“Pedir un café puede costarte la vida”: phobias of democracy in Álex de la Iglesia’s El bar

• Erma Nezirevic ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Minnesota

     University of Minnesota

     City of Minneapolis, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, ISSN 1463-6204, ISSN-e 1469-9818, Vol. 22, Nº. 4, 2021, págs. 539-552
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The so-called Spanish transition to democracy has largely been a process of collective forgetting undertaken for the sake of progress and measured by the country’s perceived success at democratization, for example, by adopting a new constitution and joining the European Union after forty years of a repressive fascist dictatorship. As the 15-M movement took off in 2011, the effectiveness of the Transition started to be openly questioned. In the 2017 film El bar, directed and co-written by Álex de la Iglesia, the characters find themselves in a situation that appears to be a random terrorist killing as one of the characters walks out of a bar in Madrid. Implying that we live in a society where “pedir un café puede costarte la vida”, the film employs a rather predictable narrative trope of trapping a handful of characters from different walks of life in an enclosed space and shows the audience how they organize themselves into a community whose goal is to leave the trap as a community, thus questioning its functionality. This article examines the plethora of fears that circulate in democratic Spain including terrorism, disease and Balkanization through a cinematic lens that seeks to reevaluate the Transition process and the very notion of crisis that shapes the public sphere and is, in turn, shaped by it.