The Ultimate Border: Mobility, Spirituality, and Death in Iñárritu’s Biutiful

Abstract

Biutiful is the first of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films to introduce the supernatural and focus on a single protagonist, Uxbal. The film makes a political commentary by showing the slums of Barcelona, where impoverished citizens and undocumented migrants coexist. Through Uxbal’s visions of ghosts, the supernatural enters the most marginalized sectors of Barcelona. While popular narratives often relate mobility to liberation and transformative experiences, Biutiful problematizes this understanding of displacement. This paper analyses how the film articulates borders both literally and allegorically. Through mobility and border theory I explore how socio-political conditions intertwine with the supernatural and determine the characters’ access to spiritual experiences. This article also explores how mobility intermingles with spiritual experiences, the supernatural, and death. I rely on the “spectral turn” to examine how ghosts in Biutiful serve to make a socio-political commentary. Lastly, this article explores the use of focalization in the film to represent the supernatural through Uxbal’s visions. Biutiful engages mobility and spirituality in a way that is symptomatic of the asymmetric power dynamics of globalization. It represents displacement as a navigation within the social fabric of the global system in which spiritual experiences seem elusive.

RESUMEN

Biutiful es la primera película de Alejandro González Iñárritu en introducir elementos sobrenaturales y centrarse en un protagonista único, Uxbal. La película realiza un comentario político mostrando los suburbios de Barcelona, donde conviven ciudadanos empobrecidos y migrantes indocumentados. Mediante las visiones de fantasmas que tiene Uxbal, lo sobrenatural penetra en los sectores marginalizados de Barcelona. Mientras que las narrativas comerciales tienden a relacionar movilidad con experiencias liberadoras, Biutiful problematiza esta percepción del desplazamiento. Este artículo analiza cómo la película configura las fronteras literal y alegóricamente. Mediante la movilidad y las teorías de fronteras, examinamos cómo las condiciones sociopolíticas están entrelazadas con lo sobrenatural y cómo determinan el acceso de los personajes a experiencias espirituales. También exploramos la relación entre movilidad y las experiencias espirituales, lo sobrenatural, y la muerte. Nos basamos en el “giro espectral” para examinar el comentario sociopolítico que realizan los fantasmas en Biutiful. Finalmente, analizamos el uso de la focalización para representar lo sobrenatural mediante las visiones de Uxbal. Biutiful encara la mobilidad y la espiritualidad como parte de las dinámicas de poder asimétricas en la globalización y muestra el desplazamiento como movimiento dentro del tejido social del sistema, en el cual las experiencias espirituales son huidizas.

Keywords:

• death
• mobility
• spirituality
• borders
• Iberoamerican cinema

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• muerte
• movilidad
• espiritualidad
• fronteras
• cine iberoamericano

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Significantly, of all the academic literature about Biutiful, only one essay focuses on the spiritual elements of the film; see Sinnerbrink (2014).

2 In this context, I use the term “globalization” with special emphasis on how the economic processes of interconnectivity and mobility affect disempowered workers, an approach that Barrie Axford has categorized as post-Marxist (2014, 12).

3 Some examples include The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin 2007), Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom 2003), or Welcome (Philipe Lioret 2010). For an extensive analysis of European films representing migration and refugees, see Yosefa Loshitzky’s Screening Strangers (2010).

4 Biutiful is often compared to Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona (Woody Allen 2008). Both films take place in the same city and feature the same leading actor. They depict the two sides of globalization: multicultural tourism for the upper classes and exploitation for the lower ones. See, for instance, Deleyto and López (2012), who argue that these films constitute a diptych of the city.

5 Local directors have represented the dark side of this globalizing process with more accuracy and attention to the specificities of Barcelona than Iñárritu’s generalizing approach. See, for instance, En construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2001), Fuerte Apache (Mateu Adrover 2007), and Raval, Raval (Antoni Verdaguer 2006). For a detailed analysis of how these films depict the social transformation of Barcelona, see Addolorato (2010).

6 See Dziuban (2019).

7 This shot echoes the tragic deaths of thousands of migrants that attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea in pateras (precarious boats) to reach the coasts of southern European countries like Spain, as well as famous images of Syrian refugees tragically drowned on the coasts of Greece, particularly of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi. While these images circulated years after the premiere of Biutiful, the similarities between the images epitomize the (lack of) difference between migrants and refugees. As Deborah Shaw (2017) argues, both terms should be used in combination (migrant-refugees) to avoid the different connotations and rights that host societies assign to either group. Migrants and refugees are both victims of forced mobility and flee violent living conditions that result from global capitalism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera

Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera is Film and Media scholar teaching at U-TAD University of Technology and Digital Art (Madrid, Spain). Her work focuses on two main areas. First, her research explores how the transnational dynamics in film and media contribute to create cultural imaginaries, with special attention to women in European films, contemporary Iberoamerican cinema, issues of memory and identity, and the narrative potential of Virtual Reality. Second, her teaching and recent research foregrounds the importance of media literacy with a particular focus on agentic citizenship. In 2017, Cristina received the Ruth McQuown Award for the Humanities of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in recognition of her commitment to diversity and overcoming barriers through her research and teaching style. She has also participated in film festivals such as San Sebastián, and she has experience working in film production, especially in 3D animation, as well as in VR filmmaking. Cristina received her PhD from the University of Florida in 2018 and her B.A. from the University Carlos III of Madrid 2011.