Resumen de Ser o no ser Franco: Naturaleza y función de risa en Espérame en el cielo
Francisco Franco, the inescapable touchstone figure in contemporary Spanish history, represents an ambiguous legacy for collective Spanish memory. Given the fact that there was not an extreme, violent break at the end of the Franco dictatorship (a sign of great maturity on the part of Spanish society), there was also an absence of a powerful symbolic act that would serve to exorcise the past that so many had suffered. Processing that grief is taken up by polymorphous symbolic acts of a political, historical and cultural nature that, little by little, contribute their part in constructing a new collective memory. One example of this is the film by Antonio Mercero Espérame en el cielo (1987).
In his film Mercero achieves an authentic destruction of the mythic image of the dictator—yet not through a hateful attitude which typifies moves of this sort, but rather through a maturity which allows him to resort to the cathartic function of laughter.
How does laughter function in Espérame en el cielo, and what role does it take regarding collective memory? This is the question taken up by the article.
