obviously functioned quite differently in the enclosed, autarkic 40s than in the booming, touristy 60s. However, la movida’s insistence on difference, modernity, and entertainment as Epps warns us is always already coopted by years of repetition and ideological manipulations.16 For example, in the texts from the 40s Spain’s insistence on being different, among other things, lies in privileging essence over artifice:

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Nos pasa a los españoles como a nuestras flores y frutas. Las otras de Europalas rosas de Holanda o las peras de Francia-tienen quizá más lucida apariencia en los escaparates del mundo, donde se enseñan envueltas en papel de seda o con lazos de colores. Pero son sosas y sin olor. En cambio, con menos apariencia son más verdad, más honradas, más sabrosas y fragrantes las peras de Galicia, las naranjas de Valencia o las rosas y claveles de Sevilla. (Sopeña Monsalve, El florido pensil: Memoria de la escuela nacional-católica, 210)17

The pathetic and defensive nature of Franco’s insistence on an unrecognized, unique Spanish essence is replaced in Almodóvar’s writing by self-conscious, unapologetic, humorous statements claiming the postmodern primacy of appearance as well as an attempt to erode and reinscribe the categories presupposed by the logic of binary opposition. However, at times they slip back to “esentializing” Spanishness as seen through Borja Casani’s words: España es la energía que genera. No somos productivos como los alemanes, no somos listos para inventarnos nuevos proyectos científicos, no somos capaces, como los japoneses, de ponernos a currar como animales, ni de generar una cultura dominante como la americana o la inglesa. . . . ¿Qué somos? Pues somos la bronca, somos la energía pura, la diversión, somos sureños, simpáticos, abiertos. (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 15)

While at times falling into this essentializing and mythologizing Spanish spirit, so familiar from various past discourses, la movida’s urban culture’s ability to circulate contradictory discourses enables them to substantially rearticulate Spanish national identity. Influenced equally by Raphael and Sid Vicious, by la copla18 and punk, by La Paquera de Jeréz and Bowie, the aesthetic pleasure of la movida departs from the “sophisticated” sense of taste of their predecessors. Kiti Manver, “la folklórica que quiere triunfar en la capital” from Pepi, Luci, Bom cohabits Madrid’s modern space with the punk bands. In Laberinto de pasiones Fabio is simultaneously filming a fotonovela where “un sádico asesino” is destroying him and talking on the phone inviting a friend to “un cutre bar a comer algo con muchísima grasa. Una fabada.” Hence, the kitschy fotonovela and the fabada, an Asturian stew of pork and beans, are simultaneous references in this scene. Patty Diphusa’s columns capture this sensibility that stretches from fabada to glitter, especially captured in “Un kilo de mariscos,” with its articulation of local and global, film noir, tradition, and trendiness. Franco’s Spain gave la movida unlimited access to bad taste with its folklóricas, child actors, clash of urban and rural, and so on. They embraced what the intellectual crowd of the 70s was terrified by: bad taste, poor imitation, and artificiality. The “real discourses” of the past (fascist and Marxist) were

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replaced by la movida’s random-looking, fragmentary insights and radically different attitude toward mass culture. High culture ceases to be the sole object of intellectual attention, and la movida stimulates the emergence of experiences that were until then regarded as intellectually inferior. Precisely this irreverent eclecticism that transgressed boundaries and undermined hierarchies distinguished the contemporary movida sensibility from the previous belief in depth, originality, and authenticity. Franco’s subdued era with its disdain of any excess was replaced by the exteriorization of passions, “dentro de aquella sociedad hipermediocre, hipergris, ellos iban vestidos alucinantemente, exteriorizaban sus pasiones, hacían en público absolutamente lo que les daba la gana” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 2). In Laberinto de pasiones, when cornered by a demand for simplicity, Fabio explains that “lo sencillo nunca fue moderno. Lo moderno es futurista. Y futurista es glitter. Por ejemplo, un shocking color de Londres.” Spain’s Sociedad hipergris was assailed by “un shocking color de Londres.” Tequila, an Argentinean group that arrived to this “sociedad hipergris” “proclaiming explosion of color,” enjoyed “lo glamoroso, el raso, las ropas de chicas.”19 They remarked that at times they looked like drag queens (“¡A veces parecíamos drag queens!”). This travesty was carried to even further limits by Fabio, who maintains that during la movida at times he felt as if he were abroad: “Para mí era como si estuviera en el extranjero. Además, iba de rubia platino, así que extranjera totalmente. Los demás eran españoles. Había también yuppies y modernas, como hay ahora. Pero nosotras éramos divinas, los que teníamos el puntazo” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez 318). Color and drag foreign to Spain, and Spaniards in color and drag, simultaneously performed and problematized gender and nationality, rejecting the oppressive and forceful relations of authenticity and Spanish womanhood promoted for decades: “La mujer de España, por española, es ya católica . . . no hay que dejarse engañar por ese otro tipo de mujer, esa fémina ansiosa de ‘snobismo’ que adora lo extravagante y se perece por lo extranjero. Donde la mujer se conserva más mujer es en España” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 26). Fabio McNamara literally becomes a “fémina ansiosa de ‘snobismo’ que adora lo extravagante.” At the same time, Pepe Rubio, a fashion designer, made a spectacle of himself by emulating la duquesa de Sevilla, organizing fashion shows with transvestites, and creating “faldas para hombre con paño de cocina” (105). Pepe Rubio and Fabio McNamara’s appropriation of the “duquesa de Sevilla,” creation of “faldas con paño de cocina,” and “adoración de lo extravagante” echo various quintessential movida prototypes, such as extravagant and excessive Patty Diphusa; “el personaje más pop” Queti,20 and a masochist housewife Luci.21 The womanhood that Pepe Rubio and Fabio simulated was drawn from both Spain and abroad, the figure of la folklórica and the ama de casa inspired them as much as 70s glam rock and 1940s American cinema.

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They were using “parodic identifications with the past-to ‘de-realize’ identity and proper names as festive zones of intensity rather then as essences” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 93). At the same time that Fabio and Pepe Rubio were simulating Spanish and foreign women, La Luna published Severo Sarduy’s text on transvestism, where he advocates the postmodern claim that “el travestí simulando a la mujer produce un modelo de mujer hipertético: más mujer que la mujer.” Sarduy’s argument, closely related to Deleuze’s as well as other postmodern thinkers’ problematization of the notion of real, copy, and simulacrum, was familiar to the movida circle.22 Santiago Auserón, a lead vocalist of Radio Futura, studied philosophy in Paris and La Luna carried on a debate on postmodernism. The figure of the transvestite is thus placed between the spontaneity of “exteriorization of passion” and theoretical astuteness. To this point, I have been discussing la movida’s own self-theorization. Now I would like to move to a consideration of la movida from the perspective of contemporary cultural theory. La movida’s focus on the transvestite as well as transsexual figures in the 80s patterned the critical discourse on la movida in the 90s.23 This same focus on the transvestite and the transsexual as a site of redefinition of gender, body, masculinity, and femininity, perhaps once meaningful, becomes overused and transformed into the uncritical privileging and exploiting of the body of the transvestite as the site of the Spanish transition. The body of the transvestite is claimed to be located in a complex transgressive space as a privileged locus of redefinition and resignification of the meaning of gender and sexuality and becomes an exemplary site for proving the intensity of social change and shattering of all the “normalizing myths.” In “Almodóvar’s City of Desire,” Marvin D’Lugo discusses a scene from the Ley del deseo (Tina being hosed down by a sanitation worker), terming it a “transsexual’s erotic spectacle” and claiming that “centering of the scene on the transsexual’s body signifies the dramatic collapse of sexual difference: male/female; gay/lesbian, heterosexual/homosexual” (139). He adds, “As we watch Tina’s ecstatic response to the thrust of water on her body, we unconsciously bear witness to the power of the city as the agency of the individual’s release from the constraints of the social suppression of body and mind” (138). Victor Fuentes, in “Almodóvar’s Postmodern Cinema: A Work in Progress,” claims that “through proliferation of homosexual, transvestite, and/or transsexual characters the films celebrate, in carnivalesque form, the polymorphous perversity of the human body, the declining power of masculine discourse and the Father’s Law, and the almost infinitely plural ‘I’ of the postmodern subject signified in the transsexual as signaled by Baudrillard” (162).24 Fuentes ties his discussion of “perverse bodies” to Sarduy’s “neobaroque simulation,” claiming that “like the historical baroque, the Spanish director’s [Almodóvar] postmodern/neobaroque extravagance hides a horror of the void

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traceable in the series of high-angle shots that mark his films’ camera work” (161). Could one really claim that Almodóvar’s postmodernity and so-claimed extravagant neobaroqueness hides a horror of the void? If so, is this horror of the void really traceable through high-angle shots? Finally, do high-angle shots really mark Almodóvar films’ camera work? Moving on to a discussion of ¡Átame! and Tacones Lejanos,25 Fuentes sees them as films of an “essentialized Almodóvar whose vision of the world is fixed,” remarking that “the cultivation of nostalgia and pastiche, once confined to his appropriations of Hollywood models, seems to have affected his attitude toward his own work, as the director and his characters circle endlessly in their own ‘labyrinth of passion.’” He concludes this section pointing out that the simulacrum now “threatens to envelop Almodóvar himself ” (166) and at the same time remarks that “the ending of High Heels provides a demonstration of the powers of love and life over the world of the simulacrum that had threatened to envelop the characters” (165). Despite seeing the simulacrum as a threatening force (especially in Almodóvar’s later films), Fuentes paradoxically still concludes the article by reiterating Almodóvar’s importance because “his insistent questioning of the simulacra of patriarchal society, his joyous affirmation of the plural and even [my emphasis] transsexual subject, and his celebration of freedom of expression and of passion and desire are contributions that gesture toward a posthumanism in keeping with the present fin de siglo: that is, a humanism unburdened by the dead weight of classical, and homocentric, humanism” (166). It seems that there is a certain contradiction between the celebratory embrace of postmodernism (the insistence on its marginalized, “ungrounded” bodies as the site of Spanish transition) and the desire to ground and interpolate them to inner spirituality,26 the power of love and life, and/or “non-classical” humanism unburdened by a homocentric one. A transsexual body takes a set of categories that are conceived as natural and unchanging and questions it. However, all the historical, political, and theoretical nuances of transsexuals and transvestites are lost by lumping together and obsessively centering on some abstract transsexual or transvestite body as the core of Almodóvar’s cinema and/or Spanish transition. On the other hand, Brad Epps articulates the “pain” and complexity of the “marginalized” bodies in Almodóvar’s cinema by pointing out how “sexual exuberance is an effect of restriction and pleasure bound to power” (“Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” 106). He discusses the filming of a sadomasochistic photonovel in Laberinto de pasiones where “Almodóvar directs Fabio to enact a violent ecstasy, to desire his own destruction before the camera” (107). While “Fabio threatens to slide offframe and to slip offscreen” (107) and Almodóvar steps in “exposing the violent power of limits and frames”:

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Insofar as Fabio plays across the boundaries of gender he evokes the dream of unframed imagination, the explosion of the limits of representation, the ecstasy of cinema. . . . To evoke such ecstasy he must, paradoxically, be contained . . . as if the only figure who could be so violently disfigured and still remain “comical” had to be hysterical, gay, and a transvestite. (108)

Epps suggests that there are various readings of this scene. It could be read as “Almodóvar’s complicity in a system of established representation” or as “a sly exposure of the pain underlying representation itself ” (108). Perhaps it is worth returning to the “real” Fabio a decade after his “stardom” in Laberinto de pasiones and la movida. In a 1997 interview, lamenting being called “maldita” and not being artistically appreciated like Barceló, he invited the public to see his three hundred paintings.27 He then outlined his conception of painting: Pintar es como rizarse el pelo, no sirve para nada, sólo para estar más bello, y un cuadro sólo sirve para embellecer la pared. En la pintura, como en la moda hay alta costura y pret-a-porter, hay alta pintura y pont-a-pintar. La alta pintura es esa que está en los museos y el pont-a-pintar significa ponte a currar. Pinto porque quiero que el nombre de Fabio pase a la historia como uno de los genios de los siglos XX y XXI. (58)

Caught between the pain of not being appreciated and the illusory insistence that he will be remembered in history as one of its geniuses, Fabio’s conception of painting resonates la movida’s statements on their project from almost two decades before. Fabio is also very self-conscious that his “failure” proceeds from an unjust equating of money and success: “muchos piensan que porque no has ganado tantas pelas como Almodóvar o Alaska, ya estás hundido. Eso es algo totalmente materialista. Creo que es muy importante saber diferenciar que una cosa son las pelas y otra es el arte y la creatividad.” Fabio insists that money does not matter, but the more that he insists on the unimportance of money and fame, the more we realize through him la movida’s inseparable ties to capital and the mercilessness of not conforming to its flows. No one goes to see his three hundred paintings. Slipping off screen, he also slipped off la movida’s track. Without access to success, he can only obsessively repeat, “Me considero el legítimo heredero del arte de ‘Los Costus’ y de Tino Casal, que no es poco; si ellos eran geniales yo también lo seré.” Besides painting, Fabio also returned to his singing career. Commenting on his “return,” an article in El País stated, “Por qué y para qué vuelve McNamara? Antes se pasaba mucha risa con él. Ahora tampoco canta, pero se ha serenado un poco y ha perdido la gracia significante.” Drag without hype or glamour does not work so well and is not as readily accepted by the mainstream bored by the absence of laughter (antes se pasaba mucha risa con él). Even a sym-

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pathetic discourse shows the inability to accept Fabio without falling back on a very traditional vocabulary. The author of the interview insists on respecting Fabio because “las circunstancias salvajes que han rodeado su vida no han podido acabar con un hombre-mujer que, a pesar de su lado bizarro y autodestructivo merece todos los respetos simplemente por el hecho de tener cojones.” Respect tied to cojones points out to the persistence and not to “a decline of the power of masculine discourse” (Fuentes) that comes back in full force, leaving Fabio as marginalized as ever and illustrating the problematics of privileging the transvestite body as a site of Spanish transition. Theoretical uses and (mis)uses and a certain glorification of the figure of the transvestite has its flip side: the denial of any subversive potential of la movida. Eduardo Subirats, one of the opponents of Vattimo’s pensiero debole,28 postmodernism, and its Spanish manifestations, edited a dossier in the February/March 2000 issue of Quimera, entitled “Anatomía de la transición española,” reflecting upon the process of Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy. His article “De la transición al espectáculo” argues that “en nombre de la estabilidad o la paz social se conciertan alianzas políticas y morales con las instituciones, los valores y las representaciones más sombrías del pasado” (21).29 According to Subirats, this cultural moment was exemplified by “la Movida y el Quinto Centenario, el nuevo cine español estatalmente promocionado, la implosión de una neovanguardia políticamente administrada en la arquitectura y las artes plásticas, el boom de una nueva literatura comercialmente definida como entretenimiento, y la estrepitosa degradación de las expresiones del pensamiento” (21). The Spanish transition to democracy was indeed embodied in social, economic, and political Francoist structures and institutions. This was already articulated and accepted during the time of transition (which was significantly termed pacto de olvido). Prego’s Así se hizo la Transición reveals all the intricacy of the process; Vilarós reading on the transition is precisely based on this fact; and Savater cruelly captured it, pointing out that “the ‘anti-Francoists’ were amongst the most ‘repugnant products of the Dictatorship’” (Smith, The Moderns, 2). Despite his rightful insistence on the complicity between democratic and Francoist institutions that marked Spain’s specific and complex passage from dictatorship to democracy, there are several problematic points in Subirats’s article. Unproblematically placing side by side la movida and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America (Quinto Centenario) as two utmost examples of “thought degradation,” he also amasses Antonio Muñoz Molina, Pilar Miró, Juan Benet, Pedro Almodóvar, Javier Mariscal, Rubert de Ventós, Fernando Savater, Francisco Umbral, and Tierno Galván as representatives of la movida, blaming them for “una descocada incompetencia intelectual junto a una elocuencia más bien bullanguera” (22). Subirats’s list classifies in the same category

