Youth culture in global cinema

oys will be men 235
ning of this essay. Ironically, in Barrio, the tracks are also symbolic of the
boys’ stasis and inability to move beyond the city and to escape their tough
realities. It is on a train that Manu and Javi embrace each other on learning
about Rai’s death, as if the rootedness evoked by the tracks were to blame
for the tragedy. The tracks are also metaphorically linked to the family ties
(especially in the case of Manu, because of his father’s old job as train driver,
and as Marsh has argued [171], the parallelism between his brother’s punctured
veins and the city’s underground system). Similarly, in the first half of
El Bola, Pablo is drawn to the railroad tracks, which in his case are symbolic
of his fascination with death and destruction but also of escapism at a literal
(the game) and metaphorical (the train) level; yet it is also at the tracks where
he realizes that his friendship with Alfredo is much more valuable than
the superficial relationships with his school peers, based on the competitive
and suicidal games that are associated with the old macho style of his
violent father, which his new friend is not prepared to accept. Pablo’s final
declaration to the police is crosscut with close-up shots of the tracks. The
pellet is abandoned there and is finally smashed by the passing train, symbolically
marking the end of his old, repressed self as ‘‘Pellet’’ and his new
start as Pablo. Finally, in Krámpack, the tracks mark the separation between
the city and the coast, with all the implied binarisms: winter and summer,
families and friendship, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and so on. For
both Dani and Nico, the station is the borderline between the reality of their
everyday, separate lives and their idyllic time on holiday together. It is also
at the station where they playfully wrestle and embrace, conciliating a modern
style of masculine friendship with no hang-ups about sexual orientation.
I use the tracks as a convenient reminder of the three aspects studied
in this essay—strong family ties, friendship, and the vulnerable body—but
one which is also symbolic of the main themes of these films, as for these
boys, the tracks also mark their coming-of-age when they eventually manage
to reach the other side by facing the harsh realities of life. Despite the
connotations of immobility, I would like to argue that the tracks can also be
seen in their more literal meaning of forward movement and become a positive
symbol of progression, as the boys in these stories (especially in El Bola
and Krámpack) seem to leave traumas behind and welcome a more flexible
model of masculinity.
notes
1. Baca Lagos points out that while youth represented only 24.4 percent of the total
Spanish population in 1991, young people were featured in 67 percent of Spanish advertising
and 59 percent of Spanish television programs (39–40). Issues of youth, adver-