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110 6 Almodóvar Interlude Transitional Laughter When in November 1975, after thirty-six years in power, the dictator Francisco Franco died of natural causes, we did not contemplate, not even symbolically, the death of the nation’s father. In Spain that death, and the political transition it set in motion, may have been the cause of mourning for some and of trauma for others, but it was also the occasion for much celebration and certainly a reason for laughter. The meaningful (and manifold) confluence of death and comedy has been a constant in this book. At this juncture, then, it is only reasonable to ask whether there is a relevant role for dark humor within the analysis of the sociopolitical process that took the country from dictatorship into democracy. In other words, does the laugh that laughs at—or in the aftermath of—such a momentous death provide some insights of consequence regarding the nature of the Spanish transition? The question could be posed in simpler terms: Is the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the Spain of the midseventies serious business or a joke? To put it so crudely is of course to be asking for trouble. On the other hand, the crudeness of the question underlines what this chapter aims to point out: how, in the analysis of the transition, the success/failure or celebratory/damning paradigms are equally unsatisfactory in their ultimate either/or simplicity. The chapter also aspires, albeit more tacitly, to move beyond the “analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex” that has dominated the critical discourse on Spanish cultural production during and after Francoism.1 For Oedipus can only be of so much use. The desire to kill Transitional Laughter  111 one’s father still keeps the father-son relation as the overarching structure in the imagining and the understanding of a national milieu. Even if that father figure is the object of repressed hatred and imaginary violence, it remains a father; that is, the figurative role the dictator reserved for himself is kept in place. There are, there must be, other symbolic ways to deal with dictators. Both the people who have been repressed and the critics who assess the culture of dissidence under and after a dictatorship need different ways to imagine those dictators. In this chapter, the films of Pedro Almodóvar offer the darkness and the laughter I need to reconsider the hegemonic discourses on the Spanish transition or at least to make room for competing ways of understanding it. Along the way, I also expect to revisit Almodóvar’s role within that moment of artistic and youth-culture exuberance after the dictator’s death known as La Movida and to rethink the director’s place within the transition itself. If a presumed “post-Francoist” moment, “typically discussed in the context of the Movida,” can be “characterized by a fairly widespread desire to be done once and for all with the dictator, to forget and ignore him,” and if Almodóvar’s early productions can be seen as enacting, among many others, that particular desire, then there is much to be said for the possibility of finding an anti-Oedipus Almodóvar.2 In consonance with the arguments of Deleuze and Guattari, this would imply the existence of a schizophrenic Almodóvar, an Almodóvar turned into a nonneurotic producer of desire. At the same time, the alleged apolitical essence of La Movida—for which the director’s first films are sometimes seen as exemplary—may compromise the filmmaker’s place in a transitional period whose lack of engagement with the country’s legacies of authoritarianism has been progressively deemed as a political and ethical flaw. Can both the Franco/father metaphor and the Oedipal narrative be disavowed only at the price of being complicit with a culture of political naïveté and historical amnesia ? This seems to be the critical corner I have painted myself into after combining the first films of Pedro Almodóvar with an anti-Oedipal thrust in them and the possible role of La Movida within the socio-ethical shortcomings of the Spanish transition. However, I do not mind walking all over the fresh paint in order to find in dark laughter the key to a cultural analysis that may go beyond the either/or approach in trying to understand the interrelations between film, culture, and politics in such a foundational moment in present-day Spain. In what follows I will concentrate on...

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