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artists, politicians, and filmmakers with radically different sensibilities, as well as intellectual, social, and political positions during Spanish transition. Two of the thinkers singled out by Subirats, Umbral and Savater, are actually each given a chapter in Smith’s The Moderns. First of all, like Subirats, Umbral and Savater chronicled the epoch and engaged intellectually with their times rather than participating in la movida. Second, their engagement with the Spanish transition is much more interesting and profound than Subirats’s reduction. It is especially illuminating to read Subirats alongside Umbral because it becomes clear that Subirats’s “intellectual superiority” to “una elocuencia más bien bullanguera” arises from, among other things, his marking of political discourse as a superior category to other possible readings (for example, the complete blindness to gender). Subirats is a quintessential example of disdain for Almodóvar emanating from the “dismissal of categories of femininity and homosexuality” and “disrespect for a register coded as ‘feminine’” (Smith, Desire Unlimited, 2). As Paul Julian Smith remarks, Umbral’s account of the epoch involves not only narrating the national body in transition but also tracing the transition on his own body as well. Umbral’s obsessive focus, however problematic, on “women, whose exclusion from the vicissitude of political life makes them exemplary witnesses to the flow of personal time” and “gay men whose lack of sustained social presence makes them pure expressions of the moment, elegant but ephemeral ‘flowers of freedom’” (The Moderns, 14) makes him vulnerable and open to gender questions that Subirats dismisses via the “power of masculine discourse” (Fuentes). Another interesting example of Subirats intentional mis(readings) can be seen through contrasting his and Brad Epps’s reading of la movida and movimiento. Subirats reads la movida etymologically; related to “Movimiento,” “la categoría a la vez estética y política introducida en Europa por las estrategias fascistas de vanguardia de los años veinte y treinta” (21). After insinuating this connection, he is quick to dismantle his own argument by underscoring la movida’s frivolity, banality, and venality that cannot be compared to “la magnitud de la utopía nacionalsocialista de una movilización total de la cultura a partir de estado” (22). However, he adds that despite its banality and venality, movida “significó una verdadera y radical transformación de la cultura; neutralizó cualquier forma imaginable de crítica social y de reflexión histórica e introdujo la moral de un generalizado cinismo y limpió las escenas intelectuales españolas de los escasos focos de sensibilidad independiente que el nacionalcatolicismo había tolerado” (22). Epps gives us a reading of movement that makes more sense in the context of la movida, Almodóvar’s cinema, and postmodernism. In “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” Epps sees Almodóvar’s films centered on the movement of sexual desire. The films are

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“framed largely around figures of femininity and homosexuality: figures subject, in Almodóvar’s eyes, to nervous anxiety, emotional exhaustion, flamboyant histrionics: to hysteria.”30 Epps examines how these figures function on “a formal level pointing to problems of stillness and mobility, placement and displacement, continuity and discontinuity, framing and figuration” (99). Once again it seems that Subirats’s reductive and narrow political reading of movimiento rests on the exclusion of “figures of femininity and homosexuality” problematized in transition times. Curiously enough, this debate and reductive reading led by Subirats repeats already known arguments for or against la movida as well as the intensity of the reactions and emotions it provoked earlier.31 Paradoxically, years later, Subirats “allied” himself with conservative forces when he echoed a statement by Madrid’s conservative mayor, Alvarez del Manzano, that la movida was “a grand socialist failure” without any imprint on the Spanish cultural or artistic scene. Subirats defined la movida as “la expresión popular de un dinamismo paralizado, la implosión de una energía social mediáticamente empaquetada, una revolución intelectual y estética que no cambió nada, y una gran fiesta lisonjera, putrefacta y vacía” (Subirats, “De la transición al espectáculo,” 23).32 Subirats privileges intellectual reflection from the 60s with its “ética de la responsabilidad historiográfica, y los valores humanistas y liberales en torno a los cuales se había articulado su crítica antifascista” to the intellectual worthlessness of the 80s with its “actitud desfachatada mejor o peor travestida con los iconos en boga del realismo mágico” (22).33 Subirats associates pensiero debole, postmodernism, and political apathy (in his opinion, so distinct from intellectual reflection marked by historiographic responsibility) without acknowledging the fragile and complex boundaries between the former and latter terms, modernity and postmodernity, as well as between pre-Franco and post-Franco Spain. Intellectual reflection, excess, banality, and performance are often placed unproblematically in their “proper” place (a country marked for so long by dictatorship especially lends itself to these simplified readings). Hence, performativity is a postmodern trait, intellectual reflection is exclusive to opposition, oppressiveness is paired with dictatorship, and so on. Nevertheless, this rigid and reductive classification yields to complex moments of excess, performance, feminization, and travesty that mark both pre-Franco and post-Franco Spain. In “Modern Times: Francisco Umbral’s Chronicle of Distinction,” Paul Julian Smith points to “Umbral’s attention to Felipe’s [González] wardrobe (long hair, boots, no tie, and ‘Fidel’s cigar’) suggesting already that socialism is just another style and the new leader’s ‘modernity’ nothing more than his photogenic qualities when reproduced on a political poster” (The Moderns, 13). This socialist performance of politics was preceded by the communist one. Santiago Carrillo, a leader of the till then clandestine Communist Party34

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crossed the border from France to Spain on February 7 with a false passport in the name of the architect Raymond B and a wig made by Gonzalo Arias, Picasso’s barber. What started perhaps with a simple need for camouflage soon became an authentic obsession. Carrillo obsessively focused on his wig, found pleasure in drag, staged his arrests, and performed politics. Teofulfo Lagunero, his friend and impresario from Madrid with a summer home at Costa Azul, accompanied him in crossing the border. Lagunero thought that “un arquitecto jamás iría vestido de ese modo” and was bewildered by Carrillo’s outfit: “Yo lo miré y vi que estaba mal vestido: unos zapatos horrorosos, los calcetines caídos . . . mal vestido, vamos.” Carrillo protested for a while, insisting that “el hábito no hace al monje” but then gave in: “dijo que bueno, y allí, en la mejor tienda de Cannes, se vistió de arriba abajo: traje, corbata, un abrigo estupendo. Estaba impecable” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 400). Afterwards, Carrillo “se coloca la peluca gris, de melenita corta, que le proporciona un aire tanto dudoso, se quita las gafas, las sustituye por unas lentillas y pone rumbo a España” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 400). After many wanderings, French and Swedish reports on his illegal stay in Madrid, run-ins with police, and clandestine press conferences, he was finally caught by the police (significantly leaving them his beloved wig): Carillo regala al policía una de sus dos pelucas. Porque tuvo que hacerse dos. La primera era muy buena, pero Carillo y Belén de Piniés, pulcros y aseados, que lavaban la peluca con frecuencia, ignoraban que ese pelo tejido no se podía secar con secador. La obra de Gonzalo Aries, el barbero de Picasso, pronto quedó inservible. Hubo que hacerse otra en Madrid, más fea y de peor calidad, pero igualmente útil. Esa segunda es la peluca que el líder comunista entrega a uno de los policías. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 604)

This entertaining reading of Carillo’s 1976 political moves and travesty problematizes the connections between a traditional left, performance, staging, drag, culture, simulacrum, and politics. It also points to the plurality of drag (pluma) in the transition and the danger of conflating all these complexities into one simplified image. Going back in time to Franco, his own body was marked by excess, performance, travesty, and complex configurations of femininity and masculinity. Franco’s despotic body, besides traits coded as masculine (cruelty, coldness, propensity for killing) was also marked by a rarely mentioned femininity.35 As seen in the first chapter, the dictator’s body was shattered by hysterical weeping, jealous outbursts (directed against Ramón Serrano Suñer, José Antonio Primo de Rivera), obsessive retelling of paternal trauma, pathological blushing and shyness, and so on. These contradictions disturbed preconceived boundaries of the dictators’ despotic body.

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Both examples, Franco and Carrillo, upset the unproblematic and reductive classifications of the Spanish culture before and after the death of the dictator. Following Giménez Caballero’s description of Franco marked by “las entrañas implacables y rostro impasible” (Martínez, La vida cotidiana, 20), I argued in the first chapter that the nation was being written in the continual slippage produced by the tension between these two gestures (the impassive face of the despot contradicts his implacable entrails). By no accident, Almodóvar entitles his story, written in 1981 for El Víbora, Fuego en las entrañas. Crazier, more excessive, and less “usable” than Patty Diphusa, the story traverses four decades, from the Spain of 1956 “donde se preparaba el boom económico” to post-Franco times. I am not attempting to suggest a direct link between Giménez Caballero’s rendition of entrañas and Almodóvar’s, but it seems clear that despite a disavowal of the past, la movida articulated itself however nonchalantly and “frivolously” against the very past they disavowed. La movida ended in the mid-80s “porque no se puede dormir tan poco y gastar tanto dinero. En el 85 estaba todo el mundo arruinado y necesitaba dormir” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 133). This frivolous explanation of its ending parallels la movida ’s conception of itself. La movida ended, but the perverse bodies that it created persist until today, as does the debate on them. Almodóvar’s bodies continue to disturb and refigure the limits of the nation already complicated by “perverse” bodies of the past (complex and porous boundaries with Franco’s Spain). Almodóvar rearticulates and fans the flames that shattered Franco’s “entrañas.” There is a curious and wonderful quote cited and commented by Paul Julian Smith in a new edition of Desire Unlimited: “the reviewer in El Mundo wrote that he ‘failed to recognize himself ’ as a heterosexual man in Almodóvar’s Spain, a nation exclusively composed of lesbians, drag queens and junkies” (194). While keeping in mind all the “problematics” of Almodóvar’s marketing the nation, ties to the Socialist Party (PSOE), the problematic relation to homosexuality (disavowal) and feminism (rape),36 Almodóvar and la movida articulated the complexity of their times and the complex passages from modernity to postmodernity. They created a sensibility that separates their world from the one before them where as Carmen Maura remarked, “being peed upon was not strange to any of them, not to Pedro, not to Alaska, not to Eva, it was as if through-out their entire lives they had been pissed on from above.”37

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Epilogue

Transgressive Bodies of the Other Franco

I’m going to shoot the perfect film. No plot. Only victims. —Eugénie de Sade

These lines are spoken by Paul Muller, a psychotic film director from the film Eugénie de Sade by Spanish director Jesús Franco, better known as Jess Franco. Although the lines would immediately be recognized by the director’s fans, most Spaniards would not know them, the film they come from, or even the filmmaker. Franco has made low-budget horror, science fiction, thriller, muscle-man epic, and pornographic films since 1957,1 and he is mostly esteemed in obscure film circles outside his native country (especially in the United States and Germany). During the screening of his film El hundimiento de la casa Usher at Imagfic in 1989, the audience booed and then walked out.2 Still, despite that disastrous encounter with the Spanish public, a few of his fans managed to organize a retrospective of his work in 1991.3 Although the retrospective screened some of his best work, Franco remains a largely invisible figure in Spanish film history. Even after the Fascist regime ended, Jess Franco remained unknown, among other things because of Pilar Miró’s preposterous classification standards for Spanish films.4 Anyone who did not meet her standards of “quality” was ostracized and therefore financially doomed to obscurity. This marginalization is startling (since he has made over 150 films in a career that spans four decades) but also somewhat understandable (since they are exploitation flicks 107

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from various genres that might not appeal to an academic audience). It is also comprehensible since Jess Franco made films that “display sensations that are on the edge of respectable” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 267), and his opus largely focuses on “pornography, the lowest in cultural esteem and gross-out horror, next to lowest” (269). In Spain of the 1950s, when Jesús Franco started his career, there was, on the one hand, saturation by historical epics, musicals, and melodramas intended to inculcate traditional moral and religious values, sponsored officially by the Francoist government. On the other hand, there was the dissident cinema, grounded in the neorealist tradition, that dealt with social problems that the “official” cinema would never acknowledge.5 The uniqueness of Jesús Franco is that he did not make either type of film even though his career began in those turbulent years. He was an anomaly not fitting in any of these camps.6 Instead, by exploiting images of monstrosity and excess and by exploring the connection of pleasure to cinematic experience, he undermined official discourse, rather than opposing it in classic leftist fashion. Further, as an exploitation filmmaker, he actually explores the extremes of the cinematic medium itself, “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensations” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 269) and “the pleasure and agitation of flesh.”7 If his early films seem anomalous in the Spain of the other, better known, Franco, they nevertheless clearly pave the way for the outrageous hedonism of the next generation of filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, and Bigas Luna. Jess Franco developed a taste for the bizarre very early in his career. During his student years in Madrid, he earned extra money by writing horror stories and Western serials under the pseudonym David Khume (a name he would continue to use throughout his film career). These student writings already envisioned the world of eccentric and unconventional characters that would later become his characteristically outlandish cinematic milieu: Ese detective caposo llamado Al Pereira lo concebí en plena juventud como personaje literario en las páginas de aquellas humildes obras. Al igual que Orloff. Un Pereira al que amo mucho, es una de mis criaturas preferidas. Es un detective privado que se ocupa de los casos más estúpidos por emolumentos miserables. ¿Quién si no él puede hacer frente al Impasible Carter, asesino, bailarín y cantaor de flamenco de Los blues de la calle Pop? (Freixas, “Hablar el cine: El increible nombre mutante,” 40)8

Franco’s first “serious” encounter with Spanish cinema was his work on the production of Juan Antonio Bardem’s film Cómicos, where he performed various tasks. He also worked on government-sponsored documentaries: “el Ministerio de Industria me encargó un cortometraje sobre la vida y milagros del árbol del olivo, Árbol de España, que me quedó como muy alucinante y ra-

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rillo” (Freixas, “Hablar el cine: El increible nombre mutante,” 41). Later, he was hired on by a number of Spanish directors from the 1950s, and he performed various odd jobs including script writing, editing, and music scoring. He also became connected with a group that would produce the oppositional film magazine Objetivo,9 whose debates on film culminated in the Salamanca congress but whose political and aesthetic preoccupations he never shared. He severed his connections with the group after only a couple of years. These various connections and odd jobs, however, were his apprenticeship in film and helped finance his first feature in 1959, Tenemos 18 años. Tenemos 18 años is a coming-of-age story of two eighteen-year-old girls. María José and Pili are cousins who both study at Madrid University. For their summer vacation they buy a car from a friend and depart for Andalucía, in search of unrestrained excitement and adventure. The two girls encounter several different people on their trip: some of them real and some products of their imagination. In the trajectory of those encounters a quasiritualistic path of iniciation unfolds. Each individual encounter is not really important in itself; rather they are simply figures of self-discovery. The encounters that mark this process culminate in the confrontation with the most captivating imaginary character, the mysterious Lord Marian, who lives in an abandoned castle. María José and Pili’s confrontation with Lord Marian blends elements of thriller and horror films, focuses on incestuous fears and desires, and is a “tale of sex and parents” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 239). Lord Marian, a surrogate father figure, enables María José and Pili to assert their sexual autonomy and “deliver themselves into the adult world” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 239). This encounter enacts the “parenticidal struggle” in which “one’s parents must be killed and rekilled in the service of sexual autonomy” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 239). The film’s focus on the father figure and paternal authority is also an implicit reference to Franco, the “monstrous Father of all Spaniards” (Geist, “An Interview with Juan Goytisolo,” 38). A girls’ road film centering on women’s bonding was an anomaly in the era in which it was filmed. The screens were saturated by fascist male bonding films that focused mainly on the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood, marginalizing women into the domestic sphere so crucial to the Falangist ideological project. Franco imagined a radically different women’s space from the films of the times that were saturated by an idealized picture of woman/mother within the nuclear family and the nation (fascist model). He also departed from a neorealistic subversion of this idealization that often focused on repression and constraint of women’s space, as seen in Bardem’s Calle Mayor. Franco departs from both of those models by imagining a quite different scenario for his female protagonists. His scenario is at the same time

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grounded in the culture he emerges from, and he probes anxieties of the times caused by women “leaving” the home, a phenomenon that started to cause uproar in the early 50s: Ha aumentado mucho, especialmente en las ciudades más populosas, la libertad y el desparpajo con que procede la muchedumbre de mujeres jóvenes independizadas por tener que trabajar fuera de su casa, libertad aprovechada por otras muchas que no podrían invocar la misma razón. Son mayores, por consiguiente, los riesgos de relajación del pudor femenino. (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 47)

Tenemos 18 años is thus a celebration of a radically different rite of passage and an insight into gender differences surrounding the director in Francisco Franco’s Spain. María José and Pili leave the gender-defined social space and undertake the road trip, trading the enclosed space of the home for an expansive one of the road. María José and Pili leave both literally and metaphorically the site of paternal authority. At the same time Jess Franco never bores his audience by being too obviously didactic. He cleverly uses the horror genre to reflect upon familial relationships, gender, and the demarcation of limits of womanhood. Hybridism in his style (horror, road film, thriller) entertains as it enhances the plurality of gender possibilities that he constructs. Franco’s first feature film, despite its many unpolished parts, conveys his unusual intellectual and cinematic sensibility. Lord Marian’s role is an archetype for many of Franco’s future characters such as Dr. Orloff, Dr. Zimmer, Jack the Ripper, Morpho, and so on. María José and Pili’s role is an archetype for his famous women detectives such as Diana and Regina from the Red Lips agency. All of this intellectual slyness and thematic singularity continued to be Franco’s trademark throughout his career, in which he dealt with three of his most gleefully indulged obsessions: pop art, pornography, and horror. He is a marginalized body that disrupted Spanish official cinema throughout his prolific career; the official body of cinema disregarded him, but he created his own extraordinary bodies.

