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Fictional socialism: blurring genre boundaries in Alex de la Iglesia's Mutant Action.

Article Excerpt
Critics and filmmakers frequently attribute the dearth of Spanish science fiction films to the lack of money for financing special effects that can compete with those of US movies. Following the catastrophic failure of Fernando Colomo's El caballero del Dragon in 1985, Spanish efforts in the fantasy and science fiction genres ceased for nearly a decade (Tamosunas 108). One of the few movies that viewers could categorize as science fiction was Alex de la Iglesia's 1992 release Accion Mutante. Set in 2012, the movie portrays a society obsessed with physical beauty and ruled by "ninos bonitos" and "pijos" (upper-class snobs). Only Mutant Action, a rebel hand of physically handicapped people, fights against the society whose body-culture obsession marginalizes them After attacking body-builders, fashion models, plastic surgeons, and health clubs, Mutant Action conceives a bold plan: to kidnap and ransom the daughter of a rich, whole-wheat bread maker.

De la Iglesia, part of a new generation of filmmakers, breaks with the filmmakers of the eighties by refusing to reiterate the big themes that Pilar Miro, the socialist head of the Cinematography Institute, supported. Through adoption of Miro's guidelines for film subsidies, the government in the eighties principally funded adaptations of literature or films about childhood trauma during and after the Spanish Civil War--films that sought to recast the previous six decades of Spanish history without the obstacles of Franco's censorship (Gubern 360). De la Iglesia's goals in Mutant Action are several. He opposes the idea that filmmakers need governmental subsidies to make high-quality movies, and, with Mutant Action, wants to make clear that "things could be done," meaning there no longer are impediments to the representation of the fantastic in Spanish cinema (De la Iglesia, The Making of Accion Mutante, 1992). De la Iglesia envisions a new age of Spanish films that are unabashedly entertaining and please a broad audience. He has repeatedly declared his desire to make a movie that "is not supposed to be serious or have any moral" because he wants audiences "to have a lot of fun watching it" (Jones 49). Therefore, be uses the science fiction genre to break with the recent trend in Spanish cinema by providing a movie that does hot have a moral or a preoccupation with history, but is pure entertainment.

Mutant Action represented Spain's first internationally credible and commercially viable SF effects movie (Tamosunas 193)....

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