ABSTRACT
Spanish comedy lms of the past two decades have demonstrated a remarkable proclivity for trafcking in stereotypes. The latest lm to join these ranks is Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s 2014 hit Ocho apellidos vascos / Spanish Affair, which, in addition to both propagating and subverting the stereotypes with which its comedic predecessors have engaged, is a socially relevant intervention in the politics of identity representation, in particular through the way it draws on notions of performativity and displacement. The lm conates regional, national, cultural, linguistic, class, and gender identities in an overarching narrative of travel and discovery. The tourist’s gaze, which articulates the lm’s main narrative, is also responsible for the two theoretical paradigms that this chapter seeks to deploy in relation to enacted masculinities: on the one hand, the prevalence of hegemonic and othering masculinities that are presented in the lm as fundamentally dictated by national and cultural traditions; and, on the other, the playful albeit not inconsequential staging of performed authenticities that seem to successfully sustain the lm’s narrative but that ultimately fail to provide a convincing alternative to essentialist modes of authenticity. The paper also addresses the question of the huge box-ofce success of this lm and briey compares it to similar popular hits of past decades, such as No desearás al vecino del quinto (Fernández, 1970), to suggest a historical continuity in comedy approaches to performed masculinities.
