At first glance, Whit Stillman’s 1994 film Barcelona looks like an intelligent comedy about shallow people, distinguished from Stillman’s other films by its political subtext. Set during the early 1980s—in “the last decade of the Cold War”—the film tells a relatively uncomplicated story about superficial Spanish and American yuppies undergoing a kind of cultural and political redemption during their quest for love. At the start of the film, an American serviceman is spat at and called facha—slang for “fascist”—in the dark streets of Barcelona. The main characters are lonely and jaded. Yet by the end of the film, they have happily paired off and are enjoying a beautiful sunny afternoon together at a lake in the United States.
But the superficiality both of the main characters and of the story arc is more meaningful than it might seem. As ever, Stillman’s model is Jane Austen, and just like in Austen, grim realism lurks behind amusing interpersonal dramas and simple political lessons. Stillman’s sociologically profound account of human relationships throws into stark relief the darker issues in play. Beneath its humor, Barcelona anticipated many of the most disturbing social trends that haunt us today.
The main plot of Barcelona centers on two American cousins living in Barcelona, Fred and Ted, and their relationships with Spanish women. As we would expect in international romances, there are cultural clashes, but the main confrontations of the film are political. The women the American cousins pursue are part of the social circle of Ramon, a fashion writer turned leftist journalist. Fred, a junior naval lieutenant, gets drawn into arguments with Ramon about U.S. foreign policy. Ted, a people-pleasing salesman for a Chicago-based multinational firm, tries to avoid controversial topics, but he gets pulled in as well.
Ramon teaches fashionable anti-Americanism to his entourage. The women around him learn to lambast everything they think of as distinctly American, from violence and racism to shopping malls and hamburgers. Like Austen’s scathing portrayals of hypochondriacs, Stillman skewers this worldview: no excuse is found for the useful idiots of anti-Americanism. In his anti-American diatribes, Ramon speaks confidently of a rightist union, the “AFL-CIA,” that promotes authoritarianism around the world. Other make similar gaffes. Fred’s girlfriend, Marta, learned English while living in America. When she goes on her own anti-American rant, Fred asks, “when you were in Rhode Island, was the crime and vulgarity really so bad?” She has no answer. Ramon is also a morally contemptible figure. He is a philanderer who leaves his live-in-girlfriend, and Ted’s initial love interest, Montserrat, to pick other women’s hair off his sheets. Finally, Barcelona shows that anti-Americanism isn’t just idle chatter. The film is punctuated by episodes of anti-American terrorist violence, and after Ramon writes an article that falsely portrays Fred as a CIA agent, a terrorist shoots him and he nearly dies. But the film has a happy ending. Fred survives, and after some triangulating, the couples settle into happy relationships. The film ends with America victorious. We see the Spaniards liberated from their destructive anti-Americanism; at the lake, they enjoy hamburgers.
At this point in the 21st century, the battles of the Cold War are distant historical vignettes. Barcelona’s lasting and disquieting power comes from its attentiveness to how those battles were fought. For instance, the film sheds light on the fashionable European hatred of NATO. This is a relic of the past century, but the film’s prescient portrayal of stochastic terrorism is part of our present reality. By portraying Fred as a CIA agent, the local media effectively calls for someone to assassinate him, and the call is answered.
The film also correctly identifies the force and scope of another Cold War polemic, the antifascist one. After Fred arrives in Barcelona, strangers accost him as facha. Ted tries to reassure him. “Don’t worry, they call everyone that. I mean, you comb your hair, you wear a coat and tie—you’re facha; military uniform, definitely facha.” Ted tries to brush it all off as “anti-NATO feeling,” a quarrel over a specific policy. But Ted has stumbled upon a much more destructive social reality. In post-Francoist Spain, antifascism has taken on the form that will outlast the Cold War. Antifacism isn’t opposition to an early 20th century political regime: it’s a way of life that opposes order and commitment of any kind. Ted discovers this when his girlfriend Montserrat suddenly scuppers their plans to move in together and departs for Paris, thinking that Ted wanted to marry him. As Marta tells Fred, “[Montserrat] was worried about getting involved with someone who thought in such extremist terms…I think there is something fascist about a boy who immediately talks about marrying a girl he likes.” From the antifascist standpoint, wanting to get married is like wearing a uniform: definitely facha. “So facha is something good then,” says Fred at the start of the film. If antifa sets the terms, he’s not wrong.