THE POP ART BODY

The 1960s were very productive for Jess Franco. The spirit of the 60s allowed Franco to develop his preposterous side already noticeable in his early days in Madrid that were spent on writing serials and pulp fiction. The most interesting films from this thematic cycle are Labios rojos from 1960; El caso de dos bellezas and Bésame, Monstruo from 1967; Lucky, el Intrépido from 1967; and Drácula contra Frankenstein from 1971. This period is above all marked by his interest in comix and pop art.

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Lucky, el Intrépido is an attempt to participate ironically in the James Bond mania that swept the world in the 60s and early 70s. But, in Franco’s version, the conventions of the spy genre are turned against themselves. Unlike the English version of the spy-hero genre, Franco’s version is structured by the limitations of the male hero. Lucky is a famous superhero and secret agent whose assignment is to discover and destroy a counterfeiting factory run by the crazed scientist Gold Glasses. Lucky finds out that the factory is located in Diglas, Albania. In Albania, after several suspenseful turns of events and changes of fortune, Lucky does not resolve the case. What is more, he finds out there is yet another counterfeit factory (this time on a remote island in the Caribbean), and he is called upon to destroy it as well. His story is the popular one of never-ending excitement, loyalty, action, adventure—and failure. All the clichés of this pop-art genre survived intact in Franco’s version: exotic locations, mysterious-sounding folk music, the superhero’s sidekick (Michel), go-go dancers, a mystery woman (Cleopatra), and a military police force run by a beautiful but sexually repressed female (Yaka). While the film revolves around the superhero fighting bad guys and deceitful women, he does not necessarily win the fight. In Albania he confronts Gold Glasses, and in the Caribbean, Franz, a former SS Colonel, but although he pursues them relentlessly, he does not capture them. While James Bond gave the world the spectacle of an ideal masculinity, Lucky gives the world its hypermasculine subversion marked by vulnerability, failure, and loss of control. Richard Dyer observes, for example, that the conventions of the nude male pin-up forbids smiles or, at best, admit only the most controlled of smiles such as those made famous on the pursed lips of Sean Connery.10 Male superheroes, in short, do not laugh. They coolly calculate their emotions. Lucky, on the other hand, laughs heartily when he explains to the audience through word balloons that the film he is in cannot even be successfully ended because they have run out of money. Even though his film career is over, Lucky stays with his followers through another medium. He becomes a main character in a comic book entitled Héroes de mañana. “I am not as stupid as I look,” Lucky’s favorite expression, could just as well have been uttered by Jess Franco himself. Too many critics were eager to discredit his venture into the pop-art spy genre, accusing his work of triviality. But Franco was always well aware of the transgressive possibilities of combining different genres and forms to bridge from one medium to another: Es un tebeo demencial, con Ray Danton haciendo un personaje del todo paródico, que llega a un hotel y, para inscribirse, dice al conserje: “Mi nombre es Lucky y mi apellido, el Intrépido,” y cosas así continuamente. Había además una secuencia amorosa en el más puro estilo cómic, con Rosalba Neri

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expresándose en albanés, pronunciando diálogos cada vez más breves hasta que sólo dice: “Oh. . . .” La película refleja también los colores falsos, los encuadres falsos . . . todo lo específico del cómic. (“Hablar el cine: El increíble nombre mutante,” 44)

The self-referential parody and humor do not stop with the main character, however. Franco himself plays a part in the deconstruction of masculinity with a self-reflection on the director’s own male fantasies of superheroism. The director here plays a role in his own film as the messenger Zoltan who entertains the super-spy and offers him a cigarette while he betrays him. Thus masculinity is never able to triumph or even to complete its tasks, a failure that needs to be seen in light of the fascist fetishizing of masculine power. Franco was exploring relations between cinema and masculinity long before it became theoretically fashionable. By refusing to play the (masculine) role of the great ideologico-parodist of the super-spy genre, Franco defetishizes both the idealized masculinity of the genre and the idealized intellectualism of leftist critique. Instead, he makes plastic, malleable, and soft the very distinction between realism and fantasy by entering his own creation in cartoon fashion. With Lucky, el intrépido Franco exposes the clichés and limits of masculinity; in the other films from the pop-art years, Labios rojos, El caso de dos bellezas, and Bésame, Monstruo, he explores issues of women’s mobility and gender constructions already touched upon in Tenemos 18 años. In many ways these three films develop unfinished ideas from Franco’s first feature film. These films make up Franco’s femme fatale trilogy, marked by the appearance of women detectives couples. In Labios rojos Chris and Lola run a detective agency called “Red Lips” in 1960s Madrid. Mr. Kalman, a famous diamond collector, has his most valuable diamond stolen by Radeck, a notorious underworld figure. Mr. Kalman hires Lola and Chris to find the valuable diamond. They pursue Radeck, catch up with him, but unfortunately instead of recovering the real diamond, they take back a fake one. As they leave with the fake diamond someone kills Radeck and takes the real one. Lola and Chris are accused of the murder, and they embark upon a difficult path to prove their innocence and catch the real criminal. After a detailed investigation they realize that the Mr. Kalman who originally contracted them was an impostor. They penetrate the corrupt underworld of diamond dealers, find the real Mr. Kalman, and finally resolve the mystery of the valuable diamond. Another film of the trilogy, Bésame, Monstruo, features once again two fabulous women detectives. Diana and Regina are commissioned to confront a mad scientist, Professor Bertrand, who wants to overpower nature by means of eugenic manipulation and mutation of bodies. All of the important characters from the underworld want to know Professor Bertrand’s secret. However, no one knows the secret location of the island where he does his experiments.

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One day while Diana and Regina are hanging out in a jazz club trying to deduce where Professor Bertrand is hiding, a messenger arrives with a knife in his back and a secret note for them (written in the form of a jazz song). The clues from the secret note put them a step ahead of everyone else. They discover the name of the island, go there, and steal the secret eugenic formulas after fighting the professor’s former assistant, Maurier, the mysterious character Eric Vicas, and Professor Bertrand’s bizarre mutant body-builders. All of these films have a comic-book feel as well as film noir suspenseful style. Furthermore the mutant body-builders from Bésame, Monstruo give an element of science fiction to the story. It is a direct result of Franco’s fascination with conventions and iconography of the classical horror film and variations on the stereotypical figure of the scientist who uses his knowledge in order to either benefit or destroy humankind (a mad scientist’s attempt to create a race of supermen, etc.). In the last film of the trilogy, El caso de dos bellezas, Diana and Regina are busy again. Several beautiful girls are disappearing daily. Various clues point to Klaus Thiller, a pop artist obsessed by sex and death, whose paintings resemble the missing girls. The case becomes dangerous and violent when Klaus asks Diana to become his model, being unaware that he is powerless against the world’s two best female detectives. Regina and Diana, as well as Chris and Lola, drive powerful cars, wear terrific outfits, and are glamorous, intelligent, and seductive. Franco redefines the traditional female position in the narrative. Diana and Regina are not burdened by austere fathers, burdensome families, or oppressive marriages. The two women detectives break with the image of women coded as domestic, passive, genteel, and so on. Instead they appropriate the car as a symbol of masculinity and independence and motivate and instigate the action. Franco emphasized pure, excessive, and unlimited enjoyment, so alien to the sensibilities of the times with its emphasis on austerity, especially in regard to womanhood. His films, in their excess of color, glamorous female accessories, sport cars, and so on, had similar subversive potential of copla, with its women protagonists, who “no se despedían de un novio a las nueve y media en el portal de su casa (. . .) una pasión como aquélla nos estaba vedada a las chicas sensatas y decentes de la nueva España” (Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás, 152).

THE HORROR BODY

Miss Muerte, a gorgeous black and white film from 1965 marked by chiaroscuro lighting, explorations of monstrosity, and iconography of the classical horror film with its mad scientists, gothic castles, and mute servants, contains all the elements that will later distinguish Franco’s horror opus. The

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story begins with Doctor von Zimmer, a misunderstood genius who discovers how to control people’s minds. When he announces his discovery to his superiors at the medical board, he is belittled by them, suffers a heart attack, and dies. He is survived by his daughter, Irma. Eager to avenge her father’s death, she uses her father’s discovery to exercise control over the mind of the beautiful Nadia, a performer she once saw in a nightclub. Nadia’s stage name is Miss Muerte. In her act she is a spider woman who traps and kills her victims in her spider web. When Irma sees the strange and voluptuous performance of Miss Muerte, she instantly realizes that Nadia would be a perfect tool for her own revenge against the members of the medical board that humiliated her father. Irma manages to lure Nadia into her own web by offering her a great Hollywood career and Las Vegas contracts, but instead takes her into a remote castle where she lives with her servants, Morpho and Barbara. Using her father’s discovery of mind manipulation, Irma takes control of Nadia and directs her to kill the members of the medical board one by one. Nadia meets Dr. Vicas, the first victim, in a train, lures him to her compartment, blinds him, and slits his throat with her poisoned fingernails. The second victim, Dr. Moroni, dies in a similar way, first blinded and then killed. The murders of the first two members of the medical board send a wave of panic through the city, and the last victim, Dr. Kallman, locks himself inside his house. At the same time Inspector Tanner (played by Jess Franco) aided by Dr. Philip Fraser (Nadia’s fiancé and a famous criminologist) is trying to find this mysterious serial killer. Nadia’s killing spree continues. She manages to sneak into the house of Dr. Kallman, seduce him, and slowly kill him. Meanwhile Nadia’s fiancé, Dr. Philip Fraser, unearths the connection between the late Dr. von Zimmer’s experiments on the human mind and his fiancée’s disappearance. He is too late to prevent the last crime, but knowing how to liberate Nadia from the mind control device, he manages to “save” her from Irma. Franco leaves us with a very ambiguous ending. Even though Nadia’s fiancé boasts of knowledge to free Nadia from the mind control, they are last seen in an embrace in which Nadia’s sharp fingernails are a little too close to his neck. Franco’s film Miss Muerte explores female sexuality as monstrous (monster coded as feminine) and illuminates anxieties about uncontrollable female power. The beautiful, sexually active woman is not the victim; she is the killer. Franco subverts the traditional horror film formula, in which “the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds, and slime, [and] the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 234). At the same time we see Nadia’s victims (professional men coded as powerful and masterful) screaming, crying, fleeing, and dying. They are marked by “abject terror gendered feminine: crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 240). The focus shifts from

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the mastering and voyeuristic gaze of all three victims to their threatened, frightened eyes. The final, mastering gaze is Nadia’s. The camera moves in on the pleading victim who looks at Nadia’s fingernails as they plunge into his eyes. Both our vision and the victim’s vision are assaulted by the sight of a powerful woman killer. Men’s pick-up lines (“You have such extraordinary nails”) lead them to destruction. Those very nails that magnetize them are the weapons with which their bodies are fragmented, penetrated, and destroyed. The nails assault not just the victims, but as Hitchcock eloquently phrases, “‘the slashing. An impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film.’ Not just the body . . . is to be ruptured, but also the body on the other side of the film and screen: our witnessing body” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 242). While imagining women as killers and not victims, Franco still repeats several conventions of the horror genre, which posits spectators as feminine since “cinefantastic horror succeeds in the production of sensation to more or less the degree that it succeeds in incorporating its spectators as ‘feminine’ and then violating that body—which recoils, shudders, cries out collectively” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 242). Miss Muerte is the horrifying image that intrudes into “proper” sphere. The male body collapses when faced with a woman (Nadia’s voluptuousness), outside of her social and familial roles, overwhelmed by the sexuality of the very female it meant to master. This is especially explicit in the case of the last victim, killed in his own domestic sphere. If we accept Creed’s proposal that “the function of the monstrous is to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability” (Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” 253)11 Nadia disturbs the order supported by science, claims to knowledge, and respectable professions. Nadia’s monstrosity is relational to her ability to disturb boundaries of the proper and improper use of science, acceptable and unacceptable sexuality, and so on. Franco’s exploration of borders and boundaries, another crucial trait of the horror opus, comments indirectly on borders of domesticity and oppressive Francoist ideals of the family, with its repressed fears and desires. The ending of Miss Muerte is open. The spectators never find out if the poisonous nails of Miss Muerte are about to caress her fiancé’s neck or kill him disposing of yet another male character, thus Franco breaks the formula for the conventional horror film ending where “the plot halts and horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 240). The horror narrative ends with the restoration of boundaries, but Franco plays with these conventions in a manner that defies conventional expectations. Instead of redrawing the boundaries that threatened the stability of symbolic order, he posits yet another threatening situation.

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THE PORNOGRAPHIC BODY

Franco’s third obsession is the pornography that he frequently combines with other genres (mostly horror). La Comtesse Noíre filmed in 1973 is a pornographic vampire film that while using conventions of sexplotation/explotation also explores women’s pleasure outside of a dominant male economy. The action takes place in Madeira, where a mute Countess Irina Karlstein lives among rumors that she has vampire ancestors. The suspicion is augmented by several dead bodies found in the forest. An Australian novelist, Baron Von Rathony, upon hearing the rumors, goes to Madeira, falls in love with Irina, thinking that he is destined to save her. Irina, however, is forced to experience eternity and is unable to experience love without killing its object. All of her encounters are centered on pure pleasure. Irina meets her prospective victims on the top of a misty mountain, takes them on a walk through the forest, seduces them, and as they experience bodily pleasure, she kills them. Franco added an interesting variation on the vampire theme. Irena sucks life out of her victims’ penises. When Baron Von Rathony meets Irina, he is sure that she is under his spell. Needless to say, he is just one more victim dragged to the forest and mercilessly killed. Despite envisioning himself as the savior of a helpless female, Baron Von Rathony meets the same fate as the other male victims. This resembles many other horror flicks in which “would-be rescuers are not infrequently blown away for their efforts” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 236). One of Franco’s traits is that he often gives his male characters hope that they can dominate their object of desire; this hope is always short lived as they are destroyed, and “no male character of any stature lives to tell the tale” (“Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 236). Irina’s victims are killed precisely at the moment of displaying their phallic hardness and aggression. Instead of the logical outcome (as in traditional porn) of visible penile ejaculations as proof of pleasure,12 we see Irina’s sadistic pleasure-in-power. Irina forsakes love for pure pleasure. In heterosexual pornography “it is the female body in the grips of an out-of control ecstasy that has offered the most sensational sight” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 270). Thus Franco perverts it, giving us the site of a dying, convulsed male body. Barbara Creed remarks that “the monstrous is produced at the border between human and inhuman, man and beast, the normal and the supernatural, good and evil, those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not, normal and abnormal sexual desire” (“Horror and the MonstrousFeminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” 253). Irina is already a monster, a vampire that borders between several categories mentioned by Creed, intensified by abnormal sexual desire that cannot be satisfied. Besides the sexual act per se, Franco’s camera angles, lighting, beautiful photography, and mis-en-scène center on questions of eroticism, voyeurism,

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fetishism, violence, and power and disempowerment, exploring its connection to bodies, sensations, pleasures, and affects. Instead of seeing Jess Franco’s complexities, his pornographic opus was rejected both in Franco’s Spain and afterwards on account of contemporary antipornography movements that posit a male sexual drive that is intrinsically violent and essentially different from a more sensual and loving female sexual nature. Thus this rejection disregards that “the non-sadomasochistic pornography has historically been one of the few types of popular film that has not punished women for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 274).

