Americans in Europe, Then and Now
By Christian J. Izquierdo
No one has captured the essence of the modern American experience in Spain--or anywhere else in Western Europe--quite like Whit Stillman in his film Barcelona. Released in July of 1994, Barcelona was a strong follow-up to Metropolitan, Stillman's 1990 directorial debut, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Barcelona tells the story of two Americans in the Catalan capital during the early 1980s when anti-American sentiment manifested itself through protests against NATO and American involvement in Europe more generally.
One of the Americans, Ted (Taylor Nichols), is a sales executive from a Chicago-based company conducting overseas operations in Barcelona. He is smart, well-read and takes his job--and himself--very seriously. Although Ted appears to have his life under control as an upwardly-mobile urban professional, he struggles with the really big issues of life such as faith, women, and career. He is constantly questioning "whether I am really cut out for sales" and whether it would be better to pursue, as he puts it, "only plain or homely women," so that physical beauty won't get in the way of having a fulfilling relationship. After a particularly bad break-up, he turns to the Old Testament, especially Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, for stern romantic advice. He is an example of the straight-laced American work ethic with a healthy dose of self-doubt. Dale Carnegie meets Po Bronson.
Fred (Christopher Eigeman) is a United States Naval Officer stationed in Barcelona and living with Ted, who is his cousin. Upon their first meeting, Stillman hints at pending acrimony between the two when Ted recalls Samuel Johnson's adage, "Guests like fish begin to stink on the third day." To which Fred responds, "I think you'll find out that I begin to stink on the first day." Fred is less polished than his cousin in many ways yet ironically is much more confident of himself. He loves being a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and takes an immediate interest in the attractive Spanish "trade-fair girls" who frequent a local pub in the Gothic quarter. He is an unabashed, unapologetic proponent of American exceptionalism and, like Ronald Reagan, viewed America as that "shining city on a hill."
When Fred notices an anti-American slur ("Yankee pigs go home") in the form of graffiti on a wall, he attempts to change the message using a ballpoint pen, somewhat revising it to "Yankee deer go home." When Ted questions the futility of his efforts, Fred asks, "Would you rather be called a Yankee deer or a Yankee pig?" Sizing up the two cousins together, one gets an idea of how George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan might have gotten along in 1980.
Ted and Fred fall in love with Spanish women and, with some difficulty, bring them home to the United States in the end, but not before an array of cultural and political squabbles, incidents of anti-American terrorism, and Stillman's witty dialogue leave a lasting impression. The two American protagonists are archetypes of American influence and power abroad by the nature of their professions: business and the military. Yet their real appeal as Americans lies in their core values and temperament, which reveal a basic decency, in contrast to the smug moral relativism of Ramon, a Spanish journalist with a flair for conspiracy theories and strong anti-American views.
Whit Stillman's genius in Barcelona lies in his ability to get to the heart of American perceptions and misperceptions abroad by dramatizing expatriates' experiences. Ted and Fred's conversations with young, educated Spanish professionals reveal the condescending attitude often directed towards Americans in social gatherings, especially when the subject turns to American influence abroad. One of the more memorable scenes in Barcelona occurs when Marta (Mira Sorvino), Fred's date, describes how the United States sent the "AFL-CIA" to crush progressive unionism with "sacks of money." Fred says, of course, that he doesn't know what she's talking about, to which Marta shakes her head and replies, "It's amazing what Americans don't know about their own country." Stillman satirizes the fatuous nature of anti-American sentiment abroad through similar conversations throughout the film.
Barcelona is one film that may be more relevant today than when it opened ten years ago. I spent much of the latter half of 2003 in Spain, and could not help but conclude that anti-American sentiment on the Iberian Peninsula has been on the rise. Despite knowing that I was an American--and a decidedly unapologetic one at that--new Spanish acquaintances freely expressed fashionable clichés about American imperialism or Bush's supposed war for oil in Iraq. Quite often, situations and conversations I experienced were strikingly similar to the American predicaments in Barcelona, which speaks to the enduring nature of the film's subject-matter.
During much of last week's national tribute to President Reagan's legacy, it became even more obvious to me that Barcelona captured the zeitgeist of Euro-American relations during the beginning of the Cold War's last decade. The seeds of the current European discontent--evident in the protests and vitriol directed against President Bush--had been brewing for decades. Reagan's unapologetic embrace of a robust American foreign policy that sought freedom abroad had its share of ugly detractors who saw the two Cold War superpowers with moral equivalence. The present and widespread celebration of the achievements of the Reagan presidency, although richly deserved, may overshadow the courage it took at the time to challenge prevailing orthodoxy around the world. A review of Whit Stillman's Barcelona provides an apposite corrective.
