Long live Mariano Ozores! Our popular culture's complex against "dandruff"

When I was a child, in the early 1980s, I loved the arrival of summer vacation and traveling by train from Barcelona to Ponferrada to spend a few days in the care of my beloved aunt and uncle Isaac and Rosi. He would come home exhausted from his plumbing job and always put on two VHS movies to doze off in the twilight. They were "for adults," but he would let us kids watch them : usually one action movie and one for "fun." Usually, Conan the Barbarian or Mad Max (or, more often, the dozens of Italian-Spanish imitations that abounded in those five-year periods) and one by Pajares and Esteso. In other words, by Mariano Ozores . "I still have them all!" he assures me now, when I call him to confirm my memories.

For him, for my cousin Róber, and for me (and for any working-class son ), those were modern films, the best of the best that could be made back then. That's why I, who already read the entertainment section of the newspapers my father bought, always left-wing papers (no right-wing newspaper ever entered Migoya's house, except for As and Sport), was shocked when critics said that Conan the Barbarian and Mad Max were fascist films. But I think the insults directed at Ozores' films were even more personally offensive , if possible (although it's certainly no small feat to be told that the films you like are fascist): they practically defined them as sub-cinema, films for morons. "Films for plumbers," said Pilar Miró, using that profession as a euphemism for rabble.

Well yes, I thought, cinema for plumbers like my uncle, what's up?

Mariano Ozores, "the prolific"

The pedantic thing hasn't changed much: it's clear that that enlightened posh classism is still in force (you know, the "everything for the people, but don't even come near me, you stinking country bumpkins") because, on the occasion of Mariano Ozores' recent death, the Ministry of Culture, in its condolences spread on social media, could only think to say that he was "one of the most prolific directors of our cinema." And that was it, they didn't know what else to add. To point that out, all it took was a quick look at his filmography (the number of titles in his filmography, more accurately) and, voila, we already have an "emotional" farewell message. Oh, yes, they also mention that by reaching ninety, he'd even had time to receive an Honorary Goya . And so, off they go, it doesn't bring prestige.

Not a single mention of the immense amount of happiness this director and screenwriter brought to millions of working-class homes, nor to the movie theaters he filled, nor of his most iconic titles and the box office records he broke. Nor a single thanks to the Ozores clan for their commendable and significant dedication to the seventh art : within acting, to the hilarious Antonio and his hilarious daughter Emma; to the unforgettable tragicomic José Luis and his dazzling daughter Adriana. Even a contextualizing mention of the current machismo in Ozores's filmography during the "uncovering" of the 1970s would have implied a demonstration of a certain amount of informative effort on the part of the Ministry. Quia.

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Cinema for plumbers, the kind crushed by subsidies. Detective films, horror films, comedy films, erotic films... escapist films. The kind we love in Hollywood without our ancestral codes. Let's not forget that, for Spanish institutions and much of the cultural press, the masses need to be re-educated and popular culture is filthy. It's better to fund everything from the state and create works with their backs to the public, for whose presumed good they work but whom they de facto despise.

And we have plenty of examples of this paternalistic contempt, which still reaches us and is reaffirmed today in all disciplines of mass entertainment.

Julio Iglesias, "the mediocre"

"The past is wonderful when you have a future. I can't go to bed and sleep with the past. I'd die of grief." This is one of the gems singer Julio Iglesias drops in one of the interviews Peruvian writer Enrique Planas includes in his recent book , *The Album of Forgotten Things *, an essay devoted to obsolete objects like the typewriter and public telephone booths , as well as to Iglesias himself, understood as a minstrel of syrupy romanticism, linked to an era and a style that will never return. If that tremendous quote had been by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan , or even Elvis Presley himself, even in his flip-and-flab phase, I'm sure it would be present in the collective memory of many Spaniards, the same ones who publicly mock him every time the Madrid star opens his mouth.

A "serious" book about the life and career of Julio Iglesias, entitled The Spaniard Who Fell in Love with the World , has recently been published by Ignacio Peyró. The author, a rarity in our cultural sector, has always spoken in the press with respect and a certain admiration for his subject, which he has to justify (no journalist would demand it if his object of admiration and work were Dean Martin or Johnny Cash ). And just because of this depth and complicity of approach, his essay has caused a slight earthquake in the Spanish intellectual scene. Horror! Does anyone dare to speak—or in this case, write—well about Julio Iglesias? We copla fans still haven't recovered from so many years of being labeled Francoists for enjoying Niña de Antequera, Imperio Argentina, Lola Flores, or Manolo Escobar (if you want to see me shed orphan tears, make me listen to ¡Ay, mi perro!, La falsa monea, ¡Ay pena, penita, pena!, or La campanita). At the very least, they called us idiots for enjoying a "subgenre" supposedly invented by the murderous dictator to keep us imbeciles (i.e., lost plumbers). So how can we dream of being respected for enjoying the 70s melodic genre and Julito's songs? If we listen to swing, blues, or country, it's all good. But melodic music in Spanish?! Ugh.