CONCLUSION

Jess Franco’s approach to filmmaking is one of total immersion, to the point of obsession. Tim Lucas notes that “in a sense, Franco’s entire oeuvre is a serial composed of recurring actors, characters, songs, and obsessions. You can’t see one Franco film until you’ve seen them all because, without that information, your set of references is incomplete” (“Introduction,” 29).13 Franco’s doit-yourself approach to filmmaking—in which he not only directs the film but also acts in it and photographs and edits it himself—only accentuates this effect further. Franco’s first screen appearance was as childish Venancio in El extraño viaje. Franco’s brilliant performance in this film is followed by several fascinating roles in his other films. In El caso de las dos bellezas Franco is an awkward art gallery guard, Napoleon Bolivard; in Bésame, monstruo he is a messenger who gets stabbed to death; in El misterio del castillo rojo he is a mad scientist who creates a new race of powerful zombies; in Barbed Wire Dolls he is slapped to death by his daughter, and he dies in slow motion; in Exorcism and Black Masses he is a serial killer; in Cartas boca arriba he is a pianist, and we also hear his voice through loudspeakers at the bus station advertising a Godard film; in She Killed in Ecstasy he is one of the haunted medical board members who gets tortured to death; in El muerto hace las maletas he is a knife specialist; in Vals para un asesino he plays a hippy guru, Kookoo, who rambles about an imminent apocalypse; and in Macumba sexual Franco is a hotel keeper who collects stuffed fish and plays Peeping Tom. These eccentric cameos culminate in Franco himself becoming one of his horror film characters, “monster with the camera.” Howard Vernon recalls, “As I used to watch him working, with his camera on his shoulder—for he usually did the camera-work himself—I would get the impression that here was a very strange being indeed, a creature with two heads and three eyes, the inseparable union of the mind and the art of cinema” (Balbo, Obsession, 11). His eccentric cameos are almost overshadowed by Franco’s real life. He indeed was a monster in his profession. Very often he would shoot several

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films at once and then sell them to several different distributors. Monica Swinn, one of the actresses who often appeared in his films recalls reading a typical Franco script: “I’d mull over the previous scenes and think to myself ‘this can’t be the same character’; ‘how many films am I really making?’” (Balbo, Obsession, 223). Howard Vernon remembers going to pick up Jess Franco at his parents’ house for the last day of shooting. Since Franco was not waiting for them as usual, they rang the bell, and his mother said that Jesús was sleeping since he had been working on the new film script. When Howard Vernon went to wake him up, Jess was surprised to see him. He told Vernon that he was so obsessed by the new script that he had genuinely forgotten about the old one. Franco’s eccentricities are smoothed by his unique charm. He would call his actors at the last moment, and most of them would agree that his approach to recruiting for a part was irresistible. He would often call Monica Swinn just before starting a new film and say something like: “I’ve got a part that’s made for you: a brothel-keeper who’s become a mother superior.” As Swinn laughingly says, “How could I resist?” (Balbo, Obsession, 224). Needless to say that this is just the opposite of what Almodóvar would became famous for: a mother superior who becomes a brothel keeper. Franco’s work obsessively centers upon the body. The horror body is the mutilated body. The science body merges uncontrollable with its surroundings; it is also endlessly enlarged and reshaped. The superhero’s body is idealized. The female body becomes an irresistible force of destruction. Franco’s bodies pose a threat and a question. He demonstrates that there is no natural body that does not involve a social and a cultural dimension; Franco’s transgressive bodies upset notions of order and hierarchy. He envisions an alternative social order, unraveling and unsettling the social hierarchy with its clear gender relations. Franco gave Spanish cinema many great female figures: Miss Muerte; Melissa, bloodthirsty, blind bird-woman; Irma; Princess Tara Obongo (the Goddess of Unspeakable Lust), and so on. They enjoyed everything that was prohibited to Spanish women of that historical period. In an interview where Franco reflected on his unusual treatment of women, he observed that: El cine es ante todo imaginación, fantasía, transformación de la realidad, creación de espacios imaginarios. Me gusta que me cuenten cosas nuevas. Estoy de acuerdo con Hitchcock cuando les dijo a los franceses que su cine no le gustaba nada, que era un cine de cocinas. Encontramos una mujer casada preparando la comida, y llega él y le dice ‘escapemos de esta vida rutinaria y tal’, y se la lleva al cine, donde hay una mujer que cocina. . . . Ni un instante de sorpresa. (Freixas, “Hablar el cine: El increíble nombre mutante,” 51)

Instead of “women in the kitchen” genre, Franco offers his spectators WIP (“women in prison” genre). He was one of the pioneers of this sexploitation

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genre. He made 99 Women, Barbed Wire Dolls, Visa pour Mourir, and Jailhouse Wardress. These four films leave us with a legacy of sadistic wardresses (the root of all evil), dictators with strong sexual appetites, innocent young women that end up in jail for the first time by mistake, corrupt lesbian guards, and so on. Thus he offers women spectators the pleasure of seeing hard, mean, and uncontrollable women and via WIP scenarios offers viewing pleasure to the lesbian audience as well. This chapter does not pretend to posit sexplotation/explotation/horror/B production cinema, such as Franco’s, solely as the site of feminist resistance since at various times figures of the final girl and other apparently subversive traits are “simply an agreed-upon fiction” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 242). While there is often playfulness and transgression regarding gender in those genres, “gender displacement can provide a kind of identificatory buffer, an emotional remove, that permits the majority audience to explore taboo subjects in the relative safety of vicariousness” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 241). However, Franco’s complexity and diversity as a filmmaker as well as his reflexivity (cameo appearences that problematize point of view and identification, reflection on experimental cinema, etc.) significantly re-inscribe conventions of the genres that he explored. Jess Franco’s films are sites of female pleasure, offering enjoyment to the female spectator as much as to the male spectator, and the fluidity and oscillations of his narrative opens space for the exploration of the fundamental instability of identifications along lines of gender, sex, and sexual preference. Thus, Jess Franco prefigures contemporary feminist reworking of “the assumption that the sexes are what they seem; that screen males represent the Male and screen females the Female” (Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” 235). Jess Franco’s opus, conspicuous in his absence, while probing questions of gender and problematizing boundaries of genres with which he worked, also disturbs the boundaries of national film production. This is accentuated by Jess Franco’s status as cult film director since “the cult movie is a ‘supertext,’ lacking fixed limits and favoring boundary crossing or territorial violations” (Smith, Desire Unlimited, 31).14 His cult followers scattered around the world problematize the notions of the national, the nation, foreign, local, and their interplay. International circulations of Franco’s low-budget, cult, trash, B production, and sexploitation films have transnational implications posing questions about co-productions, market, and movements across national borders. His in-corporation might thus bring an interesting angle to existing discourses on Spanish cinema, unsettling quests for national specificity. In lieu of his obsessions it is not surprising that Franco expresses his disdain for the majority of Spanish films, especially those produced under a Socialist government (Pilar Miró’s Socialist project), which engage in the

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production of the national cinema with its need of art house, catering to an elite audience, and its insistence on “aesthetic quality,” “good taste,” “art,” “culture,” and “national identity.” He is also sarcastic in his rejection of what he terms “‘slow rustic’ films. . . . That is to say films by people like Cacoyannis, except that in the Spanish ones they wear large Basque berets as they contemplate a cow and say “Oooh vacaaa! . . . (laughs)’” (Balbo, Obsession, 246). To the contrary of such “elite” or “rustic” filmmakers, Franco does share a sensibility with recent, postmodern Spanish directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, and Bigas Luna. Like them, he explores subjects such as voyeurism, fetishism, eroticism, violence, and decadence. Almodóvar, exploring the aesthetics of exploitation cinema, pays tribute to Franco’s influence on his work in his film Matador, where the very first scene is a stone saw beheading from Franco’s film Bloody Moon. Like them, he too creates magnificent, hybrid characters who exist as pure surface and camp. In his films, as in theirs, the world of images overpowers the world of meaning. Through his fictional alter ego, a psychotic film director, Franco once described his ideal film as containing “no plot, only victims.” This aesthetic/ideological ideal is the direct opposite of Francisco Franco’s conceptions of national cinema. Jess Franco’s rejection of Francoist cinema is marked by the wacky sense of humor seen in his deconstruction of one of Francisco Franco’s favorite postwar films, Los últimos de Filipinas. He filmed instead Las últimas de Filipinas as his response to the jaded clichés of heroism, death, duty, and law, thus juxtaposing pornographic sexploitation with a heroic genre that marked profoundly the Spanish postwar years. Placing these two texts side by side produces peculiar angles, illuminates unaccustomed patterns, and provokes unexpected configurations. In multiple ways, Jesús Franco appears as almost the inverted, ironic figure of his namesake, Generalísimo Francisco Franco. The dictator’s interest in filmmaking, to the point of even making an autobiographical movie, Raza, is well known.15 Jesús Franco’s interest in horror, in pornography, and in the pulp imagery of superspies and musclemen can be seen as an effort to represent all that the Fascist government had officially repressed. His self-portrayals, in figures such as the crazed Catholic priest, might be regarded as an acting out of those aspects of Francisco Franco’s life that the official, whitewashed, cinematic version had deliberately left out. Jesús Franco’s films enact a return of Fascism’s repressed, the playing out of the delirium from which that political order drew its energy, but had to disavow in the name of normality, Catholic morality, and political and familial order. Besides all of the above, Francisco Franco also could have been a character in one of Jess Franco’s films. Francisco Franco’s last years in power and painful death contain all the conventions of the horror film. Various corporeal alterations and bodily fluids marked his end: marble skin, putrefying flesh,

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blood, saliva, sweat, and tears. Was not the dictator himself “the body besides itself ”: “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” 269) with his uncontrollable bursting into tears, excessive and unstoppable bleeding and with the ticks that accompany Parkinson’s disease (endless trembling, shaking, and involuntary movement of the eyelids)? As in Shakespeare’s Richard II “whereby the king loses the second, sublime body that made him a king,” Franco, at the end of his life, lost the second, sublime body that makes him a dictator. He was “confronted with the void of his subjectivity outside the symbolic mandate-title ‘king’ (dictator), and is thus forced into a series of theatrical, hysterical outbursts” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 9).16 Franco also became the monstrous, terrifying, horrific, and abject; a bloody dummy (“un pelele humano”) carried in the carpet to one of his last operations: La bajada de la cama de su cuarto, al no poder transportarlo en una camilla porque la escalera no permitía el giro, lo transportamos en una alfombra. . . . En el corto trayecto desde la puerta del palacio donde salimos, llevándolo en la alfombra, a la ambulancia me impresionó grandemente, era de noche. . . . Estábamos transportando en aquella ambulancia, atrévome a decirle, a un pelele humano, un señor envuelto en una alfombra, sangrando. Pero esa persona era el jefe del Estado . . . aquello que llevábamos era el generalísimo Franco. (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 294)

His abjection manifested itself, as defined in Kristeva’s term, as one that does not “respect borders, positions, rules” (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4), seen through Franco’s bewilderment and confusion over limits and identities. Not respecting borders from the very beginning of his reign, Franco was like some alien, horrific creature that entered the entrails of Spain (entrails are an essential element of the horror flicks, sources of disgust, pain, often ripped off [eliminated, extracted] crudely).17 He was also a living dead, a zombie with “fría y marmórea piel” that in the threshold of his death wanted to fulfill his last horrifying desire to embrace all Spaniards for the last time (“desea abrazar a todos los españoles para gritar junto a ellos por última vez, en los umbrales de su muerte “¡Arriba España! ¡Viva España!”). This (his)story and the story of Spain inscribed by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco ends in a historical irony enveloping both horror and pornography when “within five years of Franco’s death, the estate at Valdefuentes had fallen into neglect. Under the management of Franco’s oldest grandson, Francisco Franco Martínez-Bordiu, its prosperity trickled away to nothing and it became the location for horror and pornographic films” (Preston, Franco, 781). Thus the history and the time “legitimize” tying together the dictator and his lesser-known namesake Jess Franco. Francisco Franco and

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Jess Franco meet through the abject, “the place where meaning collapses,” pointing out that “the social reality is nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 17) and pointing to the fragility of the symbolic order that sustained the Franco dictatorship. The “reality” must constantly be reinterpreted. To understand its intricacies the (his)story of Franco and Spain should be complicated by the juxtaposition of “unlikely” figures and “looked at awry” since “a detail of a picture that ‘gaz’d rightly,’ i.e. straightforwardly, appears as a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinguished shapes once we look at it ‘awry,’ at an angle” (Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry, 11).

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Pilar Primo de Rivera is a sister of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. She was instrumental in running Sección Femenina, the Women’s Section of the Falange founded in 1934. She thus marked the sense of Spanish postwar womanhood profoundly and is an unavoidable reference to it. 2. Pilar Primo de Rivera, Recuerdos de una vida (Madrid: Ediciones DYRSA, 1983). 3. Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Feminist Film Theory, Sue Thornham, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 4. Scripted by Franco and directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia in 1941. 5. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” Feminist Film Theory, Sue Thornham, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 6. Franco’s first public bursting into tears occurred during the cabinet meeting a day after Carrero’s death, as narrated by José Utrera Molina: “Fue un llanto sin ruido. A Franco le ganó la emoción y las lágrimas empezaron a deslizarse silenciosamente por sus mejillas. Fueron unos segundos tan sólo, que a todos nos parecieron interminables.” Quoted in Victoria Prego, Así se hizo la Transición (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores, S.A., 1995), 51. Victoria Prego adds that after the funeral Franco greeted Carrero’s widow and again broke into tears but this time in front of the whole country: “de nuevo rompe a llorar. Quienes en ese momento están viendo la televisión reciben una impresión fortísima: nunca jamás los españoles habían visto llorar a Franco. Al día siguiente, los periódicos publican la fotografía del llanto del jefe del Estado. La imagen fija de aquel instante causa un impacto tremendo en todo el país” (Así se hizo la Transición, 57). 7. One of Franco’s last operations improvised in El Pardo on November 2, 1975; narrated by his surgeon, Alonso Castrillo. 8. Slavoj Z+iz=ek, Enjoy Your Symptom (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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9. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), hereafter cited as Franco. 10. See Slavoj Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1991), hereafter cited as Looking Awry. 11. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 12. Slavoj Z+iz=ek discusses the concept of looking awry using the dialogue between the Queen and Bushy, the King’s servant, at the beginning of act II, scene II of Richard II. 13. Benjamin’s phrase. Z+iz=ek in his preface to Looking Awry follows Benjamin’s suggestion of “the reading of the highest spiritual products of a culture alongside its common, prosaic, worldly products as a theoretically productive and subversive procedure.” For a discussion of mass culture in conjunction with Spanish literature, see Stephanie Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 14. See Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean, First & Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Hereafter First & Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot will be cited as First & Last Emperors, and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, as Unclaimed Experience. 15. Victor Fuentes, “More Than Three Forms of Distortion in 20th Century Spanish Literary Historiography: Counterpoint Alternatives,” Spain Today, José Colmeiro, ed. (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1995), 22. 16. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 17. Carlos Arias Navarro was named Carrero’s sucessor as a president of government. For more information, see Prego’s chapter “El nombramiento de Arias” in Así se hizo la Transición. 18. Raza: espíritu de Franco (Gonzalo Herralde, 1977). 19. Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s notorious statement in La Hora (1948). Quoted in Carmen Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos de la postguerra española (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1987), 19, hereafter cited as Usos amorosos. 20. Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, Literatura fascista española (Volumen I & II ) (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1987). 21. Juan García Hortelano, Tormenta de verano (Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, 1961). 22. A notion of false optimism and its relation to postwar Spain is discussed in detail in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Usos amorosos.

