Why Spaniards make good bad guys: Sergi Lopez and the Persistence of the Black Legend in contemporary European cinema.

Since beginning his film career in the early 1990s, the Catalan actor Sergi Lopez has appeared in thirty-four films produced in Spain, France, and Great Britain. Described by one critic as "a burly Spaniard whose soft, open features are equally suited to expressing nice-guy innocence and sociopathic malice" (Flint), Lopez's versatility as an actor is reflected in the great variety of roles he has played--lover, friend, father, and, most successfully, villain. The present study seeks to analyze the structural importance of Lopez's star persona as it is employed in two recent European films released widely in Europe and the United States: the German director Dominik Moll's French production of Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (2000) and the English director Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). In these films, Sergi Lopez's persona has crystallized around his ability to portray the charming but sinister Spaniard. In Harry, Lopez plays Harry Ballestero, a long-lost high school buddy who undertakes to make his friend's writing career easier by getting rid of inconvenient family members and acquaintances, while in Dirty Pretty Things, his first English-language role, Lopez plays Sneaky, the aptly named dealer in an underground market in human organs. In recent years Lopez has received some of his most favorable reviews for films in which he plays the villain--he has played characters of dubious moral fiber in at least six films produced in France and Spain--but what makes his appearance in Harry and Dirty Pretty Things remarkable is that both Moll and Frears draw deliberate attention to his characters' Spanishness at key moments in their films.

The following discussion of these films will be twofold. First, I will offer a brief synthesis of some of the roots and ramifications of cultural prejudice as it has manifested itself over several centuries of European cultural production. In particular, I offer a brief introduction to the Black Legend, which David J. Weber defines as the "inherited... view that Spaniards were unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian" (qtd. in Griffin 105). Second, I shall analyze Harry and Dirty Pretty Things in terms of these films' noteworthy focalizations on the Spanish-ness of the villain, played in both cases by Sergi Lopez. By looking at the production and articulation of Lopez's star persona, I hope to clarify how Lopez has embedded himself "in the imaginary and real social construct that is Spain and the world's view of Spain" (Perriam 10), and how the Black Legend continues to perpetuate itself in contemporary European cinema.

On the Persistence of the Black Legend

Before discussing in detail Harry and Dirty Pretty Things, it will be useful to trace briefly the historical cultural construction of the Black Legend that has persisted in various forms for over five hundred years. The leyenda negra, or Black Legend, is a term coined by the Spanish journalist Julian Juderias in 1912 to describe a popularized European conception of the Spaniard as "as lecherous, deceitful, and cruel" (Maltby 3). In The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558-1660, the historian William Maltby posits that there exists even today a large body of opinion "which actually holds that the Spanish are inferior to other Europeans in those qualities commonly regarded as civilized" (3). Writing in 1971, Maltby indicates that our contemporary heightened cultural awareness has improved international opinion of Spain's reputation, "but to a remarkable degree this respect has not yet been reflected in films, textbooks, or popular literature" (6).

In addition to Maltby, cultural critics and historians such as Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Benjamin Keen, Patricia Shaw, David J. Weber, and, most recently and convincingly, Eric Griffin, have dedicated hundreds of pages to understanding the development and persistence of the Black Legend in Europe. In his excellent study, Eric Griffin outlines the evolution of English anti-Spanish sentiment from the early modern period to the present and discusses how an uncritical acceptance of many ethnic stereotypes that began in the sixteenth century can be traced to the present day. He begins by mapping out the Black Legend as it appears in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, in which one can see an essentialized representation of the Spaniard as "other." In Marlowe's work, as in the contemporary European films I shall discuss in this essay, the villain utters Spanish phrases at key moments in the articulation of the plot. Griffin insists that by emphasizing the villain Barabas's Spanish-ness, Marlowe reinforces through literature the stereotype of the avaricious Spaniard that was already widespread as a result of the translation and diffusion of Bartolome de las Casas's published accounts. Griffin then points to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which dramatizes "much the same kind of ethno-nationalist problem" (99), concluding that "in the English public mind of the 1590s, anti-Semitism and Hispanophobia seem to have been two sides of the same coin" (100).

The Black Legend was never an arbitrary cultural stereotype divorced from concrete national ideologies of power. Griffin illustrates how the cultural manifestations of the Black Legend had clear ideological functions:


The incessant repetition of these anti-Hispanic
typologies created a kind of feedback loop that
functioned to valorize the ethos of religio-political
and ethnic homogeneity that England's absolute
nationalists seem to have turned increasingly toward.
Further, the plays of the period have in common with
many of its Black Legend polemics the fact that in
them both we find a discourse of hispanicity that is
clearly racialized. For in its 'mature' form, the Black
Legend is very much a discourse of color. (101)
Thus, the English construction of the Black Legend of the Spaniard did not just have to do with naval tensions between Spain and England around 1588; rather, it was implicated in much more corrosive religious, political, and cultural struggles and ultimately led to a racialized discourse based upon the construction of an imagined ethnic stereotype. Even after the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, inspired perhaps by "the continuing frustration of Hapsburg dynastic ambitions in the Low Countries" (Griffin 95), Protestant English polemicists "began to play the Spanish 'race-card' over and over again, virtually flooding the English public sphere with an essentializing typology that marked 'the Spaniard' as cruel, duplicitous, arrogant, bestial, hypocritical, over-sexed, Antichristian, and ethnic" (95). Griffin's interpretation of the final result of this long-term cultural campaign emphasizes the ideological utility of the creation of an image of the Spaniard as a racialized "other," which reinforced "Protestant claims to English governmental institutions and cultural life" (102) while demonizing "the religious traditions, imperial obligations, dynastic inheritances and colonizing projects of Catholic Spain" (102).

Following Weber and Maltby, Griffin indicates that European anti-Spanish sentiment can be traced, in turn, through the North American colonial period and into the present day: "From these formative moments, Anglo-America has harbored an abiding suspicion of all things Hispanic" (Griffin 103). In the American film context alone there exist several important discussions of problematic Hollywood representations of Latinos (Rios-Bustamente; Gabilondo; Lie; Ramirez Berg; Pachon et al; Shaw). However, in the majority of these discussions, crossover Spanish stars such as Banderas and Bardem are analyzed not as Spaniards but as representative cases of a more generalized formulation of Latino cultural identity that exists in opposition to the hegemonic …

Interesting piece. I've read a few interpretation on the Black Legend.

Great analysis by Eric Griffin. I fear it's up to us modern day latinos to clear america of these wrongful assumptions about our background.

Ps I too love sergi, he's cruelty in "El Laberinto del Fauno" made the film worth watching.