Barcelona also captures the fading importance of religion at the end of the Cold War (one of the conflict’s most fascinating reversals). In the film, religion exists in a fragmented way. Initially, we learn that Ted is feeling guilty about stringing along his last girlfriend, and is looking to Christianity for consolation. A “sad and guilt-ridden breakup led pretty directly to the Old Testament,” he tells us. But Bible reading does not a Christian make. Ted’s Biblical studies do not provoke him to reassess his sexual morals, for instance. Instead, he fixates on the notion that he must date plain-looking women.
Whitman isn’t suggesting any real hypocrisy on Ted’s part, or of those who read or quote the Bible. In Stillman’s world, real religiosity, and therefore occasions for real hypocrisy, have vanished. What remains is a kind of spiritual divertissement. In one scene, Ted reads the Bible while dancing the Charleston as loud music plays in the background. Like swing dancing, reading the Bible is just one hobby among others, another way to pass the time. It doesn’t require any more attention than you want to give it. When Marta and Fred walk in on him, Marta asks: “This is what the Protestant Church is like?” “Pretty much,” says Fred. Perhaps this joke comes at the expense of American Protestantism, but the point seems to be that none of the characters really knows or cares what goes on in a Protestant church, or any other kind of church. As Ted reveals in one monologue, he suspects his religious faith is “largely bogus.” Even though he eventually marries a Catholic in the Catholic Church, the film never shows us the ceremony. It's fitting. The real world of Christian belief—the world of a churched Christian community—is not one that the film’s characters inhabit.
If religion doesn’t drive Ted, what does? The film has an answer. Ted is in thrall to the new spirituality of managerialism. It’s a substitute for the moral progress Christianity once provided. In his employment, Ted rhapsodises, “I found not just a job, but a culture.” This is one of the places where Stillman, otherwise confident about American superiority, acknowledges a deep defect in the American national character. The country’s commercial spirit provides tremendous material advantages, but its citizens are tempted to give spiritual significance to their commercial exchanges. Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson (described as “philosophers”) are earlier, more sophisticated manifestations of the equation of commercial success with a meaningful life. This is what began to capture the imagination of American businessmen in the 1980s, and Ted is part of that trend. The managerial ethic is supposed to be a way of life that redefines all social relationships. It’s on these grounds that the Europeans score one of their rare points off the Americans. “You know how, at parties, everyone always talks about marketing?” says Ted. “No,” replies Montserrat. “I have never heard anyone talking about marketing at a party.”
At first light, it’s rather endearing to see how Ted benefits from reading the efficiency pamphlets that masquerade as spiritual exercises. “The classic literature of self-improvement really was improving,” he tells us in an early voiceover. Ted is devoted to his job, showing up to work early to catch the overnight news reports from headquarters. It seems hard to disagree with Ted’s adage that “being bluntly honest is always safe and best.” As he enthusiastically explains to a moustachioed Spanish client, the sales relationship is really about friendship. For those with similarly shallow minds, it’s a compelling pitch: you probably distrust salesmen, but you trust your friends. So salesmen should act like friends. QED!
But upon closer inspection, the film shows that managerialism’s earnestness is based on deception. For one, all that talk about friendship rings hollow. The moustachioed Spaniard is clearly not Ted’s friend; he never appears again in the film. Fred professes his devotion to a creed based on brutal honesty, but to succeed, he must first deceive himself. Beneath Ted’s devotion to his job lies a persistent professional and personal crisis. He worries he’s not “cut out for sales,” which impels him to push himself harder. His boss, moreover, knows that he’s not cut out for sales, and so he deceives Ted in turn, setting impossible sales targets to push him even further. In the managerial world, pleasant talk about friendship and self-improvement are a façade for envy and anxiety, as Ted’s first exchange with his rival Dickie Taylor indicates. Finally, the managerial strategies for achieving personal self-improvement are obviously unserious and ineffective. Fred mocks it by repeating “Every day, in every way, I am becoming a better and better lieutenant junior-grade.” At one low point, after he discovers Marta is cheating on him, he tries it out again, repeating it aloud to himself. Almost immediately, he gets shot.
