‘Making Do’ or the Cultural Logic of the Ersatz Economy in the Spanish Films of Marco Ferreri

Abstract

In the synopsis of the script for his final film My Street (1960), Edgar Neville wrote the following:

There are the poor and the rich, workers and slackers, the virtuous and the sinners, the good and the evil. Those who are lucky live in the street, but so do those who are not. Each individual believes himself independent, yet in moments of danger or joy, they find themselves tenderly united by that neighborly relation. (quoted in Ríos Carratalá, 1997: 88)

This idealized view of daily life in central Madrid, which constitutes a central discourse of the sainete, aptly serves to exemplify Bhabha’s critique of ‘the many as one’, to which I referred at the end of the last chapter. The holistic theory of the community or the nation as an untroubled social totality is often culturally expressed – especially with regard to comedy – in the nostalgically smug terms that Neville employs here. The sainete usually takes the form of brief sketches of life in the crowded and cramped confines of a Madrid tenement building, invariably involves a romantic dalliance between a stereotypical castiza couple, bolstered by a chorus of neighbors and complemented by a rousing musical interlude. Neville is, of course, being disingenuous. The above quote is not a fair portrayal of any of his own films (including My Street) which, while exploiting localized customs and deriving from sainete, are also consistent in disrupting the totalizing harmony of their own caricature.