Expatiperro

Tonght, I went with Aditi, Mariel, Sarah, and her boyfriend to see the movie "Vicky Christina Barcelona" on its opening night in Spain. Either Woody Allen is quite popular here, or the movie's title got people's attention, because the theater was packed- though in an orderly way, since tickets here come with pre-assigned seat numbers. That is an idea that needs to get exported to the New World, and fast.

Anyways, one of the joys of seeing the the film here, especially after having seen it in San Francisco, was witnessing how the audience's reaction to it differed from back at home. Not surprisingly, people here seemed to connect with the setting, as the entire movie takes place in places where they pass through every day (in fact, one scene is filmed down the street from where I'm staying now) . But more entertaining was the audience's reaction to Vicky's master's thesis on Catalan Identity. The running joke in the movie is that it's a pointless topic, and no one has any idea what it's good for. But the Barcelonans in the theater, judging from their prolonged laugher, found the topic ridiculously absurd. Whether its self-effacement, or disbelief that anyone would want to study their culture, I'm not sure, though from my limited experience talking to them, Catalans don't tend to think of themselves as particularly special.

This is really refreshing coming from the US, where we hold ourselves in pretty high regard, as something exceptional. It's a fairly common belief that our form of government is the best, that we are the center is global events, and that our culture is the most dominant (for better or for worse), and we don't even look at other countries to see how they live. I mean, American Studies is fairly popular major at many schools around the country, and while I don't have any numbers to back this up, I'd suspect that it rivals or surpasses other cultural studies majors in number or students. On the other side of the ocean, though, I doubt that anyone here would go to the University of Barcelona to study Catalan Identity.

There's something to be said for keeping a distance between your home culture, and the culture that you study- in objectivity, in curiosity, in keeping an open mind. Though I can also see the benefits of more in-depthly studying your own culture, especially in finding ignored parts of it to dissect and explain. In any case, I couldn't help but be struck tonight by the healthy reaction in the Barcelona theater, and on how, judging from that one brief moment, they were able to take themselves lightly.