This short week we worked with the concept of transnational melodrama, and the ways in which artists deploy matters of fascism and religiosity (belief, ritual, suffering economics, etc) both onstage and backstage to compose filmic stories.
Melodrama is the frame through which artists have deployed high style and feeling to tell a story, especially in film. In a first instance, out of chronological sequence, we will consider the critical importance of negotiating sex, trust, lies, and suffering to tell stories in which emoting and the transnational become central signifiers. Hilaria Loyo’s reading of the local/global, national/transnational in Coixet’s melodramas can help us consider this in the overall discussion of national/transnational and the unfolding of melodrama as a central point of reference in which fascism and religiosity seemingly are erased in Spanish film and culture.
By Saturday at 5pm, please post a reflection on how the film by Coixet, Things that I never told you (Cosas que nunca te dije) represents these crossing axes of sex, lies, and transnational drama with fascism and religiosity.
The transnational nature of Things I Never Told You runs in direct contrast to fascism and fascist Spain. Under totalitarian fascism, the self-sufficiency of the state is very much emphasized, and cooperation with other nations is not nearly as encouraged as in a democracy. While cooperation with another nation can occur in fascism, the uniqueness, independence, and power of the country is what is emphasized. Things I Never Told You thereby stands in direct opposition to fascist ideology due to its its transnational production, and would not likely even exist under fascist Spain. Beyond the transnational nature of the production the plot itself emphasizes transnational tendencies. The city of Prague being a part of the story is a prime example of this.
Fascism relies wholeheartedly on lies and deception. In its very nature fascism relies on simultaneously lying to the citizens, proclaiming that your country in question is somehow “perfect” and incapable of doing any wrong, while often the country’s government is committing atrocities. Lies and deception are seemingly ubiquitous within Things I Never Told You. This is evident in the more malevolent lies in film, such as Ann taping her sexual encounter, or the neighbor watching her films. This is also evident in more benign lies, such as Don working with depressed people with the ulterior motive of cheering himself up realizing there are people worse off than him.
As mentioned by many of us in class, if I had not already known Things I Never Told You was made by a Spanish filmmaker, I would have assumed it was entirely an American film. However, Things I Never Told You does have some distinctly Spanish qualities: the hints at religiosity with the Jesus signs, emphasis on the gaze with Ann’s privacy violated by her neighbor and Don’s privacy violated by Ann, and the unexpected ending that leaves you with more questions than you had at the beginning. Although Things I Never Told You is set in America, these things all feel very Spanish to me because they are such recognizable traits of the other Spanish films we have seen so far this semester. As Max mentioned above, the plot of the film itself is transnational because Ann tries to send her ex-boyfriend video messages across the world to Prague, a rather meta reflection of the process of sharing a film across countries. The film combines elements of both Spanish and American filmmaking that make it relatable to viewers across cultures, showcasing how Things I Never Told You is a subtle and beautiful example of transnational cinema.
Francis Fukuyama referred to the fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of neoliberal democracy as “the end of history”. From that moment on history was simply an afterthought. But how does that work in a country like Spain, where history is a constant, affecting everything and embedding itself in every aspect of society. In Things that I never told you, the malaise brought upon by this new neoliberal order is examined. The demons of the past are replaced with the relatively trivial conflicts of the present. Losing loved ones is replaced with losing love. What on the surface looks to be a nominally romantic and slightly offputting examination of transnational love, is in reality the culmination of Spain’s own grappling with its own history. Can Spain become a new country, or will it be confined to its own historical demons? Spain’s entrance into the international film canon is a stand-in for its own entrance into the world.
Things that I never told you (1996) is a somber character film about young Americans grappling with love, loss and modernity on the Pacific North-West during the 1990s. Things that I never told you is shot on location in Portland, Oregon, featuring an all-American cast, presented entirely in English. Only additional context and a closer look at the film’s titles reveal the transnational workings behind the production. Written, directed and produced in part by Spanish filmmakers, Things that I never told you is exemplary of the ‘invisible’ co-production, a means of filmmaking not unique to, but quintessential to Spain’s film industry. Isabel Coixet’s work is classified as invisible due to the obscurity of its Spanishness, which at face value is dominated by a uniquely American melodrama. Like many of her American contemporaries making films about the melodramatic highs and lows of modern American suburbia, Coixet crafts vignettes of sexual depravity, loneliness, and unorthodox romance, all emblematic of a generation rebelling against the dogmatic and antiquated conventions of yesteryear. The ideals of Francoist fascism, concerning what is pious and what is and is not Christian are completely sidetracked by unadulterated and unapologetic storytelling, perhaps as Coixet’s over correction for the burden Franco’s regime pressed on free expression. Coixet grew up in fascist Spain, but had seen her country become a democracy by the time she created Things that I never told you, allowing her to reflect on a life she had outgrown, but not yet forgotten.
The film for this week brought to me thought of the erotic, melancholy, exile, and bypassing religiosity. We spoke briefly about the church billboards in class, but they seem important to me as a figure of Spanishness that remains in this truly transnational film. There are multiple scene that take place in cars or in halted traffic, and transportation as a symbol of modernity and progress is halted here. But even while progress in halted, emotionally and physically, religiosity is sped past, only seen in glimpses as an overbearing and overwhelming force. The billboards become longer and longer as the movie goes on, and to actually read them, one must pause the film, but that is not how a film is meant to be watched. So this symbol of religion is placed almost as a subliminal message of the presence of religiosity for those who have experienced it in their past. Over the course of the semester we have spoke much about the past and memory as active constructions that Spanish people must contend with either by reinvention or forgetting, and the billboards in this film read to me as a sign of Isabel Coixet’s questions of religion not as guiding force but as always present in the past. It does not seem to be a salient force in the lives of the characters in the film, but it is noteworthy for her as a Spanish woman and for her viewers as living with pasts that come back in glimpses.