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  • The Dark Heart of the MovidaVampire Fantasies in Iván Zulueta's Arrebato
  • Alberto Mira (bio)

Zulueta in the Margins of the Movida

That the movida had a dark side, lurking beneath the tongue-in-cheek canvases of the Costus tandem, Tino Casal's glitzy performances and colorful designs by Manuel Piña, is a seldom discussed issue which however comes across very clearly in the reminiscences of participants in J. L. Gallero's book of interviews (1991) and Luis Antonio de Villena's fictional fly-on-the-wall account Madrid ha muerto, published in 1999, two different attempts to tell the story of those years. Eduardo Haro Ibars, Leopoldo María Panero and Iván Zulueta were part of the background to the late 1970s Madrid-centered outburst of creativity, and have been regarded as key personalities, even if their work lacks some of the more widely publicized Movida traits. Zulueta disappeared from view just as Arrebato was becoming a cult film (and as the early, anarchic Movida years were coming to an end). Darker memories in personal accounts of la Movida are linked to the discovery of the downsides to hard drugs, which really marked a difference between the mid-1970s and the high Movida period: in Villena's "rise and fall" narrative, heroin is blamed for ending the epicurean dream of the early 1980s, and his novel moves towards a grim conclusion, with characters succumbing to overdose as well as AIDS. Madrid ha muerto has been criticized, among others, by Almodóvar (Cervera 26), but after all it is not so different from less fictional accounts, as told in whispers by its protagonists.1

That Villena was conversant with 19th century models of dandysm and decadence actually gave him a good insight [End Page 155] to what was going on. The dandy as an inherited cultural type had a centrality in the Movida circles through frequent references to iconic figures like Oscar Wilde and later reincarnations like David Bowie (Cervera 368). In the work of decadent writers, the dandy and the monster are presented as two sides of the "seeker for truth." Like so many amongst the Movida crowd, dandies were fastidious about manners, mindful of the mask they wore, epicurean in their taste and often played with sexual ambivalence, and their polished demeanour often hinted at a dark secret. Villena's account remains useful particularly due to his friendship with Eduardo Haro Ibars, one of the key dark voices of the Transition literature. Iván Zulueta's Arrebato (1980), on the other hand, can be studied as a first person account of a maudit, beyond the flat surfaces and the glitter of other Movida artists, which reads in many ways as an authentically Rimbaudian account of Villena's somewhat moralistic descent into hell. The film features drugs, frustration, incapacity to deal with everyday life, search for a final fix, annihilation and an undercurrent of sexual ambivalence. Still, Zulueta's story is far more complex than Villena's moralistic and anecdotal narrative: it sinks its roots deeper in cultural myths and in personal compulsion, and it reveals levels of ambivalence and fascination which are lacking in straightforward testimonies.

His film has some traits in common with key contemporary works associated to the Movida. For instance, both Almodóvar and Zulueta were part of cinephile cultures during the Transition, both had absorbed the New York underground and a healthy dose of American pop culture of the 1960s, both were immersed in the drug circuits of the period, albeit to different degrees. Almodóvar has been celebrated as the Movida success story, and from that same perspective, Zulueta now belongs to the margins of the Movida mainstream, has become the epitome of the maudit director, and more generally stands for everything about the period which was impossible to assimilate; his work speaks of frustration, obsession, powerlessness to deal with everyday realities. Central to Zulueta's conception of cinema, and to the relation between cinema and the Movida, is the imagery of vampirism which fills Arrebato, his second completed feature film. Analysts tend to confess bafflement in coming to terms with Arrebato's ultimate meaning, and seem to think...

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