South By Southwest ‘08: The Matador

Listen to the Matador audio review

(Reprinted from Short End Magazine)

Bullfighting.

The word itself is enough to illicit a cringe of distaste in the average person, and outrage from your typical liberal-minded Westerner. Yet, for thousands of Spaniards, seeing a ritual killing is just good, old-fashioned popcorn fun. You could drop a few euro on the latest Sunday matinee, or, for even less, you could go see a raging bull or even a human being gored to death, live, and for real.

“Maria, the kids want to go to that new Van Damme flick where he kick boxes his evil twin.”

“Honey, we’re supposed to be saving money this month, you promised me I could get that veg-o-matic I’ve had my eye on, remember? Just take the kids to the bullfight, I’ve got coupons, and tonight it’s a triple-slaying.”

Maybe the Spanish just know the value of a buck.

And, given the amount of violence in the usual blockbuster film, are the two really all that different? The Matador raises this question, and many others.

Like most Americans, I knew next to nothing about bullfighting prior to seeing Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey’s The Matador, other than it made me vaguely appalled to call myself a human being. It seemed amazing that such an archaic savagery could still exist in our day and age, and not only exist, but thrive.

During bullfight season, huge stadiums of fans still come out each weekend to satisfy some dark recess of their primate brain than demands bloodsport. While it’s easy to condemn such behavior as primitive and subhuman, it’s far harder to understand the psychology at work here. So, in the spirit of journalistic inquiry, I steeled myself for some serious man-on-bull action and got myself a ticket.

The film focuses on young matador David Fandila on his quest to achieve one hundred corridas (fights) within a single season and thus secure his place among the handful of master Spanish toreros. We see his family life, his training with his tutor (a retired fighter), and the mental and physical discipline required to compete at his level and chosen vocation.

The initially striking thing about The Matador is the cinematography, which is beautiful, if you can call big-screen high-definition images of cattle being creatively tortured and slaughtered by an effulgent butcher “beautiful.”

Is bullfighting gratuitous? Of course. Morally reprehensible? Probably. Captivating? Completely.

There is something about the sheer primality of this spectacle that pins you to your seat. And this film spares little in the way of gory details.

With operatic stabbings, sanguinary lancings, slow-motion coup-de-grace’s to the skull, matadors and bulls impaling one another at point-blank range, there is carnage aplenty. The matadors are rewarded with cheers and roses if they demonstrate a flair for the theatrical while dealing their deathblows, which begs the question: just what exactly is bullfighting?

Part sport, part art, part religious sacrifice – its origins lie in the bull worship of the ancient Mithras – and part bread and circus diversion for the oppressed masses (even sometimes referred to as “bread and bulls” by Spanish intellectuals), bullfighting is only one thing for certain: all drama.

Whether or not bullfighting is a legitimate sport, much less an art, it commands a certain amount of awe in the virgin spectator.

And let’s not mince words: at its heart, bullfighting is nothing more than a smarter animal killing a stupider animal for sadistic amusement. A butcher is still a butcher, even when you festoon him in a gold suit and snazzy hat.

And yet, like the sinister choreography of a S.W.A.T. team sweeping a room, there is a ballet playing out here. A good bullfighter, when paired with a good bull, can literally make it dance. Inches away from one another, the lethal interplay between bull and man can soar to heights of brutal poetry untouchable in the annals of sport.

Like ice hockey, bloodletting is intrinsic to the sport of bullfighting. Unlike hockey, deaths are commonplace. While hockey has a special tool just to scrape blood off the ice, bullfighting often has a surgeon on hand who specializes in horn wounds, as well as a Catholic priest, to administer last rites in the event of a fatality. Take that, Gretzky.

Say what you will about the motivations of the matador, but this guy is actually risking his life for his beloved game and fans. At one point in the film, Fandila is gored in the side. Do medics instantly run out of with a stretcher? Hell, no. Fandila brushes aside help, walks himself out of the arena, receives surgery in which he denies proffered anesthetic, and forty five minutes later returns and finishes off the bull.

If the macho thing does it for you, then even the worst matador makes Brett Favre look like a lace curtain nancy-boy.

