Ethics, Spectacle, and Violence in Álex de la Iglesia's La chispa de la vida

Álex de la Iglesia's Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (2013) boasts having won the most number of awards at the 28^th edition of the Goya Awards. Though not the first feature by the director to win Spain's most prestigious prize, the fact that seven of the statuettes were for so-called technical categories speaks volumes to the reception of a director that was previously seen as "a popular generic auteur" (Rodríguez Ortega 53, emphasis in the original), or, worst yet, a director who lacked a certain seriousness in portraying Spanish society. By working with genres such as the black comedy – previously fallen to the wayside under the Ley Miró – the director has further cultivated an aesthetic acumen, with certain films such as Acción mutante (1993) and El día de la bestia (1995) showcasing special effects previously unseen in the Spanish silver screen. Within the last decade, however, his films have elucidated increasing critical interest, perhaps most evident in Peter Buse, Núria Triana-Toribio, and Andrew Willis's The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (2007), and a sustained series of articles delving into issues of style, content, and thematics across the body of his work.¹

Such an interest coincides with a reevaluation of his film not as an example of generic exploitation but as an alternative treatise into some of the broader issues that have tended to haunt Spanish cinematic production of the Transition years and the entry into the European Union. Cristina Moreiras-Menor, for example, collocates De la Iglesia in a grouping consisting of Luis Buñuel, Mario Camus, and Mercedes Álvarez as directors that offer "una reflexión crítica y altamente política respecto a la temporalidad, privilegiando en ella el presente como el momento histórico por excelencia" (12). Moreiras-Menor is of course referencing Spanish cinema's visceral and (at times) inescapable relationship with the socio-political milieu of the Francoist years and, more importantly, its aftermath. She furthers that one can view the present in De la Iglesia's films as "contaminado, siempre de forma hospitalaria, con la íntima presencia del pasado y el futuro" (12). Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, in turn, underlines how films such as Balada triste de trompeta (2010):

[H]ighlight, not issues and concerns that arise out of a new crossroads in Spain's confrontation with the past … or in order to tame that past through laughter … but a more forceful and less modulated argument indicating the insidious nature of the legacy of the Francoist past and the ineffectiveness of current memory debates in unseating it from a dominant position in Spain's memory horizon.

(250-51)

Ribeiro de Menezes, importantly, combines Moreiras-Menor's reading of a political historicity to the issue of violence – a characteristic pervasive in all of the director's films. She notes that the "use of excessive violence … what many critics have called the deliberate 'bad taste' of De la Iglesia's works … serve as metaphors of Spanish history" (250).

Ribeiro de Menezes is not the only critic to read deeper into the aesthetics and politics of violence in De la Iglesia; Francisco Fernández de Alba, for example, posits that in El día de la bestia, violence exists in physical, psychological, social, and political forms, and as a sort of litmus of the unconscious violence intrinsic to the essence of Spanishness (40-41). He suggests that "the horror and fear in these movies are not necessarily based in their explicitly violent content but in the possibility that we, the Iberian audiences, are similarly confronted by that daily violence and capable of employing it in the now democratically normalized Spanish State" (40). The ideas presented by both critics engender new ways of seeing these films, rooting their almost gratuitous scenes of mutilations, mass shootings, and cadavers as a codex of the relationship between violence and Spanishness.

My interest in these pages is to revisit the issue of violence, albeit in a film that has garnered no critical interest. La chispa de la vida (2011), a...