Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) was the commercial debut of the award-winning Pedro Almodóvar. It features the iconic golden shower scene, provoking a great deal of controversy in the prevailing values of the time. How did Almodóvar manage to earn a reputation in the establishment after that?
The sociology of the Spanish “sewers” would not be understood without the cinematographic contributions of the director, who must be recognised as having a good nose for promoting new icons: the “Almodóvar girls” – let’s include Antonio Banderas in this category – and his films – both in content and form – are undoubtedly part of the Spanish moodboard. Almodóvar’s imaginary is a reference in terms of the portrayal of Spanish society -marginal, bourgeois, LGBTIQ+, folkloric, and in general, diverse-, as well as being an icon of the aesthetics of the most costumbrist Spain. This exaltation of things commonly buried in the underworld and the suburbs is also the idea behind what is known as “cine quinqui” (meaning “delinquency cinema”).
Iconic films such as “Yo, El Vaquilla”, “Historias del Kronen” or “La estanquera de Vallecas”, help to reconstruct the history of post-transition Spain, that of the caballo or horse and delinquency as a response to the levels of precariousness. The last film mentioned comes from one of the genre’s leading figures: Eloy de la Iglesia. Although the imaginary of Almodóvar’s first stage and Eloy de la Iglesia’s filmography do not seem to be very different in their themes, some factor conditioned the fact that one has two Oscars and the other ended up hooked on heroin and wiped off the map of official history.
The rats that came out of the sewers
Is there a parallel between that marginalised, precarious generation, pushed into the abyss of delinquency and drugs, and today’s generation? The rise of the “neo-quinqui” universe – see the triumph of trap – now surrounds all strata of society – again, in a context of precariousness.
In the cinema, the director Carlos Salado signed Ramon Guerrero (a.k.a. “el Cristo”), a bricklayer from Colonia Requena, a precarious neighbourhood in Alicante – the place where the film was shot – and turned him into what Almodóvar would call Antonio Banderas. “Criando ratas” is the debut feature by Salado, who had to stop shooting the film when Cristo went to prison, and tells a story centred on the microcosm of this periphery, but not in the Spain of the 1980s, but in the Spain of today. The director devised a spin-off of the film and kept the character of el Cristo, only this time with a new co-star: Fernando Gálvez a.k.a Yung Beef. The resulting short film – “Mala Ruina”- included the soundtrack composed and produced by the Granada rapper. In turn, the same year, Pedro Almodóvar decided to give Rosalía a role -secondary but essential in her musical contribution- in his feature film, Dolor y Gloria (2019).
Just as, at the time, a young and irreverent Alaska was signed by a, at the time, rebellious Almodóvar for the role of Bom, the flirtations between cinematographic and musical currents that represent a series of similar values – underground cinema signing up underground musicians, mainstream cinema signing up mainstream musicians – are still very much alive. In this case, we find the two main paradigms exposed in a single image: a self-managed project, with a very limited budget and a very marginal line-up, signs the representative of these values in the musical context -binomial Salado – Yung Beef. On the other hand, we find an author’s project with the backing of a production company, great prestige and a comfortable place in the industry that signs a referent of the same scene.
“God save the underground”
One of the ideas that surrounds Jordi Costa’s “Como acabar con la contracultura” is the constant threat of the mainstream and the inexhaustible capacity of the system to redirect any socio-cultural threat that poses a challenge to the system. It is precisely Costa’s book that makes a cameo – elegantly intentional by Almodóvar – in “Dolor y Gloria”, appearing at the table of Salvador Mallo (the film director played by Antonio Banderas).
Just as the system has been able to neutralise initially underground referents by giving them a “full life” in the elite, it has also been the first to consign those who resisted to the pit of oblivion. That’s why there is still a debate about whether trap is vindictive or the ultimate expression of capitalism. History repeats itself: some will end up in the bosom of the media aristocracy and others will be cornered at their convenience, tearing the skin off the discourse so that it ends up meaningless.
From the quinqui mullet to the modern mullet
In this line, production companies have found a vein in the adoption of dissident narratives without taking risks: they introduce certain supposedly transgressive nuances, but without crossing the line of the disruptive. In 2021, Netflix spent seven million euros to shoot the film “Las leyes de la frontera”, a film with a quinqui air with a script adapted from the book of the same name by Javier Cercas. The plot is based on the story of three young petty criminals who go on the run in Girona in Spain during the Transition.
The film represents the materialisation of the threat that Jordi Costa talks about. The mainstream takes an element with a specific symbolic value (the cinema quinqui), strips it of that value and keeps the aesthetics (it tears the skin off). In this case, it adds the modern premise of Spanish costumbrista “nostalgia” – like living in an eternal video clip of “Demasiadas Mujeres” by C.Tangana. The film, being a super-production, loses the vindictive undercurrent present in the original quinqui cinema and focuses solely on form, resulting in an aesthetic devoid of meaning. The same thing is done by the majors, one need only mention when Sony signed Yung Beef (a disastrous working relationship that did not come to fruition), or the current case of the same label signing El Morad, a singer embroiled in controversy whose music is deeply rooted in his reality and that of the streets.
Once again, the system phagocytises the threat, neutralises it by eliminating its political charge, introduces it into the commercial circuit and we end up with city hipsters wearing the mullet, which at the time had the symbolic, political, and stigmatised charge of marginality.
