Two-thirds of the way into Pedro Almodóvar's Los amantes pasajeros (2013), the three campy stewards played by Carlos Areces, Raúl Arévalo and Javier Cámara beg Norma (Cecilia Roth), a celebrity passenger in the business class section of the aircraft in which they work, to tell them the story of her professional success. Flattered by the request, Norma elucidates that she began as a destape film star back in the early 1980s, although her fame came when she appeared naked on the cover of the magazine Interviú. Aware of her limited aptitude as an actress, Norma realised that she had a talent for bondage and, thus, became a top-notch dominatrix of Spain's most powerful men. Among her many sex slaves, Norma claims, were members of Opus Dei and the armed forces. Viewers who are familiar with present-day Spain may read this scene as a play on notorious sex scandals of public figures. Those who are also conversant with the history of Spanish cinema may additionally evoke a recurrent pattern in the filmic representations of the religious organisation Opus Dei that appeared in the first years of the transition to democracy. Films such as La trastienda/The Backroom (dir. Jorge Grau, 1976), Cara al sol que más calienta/Facing the Warmest Sun (dir. Jesús Yagüe, 1977) and La escopeta nacional/The National Shotgun (dir. Luis García Berlanga, 1978) featured Opus Dei characters who belonged to the economic and political elites and who became involved in a sexual scandal depicted with large doses of eroticism.

The purpose of this essay is to examine these pioneering representations of Opus Dei to which Almodóvar pays homage. To do so, I need to situate them within the destape subgenre popular in that period and, thereby, within the polarised debate about its political implications (whether destape was liberating or conservative). The destape phenomenon is intrinsic to the history of Spanish cinema and is characterised by the over-provision of sexual images without any apparent narrative intention. Some have seen the destape boom as ‘a strong indication that the Franquista moral order was breaking down’ (Kowalsky 2004: 190), so the shift from the sexual repression of Francoism to the sexual obsession of the destape era was expected and healthy (Umbral 1976: 56), as it provided a much-needed sexual catharsis for Spanish society (Ponce 2004: 11; Freixas and Bassa 2005: 177).