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23. Jesús González Requena, “Entre el cartón piedra y los coros y danzas” in Archivos de la Filmoteca 7 (1990): 52. 24. El extraño viaje (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1964). 25. Franco inagurated SEAT (la Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo) in 1955 and in June of 1957, SEAT put Seiscientos in circulation. 26. Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Sol y sombra (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1990). Sánchez Vidal cites Waldo de Mier’s España cambia de piel, a sociological study that reflects upon rapid development experienced by Spain. To illustrate advantages of economic growth, Waldo de Mier uses a comment made by his friend from Bilbao who stated that “el auténtico signo externo de buen nivel de vida de una ciudad está en el número de automóviles estacionados en las calles y, sobre todo, en los automóviles que circulan con abolladuras en las aletas” (Sol y sombra, 156). 27. Preston writes that “the first fruits of the change could be perceived in the 30 Dec. 1962–end of year broadcast. The tone was much less anachronistic. Talk of ‘the Spanish miracle’ and lengthy statistical comparisons between 1936 and 1962 in everything from fertilizer production to irrigation schemes was tendentious but a more modern and effective way of making points previously expressed in an obsolete rhetoric of vengeful trumphalism” (Franco, 706). 28. The official myth of modernization and prosperity linked with tourism that saturated the space of 1960s Spain was named by Juan Goytisolo “modernización que engorda pero sigue muda.” See Juan Goytisolo, Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970), 44. 29. Juan Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986). 30. Pedro Almodóvar, Fuego en las entrañas (Barcelona: Ediciones la Cúpula, 1981). 31. Pedro Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa y otros textos (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1991). 32. The term refers to Madrid’s art, film, and music circles of the late 70s and early 80s (Borja Casani, Carlos Berlanga, Fabio McNamara, Bernardo Bonezzi, Ouka Lele, Alaska, los Costus, Sybilla, and Lola Moriarty). Movida is a contested term related to modernity. Paul Julian Smith writes that the participants of la movida “did not use that word themselves; rather they identified themselves as ‘the moderns.’” See Paul Julian Smith’s “Introduction” in The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), hereafter cited as The Moderns. 33. See Marsha Kinder, “Pleasure and the New Spanish Mentality: A Conversation with Pedro Almodóvar,” Film Quarterly (Fall 1987): 33–44. 34. Kathleen Vernon and Barbara Morris, eds., Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995), hereafter cited as PostFranco, Postmodern. 35. Bradley S. Epps, “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” Post-Franco, Postmodern. Epps also emphasizes that this does not

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“deny the critical power of Almodóvar’s work but acknowledges the commercial power of cultural critique itself ” (102). Hereafter “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar” will be cited as “Figuring Hysteria.” 36. Recalled by Howard Vernon, one of Franco’s favorite actors, in Lucas Balbo, ed., Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (Berlin: Frank Trebbin, 1993), hereafter cited as Obsession.

CHAPTER ONE 1. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Los demonios familiares de Franco (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1987), hereafter cited as Los demonios. 2. Antonio Castro Villacañas in La Hora (1948). 3. David T. Gies, “Modern Spanish Culture: An Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4. Carlos Jaime, Franco ha dicho (Madrid: Sedmay, 1947). 5. Maquisards (maquis) were French guerrilla fighters against the Nazis in World War II. Preston writes that “the defeat of the Axis had allowed many of the Spanish maquisards who had played a key role in the French resistance to return to Spain. By the end of 1945, a full-scale guerrilla war against the regime was beginning to build up in the north and east. Dominated by Communists, but including also Socialists and anarchists, the so-called Spanish maquis would threaten the regime until 1947” (Franco, 549). 6. Cited from José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s “Discurso fundacional de Falange española,” given on October 29, 1933, in Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia. 7. Preston writes that Serrano Suñer’s “arrival in Salamanca on 20 February 1937 constituted a significant elevation of the intellectual level within the Nationalist leadership” (Franco, 254). 8. Cited from José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s “Discurso fundacional de Falange española” given on October 29, 1933, in Madrid’s Teatro de la Comedia. For Primo de Rivera’s definition of Falange as “a poetic movement,” his political program, his ritualizing of politics, and delineation of the nation as “an organic unit of universal destiny,” see Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989), hereafter cited as Myth and History. 9. Carolyn P. Boyd, “History, Politics, and Culture, 1936–1975,” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10. For more information on Franco’s manipulation of José Antonio’s death, see Preston’s chapter “The Making of Caudillo.” 11. Cited from José Antonio’s “Discurso fundacional de Falange española” given on October 29, 1933, in Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid.

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12. “Dos” refers to two balls. Thus even though Spain was excluded from the United Nations (ONU), it had “more balls.” 13. Quoted from Raza ( José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941). 14. Andrés Sopeña Monsalve, El florido pensil: Memoria de la escuela nacionalcatólica (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994). 15. It is estimated that “twenty thousand Republican prisoners were employed, and fourteen died, along with many who lost limbs in accidents or were afflicted with silicosis” (Preston, Franco, 352). 16. Inman E. Fox, “Spain as Castile: Nationalism and National Identity,” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 17. A heroic resistance of “Spanish” inhabitants against the Roman armies in 154 B.C.

18. It is today’s Avenida de la Castellana. 19. Written by journalist Luis de Galinsoga in Vanguardia Española de Barcelona ( June 9, 1939). Quoted in Juan María Martínez, La vida cotidiana en la España de los 40 (Madrid: Ediciones del Prado S.A., 1990), 28. Hereafter La vida cotidiana en la España de los 40 will be cited as La vida cotidiana. 20. Julio L. Fernández, Los enigmas del Caudillo: Perfiles desconocidos de un dictador temeroso e implacable (Madrid: Nuer Ediciones, S.A., 1992), hereafter cited as Los enigmas del Caudillo. 21. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 22. Randolph D. Pope, Novela de emergencia: España 1939–1954 (Madrid: Temas, 1984), hereafter cited as Novela de emergencia. 23. Arriba (May 2, 1939). 24. In Raza, José tells his friend Luis: “Al revés que tú, Luis, que por los libros dejaste de leer las piedras. No sabes lo que has perdido. ¿Qué son unas pocas más matemáticas en una vida? ¡Nada! En cambio, ¡qué lecciones no encierran las piedras!” 25. Dionisio Ridruejo, Casi unas memorias (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976). 26. Almogávars formed part of the military order la Compañía catalana that under the command of Roger de Flor started to serve the Bizantin emperor in the beginning of the fourteenth century. Members were known for their bravery and military strength. 27. Quoted from Raza ( José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941). 28. Francisco Franco, Diario de una bandera (Madrid: Doncel, 1976). 29. The uncanny, apocryphal stories about his family, especially his father, make this early text a clear predecesor to Raza. 30. Vicente Pozuelo Escudero, Los últimos 476 días de Franco (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1980).

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31. The acronym NO-DO stands for Noticiarios y Documentales Cinematográficos (Cinematographic Newsreel and Documentaries), the newsreel shown in all cinemas. It presented the official view of Spain and the outside world. 32. Saturnino Rodríguez Martínez, NO-DO, catecismo social de una época (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1999). 33. José Luis Castillo-Puche, El vengador (Barcelona: Planeta, 1956). 34. Ricardo Fernández de la Reguera, Cuerpo a tierra (Barcelona: G. P., 1975). 35. See Jo Labanyi, “Raza, género y denegación en el cine español del primer Franquismo: el cine de misioneros y las películas folclóricas,” Archivos de la Filmoteca 32 (1999): 22–42. 36. The ideological trajectory of the regime is reflected in the circumstances that surround Raza. It was reedited eight years later (in 1950) under the title Espíritu de una raza. The new version omitted several scenes that did not fit the image that Spain wanted to project (have) in the 1950s, such as the Fascist salute. For details on discrepancies between the two versions and its ideological implications, see Ferran Alberich, “Raza: Cine y propaganda en la inmediata posguerra,” Archivos de la Filmoteca 27 (1997): 50–61. 37. Primer Plano (1943), quoted in Vicente Molina-Foix, New Cinema in Spain (London: BFI, 1977). 38. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 39. Raza was scripted and released in the middle of the Second World War. Its costs were 1,600,000 pesetas (an extremely high amount for the period), 50 decorados, 500 vestidos. 40. Primer Plano 6 (November 24, 1940). 41. Fernando Méndez-Leite, Historia del cine español (Madrid: Rialp, 1965). 42. Despite several links with the regime, Sáenz de Heredia’s career was complex. He did not solely direct national epics but was also an author of several sophisticated comedies such as Historias de la radio. He also worked at Filmófono with Buñuel during the Republic years. Even Raza, despite its ideological baggage, is an “academically sound film,” as pointed out by Román Gubern in “Raza.” Gubern emphasizes that “Raza fue un film realizado con competente profesionalidad académica, que a veces aparecía contaminado por efluvios del admirado cine soviético, con profusos contrapicados (escena del fusilamiento de los frailes en la playa), y también por la estética del cine alemán e italiano de la época, con su caligrafismo aportado por la iluminación preciosista del austríaco Enrique Guerner (visita de Marisol a José en la cárcel, escenas nocturnas del frente de Bilbao).” Quoted in Antología crítica del cine español 1906–1995, Julio Pérez Perucha, ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, S.A., 1997), 140. For an insightful and original view of comedy in 1940s Spanish cinema with reference to Sáenz de Heredia, see Steven Marsh, “Negociando la nación: Tácticas y prácticas del subalterno en la comedia cinematográfica de los años cuarenta,” La herida de las sombras. El cine español en los años 40 (Madrid: Cuadernos de la Academia, 2001).

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43. José Luis Guarner, 30 años de cine en español (Barcelona: Kairos, 1971). 44. Franco’s obsession with the perfect family was brilliantly shown in Gonzalo Herralde’s reconstruction of Raza in his 1977 film Raza, el espíritu de Franco. In this film Gonzalo Herralde cleverly juxtaposes Franco’s life with his fictional alter-ego, José from Raza, and therefore destroys and deconstructs Franco’s ideological and idealized construction of himself. Herralde’s film captures Franco’s endless process of self-transformation and creation of this fictional identity for both himself and the country. 45. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), hereafter cited as Blood Cinema. 46. Regarding religious undertones of the film, Kinder writes that “in Raza, the patriarchal mother is idealized and explicitly linked to the Virgin Mary as the embodiment of sacred law” (Blood Cinema, 200). 47. Charles Affron, “Identifications,” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Marcia Landy, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). 48. Alfredo Mayo, a star of all three films, ties together the “patriotic war film” genre and adds to the intertextual dimension of these narratives. He exemplifies patriotism, importance of male friendship (bonding), military loyalty, and heroism. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán summarizes Mayo’s importance for this genre by emphasizing, “¡Qué bien le sentaba la camisa arremangada a Alfredo Mayo! ¡Qué bíceps más poético-imperiales los suyos! ¡Qué bigote tan legionario!” Quoted in Crónica sentimental de España (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1997), 74. This 1940s “star image” of Alfredo Mayo as the romantic and heroic “man in uniform” was embedded in the postwar values. Years later this image was used subversively, such as in Carlos Saura’s 1965 film Caza, starring Mayo. 49. Peter Evans adds an interesting observation that “the mode of address, ‘muchacho’ [boy], emphasizes the youthfulness of the junior officer, characterized in some scenes by an almost girlish demureness emphasized in the nocturnal desert encounter during which the soft lighting feminizes naturally androgynous features, especially long eyelashes often lowered in coyness born of a shared but unspoken secret mutual attraction” (“Cifesa: Cinema and Authoritarian Aesthetics,” 219). 50. In “Cifesa: Cinema and Authoritarian Aesthetics” Peter Evans observes that “a pattern of alternating syntagma intersects scenes of men fighting in the desert led by Carlos’s mentor and homoerotically defined Oedipal father-figure, the symbolically named Santiago Valcázar, with shots of the young hero himself, accompanied by his new girlfriend, seemingly renouncing the warrior world of the Harka for the elegant dance halls and restaurants of Madrid.” (Peter Evans, “Cifesa: Cinema and Authoritarian Aesthetics,” Spanish Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 218.) 51. Jack Babuscio, “Buddy Love: Men and Friendship in Films,” Gay News 117: 24. Originally cited in Barbara Creed, “Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts,” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, Grosz, Elizabeth and Elspeth Probyn, eds. (London: Routledge, 1995), 98.

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52. Raymond Durgnat, “Ways of Melodrama,” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Marcia Landy, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). 53. Preston writes that Franco, “stoical about his disappointment in love” (Franco, 17), found a perfect match in Carmen Polo that “always dreamed that love would be an existence lit up by joy and laughter; but it brought her nothing but sadness and tears” (Franco, 27). 54. Drawing on Fassbinder’s remark that in Sirk’s films nothing is natural, Schatz argues that “Sirk’s popularity seems closely related to his capacity to flesh out the unnatural aspects of America’s social reality, to articulate cinematically how the reality itself is a collective cultural fantasy.” See Thomas Schatz, “The Family Melodrama,” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Marcia Landy, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). 55. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Marcia Landy, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). 56. Roberto Cantalupo, an Italian ambassador in Salamanca in 1937, remarked that as Franco was about to give a public address, he stepped out on the balcony “that offered an incredible spectacle of the immense square but was incapable of saying anything to the people that applauded and waited to be harangued; he became cold, glassy and feminine again” (Preston, Franco, 225). 57. Massumi and Dean also emphasize that “a body image is less a static outline of the body in a typifying posture, than a cumulative afterimage of its successive displacement. It is essentially kinetic” (First & Last Emperors, 137). 58. Rafael García Serrano, “Episodios Nacionales o historia de la ocasión perdida,” Arriba ( July 27, 1943). 59. Rafael García Serrano, La fiel infantería (Madrid: Sala, 1973). Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Javier Mariño (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985). For different readings and the discussion of literatura of this period, see Pope, Novela de emergencia, and Labanyi, Myth and History. 60. Rafael García Serrano, Eugenio o proclamación de la primavera (Madrid: Edición para el bolsillo de la Camisa Azul, 1953). 61. Blanco Salas, Franco’s doctor in the legion, recalls the following: “De la dureza de aquel combate nos da idea el elevado número de bajas que tuvimos. La muerte estaba allí para todos. También para Franco. Pero este sonriente Capitán, tan repetidamente ofrecido a las balas, parecía tener, en efecto, lo que los moros que mandaba llamaban en su lengua ‘baraka’; tener ‘baraka’ es para ellos tener la protección de las fuerzas prodigiosas.” Quoted in José Luis Saénz de Heredia, Franco . . . ese hombre (Madrid: Difusión Librera, 1975). 62. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 63. On Ridruejo’s ambiguous relationship to the regime, see Barry Jordan, “The Emergence of a Dissident Intelligentsia,” in Spanish Cultural Studies.

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64. Karen Horney, “The Dread of Woman,” Final Lectures by Karen Horney, Douglas H. Ingram, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991). 65. Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet,” Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992). 66. For more discussion on the voice acusmatique, see Z+iz=ek, Looking Awry. 67. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 68. The different endings are due to censorship. The novel was first published in 1943 and then recalled in 1944 from the bookstores. For Torrente Ballester’s struggle with censorship, see his preface to Javier Mariño in the 1985 edition of the book. 69. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction,” Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992). 70. Primer Plano 164 (December 2, 1943). 71. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Obras completas, Agustín del Río Cisneros, ed. (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1962). 72. Pío Rodríguez, “Forty Years of Spanish Culture,” Mass Media and Mass Culture: Moments in European Culture (Paris: UNESCO, 1982). 73. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 74. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek reads Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk through Kristeva’s figure of scar and through Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. See “The Scar of the Foreigner and the Fold of the Baroque: National Affiliations and Homosexuality in Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk,” Gombrowicz’ Grimaces (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 75. As noted in Vida cotidiana, the figure of the estraperlista was a massive phenomenon of the 40s: “Apareció el tipo de estraperlista recién enriquecido . . . solían ser sujetos ostentosos, avasalladores, que gustaban de hacerse notar y que con el tiempo y abusando de unos permisos de importación pagados a precio de oro, lucían coche fastuoso que llamaron “haiga” por el uso frecuente que de este vocablo hacían aquellos nuevos ricos, tan faltos de escrúpulos como de conocimientos gramaticales . . . la moda del libro de tapa dura y sobrecubierta llamativa nació en esta época. Signo revelador del alto status del estraperlista era la exhibición de la señora que para que no cupieran dudas a su opulencia, era un escaparate de joyería con sus collares, pulseras y colgantes; y de peletería a base de zorros plateados, armiños y astrakanes” (Martínez, Vida cotidiana, 101).

