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86 5 Modernizing Desire Fernán-Gómez’s El extraño viaje Consumerism, dissidence, and complicity; vehicles that mean more than movement; decisions that transfigure the very field of choice; spaces that cannot hide or shelter from ethical demands; the perverse realization that innocence can be as harmful as connivance . . . To the series of questions covered so far, we now need to add a reflection on the place desire occupies within modernity . Desire certainly played a major role in all the purchasing, killing, and compromising done by ostracized old men, secluded fetishist, ironic modernizers , and reluctant executioners. However, the production and reproduction of desire within a certain modernizing project need to be placed center stage at this point in this research project with the analysis of the movie that more clearly put them on-screen. Enter Fernando Fernán-Gómez and his strange voyage. In a small village near Madrid, Fernando (Carlos Larrañaga), a musician from the capital, starts a romantic relationship with the very chaste and very cursi (corny) Beatriz (Lina Canalejas) while he meets in secret with Ignacia (Tota Alba), the eldest (and harshest) of the three rich orphans who comprise the Vidal family. The grim interior of the Vidals’ mansion, together with the village’s “social club,” unpaved streets, and humble squares, provide the main settings in which this story unfolds, a story that includes episodes of voyeurism, a disconcerting occurrence of cross-dressing, three murders, and the theft of a corset. One of the bodies ends up dumped into a large wine vat (the local custom is to submerge cured hams in this vat so that the wine tastes better). Eventually, the Fernán-Gómez’s El extraño viaje  87 murderers will be murdered, and this second crime, the police will learn, has been committed so that the criminal can get married and fulfill his dream to start a zarzuela, or comic operetta, company. Even in a plot summary as brief as this one, it becomes apparent that the quality of the film narrative oscillates between the costumbrismo of a small-town movie and a darker, even grotesque, whodunit. Another way to underline the film’s hybridity would be to describe El extraño viaje (The Strange Voyage, 1964) as a film in which the sainete and the psychological thriller combine forces in order to put at center stage the workings of a variety of desires within a provincial space. This is a space where gossip and murder coexist, where rock-and-roll and zarzuela intermingle, and where Arniches, the paradigmatic sainete author in the twentieth century, meets Alfred Hitchcock. Starting with the silent classic La aldea maldita (The Cursed Village) (Florián Rey, 1930), Spanish cinema has created a series of canonical films in which the small town is both background and microcosmos. Analyzing precisely Fernán-Gómez’s movie, Steven Marsh writes that “the Spanish pueblo is the unpredictable ‘home’ at the centre of the nation’s Arcadian imagination.”1 At the beginning of the 1970s this narrative began to reach a broader audience. The future prime minister of Spain Adolfo Suárez, by then director of TVE, brought the nostalgia of the small-town space directly into Spanish homes when he promoted the creation of the TV series Crónicas de un pueblo.2 The small town, the village, and even the province were definitely hijacked by the regime and repackaged as spaces untouched by modernity. Throughout this stage of Francoism, the regime indeed seems to have been pushing for socioeconomic modernization while dreaming of a premodern reality that amounted to, say, an autarchy of the soul. Almost a decade before Crónicas popularized this fantasy of idealized public and private spheres beyond the reach of the modern, El extraño viaje offered images of a rural community suffused with the stuff capitalist modernization is made of, including images, as noted earlier, of desire, images of a new set of cravings seen everywhere, even in the spaces the regime imagined as pristine. So let us start at the beginning. Let us start with the first sequences of the film in order to read them symptomatically. After all, they become a succession of images that reveal, among other realities, how new desires are connected to new ways of looking and, no doubt, of filming. For cinematographic modernity is also a question of desire, the desire to look different. In a movie that seems to...

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