This week on Palomitas, we're heading to Cartagena – to the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre and the ruins of the Spanish economic crisis – with Álex de la Iglesia's searing 2011 comedy-drama, La chispa de la vida (As Luck Would Have It). We're joined by special guest Dr Raquel Martínez Martín, Teaching Associate in Modern Languages (Spanish) at the University of Strathclyde, whose recent PhD examines immobility, agency, and resistance in Spanish crisis cinema.

The film follows Roberto (José Mota), a once-successful ad executive who coined a famous slogan for Coca-Cola. Now he's one of nearly five million unemployed, his benefits have run out, and he's just been humiliatingly rejected for a job. On a nostalgic trip to his honeymoon hotel, he falls from a scaffold in a museum built over Roman ruins – and is impaled through the skull by a metal rod. Immobile, conscious, and facing death, he decides to do the only thing he knows: market his own tragedy. He hires an agent, sells exclusive TV rights, and becomes a media spectacle. Salma Hayek co-stars as his wife Luisa.

Winner of the Silver Shell for Best Actor at San Sebastián, La chispa is a brutal, absurdist allegory for Spain's housing bubble collapse, the politics of austerity, and the logic that turns human beings into human capital. Raquel helps us unpack why a man impaled on a spike might be the perfect metaphor for precarity.

Selected scholarship cited in the episode:

Allbritton, Dean. 2014. “Prime Risks: The Politics of Pain and Suffering in Spanish Crisis Cinema.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 15 (1-2): 101–15. doi:10.1080/14636204.2014.931663.

Hilborn, Matthew. 2025. Film Comedy and Spain: Humour, Genre, and the Nation 1970-2020. Oxford: Legenda.

Hogan, Erin K. 2025. Patriarchy's Remains: An Autopsy of Iberian Cinematic Dark Humour. McGill-Queen's Press.

Marr, Matthew J. 2019. “(Im)Mobility at the Movies: El Paro, Property and Prosthesis in Álex de La Iglesia’s La Chispa de La Vida (2011).” Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies 3 (1): 47-65. doi:10.1080/24741604.2019.1584499.

Martínez Martín, Raquel. 2024. Stasis Spain: On the Representation of (Im)mobility, Agency and Resistance in Spanish Crisis Cinema (2008-2018). PhD Thesis. University of Strathclyde.

Venkatesh, Vinodh. 2016. ”Ethics, Spectacle, and Violence in Álex de la Iglesia's La chispa de la vida.” Hispanófila 178 (1): 21-35. doi:10.1353/hsf.2016.0057.