To paraphrase Hemingway, bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in constant danger of death. There’s also an undeniable erotic element to the whole affair. Its three stages mimic the rising action and climax of the sex act, culminating in the final thrust of the matador’s phallic sword, penetrating between the bull’s shoulder blades and directly into the heart.
In the first stage, the three toreros are introduced by trumpet fanfare as they take a ceremonious parade lap around the arena and salute any dignitaries present. Then the fighters are typically paired with two bulls apiece, and the picadors, mounted on blinded, sometimes drugged-up horses, one at a time render the bull weakened and angry via spear incisions to the top of its neck, drawing first blood. During this phase, the matador closely observes the behavior of his bull to learn clues that could prove the difference between life and death in the ensuing fight. The horses wear armor these days, but used to go naked, which often ended in their literal disembowelment at the horns of the bull.

In the second stage, the matador takes the arena with his capote, or pink and white dress cape, where he taunts the bull and further studies its behavior and aggressive tendencies while putting on as best a show as he can to the crowd, i.e. getting as close as he dares to the animal during its passes, turning his back to it, and sidestepping its charges in highly stylized maneuvers. Every bull his its own distinct personality, the film explains, and no lesson learned from one bull can be applied to all.

Next, the banderillos, or flagmen, place three barbed darts on the bull’s flank, and the final stage begins when the iconic red cape, or muleta, comes out, along with a blade, courtesy of a sword page. That bulls see only red is a misconception; they are in fact colorblind and the cape’s color is chosen to hide the splashes of blood. The consummation is the most dangerous part of the death-dance, as the matador is most exposed to the horns when delivering the fatal piercing. If executed correctly, requiring the utmost skill, it results in a quick and what is known as a “clean” kill. If the bull does not fall instantly, but instead limps about bleeding (a depressing sight to even these fans, apparently), a sword through the head is often required as a mercy kill and the matador is considered to have botched the job, such dishonor eliciting much booing from the crowd.

When interviewed about his stance on the morality of his profession, Fandila raises some surprising arguments. After acknowledging the barbarism of bullfighting, he says he respects it as a tradition and points out that the bull’s meat is not wasted but sold following each match. At least the bull has a chance to defend itself, he offers, which is more than your Thanksgiving turkey can say. Granted, a turkey probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance against its hunter, but the guy has a point. It also turns out that when a bull puts on an especially good show and fights valiantly, the crowd or the matador can choose to spare its life. The filmmakers then cut to a shot of several old bulls reposing on a Spanish pasture, in a moment of disarming poignancy. Displaying the scars from their brushes with death, each animal possesses about it a kind of serenity and quiet dignity, as if it knows it was given the ultimate test, and earned its status as a survivor. In this way, a brave bull can earn its freedom.

While this is no doubt small solace to animal rights activists, who protest the sport all over the world, bullfighting remains protected in Spain since Franco, under the auspices of patriotism (declared the country’s national sport and often televised) and preserving national culture, somewhat similar to the way voodoo priests can sacrifice chickens in the US under freedom of religion, and Jewish rabbis can circumcise infants with their teeth.

Interesting offshoots of bullfighting include the Basque-Navarre style, which is nonviolent and is enjoying a revival, and certain American rodeo practices such as bullriding. There’s even a nonviolent California bullfighting league.

The Matador provides a welcome window into a practice that, while seemingly appalling and without redeeming value to Western eyes, reveals itself to be a much more complex tradition rich with Old World heritage, moral and ethical contradictions, outmoded notions of valor and heroism, and modern gladiatorial spectacle.

Bullfighting is possibly the only surviving sport that, along with Greco-Roman wrestling, can be traced directly back to the Coliseum. And given the popularity of the NFL, the WCW, and NASCAR virtually replacing the quaint-by-comparison game of baseball as the national pastime, is bullfighting really all that anachronistic?

It’s as if our queasiness as Americans at bullfighting is due to its hitting too close to home, its showing us just where our modern concepts of competition originate: in war, which is always just senseless violence for its own sake, when you get right down to it, for the glorification of the make ego. “This is what you really want, so take it or leave it,” the matador is saying. As if bullfighting, by its very existence, challenges our values of fair play, athleticism, hero worship; reveals all our ball games as mere simulacra. As if bullfighting, by its very existence, is saying to everyone around it who is more cultured, “This is sport.”

-Andy Gately, March 2008