"Tenemos un defecto": Europe and the Repressed macho ibérico in Vicente Escrivá's Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos

If the trope that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees" sounds immediate and familiar centuries after it was first uttered (ostensibly by Alexandre Dumas, père), it is as much because of the numerous critical explorations of the attitudes it reflects as for the original sentiment itself. Often used today as a form of historical shorthand signifying the belief that Spain was fundamentally different from the rest of Europe, whether coded negatively (as backward and feudal) or positively (as exotic and timeless), the phrase embodies a collective of beliefs according to which Spain failed to live up to the expectations of a wider European culture. The statement "Africa begins at the Pyrenees" establishes France as Spain's foil, both geographically, as the "other" side of the Pyrenees, and culturally, as the final outpost of European culture on a journey south. This contrast echoes the historical role France played in characterizing Spanish culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from inspiring Enlightenmentera Spaniards longing for progress (the so-called afrancesados) to contributing to a growing corpus of exoticized representations of Spain, of which Merimee's Carmen is perhaps the most famous example. In any interpretation of the phrase, the subject is situated within Europe, looking out toward Spain. Spain is portrayed explicitly as "other," the exception to the European rule. This essay explores these themes of national identity and essentialism in a film that reverses the perspective: the subject is situated within Spain, and the rest of Europe, particularly France, is the exceptional, perplexing object. The unproblematized assumption of Spanish difference is embodied in the infamous tourist slogan "Spain is Different," about which Patricia Hart urges us to ask, "Different from what?" and even, "What's Spain?" (188). If these questions defy simple answers, it is because they are seen to be so self-evident that explanation is unnecessary; however, films of the era demonstrate a surprising fixation on this "difference." In the film I will discuss here, the nature of this perceived difference is made explicit, much like the entertainment France promises to the film's sexually repressed Spanish protagonists in the waning years of the Franco regime. I will argue that Vicente Escrivá's 1973 comedy Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos inverts the traditional opposition between Spain and Europe not to deconstruct it, but to reconfirm it in still more conservative terms. Spanish masculinity and particularly the insatiable lust associated with machismo are presented as a historical pathology that predates the Spanish state by millennia and forms part of a timeless Spanish identity in which historical context exerts little more than a complementary influence. Superficial stereotypes of the macho ibérico and the caballero español are satirized and ridiculed, but the substitution of repression and neurosis as essential traits of the Spanish male are no less essentializing. The film perpetuates essentialist characterizations of Spain while superficially engaging with contemporary themes of modernization and liberalization, addressing the temptations presented from an ever-closer Europe while assuring its audience that, in fact, Spanish culture is unassailable even to the strongest forces of social change.

Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos belongs to a surprisingly prolific series of films in the 1960s and 1970s which, explains Sasha Pack, "met scant critical acclaim but continued to detain viewers of late-night Spanish television into the twenty-first century" (145). These tourism sex comedies portray Spanish male characters in exaggerated, comic personal crisis due to the destabilizing effects of the influx of foreigners through the tourist boom. The genre has been the focus of increasing critical interest in recent years, with studies such as Patricia Hart's in Eugenia Afinoguénova and Jaume Martí Olivella's recently published collection Spain is Still Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Identity and Pack 'sinhisbook'sinhisbooks in his book Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain.¹ The perceived intensity of this encounter was augmented by the extent to which Spain's own cultural difference from Europe was overstated, even fetishized. As Afinoguénova and Mart...