Spanishness Through Dark Humor

The book focuses on Spanish film produced between 1960–92 and it reframes important part of Spanish cinematic canon of the 1960s, as well as the early Almodóvar’s and Alex de la Iglesia’s films. It conceptualizes Spanishness through dark humor as a specific way of self-knowledge. In Egea’s view, dark comedy is not only defining of the nation and of Spanish cinema, but also mediating of the socioeconomic context in which the darkly funny films are produced. To this extent, Egea understands dark comedies as interventions revealing the darker side of the dictatorship propaganda, and later, the incompleteness of the Transition and false glamour of Spain in the early 90s. Another important angle of Egea’s analysis is what he calls “cultural specificity” of Spanish dark humor that could serve to reframe modern cinema and modernity itself. Not unrelated to this ambitious attempt to rethink modernity through Spanish dark laughter are the ethical questions that Egea reflects upon: What are the mechanisms and limits of complicity, dissidence and rebellion against an unethical social and political order from within?

The first chapter contains a discussion of dark comedy as a genre defining of Spanish national cinema. Egea argues that dark comedies re-shape once established imagined national community, indeed he claims that they “wrestle” with the nation. He follows with a brief history of what seeming Spanish has meant since majismo and connects this to the theories of Spain’s peripheral modernity. Referring to the 1960-s when various films that he reflects upon where made, Egea notes that by then modernity has lost its ethos and become “a ceaseless creation of needs and consumption.” The historical concept of “apertura” (opening) when Spanish culture performed towards the expectations of the tourists arriving mainly from northern Europe, is one side of the “visual modernity” of those years. On the other side stand dark comedies of those years with their aesthetics of deformation. They are retraceable to Valle Inclán’s “esperpento,” that continue also in Almodóvar’s and de la Iglesia’s films of the 80s and 90s. Towards the end of the first chapter, Egea introduces his own concept of “laughing darkly.” Relying on Breton, he describes dark laughter as “self-protective” expression of modern sensibility whence we are laughing at ourselves bitterly yet not without perverse pleasure.

Chapter two focuses on El cochecito (1960) directed by Marco Ferreri. Ferreri’s film’s dark laughter examines the character’s capacity to rebel against the consumerist society through an acquisition of a vehicle, an apparently liberating commodity. This acquires specific political meaning in the context of the 1960s Spain’s transformation of socioeconomic system that made various film directors and writers question citizen’s complicity with the order through consumption. Through an analysis of the film photography, Egea retraces the transformation of the vehicle and its relations with the protagonist, and arrives at the conclusion that even if the the commodity has been used against the system that the protagonist rejects, that alone has neither guaranteed a transcendental character of his rebellion nor let him escape.

In the third chapter, Egea interprets Berlanga’s El Verdugo (1963) along the same lines as a dissection-like analysis of complicity with the regime of an average good citizen. In Egea’s text, it is the camera that examines the relation between the individual and the fascist state that is becoming consumerist at the same time. The moral statement of the movie can be tracked, as Egea suggests, through the shots, cranes, depth of the field and the montage. The same angle is used to film the execution of the death penalty and the wedding ceremony. The depth of the field of vision underscores how much the protagonists lack freedom while “nearness and closeness are at the same time spatial and moral terms.” Dissecting the camera searches for the spaces where agency becomes complicit with the regime by failing to make a right ethical...