Monumental Landscapes in the Society of the Spectacle: From Fuenteovejuna to New York

David R. Castillo

The 1980 Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) production of Lope de Vega's classic drama Fuenteovejuna (1619) concludes with a suggestive visual montage that brings the landscape into the scene in spectacular fashion: the stone walls of the royal palace of Fernando and Isabel slowly open up and then fade away to reveal a panoramic view of the Castilian countryside. The significance of this climactic scene is underscored by an intense, seemingly supernatural luminosity, which transforms the fields beyond the architectural setting into an ethereal panorama. This spectacular montage may remind us of Yi-Fu Tuan's description of the convergence of the terms "nature," "landscape," and "scenery" in the early modern period. As he pointed out in his foundational work Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitude, and Values (1974), the convergence of nature, landscape, and scenery signals the demotion of the all-encompassing cosmos of the ancients, as well as the fundamental transformation of the original Dutch notion of landschap (farms, fields). The core of Tuan's thesis is that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the landscape entered the realms of spectacle and make-believe (the world of the theater). In so doing, it claimed signifying centrality in official portraits and spectacles of power (133).

The semantic charge of the Spanish word paisaje proves that the modern connection between landscape and spectacle goes beyond the English language. The definition of paisaje in the Diccionario del uso del español (1998) (compiled by Moliner) confirms the centrality of this link: "Extensión de campo que se ve desde un sitio. El campo considerado como espectáculo" (536) (Extension of terrain seen from a specific site. The countryside viewed as a spectacle). The entry for panorama is even more telling for our purposes, in that it reveals a link between the meaning of "paisaje" and the "total view" suggested by the etymology of the word (pan-orama): "Paisaje pintado en una superficie cilíndrica, que se contempla como espectáculo.... Referido a vistas o dibujos de algo, hecho a cierta distancia, de modo que se ve el conjunto de lo que se quiere representar" (557) (Landscape depicted on a cylindrical surface that is contemplated as a spectacle.... Referring to vistas or drawings of something from a certain distance so as to view the totality of what we want to represent).

Denis Cosgrove recently investigated this link between landscape and spectacle, beginning with Renaissance art and theater. He notes that the word theater acquired connotations beyond its ancient meaning that brought it remarkably close to the emerging notion of landscape: "In the sixteenth century, theater not only had the architectural meaning, derived from the ancients, of a playhouse and the performances staged there, but also meant a conspectus: a place, region, or text in which phenomena are unified for public understanding" (101).

Returning to the 1980 production of Fuenteovejuna, I would argue that the spectacular panorama at the conclusion of the film works as a portrait of the body politic, "unified for public understanding." Paraphrasing Tuan, we could say that the expansive landscape of the state becomes the background of the king's portrait—or better said, the scene of his pose. As the camera zooms in, we see that the citizens or "paisanos" of Fuenteovejuna are slowly moving through the scene(ry). This "total view" of the body politic is strongly reminiscent of the illustration on the cover of Thomas Hobbes's foundational treatise Leviathan (1651), which represents the territory of the state as the body of the king, with his head rising over the landscape. On closer inspection, we see that the torso of the monarch is composed of countless human figures, whose own faces are turned toward the king's head.

The underside of this mythical portrait of monarchical omnipresence is the panoptic spectacle of vigilance, discipline, and punishment that is richly chronicled in the third act of Lope's play. I am thinking both of the graphic depiction of the brutal piercing and dismemberment of the medieval body politic allegorized in the figure of the comendador and of the compulsive repetition of scenes (near the end of the play) of inquisitorial interrogation of the king's subjects. It is important to recognize that this is not gratuitous violence but, rather, the price that must be paid for the establishment of the Absolutist order, the pound of flesh demanded by the emerging modern state. In the words of Fuenteovejuna's mayor, the exemplary voice of the new monarchical subjects: "Que Reyes hay en Castilla / que nuevas órdenes hazen / con que desórdenes quitan" (II, 1620–23) (For there are monarchs in Castile / who give [literally make] new orders / with which they eliminate disorders).

In erasing the history of social and political antagonism from the Castilian landscape, the mythical panorama of the pacified countryside, presented at the conclusion of the RTVE production of Fuenteovejuna, closely follows the monarchical metanarrative that is inscribed in the king's proclamation at the end of Lope's original text: "Y la villa es bien se quede / en mi, pues de mi se vale" (III, 2446–47) (And the town must thus remain within me, insofar as it has claimed me [as its legitimate ruler]). The implication is that the town of Fuenteovejuna, which allegorically represents all of Spain, voluntarily and heroically embraces monarchical absolutism as political...