A Dazzling Age

Recent research on youth culture has sought to broaden the range of debates that were originally based on examples of teen cinema or subculture drawn from the US or UK. Thus there have been studies of youth culture in global cinema (Shary and Seibel) or those attempting to address youth and identity in a postcolonial world (Huq). Yet Spanish youth media, creatively innovative and commercially successful, have not attracted the scholarly interest they deserve.

This third chapter offers case studies of two top-rated TV series from the years 2007 to 2010. Giving an account of the production and reception of these screen narratives, it points to the growing convergence between the two media of cinema and television. And focusing on the three themes of sex and friendship, immigration and ethnicity, and analogue and digital technology, it also asks what specificities we find in social representation in a Spanish context. As in the previous chapter, my argument is that a critically reviled genre, when sympathetically treated, gives up unexpected and productive forms of knowledge and pleasure.

It might be said that the study of youth culture in Spain is in its infancy. Thus when respected film historian José Enrique Monterde treats the topic in a collection called “The Dazzling Age” (La edad deslumbrante) he restricts himself to a canon of US comedies whose apparent transgressiveness is, he says, merely a mask for reactionary machismo (216); claims that the place assigned to “youth” in such films is “witless” (218); and attacks (unnamed) “infantilized” Spanish critics who have championed the genre, unable to discriminate between the Farrelly brothers and the Taviani brothers (213). Curiously, another contributor to this volume, published in association with the Gijón International Film Festival, stresses rather the sobriety of Spanish youth. Alex Mendíbil cites statistics suggesting that a large majority of young Spaniards are active as volunteers at schools and in religious organizations; that those lucky enough to have jobs are diligently paying into their pensions; and that their greatest worry is future financial viability (208). This contrasts markedly once more with Antonio Muñoz Carrión's study of “tactics of youth communication” in Spain (2007), published in Revista de Estudios de Juventud, where he identifies “presentism,” or the lack of temporal horizons, as typical of contemporary teenagers, as, indeed, of their parents at the same age.