Of course, neither the emergence of stochastic terrorism nor the facha-ization of everything good in life is really the main thread of the film. Nor are the decline of religion and the rise of managerialism particularly prominent themes. These are small particulars in a plot that generally focuses on modern relationships. But here too, it’s the details that are often the most troubling. Because the film focuses on the point of view of the American men rather than the Spanish women, it skips over the late 20th century attempts to dissolve sexual difference. We get a window into the distinct ways that modern men think about relationships. We might say that Barcelona sketches out the contours of the “manosphere” that would take off in the digital age, when the social and political divides between the sexes have become more pronounced, and relations between men and women really have broken down. The film casts a critical eye upon this nascent manosphere, but in a way that’s more profound than the contemporary rote invocations of “toxic masculinity.”
In the manosphere, the problem is that men over-intellectualize their relationships. This over-intellectualization characterizes Ted and Ramon, who are ostensibly antagonists. Throughout the film, they compete for the affection of Montserrat, and each is contemptuous of the other. Ted is disgusted by Ramon’s personality and views, and Ramon regards Ted as an archetypically stupid American. However, despite their hostility to one another, Ted and Ramon have complementary defects. Ted invents a theory about how he must only pursue plain women in order to establish meaningful relationships. Ramon invents a theory how beautiful women are the only source of meaning left in the modern world, after the death of God. Ramon keeps Montserrat under his influence by theorizing about the dangers of American consumerism. Ted, for his part, comes up with a scheme to win Montserrat back using his experience in sales, referring to the enigmatic “Manoeuvre X”. Both Ted and Ramon rely on the power of theory to seduce others—and themselves.
The correction to male over-intellectualization comes from plainer, rougher men. Vulgar, selfish, and rude, Fred seems to embody typically male vices. His personality is definitely facha, and unappealing at that. As he puts it early on to Ted, unlike other guests, “you’ll find that I begin to stink on the first day.” But as the film progresses, he becomes a much more sympathetic and even insightful character. Unlike Ted, Fred’s professional decisions are not premised on theory:
The Naval officer is one of the only white-collar jobs where you really must deal intensively with the physical world all day long, and it counts. It is not theoretical. You dominate the elements in all four dimensions without a slip-up, or it gets very wet. And then there is all the fighting for freedom, defending democracy, “shining city on the hill” stuff, which as you know, I really buy.
Fred’s common-sense intuitions allow him to cut the theoretical pretensions of others down to size. He exposes Ramon’s hold over Montserrat as a version of sophism, a belief in the omnipotence of speech. “You mean,” says Fred, “she’s dumped Ted and gone back to Ramon because of some conversation?” Maneouvre X is not some ingeniously sophisticated stratagem: Ted is just playing hard to get. This is a strategy doomed to fail, as Marta observes that Ted’s avoidance of Montserrat sent her back to Ramon.
As in The Last Days of Disco, Stillman’s focus on modern relationships confronts the effects of the sexual revolution in ways that reveal its true costs, as well as its more disturbing dynamics.
In this vein, the film provides a short but ingenious account of who is really interested in BDSM. In the post-Freudian sexually liberal world, it’s supposed to be repressed conservatives who harbor deviant sexual fantasies. But that’s not true. As one recent study reports, while Republicans are more likely to fantasize about extramarital affairs, “self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain.”
Likewise, in Barcelona, the sexually liberal characters are most fascinated by BDSM. Fred understands this: in a prank meant to make Ted (and himself) seem more alluring, he invents the following rumor about him:
“Have you ever heard of the Marquis de Sade? Ted’s a great admirer of de Sade, and a follower of Dr. Johnson’s…see that odd expression on his face? . . . Well, underneath the apparently very normal clothes he’s wearing are these narrow leather straps, drawn taut, so that when he dances…”
The rumor makes Ted interesting. But Ted’s eventual wife, Greta, finds him interesting for an altogether different reason. Greta is the only character in the film who’s not a comically shallow personality; as her brother tells Ted before their wedding, “My sister is a very serious girl. Do you know that?” Greta is also the only character with any real religious or moral formation. Unlike the other Spanish women, she sees Ramon for what he is: “repelente.” For Greta, the rumor about Ted that fascinates her is that he wanted to marry Montserrat. Drawn to Ted for this reason, she marries him and brings about the film’s happy ending.