Opinion

The reactions of music and literary journalists to this book have been priceless, a joy that has challenged the prejudices of the respectable aspiring "expert": while there have been voices with a platform decidedly in favor of finally singing the virtues of Iglesias as a value in himself, a turning point in the romantic musical genre , which also contains its own rules worthy of a minimum of respect, since every genre has its intricacies (in this regard, the comments on social media by the writer and critic Josep Maria Nadal Suau have been notable), a host of opinion-makers have not missed the opportunity to once again practice the favorite sport of aspiring dogma spreaders: acting clever by trying to humiliate what they don't like or understand. In this case, demonstrating in just a paragraph what the success of someone supposedly as mediocre as the singer of Abrázame was due to: because, of course, what that man has achieved in the international music market is a piece of cake. They know it!

It doesn't matter that he had the support, affection, and collaborations of Frank Sinatra , Charles Aznavour, and Willie Nelson, figures never questioned from the outset by our Moiseses and who, without a doubt, those gentlemen so critical of our work fervently love. It doesn't matter that behind Julio there were composers, arrangers, and producers of the caliber of Rafael Ferro, El Dúo Dinámico, or Manuel Alejandro. No, in a single paragraph, we can dismiss this "figurehead" so we can dedicate ourselves to what we love , which is to revere any musical name that comes from the Anglo-Saxon world.

And whoever says Julio Iglesias also says La oreja de Van Gogh or Mecano, our pop landmarks, phenomena respected by the press throughout the Spanish-speaking world... except here. The intelligently frivolous essence of pop clashes with the transcendentalist zeal of many of those (often puerile and reactionary) critics. And a great paradox: never has modernity done so much to incentivize our colonized submission to cultural imperialism from the United States and Great Britain as Spanish modernity.

This policy of turning its back on the natural path by which each society generates its own culture has already spread to the world of comics. With the recent launch of state-wide calls to distribute one million euros in grants to comics projects, the final death certificate of comics as a popular medium has also been issued. Because a series of moral biases will be applied to select the winning projects, it is therefore to be expected, among other conditions and forced rules, that proposals such as "all the little black people are hungry and cold" (that is, involuntary parodies of social criticism and various porno-poverty, exclusively designed to cash a check and fill the gaps) will be given preference in the filter.

Of course, social criticism isn't a problem per se; it's just another genre: the obligation to include it is, and to include it at the whim of whoever's calling the shots, making the creative process artificial and unnatural. And comics about sex, violence, transgressors of the window dressing function, or satires that touch on the taboos of the prevailing sensibility or power (something that not so long ago was an implicit quality of comics as a popular and freer medium than literature and film) will obviously not receive any support. The same thing is expected to happen as in the 1980s with the Miró Law: goodbye to genre works and hello to moralistic and Manichean comics!

Of course, there will be numerous authors who deserve this support and who produce worthy works : the market also marginalizes many artists who don't necessarily have to enter that path of mass appeal, but it would be ideal to contribute and not lay the groundwork for elitism and sectarianism. Perhaps at some point, perhaps, this gap in audiences can be overcome and something like the Spanish audiovisual industry can happen, which today is much more alive and in tune with its society than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

However, to my surprise, not even my friends who support institutional financial incentives for Spanish comics have been optimistic: all but one have sadly told me that they expect the new landscape to be fertile ground for fraud, especially by some publishers, as has happened in the film industry with multiple production companies. According to these friends, the problem is the middlemen, already identified as recurrent scammers of public funds.

"The only thing I regret is that it's so automatically accepted that local comics can't count on the public at all."

Anyway, I'm older and luckily this is far behind me now, so the only thing I regret is that it is so automatically accepted that local comics cannot count on the public at all and that from now on they will operate on artificial respiration (which, in addition, will apply a subjective standard to the type of work that sees the light, as in the old censorship ), while the overwhelming majority of compatriot authors will continue to look for their share in the French and American markets, which do work (a French editor usually pays three to ten times more than a Spanish one).

And for all this, I love Spanish culture and am disgusted by our cultural management. These are reasons that, year after year, contribute to confirming that the institutional and intellectual soul of our country doesn't understand the deceptively light-hearted spirit of pop culture: what they crave and appreciate is dead, moralizing culture in its death throes .

And that's why the Spanish public (and Spanish authors themselves, as can be deduced from their online debates!) rushes to consume what the Yankees foist on us as bulk fodder: Marvel or DC superhero movies full of violence, incorrectness, and escapism, which we abhor in our own cultural production, based on plots stolen by these multinational production companies from their original authors (our comic book colleagues) in exchange for a check for $5,000 and an invitation to the premiere. In other words, Marvel and DC would be companies accused of ultra-capitalist abuse (and rightly so) if they had been born on our soil: but being from there, we don't care; we even admire them; and we all pass through the box office.

Anyway, in the immediate future, we'll always have the consolation of organizing a tribute to Ibáñez with taxpayer money so that four of us privileged people on stage can burst into tears remembering how happy we were buying and reading a Mortadelo.