Of Moles and Giraffes: Recluses, Drifters, and Disconnection

Abstract

This chapter addresses questions of space, place, and belonging in two low-budget, ‘independent’ films: La guarida del topo (Alfredo Ureta 2011) and Jirafas (Kiki Álvarez 2013). Their reclusive characters and claustrophobic domestic spaces complicate boundaries between inside and outside, presenting us with an image of a nation caught between the comforting allure of enclosure and the potentially dissolvent power of connection. The films’ ambivalent combination of marginality and continuity activates neither a productive paradigm of dialectical synthesis, nor an alternative model of mutual recognition. Informed by Augé’s ‘non-place’, de Certeau’s ‘place’ and ‘space’, Massey’s ‘throwntogetherness’, Foucault’s disciplinary society (1995), and Deleuze’s society of control (1992), this chapter argues that although these films’ protagonists may attempt to tunnel under the field of visibility and power, they cannot escape the reach of control, whose expansive mesh renders meaningless categories such as inside, outside, underneath, and against.