Barcelona’s comedy veils over one of modern liberalism’s darkest dynamics. We fantasize about what’s taboo; for conservatives, that’s adultery, but for progressive liberals, it’s violent power asymmetry. Liberal erotic fantasies emerge because they associate power with corruption. Liberals promise an emancipated political order in which power is only legitimately exercised if it’s based on consent. But one cannot legitimate every act through explicit consent, especially in intimate relationships. So liberals are forced to legitimate themselves in a different way. They become obsessed by drawing attention to the injustice and brutality supposedly associated with preliberal, premodern society. They do this to raise the alarm whenever someone questions liberalism—do you really want to go back to the dark ages?
When it comes to sex, the liberal answer is yes. For all their supposed enlightenment, the most “backwards” relationship in Barcelona is between Montserrat and Ramon. It’s the latter who sets the terms of the open relationship so he can satisfy his sexual desires. He manages her relationship with Ted, manipulating her to break it off when it gets too serious. In the film’s denouement, we are led to conclude that Ramon trades her away to Fred in order to make amends for spreading the false rumor about him. But none of the progressive characters condemn Ramon for this; Marta (one of his lovers at the film’s start) praises him for being “clever.” Again, what’s taboo becomes desired: it’s liberals who fantasize about non-consensual sex and power imbalances. Look at the films, books, and television shows most popular among American liberals, and especially among liberal women, over the last decade. It’s hard to consume very much popular media without getting a strong sense that liberals actually have a thing, so to speak, for coercive sexual relationships.
The sexual world that liberals create becomes far more destructive than the world of repressed conservatives. This was the theme of Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The film shows that in the liberal world, those who want to unleash their erotic fantasies must go much further than breaking taboos around marital fidelity. The film’s protagonist ends up joining orgies amongst New York elites that culminate in the most horrifying premodern pagan practices, including human sacrifice.
The world of Barcelona is different from the world of Eyes Wide Shut, but it’s a difference of degree, not of kind. In both worlds, progressives romanticize sexual pleasure as the most important kind of pleasure, one to which every person has a right. As Ramon might say, it’s the only source of meaning in a world without God. In order to have more of it, liberal progressives strove to remove the old barriers restraining sexual activity. Yet they remain alarmed by power--it’s corrupt. Since sexual relationships inevitably bring tensions in the exercise of power, their strategy is to try to frame sexual relationships in terms of voluntarism. Consent is supposed to remove the problematic power dynamics while maintaining the romance. But this has two problems.
First, you can’t equate consensual sex with romance. As the Spanish girls tell the Americans, you don’t even need to be attracted to someone to have sex with them. You don’t need to be especially conservative—the two Americans aren’t—to find this depressing, especially when it’s your girlfriend telling you that. Second, in evaluating sex only in terms of consent, liberals imply that we should assume, until proven otherwise, that sex is fundamentally about power—the corrupt kind. As we move into the realm of requiring explicit consent to begin or even maintain an intimate relationship, we are framing intimacy itself as a corrupt exercise of power unless it proceeds from a contract. That’s the same way liberals understand political power. So for liberals, politics and sex alike, from the monarchy to the Marquis de Sade, are about corrupt exercises of power. And the taboo on corruption lends these exercises a certain allure.
Unlike Kubrick, and like Austen, Stillman prefers to keep grimmer elements of modern politics and society in the background, referring to them with tact and caution. But they’re there. A sociologically sophisticated artist, Stillman knows that a good comedy must sketch out the darker parts of modern life.
Excellent as always— however, I think Stillman’s view of religion is more optimistic than it initially appears. While in the hospital, the two Spanish girls (aurora and greta, I think), constantly pray for Ted’s recovery. Fred says a prayer and Ted awakens from his coma, comically dismissive of Fred’s prayer. Nonetheless, I think there is real symbolism here. God is still working in history even if contemporary man is too vain to realize.