Middlebrow Cinematic Identity Formations Are Located in the Realm of ‘Quality’ Romantic Sex Comedies

6 THE MEXICAN ROMANTIC SEX COMEDY The emergence of Mexican middlebrow filmmaking in the 1990s Deborah Shaw The middlebrow and Mexican film culture: an introduction This chapter charts the rise of a new genre in Mexican cinema in the 1990s: the romantic sex comedy, a middlebrow cultural form that was born from changes in a national cinema culture that saw the development of the multiplex in Mexican cities and the development of a new professional bourgeoisie working in new mediascapes. This, together with a funding landscape that was moving away from a state-sponsored national arts cinema, resulted in more commercial forms of filmmaking that created a new cinema-going middle class. In the light of these social and cultural shifts, this chapter reinterprets Bourdieu’s notion of the middlebrow (‘culture moyenne’) as a ‘second rate imitation of legitimate culture’ (1999, 323). It argues that what constitutes the middlebrow is not fixed, and can and has changed as the nature of the middle classes themselves changes, and the national context to which it is applied shifts. Mark Jancovich, in an article on pornography and the middlebrow, has suggested that new configurations of the petite bourgeoisie create new forms of middlebrow culture (2001), and I argue that this is the case in a series of films released in the 1990s in Mexico. Jancovich writes this in relation to pornography and the middlebrow, yet it is very apposite to the Mexican context in which new middlebrow cinematic identity formations are located in the realm of ‘quality’ romantic sex comedies. This chapter examines the two most commercially successful Mexican films of this period, Slo con tu pareja / Love in the Time of Hysteria (Cuarón 1991) and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas / Sex, Shame and Tears (Serrano 1998), and considers the ways in which high and low cultural registers are mixed together to form a new Mexican middlebrow. I examine the representations of gender, class and ethnicity 108 Deborah Shaw in this new cinema for the middle classes, and argue that these films present this class on screen for the first time. The films both mock and admire the aspirational lifestyles of the male protagonists; create new post-feminist female characters; and erase the social reality of the majority of working-class mestizo Mexicans. For Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979; English translation 1984), the middlebrow (‘culture moyenne’) creates an accessible version of high culture for the aspirational middle classes. Copying and imitation are central to this formulation: he refers to sub-substandard copies of high culture; accessible versions of ‘pure art’; ‘film adaptations of classical drama and literature’; and ‘popular arrangements of classical music’ or ‘orchestral versions’ of popular music (1999, 323). The suggestion is that the petite bourgeoisie engage in a misreading, taking the copy for the original, as they do not have the cultural capital to know otherwise. Another central conception of Bourdieu’s middlebrow is the bringing together of expressions of high and low culture to create a middle – a mainstream version of high culture. Middlebrow culture for Bourdieu is ‘entirely organized to give the impression of bringing legitimate culture within the reach of all, by combining two normally exclusive characteristics, immediate accessibility and the outward signs of cultural legitimacy’ (1999, 323). Most critics writing on the middlebrow see it as a mode that borrows from both high and low cultural spaces, and, following Bourdieu, both makes the difficult accessible and intellectualizes the popular. Sally Faulkner, in her book on the history of Spanish film from its inception to 2010, uses it as a dominant category in assessing Spanish cinema. She writes of a tranche of filmmaking being characterized by the middlebrow and her work ‘highlights the in-betweenness of the middlebrow film, which often fuses high production values, serious – but not challenging – subject matter, high – but not obscure – cultural references, and accessible form’ (2013, 8). Turning to reception, the key concept is that the middlebrow audiences are always aiming upwards to impress and enhance their cultural capital and legitimacy as cultural subjects. However, as Bourdieu has also theorized, culture and habitus are interconnected with social structures rooted in class, regulating taste, thoughts, feelings and ‘bodily postures’ (Reed-Danahay 2005, 107). When these social structures change so too will cultural expressions of the category. While it has traditionally been a top-down concept, middlebrow culture can also find its expressions in traditionally ‘low’ cultural forms as class identities are redefined. This has, this chapter argues, been the case in Mexican cinematic culture beginning in the 1990s. My notion of the middlebrow in relation to domestic Mexican popular films of the 1990s corresponds to this mixing of traditionally high and low cultural forms in a bid to create new middle-class audiences for Mexican films. However, rather than making difficult, elitist culture more accessible, Mexican middle-class romantic sex comedies of the 1990s have infused easily consumed popular culture with some carefully selected high-cultural references, and have added intellectual content through their philosophical musings on the nature of relationships. Thus, they are middlebrow, but they come to the middle from a reverse position to that which is theorized by Bourdieu. The Mexican romantic sex comedy 109 In his article, ‘Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste and the Problem of the Middlebrow’, Jancovich argues that the habits of the old petite bourgeoisie, which informs Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, and was developed in response to 1960s French society, have been replaced by a new distinct breed of professionals ‘involv- ing presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services’ (2001, 359). With a focus on mainstream soft porn, Jancovich explains new cultural forms openly embraced by this new class: The old petite bourgeoisie tried to avoid being judged through a tactic of respectability and restraint through which they hoped to pass unnoticed, but the new petite bourgeoisie, on the other hand, tries to avoid judgment by rejecting the values of the old petite bourgeoisie. In an attempt to avoid being identified as petite bourgeois, it rejects the ethic of respectability and restraint and defines this ethic as ‘outmoded’ and ‘fuddy-duddy’. In its place, it therefore adopts an ethic of fun, which is defined as ‘modern’ and sophis- ticated in opposition to the tastes of the old petite bourgeoisie. (2001, 359) Jancovich’s explanation is useful in understanding the popularity of Mexican romantic sex comedies for domestic middle-class audiences from the 1990s. He identifies a new middlebrow that finds one of its cultural expressions through a pornographic mainstream and magazines such as Playboy (1953–). Here I follow Jancovich to argue that in Mexican film of the 1990s we witness new middlebrow expressions of culture through romantic sex comedies, expressions that have emerged through a new petite bourgeoisie working in fields such as marketing, the media and public relations. According to Bourdieu’s original formulation, ‘Middle-brow culture is resolutely against vulgarity’ (1999, 326). The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile – in a word, natural – enjoyment . implies an affirmation of superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasure forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consump- tion are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences. Thus, as Bourdieu also acknowledges, social identity is relational and is forged by distinguishing itself from the tastes and behaviours of others (1999). As with the middle-class consumers of soft porn, the new Mexican middlebrow that emerged in the 1990s finds a cultural expression in representations of sexuality that are resolutely in favour of vulgarity. In contrast to lowbrow sex comedies, such as the Carry On Films in England of the 1970s, the pornochanchadas popular in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s, the Spanish sex comedies of the early 1990s and the 110 Deborah Shaw US teen sex comedies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, these are films with intellectual and artistic pretensions. These mainstream romantic sex comedies helped reinvigorate Mexican cinematic culture in the 1990s and created a new class of cinemagoer. In line with Jancovich’s formulation of a new professional middle class, a number of the lead characters in both the case studies here (Love in the Time of Hysteria and Sex, Shame and Tears) work in advertising and the media. Mexican film culture of the 1990s The domestic success of a number of films in the 1990s, including Love in the Time of Hysteria (Cuarn 1991), Como agua para chocolate / Like Water for Chocolate (Arau 1991), Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda / Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman (Bermán and Tardán 1996) and Sex, Shame and Tears (Serrano 1998), heralded a commercial turn in Mexican filmmaking through a focus on identity, eroticism and humour (Zavala 2011). Sex, Shame and Tears is a good example of this new commercial filmmaking targeted at the middle and upper classes.

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