UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA II “FRANKESTEIN” IN CASTILE: THE USES OF THE BRITISH LITERARY GOTHIC IN SPANISH CINEMA AFTER FRANCO “FRANKENSTEIN” EN CASTILLA: LA TRADICIÓN "GÓTICA" BRITÁNICA EN EL CINE ESPAÑOL POSFRANQUISTA TESIS DOCTORAL DE: JONATHAN PETER HOLLAND DIRIGIDA POR: FÉLIX MARTÍN GUTIÉRREZ Madrid, 2013 ©Zafeiria Mitatou, 2013 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA Departamento de Filología Inglesa II “FRANKENSTEIN” IN CASTILE: THE USES OF THE BRITISH LITERARY GOTHIC IN SPANISH CINEMA AFTER FRANCO (“FRANKENSTEIN” EN CASTILLA: LA TRADICIÓN “GÓTICA” BRITÁNICA EN EL CINE ESPAÑOL POSFRANQUISTA) MEMORIA PRESENTADA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR POR Jonathan Peter Holland Bajo la dirección del Doctor: Félix Martín Gutiérrez Madrid, 2013 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA Departamento de Filología Inglesa II JONATHAN PETER HOLLAND “FRANKENSTEIN” IN CASTILE: THE USES OF THE BRITISH LITERARY GOTHIC IN SPANISH CINEMA AFTER FRANCO (“FRANKENSTEIN” EN CASTILLA: LA TRADICIÓN “GÓTICA” BRITÁNICA EN EL CINE ESPAÑOL POSFRANQUISTA) TESIS DOCTORAL DIRECTOR: DR. FÉLIX MARTÍN GUTIÉRREZ MADRID, 2013 “FRANKENSTEIN” IN CASTILE: THE USES OF THE BRITISH LITERARY GOTHIC IN SPANISH CINEMA AFTER FRANCO Jonathan Holland INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER 1: Gothic Tropes in Spanish Film 27 1.1. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Gothic Taxonomy 27 1.2. The Ambiguity of Terror and Horror 29 1.3. The Ancestral Curse 34 1.4. Saying Grace: Anti-Catholicism 35 1.5. Children 40 1.6. Claustrophobia 42 1.7. The Explained Supernatural 44 1.8. Haunted Houses 45 1.9. Gothic Romanticism 54 1.10. Secrets 55 1.11. The Sublime 57 CHAPTER 2: Ways of Viewing: Spain and Rebecca 62 2.1. Francoism and Repression 62 2.2. Theories of Media Reception: Gramsci, Fiske, Certeau 65 2.3. Rebecca: du Maurier and Hitchcock 72 2.4. Mrs Danvers and Others 79 2.5. Silences 82 2.6. The Narrator as Child 85 CHAPTER 3: “El Espíritu de la Colmena” and its Gothic Monsters 91 3.1. The Gothic Genesis of El espíritu de la colmena 91 3.2. The Monsters of El espíritu de la colmena 101 3.3. Ana and Abjection 102 3.4. Ideological Isabel 107 3.5. Don José’s Eyes 113 3.6. The Industrial Monster: the Train 114 3.7. The Monster of Censorship 117 3.8. Ambiguity and Interpretation 128 CHAPTER 4: The Gothic Structure of The Others 135 4.1. The Others and The Turn of the Screw 135 4.2. The Others as Gothic Allegory 142 4.3. Narrative Structure and Ambiguity in The Others 147 4.4. Twisted Endings 150 4.5. The Double Narrative Structure of The Others 155 4.6 The Others: Detailed Analysis 160 4.7. The Ideology of the Narrative Structure of The Others 176 CHAPTER 5: Hauntings and Hauntology 181 5.1. Hauntology 181 5.2. Abraham and Torok 185 5.3 Avery Gordon 191 5.4 Hauntology and Spain 192 CHAPTER 6: Hauntology and The Ghosts Of El Orfanato 200 6.1. El orfanato and Spanish History 200 6.2. The Ghosts of Spain 205 6.3. The Return of the Ghost 209 6.4. Simon’s Game 223 CHAPTER 7: Pere Portabella’s Vampir-Cuadecuc: Gothic Transtextuality and Political Meaning 227 7.1. Dracula and Spanish Gothic 227 7.2. Pere Portabella: Contexts 234 7.3. Intertextualities 239 7.4. Vampir-Cuadecuc and the Dominant Cinema 242 7.5. Vampyr-Cuadecuc: Analysis 248 CHAPTER 8: Gothic and the Depthless Past: Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis 256 8.1. The Inauthentic Gothic 256 8.2. The Centrality of Narrative 260 8.3. Character-led Drama: but what kinds of characters? 265 8.4. Narrative Closure 270 8.5. Metacinematic Style: Tesis as Countercinema 271 8.6. Tesis and Genre 274 8.7. Gothic Extremes: Snuff 278 8.8. Rebellion and the Institution 284 CONCLUSION: Other Genres 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY 296 FILMOGRAPHY 309 INTRODUCTION This doctoral thesis starts with a gaze: but not with the aggressive, Gothic gaze of Stoker’s Dracula, or of Walpole’s Manfred, or of Radcliffe’s Schedoni. In Víctor Erice’s film El espíritu de la colmena, a six year-old girl, Ana, is taken to see a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in the Spanish pueblo of Hoyuelos in Castilla-La Mancha. Ana watches the film innocent and open-eyed, too young to properly understand what it is saying. The question of why the monster dies is of special interest to her. Having presumably been born in 1934, Ana is unaware of the quasi- Gothic terrors that have divided and partly destroyed Spain in that most traumatic of eras in Spanish twentieth-century history, the 1936-39 Civil War, but the world in which she is growing up is full of the effects of that war – in the silences of her parents, which fill the house in which she lives