"Paleto Cinema" and the Triumph of Consumer Culture in Spain: The Case of Pedro Lazaga's La ciudad no es para mí

"Paleto Cinema" and the Triumph of Consumer Culture in Spain: The Case of Pedro Lazaga's La ciudad no es para mi Nathan Richardson teaches Spanish literature, film, and culture at Bowling Green State University. He has published articles on the contemporary Spanish novel. His book, Postmodern Paletos: Immigration, Nation-building , and Globalization in Fifty Years of Spanish Narrative and Film is forthcoming . He is currently working on a project that investigates the representation and construction of space, especially urban hcaks, in the Spanish cultural production of the democracy. In die late 1960s, while Spanish film critics attended to the growing Âœuvre of Carlos Saura and the unfulfilled promise of the Nuevo Cine Español, audiences flocked to a series of formulaic comedies later referred to aspaleto films.1 Characterized by such forgotten works as El turismo es un gran invento (1967), De picos pardos a h ciudad (1969), and El abuelo tiene un plan (1973); and the predictable performances of actors such as Alfredo Landa, Tony Leblanc, and especially Paco MartÃ-nez Soria, paleto cinema playfully reflected the plight of the hundreds of thousands of rural villagers invading Spanish cities throughout the decade. The popularity of these films seemed to rest on their gratuitous comedie broadsides of the cosmopolitan culture that confronted the unsophisticated rural immigrant (or paleto) and on the ultimate triumph of the films' country-bumpkin protagonists over the bewildering urban culture. The few critics who have considered this popular subgenre read these movies as sustaining Franco-era stereotypes .2 In them, the city and the modernization it represents are shown as corrupt, the country as a primeval idyll, and the immigrant, a hapless soul with delusions of urban grandeur . Such designations and the unlikely triumph of the rural over the modern and urban, according to MarÃ-a Garcia León, provide therapy for an immigrant audience overwhelmed by the vast social changes wrought in the decade of Spain's "economic miracle" (41). Yet, it is these very changes, indeed the very rise of a culture of economic prosperity characterized by a newfound power of consumption, that demand a reconsideration of the paleto films. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 62 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The first and most popular film of the pakto subgenre, Pedro Lazaga's La ciudad no es para mi (1965), when read in light of these changes, reveals how such escapist cinema in fact became complicit with the very culture it supposedly critiques. Indeed, in the context of 1960s economic change the therapeutic revenge-of-the-immigrant effected in La ciudad no es para mi is transformed instead into a celebration of the rising commodity culture he confronts, wherein revenge is realized byway of the very capitalist formulas that the pakto protagonist presumes to attack. Ultimately, the positioning of the viewer in combination with the protagonist's anti-urban strategies in the film suggest a complicity oÃ- paleto cinema with a society bent on transforming a generation of immigrants traumatized by sudden geographic, economic, and cultural change into eager and active consumers. As the following re-reading of La ciudad no es para mi shows, the film's spectator-immigrants were being transformed into one of the principal commodities upon which Spanish consumer culture would be based even as they were hailed as the consumers that would consolidate that culture. In such a light, the role oÃ- pakto cinema is transformed from incidental to foundational in the construction of contemporary Spanish society. The Triumph of the Paleto La ciudad no es para mÃ-, the most commercially successful Spanish film of the 1960s, appears to derive its immense popularity from a rather simple storyline promising spectators an easy release of aggression against a corrupting, commodifying , and alienating urban lifestyle.3 Its filmic therapy begins with an extensive introductory segment that establishes an early distinction between the wild world of the modern metropolis and the traditional Spanish rural idyll to come. This segment, incidental to the plot, captures spectator interest nonetheless. Its brief, fast-paced montage of life in modern-day Madrid establishes the city as the locus of frenzied workers identified more appropriately as numbers or mere images...