El Señor Gordo: Doctor Monsters Therapy

18 mayo 2013

Doctor Monsters Therapy

Sartre said that hell is other people. A recent filmography has reinterpreted the phrase turning the others in beings and also into monsters, and also apparently willing to destroy our life, family and properties. Apparently.

The cinema has always been a good instrument to measure global concerns, fears and obsessions. It is well known that during the 70s, the oil crisis, concerns about the present and the fear of what might come, impacted on the seventh art in the disaster subgenre, although it had begun time ago, it flourished during that decade with titles such as “Airport" (1970) "The Towering Inferno" (1974), "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), "Earthquake" (1974), "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) or "The China Syndrome" (1978).

The cinematic metaphor that our collective subconscious —if such a thing exists— has chosen to express the discomfort of the economic crisis and the values of the second decade of the 21st century is in the subgenre of monsters. A look at last year’s 2012 releases is enough to check their proliferation. It might seem at first somewhat contradictory. The cinema is an escape tool and if anything seems to be populated with everyday reality of monsters. Why multiply them well in fiction occupying our leisure time?

We have been attracted to monsters for centuries. We can find evidence of this in paintings by Carreño de Miranda or Goya. It is true that our reality is populated by horror classics that are still active and committing crimes. Creatures like Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, Angela Merkel, the chief Carlos Fabra or the modern Rinconete and former head of Spanish entrepreneurs Gerardo Diaz Ferran, to name a few illustrious of the list, continue to terrorize the good people. But monsters are also those anonymous beings that resemble normality and appear to be numerous. Beings that are convinced of making life difficult for others and manifest themselves moved by viscous and petty threads. It won´t be difficult to think of a few, in your company, in your own community, perhaps in your family, or just the guy who will not shut up at the movies and at the end when leaving the movies (I´m sure, sure they do!) empties the ashtray out the window, while out of his mouth comes out a light fluid that falls onto the ground after a Triple Axel with two twists ... Ordinary People.

And perhaps this is the most interesting finding of these monster movies, that under the pretext of the threat of extraordinary, supernatural and disfigured creatures, they emphasize the main deformity that the true monstrosity is often in specimens with a normal appearance. It is no coincidence that another illustrious monster, Mariano Rajoy, will not stop appealing (when he was in the opposition and would speak) to the "normal people" that "he does normal things" and "uses common sense" so they would join his faithful cohort.

Sometimes the thesis of the monstrosity of ordinary beings is made explicit, as in Tim Burton films. Francis Ford Coppola told us that Dracula, although a murder only moved for love. But the animated films of the monstrous subgenre, supposedly made for children, which have recently fallen upon that there is nothing more monstrous than mediocre masses that blindly follow leaders and reject what is different, as shown in "For Norman" (2012), to cite a recent tape. Even in films where the monsters continue to perform with rigor their role to scare, persecute, torture, cut, slice, slaughter or consume the unfortunates who cross in their path, there is room for a more ambiguous interpretation, confusing the nature of monsters of the deformed beings with that of normal-appearing beings, as shown in the series "Rec" by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.

I at least buy the moral. Not accepting the difference or worse, pursuing ones that are different is in itself something monstrous. Moreover, the really monstrous sometimes masquerades as something normal, not only in people, also in organizations and even in the laws.