“Classical heroes reflected in concave mirrors produce the Esperpento,” declares Max Estrella, the tragicomic, impoverished poet of Bohemian Lights (Luces de Bohemia), the play by Spanish author Valle-Inclán which initiated the artistic movement ‘esperpento’. Roughly translated as ‘grotesque farce’ or ‘degenerate tragedy’, it is a more appropriate lens than Nolan’s Odyssey through which to look at our contemporary Western world.
“The most beautiful images in a concave mirror produce a mathematical absurdity. My present aesthetic is to transform classical norms with the mathematics of the concave mirror,” continues Max, himself a caricature of a romantic bohemian poet. Written in the 1920s, these sentences articulated the founding ideas of an artistic movement that anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd of Beckett and Genet by several decades.
Yet esperpento is different from standard absurdism. The playwrights associated with the absurd were reflecting on the emptiness of an existence devoid of meaning, purpose, and communication in a post-World War II world. Valle-Inclán, by contrast, is reflecting on the grotesque drama that Spain had become after losing its status as a global power and going through the sham of the Restoration.
“Spain is a grotesque deformation of European civilization,” Max Estrella states in the same scene, No. XII, of the same play. Valle-Inclán doesn’t spare anyone: stiff state institutions whose policies produce outcomes directly opposite their intent; a ruling class that betrays its own rhetoric; police and military establishments that have lost their original purpose and turned inward against citizens; traditional moral values of honor, love, and courage degraded into farce; bohemians reduced to self-parodies; and a populace too busy surviving at any cost to retain any ethics.
In Valle-Inclán’s plays, their portrayal is transformed by “the mathematics of the concave mirror” —that is, by deforming the features of any given character, social institution, or value. It is the only way, according to the author, to see their true form, because their un-distorted facades are empty ones inherited from a previous order that is almost gone socially, economically, politically, and culturally.
Valle-Inclán identified a vast abyss separating historical myths—patriotism, honor, elevated civilizational values—from the mediocrity of Spanish society at the beginning of the 20th century. Characters pretending to act out the historical myth perform a tragicomedy that becomes grotesque because it bears no relation to that widespread social mediocrity.
In The Captain’s Daughter (La hija del capitán), Valle-Inclán turned his concave mirror directly on the military. In the play, a captain consents to his daughter’s relationship with a powerful general to advance his own career. When her lover attempts to shoot the general but accidentally kills a bystander instead, the lover and the daughter leak compromising documents to the press. To escape disgrace, the general fabricates a national security emergency, claiming a coup is underway that only he can quell. It was written in 1927, but it could have been written yesterday.
However, the genius of Valle-Inclán lies not so much in the plot, as in the way in which it is written. He views his characters from above, maintaining a detached perspective that exposes their absurdities. He regularly animalizes human figures—having them grunt or squawk—while simultaneously humanizing inanimate objects. He blends refined, elevated prose with street slang. His characters, like Max Estrella, attempt to stage a Greek tragedy, but their heroism is structurally distorted into comedy. For Valle-Inclán, the truth of a declining society cannot be shown by mimetic representation, but by comically forcing its shape until it reveals the underlying tragedy.
We could very well say that “the West has become a grotesque deformation of European civilization.” Where Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, attempts to address contemporary anxiety by reinterpreting a classical myth and wrapping societal decline in epic, nostalgic aesthetics, Valle-Inclán’s esperpento offers a more accurate diagnostic tool. Nolan distorts the classical hero to preserve our illusion of grandeur; Valle-Inclán distorts the hero to show that the grand ideal has already decayed into satire.
Consider, for example, the latest EU “Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation” (PPWR) that came into effect on August 12: an absurdity that even the EU has asked member states to delay implementing. The measure is supposed to make all packaging recyclable by 2030, but ends up creating an administrative monster that primarily hurts small and medium enterprises while levying yet another tax, a textbook esperpento dynamic where the institutional mechanism achieves the inverse of its intent.
This pattern of inverted logic extends well beyond the commercial. Europe has dismantled its industry and impoverished its citizens through a war ostensibly fought to defend “freedom,” yet which itself is making the continent less free. The absurdity of these wars is reflected in the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, whose stated purpose has become reopening a waterway that was open before the war, and which U.S. intelligence had warned would close if Iran were attacked.
The man who is supposed to be in charge of the war lies systematically in order to manipulate the price of oil markets, which sooner or later will come crashing down. But it will not matter to him —or, for that matter, to those whom he represents, who are making a killing from rising energy prices. He only cares about making money for himself and the financial elite that has selected him, whose interests are at odds with the people he claims to represent.
This is a financial elite for whom the only measure of success is the stock market, artificially inflated by a bubble from a technolgy that is supposed to completely disrupt and improve the world, but which is basically an empty promise. It is a bubble that will also come crashing down, but which, as happened in 2008, will be paid for by the middle class and not those who caused it.
This middle class is basically disappearing, its very way of life and livelihood threatened by the logic of a system that dictates the upward accumulation of power and capital. The resulting frustration is then directed at foreigners, who have been lured in by the elite as a cheaper source of labor, and who are themselves victims of the very same powers. They are pitted against each other with no prospect of resolving a conflict that is premised on false principles, ensuring they don’t direct their anger at those who are actually causing it.
This is a false culture war, not because culture isn’t changing (culture understood as a way of life), but because what is driving the change is not a clash between cultures, which have themselves mostly been subjected to the logic of the economic system. What is driving the change is the marketization of every aspect of life based on a worldview devoid of meaning.
While the Western world still claims to be the cradle of high principles and institutions like freedom, democracy, equality, and human rights, its behavior in supporting an ongoing genocide demonstrates that these have become little more than empty words.
That is why I argue that a better lens through which we can reflect on the nature of our time is Valle-Inclán’s esperpento, rather than Nolan’s aesthetic Odyssey.
I do agree —and have written about— how Nolan’s Odyssey is a contemporary tale of the loss of our epoch. That is the artistic quality that I recognize in the film, rather than a faithful telling of the classical work. The film distorts the original in order to bring it closer to the modern audience, but it does so by incorporating and twisting character and substance in a way that idealizes a vanishing world.
I much prefer Valle-Inclán’s esperpento —in the vein of Monty Python— to convey the nature of the time we are living in.
