COKE CANS, THE OSBORNE BULL AND SPANISHNESS: SPACE AND THE MALE BODY IN JAMÓN, JAMÓN (BIGAS LUNA, 1992)

Abstract

This article observes Bigas Luna’s film Jamón, jamón as a text that approaches the issue of Spanishness as an aesthetic issue and as an exploration of modernity. It explores the male body of the film’s three male characters: José Luis (prototype of the globalized man), Raúl (the macho ibérico), and Manuel (who embodies the idea of Europe), observing how Luna shows the confrontation between them as a metaphor for the historically assumed Spain’s resistance to modernity, thus making the film a renegotiation of Spanishness against the emergent neoliberal economy of the early 1990s.