Jamon Jamon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the bull. Not a living one — the giant Osborne cut-out on the Monegros horizon, a sheet of black tin with testicles, advertising brandy to no one across a plain that looks like the moon got sunburned. Bigas Luna keeps cutting back to it, and the longer you watch, the less it reads as a billboard and the more it reads as a god. That is the first thing to understand about Jamón Jamón: its objects are not props. They are deities, and the people underneath them are livestock.

Deleuze had a name for cinema that works this way. He called it naturalism, and he meant something more precise than "earthy" or "frank." In the naturalist image, a recognizable social world — here the lingerie factory, the matriarch's bourgeois control, the roadside brothel-bar — is only a crust. Underneath runs what he called an originary world: a place of raw drives older than manners, where appetite, sex, and death are the same hunger wearing different masks. The Monegros desert IS that originary world made geography. Nothing grows there. The factory and the family home are the derived milieu, the polite surface; the desert is what the surface is lying about. When José Luis ta:tes Silvia and claims he can taste tortilla and garlic on her skin, that is not a flirtation. It is the originary world speaking through him — desire that can only express itself as eating.

This is why the right Deleuzian word for the whole film is the impulse-image. Between the affection-image (a feeling held in a face) and the action-image (a person who sizes up a situation and acts to change it), Deleuze located a darker, degenerate thing. In the impulse-image nobody chooses. They are driven — by hunger, by lust, by the compulsion to possess — and the drives don't build toward anything except exhaustion and death. The matriarch hires the bullfighter Raúl to seduce her son's fiancée, then wants him herself. Raúl wants the women, the bull-ring, the next meal, in no particular order. Each character is less a person with a plan than a symptom: every gesture reads as the visible twitch of a hidden compulsion. Watch how the film equates the men's bodies with meat hung for sale — Bardem posed against emptiness like livestock or an underwear catalogue — and you see naturalism's signature: the human reduced to the animal it was pretending not to be.

Which brings us to the fetish, the impulse-image's basic currency. Deleuze borrowed the term to name a part-object that gets supercharged with all the desire a person can't otherwise discharge. Jamón Jamón is built almost entirely out of these. Ham — jamón — is phallus and nation and food at once; the men literally beat each other to death with cured hams in the finale, the fetish completing its journey from appetite to weapon. Garlic, tortilla, the Sansón underwear that wires sex directly to commerce, the bull overhead. Each is a charged fragment standing in for a whole that can never be had. This is the craft Bigas Luna inherited and refined: from Buñuel's Viridiana, the trick of loading clichéd Spanish-Catholic objects with subversive weight; from Tristana, the morbid fixation on a single charged prop; from La Grande Bouffe, the grotesque collapse of eating into dying. He took those debts and made an entire visual grammar of españolidad out of them.

And there is a line of slope running under all of it — Deleuze's term for the irreversible downhill that every true naturalist film obeys. The impulse-image has no neutral. Once the seduction is set in motion it can only intensify and rot; the melodrama of class transgression that opens as erotic comedy cannot resolve, it can only fall, because nobody in it is capable of an action that would change the situation. The plot's mechanics come straight from Ossessione — the drifter, the seduction, the fatal class-crossing — but where noir gives you the illusion of choice, Bigas Luna strips it out. The slope ends, as it must, in the ham-and-bull ritual of the killing, melodrama lifted out of naturalism into folk tragedy, exactly the arc Saura's Carmen and Almodóvar's Matador had made internationally legible just before.

One object refuses to stay a fetish, though, and that is the Osborne bull. It graduates into something Deleuze would call a symbol — not a charged fragment but the single image that condenses the film's whole organizing relation. Spanish manhood as a hollow silhouette: monumental, advertising-flat, anatomically equipped and completely empty, presiding over men who will die imitating it. The film never says this. It just keeps framing the brawl against that black cut-out until you understand the joke is also a verdict.

What did the film do? It proved you could make a national self-portrait entirely out of consumer junk and culinary totems — that ham and underwear could carry the symbolic load Buñuel had reserved for crucifixes. It launched Cruz and Bardem by treating their bodies as the meat the whole system runs on, which is either the cruelest or the most honest debut imaginable. Watch it again and watch the objects, not the people. The people are only doing what the ham tells them.