CHAPTER TWO 1. Tormenta de verano takes place in a summer resort (Ciudad residencial Velas Blancas) near Barcelona.

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2. Javier’s as well as the community’s fascination with this dead body comes from “the gaze that is on the side of the object.” For more see Z+iz=ek’s chapter “Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Triad of the Gaze” in Looking Awry. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 4. A notion of false optimism and its relation to postwar Spain is discussed in detail in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Usos amorosos. 5. Preston writes that on March 4, 1956, in Valladolid “in a rhetorically violent speech, Arrese talked of smashing Communism and liberalism with ‘fists and guns’ and declared that the first objective was to ‘capture the street’” (Franco, 653). 6. Juan F. Marsal, Pensar bajo el franquismo: Intelectuales y política en la generación de los años cincuenta (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1979), hereafter cited as Pensar bajo el franquismo. 7. José Bugeda Sanchís, quoted in Pensar bajo el franquismo. 8. “Manifiesto de las generaciones ajenas a la Guerra Civil” was published in 1957 by disillusioned young Falangists, many of whom were writing for Alférez, La Hora, Haz, and Laye. For more information, see Pensar bajo el franquismo. 9. The Salamanca congress in May of 1955 was the First National Film Congress. The papers given at the congress were published in the film magazine Objetivo 6 ( June 1955). Kinder writes that it was “an event that helped to establish neorealism as the primary aesthetic model for the first phase of the New Spanish Cinema” (Blood Cinema, 27). For more information read Kinder’s chapter “The Ideological Reinscription of Neorealist and Hollywood Conventions in Spanish Cinema of the 1950s” in Blood Cinema and Carlos F. Heredero’s chapter “Las conversaciones de Salamanca” in Las huellas del tiempo: Cine español 1951–61 (Madrid: Filmoteca, 1993). Hereafter Las huellas del tiempo: Cine español 1951–61 will be cited as Las huellas del tiempo. 10. The quotes refering to Spanish “reality,” cinema, and literature from Basilio Martín Patino, Ignacio Aldecoa, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, and Juan Goytisolo come from “El nuevo clima de la narración en los primeros años cincuenta: Ignacio Aldecoa, Sánchez Ferlosio, Fernández Santos, Martín Gaite, Ana María Matute y Juan Goytisolo” in Luis Miguel Fernández, El neorealismo en la narración española de los años cincuenta (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1992). 11. The critics take a similar stance. For example Gonzalo Sobejano writes that “en efecto, lo que distingue más hondamente a los novelistas sociales, cualquiera que sea la categoría artística alcanzada por cada uno, es un invencible propósito de veracidad testimonial, el empeño de no incurrir en falsamiento alguno acerca del estado de su pueblo.” See Novela española de nuestro tiempo (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1975), 307. 12. J. Villa Pastur’s term, used in a review of El Jarama in Archivum (May–December 1955). Cited in Luis Miguel Fernández, El neorealismo en la narración española de los años cincuenta, 151. 13. Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1970).

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14. Sebastián tries to save Lucita, who has just drowned. This is the final scene in which “bosque de piernas” overwhelms Tito and Paulina, who are helping the exhausted Sebastián. 15. Juan Goytisolo, Fiestas (Barcelona: Destino, 1957). 16. See J. L. García Delgado, “Estancamiento industrial e intervencionismo económico durante el primer franquismo,” Josep Fontana, ed., España bajo el franquismo (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1986). 17. Political consequences of these changes are seen in Preston’s comment that “Spanish students of this period, even left-wing and liberal ones, were almost exclusively from comfortable middle-class families. Like the young Falangists who expressed a different kind of dissatisfaction with the regime, they could not simply be subjected to the savage repression casually dispensed against working-class strikers” (Franco, 645). 18. This was a device installed on some cars to produce hydrogen carbide as fuel. 19. A two-seater, the biscúter was the first car to reach the masses in the postwar period. 20. The liberal team was “Laín Entralgo (rector de Universidad de Madrid), Antonio Tovar, Fraga Iribarne, Rodríguez Valcarcel, Sopeña, and Alvarez de Miranda.” See Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 35. 21. Juan Antonio Bardem was arrested in February 1956, during the filming of Calle Mayor. 22. He was dubbed “Caudillo of the West” by a journalist of La Vanguardia Española, Luis de Galisonga, following the signing of the Defence Pacts with the United States on September 26, 1953, which brought “$226 million in military and technological assistance” (Preston, Franco, 626). 23. Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 24. Heredero cites García Escudero’s conversation with Arias Salgado in which Salgado remarked “¿Pero tú no crees que gracias a nosotros se están salvando almas . . . ? (Las huellas del tiempo, 39). 25. Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985). 26. Diego Galán, “Cine español, 1950–1961,” Augusto Torres, ed., Cine español,1896–1988 (Madrid: Ministerio de cultura, 1989). 27. Kinder points out that Surcos raises several important questions such as “how are conventions from a supposedly left-wing discourse like neorealism ideologically reinscribed to serve an ultra right-wing Falangist thesis film?” For more on Surcos see “Falangist Neorealism in Surcos” in Blood Cinema. 28. He resigned on March 3, 1952, pressured by Arias Salgado because he gave “National Interest” status to Surcos instead of to Alba de América. 29. García Escudero’s welcomed return in July 1962 opens another important chapter in the history of Spanish cinema with the creation of “New Spanish Cinema.”

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30. See Isolina Ballesteros, “Mujer y Nación en el cine español de posguerra: Los años 40,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 3 (1999): 51–70. 31. Heredero also points out that the Alba de América failure is “el comienzo de la agonía para el ciclo historicista desarollado al amparo y para justificación de la autarquía” (Las huellas del tiempo, 16). 32. Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui, a Falangist and the director of Alcalá recalled in 1970 (referring to the Salamanca congress) that “todos estábamos borrachos de neorrealismo” in Cinestudio 82 (February, 1970). The very same Arroita-Jáuregui demanded from the state “un cine revolucionario, religiosamente exacto, políticamente válido, socialmente educativo y estéticamente valioso” (Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 350). 33. Heredero writes that “la redacción de llamamiento destinado a convocar las jornadas parte de Ricardo Muñoz Suay y Eduardo Ducay, quienes toman como base el editorial publicado por Objetivo no. 3 (escrito por Muñoz Suay). El texto se contrasta después con Bardem y Garagorri, y al día siguiente, en el Colegio Mayor José Antonio, es consensuado con algunos retoques y luego aprobado de manera unánime por todos los firmantes: Patino y Prada (del cine-club de Salamanca), Muñoz Suay, Garagorri, Bardem y Ducay (de Objetivo), José María Pérez Lozano (redactor-jefe de Signo; representante del grupo católico) y Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui (falangista liberal; representante de la crítica por las publicaciones del Movimiento)” (Las huellas del tiempo, 347). For all the complexities of this event, see Heredero’s chapter “Conversaciones de Salamanca.” 34. The text also emphasized that “para nosotros la historia del cine sea simplemente una historia escrita, no es solamente cuestión de edad. Un año o dos en circunstancias normales-lo hemos podido comprobar-son capaces de subsanar cualquier bache del tiempo. Ese bache que aquí nos produce mayor ansiedad en contacto del amigo que ha viajado, del amigo mayor, de antes de la guerra, en el contacto continuo y apasionante de los libros especializados y las revistas celosamente esperadas de más allá de las fronteras.” Cine-club del SEU de Salamanca, Boletín del cine-club ( January 1955). 35. This is especially noticeable in the films scripted and/or filmed by Marco Fereri and Rafael Azcona. 36. Heredero writes that a Christian critic “está llamado a subordinar los valores estéticos a la jerarquía moral ortodoxa, y de aquí la proliferación-verdaderamente insólita y exclusiva de este período histórico-de sacerdotes o miembros del clero entregados a la misión pastoral y aleccionadora de la crítica: los padres Begoña, Landáburu, Staehlin, Sobrino, Vaca, Oñate, Echenique, Soria, Villares, etc.” (Las huellas del tiempo, 58). For a detailed discussion of church and 50s cinema, see Heredero’s chapter “A la santidad por el cinematógrafo.” 37. Carmen Martín Gaite, Entre visillos (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1975). 38. See Kathleen M. Vernon, “Culture and Cinema to 1975,” David T. Gies, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and “Reading Hollywood in/and Spanish Cinema: From Trade Wars to Transculturation,” Marsha Kinder, ed., Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Rep-

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resentation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). See also Kinder’s chapter “The Ideological Reinscription of Neorealist and Hollywood Conventions in Spanish Cinema of the 1950s” in Blood Cinema. 39. The opening shots of ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall! resemble closely the openings of several other films from that period, such as Calle Mayor and El extraño viaje, as well as the literary works discussed earlier, Tormenta de verano and Entre visillos. 40. Rosas y Espinas was a Catholic newspaper from the postwar years. 41. Berlanga’s commentary echoes several real historical events. For example, Franco’s commitment to autarky “was backed up by naïve faith in miraculous solutions to extraordinarily complex economic problems. He was easily convinced in late 1939 by geologists eager to please him that Spain possessed enormous gold deposits. Accordingly, he authorized and even went to direct in person gold-mining operations in Extremadura. He could not then resist announcing, in his New Year’s eve broadcast on 31 December 1939, just as the country was descending into a period of appalling privation, that the massive gold deposits in Spain presaged a wonderful economic future. The gold was never found” (Preston, Franco, 348). 42. Terenci Moix, Suspiros de España: La copla y el cine de nuestro recuerdo (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1993). 43. Spain signed the defense pact with the United States on September 26, 1953, which led to setting up U.S. air bases in Spain. 44. Manolo is a manager of Carmen Vargas, an Andalusian folklórica. 45. Antonio Castro Villacañas, La Hora (May 14, 1948). 46. See Kathleen M. Vernon “Culture and Cinema to 1975,” David T. Gies, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and “Reading Hollywood in/and Spanish Cinema: From Trade Wars to Transculturation,” Marsha Kinder, ed., Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 47. Terenci Moix, El peso de la paja: Memorias: El cine de los sábados (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990). 48. Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1986). 49. Kinder points out that while Sara Montiel as sexual subject “departs from the dominant ideology . . . in most other ways, the film was compatible with Fascist discourse” (Blood Cinema, 68). 50. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 51. Caruth is refering to Freud’s rendition of the Tancred story from Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata. See Caruth’s introduction, “The Wound and the Voice.” 52. Caruth uses a telling example of Alain Resnais that “had originally been commissioned to make a documentary on Hiroshima but after several months of collect-

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ing archival footage he had refused to do it. . . . In his refusal to make a documentary on Hiroshima, Resnais paradoxically implies that it is direct archival footage that cannot maintain the very specificity of the event” (Unclaimed Experience, 27). 53. For more information, see Heredero’s chapter “Excepciones y rarezas.” He is referring to the following films: La corona negra (Luis Saslavsky, 1950); Diferente (Luis María Delgado, 1961); La bandera negra (Amando de Ossorio, 1956); Manicomio (Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1952); and Fedra (Mur Oti, 1956). 54. I am taking this notion of screen images from Paul Julian Smith, who develops it in regard to Almodóvar’s cinema. See Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 1994), hereafter cited as Desire Unlimited.

CHAPTER THREE 1. The three pop music hits from 1965. On popular culture and cars, see Sánchez Vidal’s chapters “El coche más grande que haiga” and “La ‘guerra de los bikinis’” in Sol y sombra. 2. Franco inagurated SEAT (la Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo) in 1955 and in June of 1957, SEAT put Seiscientos (Fiat 600) in circulation. 3. Sánchez Vidal cites Waldo de Mier’s España cambia de piel, a sociological study that was reflecting upon rapid changes experienced by Spain in the 1960s. To illustrate the advantages of economic growth, Waldo de Mier uses a comment made by his friend from Bilbao who stated that “el auténtico signo externo de buen nivel de vida de una ciudad está en el número de automóviles estacionados en las calles y, sobre todo, en los automóviles que circulan con abolladuras en las aletas” (Sol y sombra, 156). 4. Pedro Lazaga filmed Sor Citroen in 1967 with Gracita Morales terrorizing madrileños with her Citroen 2 CVs, followed by another masterpiece featuring car themes, Las Monjitas del Jeep. 5. Plan de Desarollo (the First Development Plan) was announced by Navarro Rubio on December 19, 1960. Later on, following the suggestion of Carrero Blanco in January of 1962, López Rodó was made head of the Commissariat for the Development Plan. Preston writes that “López Rodó considered that the integration of Spain into the dynamic European economy would necessarily have political consequences in Spain. His views were summed up in a phrase, erroneously attributed to him, that only when per capita income in Spain reached $1000.00 per annum could there be democratization” (Franco, 699). 6. Preston writes that “the first fruits of the change could be perceived in the 30 Dec. 1962–end of year broadcast. The tone was much less anachronistic. Talk of ‘the Spanish miracle’ and lengthy statistical comparisons between 1936 and 1962 in everything from fertilizer production to irrigation schemes was tendentious but a more modern and effective way of making points previously expressed in an obsolete rhetoric of vengeful trumphalism” (Franco, 706).

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7. The official myth of modernization and prosperity linked with tourism that saturated the space of 1960s Spain was named by Goytisolo “modernización que engorda pero sigue muda.” See Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970), 44. 8. The contraceptive pill was legally introduced in Spain in 1965. 9. Amando de Miguel, “La España del desarrollo,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 82–85. 10. Juan Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986). 11. Vicente Coello, “Un actor bajito, pero muy largo,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 133–34. 12. Alfredo Landa is associated with “Spanish comedies of the 1970s that were fixated on the consumerist fever of the period and sprinkled with mildly erotic themes. Landa’s incredible popularity in such works defined a subgenre, called Landismo in recognition of the way his comic persona defined these films,” in Marvin D’Lugo, Guide to the Cinema of Spain (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 234. 13. José Manuel Recio, Alfredo Landa (Barcelona: CILEH, 1992). 14. A film critic of the newspaper Pueblo, Tomás García de la Puerta coined the term and used it in a pejorative way. 15. Preston writes that “if six years previously, Franco had believed Carrero Blanco that Fraga was opening the door to Marxism and erotic subversion, he was now even more easily convinced that Pío Cabanillas must go” (Franco, 771). 16. Prego notes that “al palacio de El Pardo han llegado ya varios dossiers elaborados por el ministro de la Gobernación, García Hernández, y por el director del diario Pueblo, Emilio Romero. Desde informaciones de diarios nacionales, pasando por noticias de periódicos extranjeros que han entrado libremente en el país, hasta llegar a lo que puede ofender a Franco: el destape. Fotografías de mujeres semidesnudas o en actitudes insinuantes. Eso Franco no lo puede soportar” (Así se hizo la Transición, 184). 17. Preston also emphasizes that “Parkinson’s disease isolated Franco from the world around him. A further contributing factor to that isolation was the manic enthusiasm of both Franco and his wife for the television” (Franco, 719). 18. Forces of power were distributed in a radically different way than before and “reflected not the traditional divisions into Falangists, monarchists, Catholics and so on but rather differing, and kaleidoscopically changing, perceptions of how best to survive the imminent disappearance of Franco” (Preston, Franco, 747). 19. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to cover all the important moments between these events. For a detailed analysis of the period, see Preston’s chapter “The Long Goodbye” and Prego’s “Los últimos pasos del régimen.” 20. Prego remarks: “Resulta delirante. Nadie en su sano juicio puede creer que aquello es un accidente ni una explosión de gas. Las fachadas intactas; el boquete, inmenso, en mitad de la calle; el hecho de que, con semejante explosión, el coche de Carrero haya sido el único de todos los que se encontraban aparcados en el lugar que ha saltado por los aires” (Así se hizo la Transición, 29).