with unspoken tensions, in the maqui she will later meet, in scenes with echo those of Pip with the convict Magwitch in Dickens’ Gothically-inflected Great Expectations (1861), of mysterious gunshots which ring out at night, and in the literal detritus of the war which scatter the remote landscapes of Castilla-La Mancha. Whale’s film becomes Ana’s frame for understanding that reality, and she undertakes a spiritual journey in search of the answers which will end, in the final 4 scenes, almost killing her. In other words, it is a framework supplied by the Gothic – by Shelley’s Frankenstein (1820), by way of Whale, which enables Ana to reach a point where she is finally able to come to a final, affirmative declaration of identity: “soy Ana”. Whereas for the other members of the community in which she lives the film is entertainment, something to be escaped into, for Ana, unburdened by their expectations of what popular culture is for, it becomes an enabling device. In the opening scenes of Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (2001), a bomb falls from the hatch of an airplane. The camera then cuts to a boy, unconscious or dead, lying on cellar flagstones, blood coming from his head: the image of the injured child is redolent of that of Ofelia in del Toro’s later film, El laberinto del fauno (2006). A voiceover by the Argentinean actor Federico Luppi asks what these disconnected images signify: “What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself, time and again?” The two images, bleeding child and bomb, inevitably conjure up traumatic aspects of Spanish and Western European twentieth-century history. Such a visual echo is a clear recognition by del Toro of the impact of other films on his imagination: he is very much a postmodern filmmaker, explicitly drawing on other cultural artefacts to make his meanings. But what is important for our purposes here is the allusion to the gothic, a representational mode which has been chosen by del Toro as a methodology by which the film will attempt, ideologically, narratively, and psychologically, to come to terms with the Spanish Civil War. In the first scene of the gothic novel which is traditionally held to be the founding text of the genre, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1759), Conrad, the son of the usurper Manfred, is crushed to death by a massive plumed helmet which has come crashing through the roof of his castle. Manfred temporarily becomes an overawed Burkean observer: 5 He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers. The horror of the spectacle, the ignorance of all around how this misfortune happened, and above all, the tremendous phenomenon before him, took away the prince’s speech. (Walpole 19) A gothic supernatural manifestation of the “sins of the fathers coming to rest upon the sons”, the helmet symbolizes the legitimate owner’s imminent return, its literal and figurative weight meaning that it never disappears throughout the duration of the novel. There are clearly strong parallels between Walpole’s helmet and del Toro’s bomb. The message of the helmet is that the younger generation will become the victim of legitimate or illegitimate patriarchal politics; the bomb of El espinazo del diablo likewise remains, the bomb failing to explode on impact. It remains there, seemingly alive, becoming psychologically connected to the boy Santi, who died on the same night it falls and who will return during the film to wreak vengeance. The bomb is a living presence, and is fascinating to the boys, who listen to it as though waiting for it to speak. Like the helmet in The Castle of Otranto, and like the images of Frankenstein in Hoyuelos, the bomb is a visitor from and a reference to a past “somewhere else,” a place with a violence which erupts into the present of the boys and represents a threat to their future security. Bomb, helmet and monster are thus all gothic ghosts, incursions into, and explanations of, a potentially violent present. I offer these two key examples by way of introductory demonstration that gothic motifs offer a key to interpretation, hitherto largely unexplored, for Spanish film in the post-Franco era. 6 It is worth pointing out here that throughout this analysis, we will be using the word “gothic” as it relates to the British literary tradition, not in its main Spanish sense as given in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española: “arte que se desarrolla en Europa desde el siglo XII hasta el Renacimiento”. Our use of quotation marks around the Spanish title - Frankenstein en Castilla: la tradición “gótica” británica en el cine español posfranquista – is intended to separate out the British term “gothic” from the Spanish “gótico”.