(Im)mobility at the Movies: el paro, Property and Prosthesis in Álex de la Iglesia’s La chispa de la vida (2011)

Abstract

In contrast with the many luckless physical falls elsewhere in Álex de la Iglesia’s oeuvre, the protagonist’s macabre plunge onto a steel spike in La chispa de la vida (2011) is more than a cartoonish gag staged merely in the service of dark humour. The resultant form of immobility wrought upon the body of Roberto, an unemployed advertising executive, allegorically serves as the socio-economic conceit at the heart of the film, and (following Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’) as an unlikely source of the film’s very motion as a screen story. At once contextualizing La chispa in relation to a long tradition of Spanish cine inmobiliario (cinema discursively engaged with immovable property), this essay will examine the film’s timely and unusual satirical take on Spain’s recent ladrillo bust, as well as its self-conscious reflections on media and popular culture’s narrative representations thereof: stories caught up, like the main character’s own body, in the machinations of inmobiliaria, much as La chispa itself is a screen story predicated on professional, financial and physical immobility.