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21. The event was narrated by José Utrera Molina. 22. This was evident despite the fact that “from the mid-1960s, implausible efforts were made to present a picture of a superhumanly fit Caudillo; such as catching a tuna weighing 375 kilos, a European record” (Preston, Franco, 723). 23. Prego adds that “Arias se ha rebelado contra los planes políticos del ‘entorno de El Pardo’ pero la realidad es que no se ha liberado, ni mucho menos de su influencia. La presión que el franquismo más puro e intransigente va a ejercer sobre el presidente del Gobierno va a convertir a Carlos Arias en un hombre imprevisible, inconsciente, irritable, que cambia de orientación política a golpe de presión o de amenaza, que odia a quienes teme y teme aquéllos ante los que, una y otra vez, acaba cediendo” (Así se hizo la Transición, 74). 24. Preston notes that “Franco was captivated by the arrival of colour television. He asked Fraga to help him make senior appointments. . . . You who are out in the world can help me. I have been locked up here for so long that I don’t know anyone anymore” (Franco, 735). Another crucial moment was that on December 6, 1968 Franco left a cabinet meeting for the first time: “it was a symbolic anticipation of his more general absence during the final six years of his rule” (739). 25. He added that “queremos además salir al paso, en el terreno que nos citen, de quienes, sin adoptar la gallarda posición del adversario en campo abierto, se infiltran a favor de la noche y de las sombras en la estructura del Régimen para socavarlo al amparo de la traición” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 128). 26. Alonso Castrillo, one of the surgeons, narrated that “era un botiquín que estaba en desuso, que estaba convertido en un trastero. Era un trastero mínimo, con una mesa de operaciones que yo creo que era de la guerra del catorce, antediluviana, con unas estanterías cerradas que hacía muchos años que no se habían utilizado para nada. . . . La bajada de la cama de su cuarto, al no poder transportarlo en una camilla porque la escalera no permitía el giro, lo transportamos en una alfombra. . . . En el corto trayecto desde la puerta del palacio donde salimos, llevándolo en la alfombra, a la ambulancia me impresionó grandemente, era de noche. . . . Estábamos transportando en aquella ambulancia, atrévome a decirle, a un pelele humano, un señor envuelto en una alfombra, sangrando. Pero esa persona era el jefe del Estado . . . aquello que llevábamos era el generalísimo Franco. . . . La ambulancia llega al botiquín del regimiento. A Franco se le pone sobre la vieja mesa de operaciones. . . . Estaba allí desnudo, encima de aquella mesa . . . encontré una toalla amarilla, sucia, abandonada en un rincón. Con eso le cubrí. . . . Se ponen unas lámparas auxiliares. Todos los cables, los de los aparatos quirúrgicos traídos por el doctor Hidalgo y los de las lámparas, están tendidos por el suelo. . . . Entonces aquellos cables que estaban por los suelos con el agua que se escapaba, con los líquidos del aspirador, empiezan a echar chispas, se hace un cortocircuito y nos quedamos a oscuras. Se apagó la luz. Estaba Franco con la tripa abierta, con la luz apagada y en un quirófano improvisado” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 295). 27. Prego adds that “el hecho es que en pocas horas el organismo de Franco ha logrado superar completamente la intervención quirúrgica, o comoquiera que pueda calificarse eso que ha tenido lugar en un cuarto cochambroso la noche del 2 de noviem-

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bre de 1975 en torno al jefe de un Estado que es la undécima potencia industrial del mundo y que se llama España” (Así se hizo la Transición, 296). 28. “En el último día y medio era imposible controlar la tensión arterial, porque no tenía, era imposible percibírsela. En fin, estaba en estado de shock cardiogénico: con piel fría, marmórea” (Prego, Así se hizo la Transición, 319). 29. Ramón Freixas cruelly adds that the male protagonist is “en multitud de ocasiones virgen, o casi: el típico paleto de pueblo que sólo mantiene amistad con los animales a su cuidado.” See “Comedia Cinematográfica española: 1961 a 1977: Carcajadas en vía muerta,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 43–60. 30. Sueca, a Swedish woman, became a generic term for foreign women, usually blond, coming to Spain for the summer holiday, especially from the 1960s on. 31. Marjori, a character in Amor a la española explains her visit to Spain in these terms. 32. Fernando Vizcaíno Casas, “Un todoterreno genial,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 87–93. 33. Ed Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 34. Once he recuperates he marries Fina, a good, virtuous village girl. 35. Paca Gabaldón notes that “en los años 60 y 70 el españolito medio, de voraz apetito sexual insatisfecho, se veía muy identificado con ese cine de humor erótico, por llamarlo de alguna manera.” Quoted in Alfredo Landa. 36. Alvaro del Amo, Comedia cinematográfica española (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1975). 37. José Luis Garci, “Encuentro con Alfredo Landa,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 162–211. 38. Luis María Delgado, “Sir Alfredo,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 149–50. 39. Juan Miguel Lamet, “No somos de piedra,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 104–05. 40. “¿Por qué vino el landismo? La respuesta es muy sencilla: porque le gustaba al público. Había cola ante las taquillas” (Vicente Coello, “Un actor bajito, pero muy largo,” Nickel Odeon 5 [Winter 1996]): 133–34. 41. José Manuel Alonso Ibarrola, “‘Landismo’ viene de Landa,” Nickel Odeon 5 (Winter 1996): 79–81. 42. Z+iz=ek discusses the concept of looking awry using the dialogue between the Queen and Bushy, the King’s servant, at the beginning of act II, scene II of Richard II. See Z+iz=ek, “From Realty to the Real.” 43. The wine from this particular barrel wins the prize as the best wine of the year in the region. This kind of black humor is typical of Spanish cinema from the 1950s and 60s.

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44. This chapter does not pretend to advocate that there was a radical break in Spanish history, politics, or so on marked by Franco’s death. The situation was much more complex. Franco’s death marked several years of uncertainty to come. As Goytisolo remarks, “After the disappearance of a ‘monstrous Father’ we felt liberated and at the same time orphaned. Liberated because it meant the end of a guardianship that prevented us from growing up, orphaned because in a certain sense it created the vacuum of freedom.” See Anthony L. Geist, “An Interview with Juan Goytisolo,” TriQuarterly 57 (1983): 38. For an excellent discussion of the events that followed Franco’s death and all the complexities of the times, see chapters 14–26 of Prego, Así se hizo la Transición. 45. Franco’s message was read by Carlos Arias Navarro at 10:00 A.M. on November 20, 1975. In this last message Franco stated: “I beg forgiveness of everyone, just as with all my heart I forgive those who declared themselves my enemies even though I never thought of them as such. I believe that I had no enemies other than the enemies of Spain” (Preston, Franco, 779). 46. For homosexuality, cinema, and transition, see Paul Julian Smith’s chapter “Eloy de la Iglesia’s Cinema of Transition” in Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Smith focuses on the “representation of gay men in Spanish cinema,” as well as on “an explicit and complex examination of the interplay between homosexuality, Marxism, and separatism” (129).

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Fraga founded Alianza Popular, a moderate right-wing party on September 23, 1976. 2. Borja Casani, one of the creators of La Luna, remarked that he attempted to do something along the lines of New York’s Village Voice. See José Luis Gallero, ed., Sólo se vive una vez: Esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileña (Madrid: Ediciones Ardora, 1991), 12, hereafter cited as Sólo se vive una vez. 3. Marvin D’Lugo, “Almodóvar’s City of Desire” in Post-Franco, Postmodern. 4. With the same ease that they move between high and low culture, participants of la movida show an ease moving between diverse geographical spaces. They are as comfortable in Soho as they are in Rastro (a flee market in Madrid). 5. Pedro Pérez del Solar, “Vidas ejemplares: algunas aproximaciones,” Quimera (February/March 2000): 41–45. On Patty’s capital I (YO), see Teresa M. Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998), especially the section entitled “El cuerpo compuesto: La Anarcoma de Nazario, La Mullereta de Jorge Rueda y La Patty Diphusa de Pedro Almodóvar.” On Spain and “modernity,” see Smith, The Moderns. 6. See Marsha Kinder, “Pleasure and the New Spanish Mentality: A Conversation with Pedro Almodóvar,” Film Quarterly (Fall 1987): 33–44.

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7. The term refers to Madrid’s art, film, and music circles of the late 70s and early 80s (Borja Casani, Carlos Berlanga, Fabio McNamara, Bernardo Bonezzi, Ouka Lele, Alaska, los Costus, Sybilla, and Lola Moriarty). Movida is a contested term related to modernity. Paul Julian Smith writes that the participants of la movida “did not use that word themselves; rather they identified themselves as ‘the moderns.’” See Smith’s introduction to The Moderns. 8. In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, Kaka de Luxe performed in the pub People in Madrid. That same year Spaniards watching TVE’s pop music show La caja de ritmos could hear performances of “Me gusta ser una zorra” (“I like being a slut”) by Vulpes, an all-girl band. Almodóvar and McNamara sang “Voy a ser mamá,” and Luci, Almodóvar’s bottom (submissive) housewive became a heroine of “Murciana.” The lyrics to their songs are willfully offensive and hilarious. For example, in Pepi, Luci, Bom, the Bomitoni band sings: “Te quiero porque eres sucia/guarra, puta y lisonjera/la más hortera de Murcia/a mi disposición entera./Sólo pienso en ti, murciana,/porque eres una marrana.” 9. Epps also emphasizes that this does not “deny the critical power of Almodóvar’s work but acknowledge[s] the commercial power of cultural critique itself.” See Bradley S. Epps, “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar” in Post-Franco, Postmodern. 10. La flor de mi secreto shows scenes of students’ demonstrations against Felipe González’s government. See José F. Colmeiro, “Del rosa al negro: Subtextos culturales en La flor de mi secreto,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 1 (1997): 115–28. 11. As Nietzsche remarks, “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial-out of profundity.” See The Gay Science (New York: Random House,1974). 12. See Smith’s introduction to Desire Unlimited. 13. As Paul Julian Smith writes, “the conspicuous frivolity of Almodóvar’s cinema is intimately linked to serious concerns which have often gone unnoticed; and the frequent dismissal of Almodóvar’s work as ‘zany’ or ‘kitsch’ arises from a disrespect for a register coded as ‘feminine and for those men who identify themselves with women’s concerns” (Desire Unlimited, 2). 14. I am reducing a very complex political spectrum to the terms left and right because, despite the shade and range and complexity of left and right, la movida’s sensibility radically departs from any of the political parties on the scene during the transition. On the complexity of the political scene of the transition period, see Prego, Así se hizo la Transición. 15. As Almodóvar and McNamara sing in Labyrinth of Passion: “cocaina-tonifica, marihuana-coloca, bustaid-relaja, cicloro-estimula, cicuta-desinfecta, nembutal es mortal, amoníaco-reactiva, cetrina-enloquece, sosegón-alucina, opio-amodorra.” 16. Epps writes that “the idea that post-Franco Spain is ‘new’ and ‘different’ finds itself coopted by such Francoist slogans as ‘la nueva España’ and ‘España es diferente’” (“Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar,” 121).

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17. Andrés Sopeña Monsalve, El florido pensil: Memoria de la escuela nacionalcatólica (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994). 18. Anthony Geist writes that the copla “en los años 20 reemplaza al cuplé (el cuplet francés) como género dominante de la canción popular española; se hace aún más popular gracias a cine sonoro (1929); el cine encuentra en la copla el motivo ideal para la avalancha de películas de españolada-una visión estereotipada y folklorizada de la vida andaluza” in “Lorca, lorquismo y la copla española,” Ideal ( June 5, 1998): 9. 19. Quoted in Colmeiro, “Del rosa al negro: Subtextos culturales en La flor de mi secreto,” 126. 20. Almodóvar remarks that “Queti es el personaje más pop que vive esa sabiduría de las revistas, que se las sabe de memoria, sabe cómo volver fértiles a los pajaritos, cómo apaciguar la potencia de su padre. Les da remedios a todos: para las uñas, para los muslos. Es una especie de enciclopedia adquirida en las cajas de cerillas y en las peores revistas de este tipo, Pronto y otras por el estilo.“ See Nuria Vidal, El cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1988), 61. 21. In ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! Almodóvar returns to the subject, saying that he wanted to do for the genre of the housewife what Quixote did for chivalry novels. 22. Massumi writes that the body of the real woman is replaced by that of the transvestite that is “realer then real” and “stands on its own as a copy without a model.” Brian Massumi, “Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari,” Copyright 1 (Fall 1987): 90–97. 23. Teresa Vilarós argues that “si alguna imagen pudiera iluminar de un modo rápido el proceso sociocultural de la España de la transición, esta podría ser quizá la de la ‘pluma,’ tanto en sus sentidos literales-pluma para escribir, pluma de ave-como en su sentido figurado y de argó, el de adorno o signo de travesti. . . . La pluma de los primeros años del posfranquismo no quiere ni anuncia identidades ni construcciones. Tampoco escribe destrucciones o reivindicaciones. Es una pluma peculiar que escribe ‘al vuelo’ el presente inmediato. O, mejor dicho, el vuelo de la pluma de los ochenta es, más que vuelo que escribe en el aire, un revuelo, un alzarse en caótico exceso que, al posarse, va a dejar su escritura no en el aire sino en el cuerpo.” See “Revuelo de plumas en la España de la transición,” Revista Cultural de Crítica 8 (May 1994): 20–25. 24. Victor Fuentes, “Almodóvar’s Postmodern Cinema: A Work in Progress” in Post-Franco, Postmodern. 25. He contrasts those films with Ley del deseo and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. 26. D’Lugo argues that in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios “Pepa needs to achieve more than the outward trappings of liberation; she needs an inner spiritual emancipation” (“Almodóvar’s City of Desire,” 140). 27. Fabio McNamara said “que vean los más de 300 cuardos que he hecho y luego que hablen, ¿sabes? Que antes vean y luego hablen. Que vean toda mi obra. Luego dicen que Barceló es buenísimo y que los otros también y que yo soy una maldita.” Mondo Brutto 11 (Spring 1997): 58.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

143

28. Vattimo’s “weak thought.” For Vattimo’s relation to Spain and postmodernity, see Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993) and Smith, The Moderns. 29. Eduardo Subirats, “De (February/March 2000): 21–26.

la

transición

al

espectáculo,”

Quimera

30. Epps uses the concept of hysteria, now seen more as “a metaphor than as a malady, more as a figure than as fact” (101). 31. It generated heated debates, appropriations, and dissociations. Both left and right manipulated its meaning within a Spanish culture in the democratic transition. This provoked an extremely contradictory conceptualization of la movida: the “left” tried to appropriate it despite its immense ideological distance from it; the “right” labeled it “leftist,” which it clearly was not; and the participants of la movida even denied that it ever happened. Conservative, right-wing politicians denied it because of their profound hatred of all the values that la movida celebrated. They also attempted to discredit Socialists by associating them with la movida. 32. Manzano emphasized that “La movida ha sido el gran fracaso socialista. . . . Fue un fuego artificial que se ha desvanecido. . . . No ha dejado una sola obra pictórica o musical, en fin, de relieve, que la recuerde. . . . Creo que lo que hay que hacer es acudir a nuestra propia movida, que está en la música española, en la zarzuela, en nuestras tradiciones e idiosincrasia y hay que tirar de eso y no de aventuras ficticias” (Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez, 326). 33. Subirats gives Benet as an example. For quite a different reading of Benet’s fiction, see Labany’s chapter “Fiction as Echo: Volverás a Región” in Myth and History. 34. Prego writes that “la reforma del Código Penal recién aprobada (1976) deja claro y sin ningún género de dudas al Partido Comunista fuera de la ley porque está dentro de la famosa modificación del punto quinto del artículo 172, que dice que serán consideradas ilegales las asociaciones ‘que sometidas a disciplina internacional, pretendan implantar un régimen totalitario’” (Así se hizo la Transición, 537). 35. This is already cited in the first chapter: Mussolini’s ambassador Roberto Cantalupo described him as “icy, feminine and elusive” (Preston, Franco, xx); the Catalan novelist and journalist Juan Ferragut said that “when he is praised he blushes like a girl who has been flattered” (Preston, Franco, 37). He was known for “a gentle manner, a soft voice, a propensity to weep, an enduring sense of deprivation, a tone of selfpitying resentment” (Preston, Franco, 6). “His eyes are the most remarkable part of his physiognomy, typically Spanish, large and luminous with long lashes” (Preston, Franco, 168). Whitaker, the distinguished American journalist, focused on Franco’s hands “like a woman’s and always damp with perspiration” (Preston, Franco, 168). 36. See Susan Martin-Márquez, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso 2000). 37. Carmen Maura comments that “Alaska me pareció supersimpática, superguapa y superdivertida. Tenía quince años. Llegó al piso y Pedro me la presentó pidiéndome que la ayudara un poco porque yo era actriz. A ella no le resultaba nada raro lo

144

NOTES TO EPILOGUE

de la meada. A nadie le parecía raro, ni a Pedro, ni a Alaska, ni a Eva, como si toda la vida les hubieran caído meadas encima. Era un mundo muy raro el que rodeaba a Pedro, un mundo que me fascinó cuando empecé a conocerle bien. Era una gente que podía hacer lo que le daba la gana, nadie juzgaba nada, las cosas no se consideraban tonterías, todo el mundo hacía cosas extrañas que a nadie extrañaban. Eso me encantaba” (Vidal, El cine de Pedro Almodóvar, 18).

EPILOGUE 1. In 1954 he was a screenwriter for El Coyote ( Joaquín Romero Marchent) and director assistant for Cómicos (Bardem). He also wrote music scores for Cómicos. His first short film was Arbol de España (1957) and his first feature film was Tenemos 18 años (1959). 2. Carlos Aguilar, a Spanish film critic, recounts this story in his “Tribute to Jess Franco,” Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco, 248. 3. Carlos Aguilar was again a key figure in this homage, and without him and a couple of other Spanish enthusiasts of Franco, this retrospective would have never taken place. 4. Miró Law of 1983 “provided pre-production subventions for those projects deemed good enough to merit official funding” (217). See Jaume Martí-Olivella, “Regendering Spain’s Political Bodies: Nationality and Gender in the Films by Pilar Miró and Arantxa Lazcano,” Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation, Marsha Kinder, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 5. See Marsha Kinder’s chapter “The Ideological Reinscription of Neorealist and Hollywood Conventions in Spanish Cinema of the 1950s” in Blood Cinema and Heredero’s chapter “Las conversaciones de Salamanca” in Las huellas del tiempo. 6. For other anomalous films and filmmakers, see Heredero’s chapter “Excepciones y rarezas” in Las huellas del tiempo. 7. See Shaviro’s chapter “Film Theory and Visual Fascination” in The Cinematic Body. 8. Ramón Freixas, “Hablar el cine: El increible nombre mutante,” Archivos de la filmoteca (Winter 1994): 39–51. 9. Objetivo, a progressive, left-wing film journal, was founded in May 1953. 10. Richard Dyer, “Don’t Look Now: The Instabilities of the Male Pin-up,” Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992). 11. Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” Feminist Film Theory, Sue Thornham, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 12. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

NOTES TO EPILOGUE

145

13. Tim Lucas, “Introduction,” Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco, Lucas Balbo, ed. (Berlin: Frank Trebbin, 1993). 14. Paul Julian Smith is citing J. P. Tellotte’s “Introduction” from The Cult Film Experience. Smith uses it in his discussion of Almodóvar’s Labyrinth of Passion. See Smith’s chapter “Laberinto de pasiones: Cult Film Experiences” in Desire Unlimited. 15. For more details see the first chapter of this book. 16. For more details see the first and third chapters of this book. 17. As discussed in detail in the introduction and the first chapter, Ernesto Giménez Caballero pointed out the ambiguity of the boundary between Franco’s body and that of the entire country by stating, “¿quién se ha metido en las entrañas de España como Franco hasta el punto de no saber ya si Franco es España o si España es Franco?” (Martín Gaite, Usos amorosos, 19). See my introduction and the first chapter.

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Bibliography

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Index

Bésame, Monstruo, 110, 117 plot synopsis of, 112, 113 ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!, 59, 61, 68–69 plot synopsis of, 62–65 and economy of scarcity, 65–66, 135n gender in, 66–67 Bikini, 8, 71–73, 88–89 Bloody Moon, 120 Body, 4 authoritarian, 8, 71 despotic, 6, 11, 12, 23, 35, 44, 47, 104 estraperlo, excessive bodies of, 6, 46 Franco’s dying body, 9, 72–74, 80 horror ( Jesús Franco), 113–15 hungry, 7, 45 mutilated, 7, 44 perverse, 9, 91, 105 pop art ( Jesús Franco), 110–13 pornographic ( Jesús Franco), 116–17 Republican, 7, 45 transexual, 7, 46, 99 transgressive, 10, 107 traumatized, 7, 49 Borbón, Juan Carlos de, 74, 76 Bosch, Juan, 71

A mí la legión, 27 and conventions of buddy films, 32 melodrama in, 34–35 plot synopsis of, 31–32 sexuality in, 32 Alba de América, 58, 134n Aldecoa, Ignacio, 51, 52, 69 Almodóvar, Pedro, 9, 10, 91–103, 105, 108, 118, 120, 141n Almogávar, 38, 127n Amor a la española, 82–84 Anderson, Benedict, 27, 42 Antiintellectualism in postwar Spain, 6, 21–22 Apertura, la, 8, 72, 79 Árbol de España, El, 108 Arias Navarro, Carlos, 6, 74, 78, 79, 124n Arias Salgado, Gabriel, 8, 57–58, 67, 72 Arrevalo, Carlos, 32 Astray, Millán, 20, 22, 24 Autarky, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 55, 79 Bahía de Palma, 8, 71 Balarasa, 60 Barbed Wire Dolls, 117, 119 Bardem, Juan Antonio, 51, 52, 70, 107, 109, 133n Barthes, Roland, 50 Berlanga, Luis García, 61, 63–70, 135n

Calle Mayor, 109 Caruth, Cathy, 7, 52–53, 70, 135n, 136n Carillo, Santiago, 103–5

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156

INDEX

Carrero Blanco, Luis, 9, 72, 75, 78 death of, 76–77, 137n Cartas boca arriba, 117 Caso de dos bellezas, El, 110, 112, 117 Chez, Heinz, 79 Cifesa, 58, 129n Clover, Carol, 2, 109, 114–16, 119 Creed, Barbara, 115–16 Cochecito, El, 59 Cómicos, 107 Comtesse Noir, La, 116 Copla, la, 63–64, 66, 96, 113, 142n Cuerpo a tierra, 26 Destape, el, 9, 73–75, 86 Development Plan (Plan de Desarollo), 8, 72–76, 136n Diphusa Patty, 91–97 D’Lugo, Marvin, 92, 98, 142n Drácula contra Frankenstein, 110 Dyer, Richard, 111 Epps, Bradley, 9, 10, 93, 95, 99–100, 102–3, 125n, 126n, 141n, 143n Esa pareja feliz, 59, 60 España cambia de piel, 8, 72, 125n, 136n Estraperlo, 6, 46, 131n Eugénie de Sade, 107 Exorcism and Black Masses, 117 Extraño viaje, El, 8, 86–88, 117 Falange, la, 7, 13–15, 21–22, 76, 126n Fernán Gómez, Fernando, 86 Fernández-Miranda, Torcuato, 78 Fernández Santos, Jesús, 51–52, 69 Fiel infantería, La, 36 plot synopsis of, 37 reference to Franco, 37–38 Flor de mi secreto, La, 93, 141n Folklóricas, 66, 96, 97 Foreigners sexuality of, 67, 68 suecas, 74, 81–84, 88, 139n Foucault, Michel, 4, 16, 18, 35 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 8, 72, 75–76, 92, 140n

Franco, Bahamonde Francisco abject figure of, 3–4, 121–22 apochryphal biography of, 30, 34 and arts and culture, 20, 21, 25, 29 and autarky, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 55, 79 and Axis powers, 12, 15 as body without image, 19–20 bursting into tears, 3, 25, 77–78, 80, 121, 123n, 143n as Caudillo de la cultura, 6 as Caudillo of the West, 54, 133n corpse of, 88 death of, 80–81 death agony of, 3, 72–74, 80 as despotic body, 6, 11, 12, 23, 35, 44, 47, 104 and Día de la Raza, 22–23 and Diario de una bandera, 24–25, 30 and Doña Carmen (marriage postponment), 33 and economy, 8, 11, 15, 55, 62–64, 135n entry into Madrid, 18–19 and femeninity, 35–36, 104, 130n, 143n identification with historical figures, 18 and Jesús Franco, 2–3, 120–21 last images of, 80 last operation, 3, 73, 80, 123n, 138n, 139n last words to his nation, 80, 88, 140n paternal trauma of, 30, 104 pseudonyms of, 21 relationship with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 13, 14, 94–95 and rewriting of history, 12, 16–19, 30 and Saénz de Heredia, 28–29 and struggle for power, 12–15 Franco, Jesús ( Jess), 2, 10, 87, 107–22 and Francisco Franco, 2, 3, 120–21 and horror body, 113–15 and pop art body, 110–13 pornographic body, 116–17

INDEX

Franco Polo, [María del] Carmen (Nenuca; Carmencita) marriage to Cristóbal Martínez Bordiu (Marqués de Villaverde), 55–56 Fuego en las entrañas, 9, 92, 105 García Escudero, José María, 54, 58, 133n García Hortelano, Juan, 7, 49, 52 García Serrano, Rafael, 36–38 Gímenez Caballero, Ernesto, 11, 24, 46, 105 Gironazo, 79 Girón de Velasco, José Antonio, 79 González, Felipe, 91–92, 103 Goytisolo, Juan, 9, 51, 53, 72–73, 88, 125n, 137n Griffis, Stanton (the first US ambassador), 56–57 Harka, 27 homosociality/homosexuality in, 33–34 melodrama in, 34–35 plot synopsis of, 32–33 reference to Franco’s biography, 33–34 Heredero, Carlos, 57–61, 67–68, 70, 132n, 133n, 134n, 136n Homosexuality, 7, 35, 40, 41, 84–86, 88, 89, 102 Hundimiento de la casa Usher, El, 107 Jailhouse Wardress, 119 Kika, 94 Kinder, Marsha, 30, 59, 60, 129n, 133n, 135n Kristeva, Julia, 41, 45, 121 Labanyi, Jo, 29, 126n, 128n Laberinto de pasiones, 93, 95–97, 99–100, 141n Labios rojos, 110 plot synopsis of, 112–13

157

Landa, Alfredo, 75, 81–82, 85, 137n Landismo, 74–75, 81–86, 139n and homosexuality, 84–86 and masculinity, 82–83 Ley del deseo, La, 98 Locura de amor, 59 López Rodó, Laurano, 8, 55, 76 Lucky, el Intrepido, 110, 112 plot synopsis of, 111 Luna de Madrid, La, 92, 98, 140n Macumba sexual, 117 Maquis, 12, 126n Mariño, Javier, 36 and homosexual figure, 40–41 plot synopsis of, 38–42 two different endings of, 42 and women, 38–43, 131n Mariscal, Ana, 58 Martín Gaite, Carmen, 1, 6, 11, 12, 19, 24, 27, 28, 50, 51, 54, 61, 65, 66 Martin-Márquez, Susan, 143n Martín Patino, Basilio, 51, 59 Martínez Bordiu, Cristóbal (Marqués de Villaverde), 55–56, 74 Massumi and Dean, 6, 7, 19, 20, 23, 34, 36, 43, 44, 130n Massumi, Brian, 142n Matador, 120 Matute, Ana María, 52, 69, 70 Mayo, Alfredo, 29, 32, 129n McNamara, Fabio (Fanny), 1, 93, 96–97, 99–101, 141n, 142n Mier, Waldo de, 8, 72, 136n Miró, Pilar, 107, 119, 144n Miss Muerte, 113, 115 plot synopsis of, 114 Misterio del castillo rojo, El, 117 Moix, Terenci, 64, 66 Monjitas del Jeep, 72 Montiel, Sarita, 67 Morris, Barbara, 9, 93 Movida, la, 9, 10, 92–103, 105, 125n, 141n, 143n Muerte de un ciclista, 54, 59–60 Muerto hace las maletas, El, 117

158

INDEX

Mulder, Elisabeth, 45 Muñoz Suay, Ricardo, 51–52, 134n Neorrealismo, 51–52, 59, 134n No desearás el vecino del quinto, 84–85 NO-DO (Noticias Documentales), 26, 128n Objetivo (film journal), 54, 109, 144n Opus Dei, 8, 55 Orduña, Juan de, 31, 58 Patriotic films of the 40s and vision of history, 27–28 Pecadora, La, 68 Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, 93–94, 96, 141n Piquer, Conchita, 66 Pisito, El, 60 Plácido, 59 Polo y Martínez Valdés [María del] Carmen, 20 and acquisitiveness, 55 and love, 130n as model of womanhood, 24 and Francisco Franco (marriage postponment), 33 and Unamuno, 22–23 Prego, Victoria, 6, 9, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 95, 101, 104, 121, 123n, 137n, 138n, 139n, 149n, 143n Preludio a la muerte, 45 Preston, Paul, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 35, 36, 44, 45, 46, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 64, 70, 74, 75, 76, 79, 121, 125n, 126n, 127n, 130n, 133n, 135n, 136n, 137n, 138n, 140n, 143n Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 13, 14, 24, 29, 34, 43, 44, 79, 94, 104, 126n Primo de Rivera, Pilar, 2, 34, 39, 123n Puig Antich, Salvador, 79 Raza, 20, 27, 28, 120, 127n, 128n Franco’s apocryphal biography in, 30 melodramatic conventions of, 30, 35 plot summary of, 29–30

Raza, el espíritu de Franco, 129n Rodríguez-Puértolas, Julio, 6, 13, 14, 22, 23, 26, 36 Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis, 28–31, 128n Salamanca congress, 51, 59, 132n, 134n Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael, 51, 52, 69 Sarduy, Severo, 98 Savater, Fernando, 101–2 Seiscientos (Fiat 600), 8, 72, 82, 136n Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 13–15, 104 Shaviro, Steven, 5, 82, 83, 85 She killed in ecstasy, 117 Smith, Paul Julian, 70, 101, 102, 103, 105, 119, 136n, 140n, 141n Sor Citroen, 72 Spanish comedy (comedia sexy celtibérica), 5, 81–86 Subirats, Eduardo, 101–3 Surcos, 58–59 Tacones lejanos, 99 Taussig, Michael, 68 Tenemos 18 años, 110 plot synopsis of, 109 Theweleit, Klaus, 25, 37, 39, 41, 43 Tormenta de verano, 7, 49, 50, 52, 67 Torrente Ballester, Gonzalo, 36, 38, 42 Transexual, 7, 46, 98, 99, 105 Transvestism (drag queen), 2, 97, 98, 100, 101 Twenty-Five Years of Peace Celebration, 75–76 Último cuplé, El, 67 Últimas de Filipinas, Las, 120 Ultimos de Filipinas, Los, 120 Umbral, Francisco, 101–3 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 54, 69 United Nations Organization (UN), 15, 16, 49 Universidad Laboral de Gijón, 43

INDEX

Valle de los Caídos, 17, 20, 45, 50, 55 Vals para un asesino, 117 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 11, 23, 30, 71 Vengador, El, 26 Vente a Alemania, Pepe, 82–83 Vernon, Kathleen, 9, 93 Vilarós, Teresa, 101, 140n, 142n Visa pour Mourir, 119 Viridiana, 57

159

Warrior/writer (hombres mitad monjes, mitad soldados), 6, 23–24, 26, 36, 42 Williams, Linda, 3, 10, 116–17, 121 Z+iz=ek, Slavoj, 3, 4, 121, 122 and voice acusmatique, 34, 41 and le trait unaire, 3 and looking awry, 4–5, 86–88, 124n, 139n