"You are dull." Berta and José Ramón, the protagonists of the Poquita fe series, which Movistar premiered just a week ago, are used to hearing that. It's not the first time they've said it. But when her supposedly cool friend of hers and a guy they just met at a dinner who won't stop talking about chakras and “real Thailand” blurts it out, something clicks in Berta. She turns around in the hallway, puts her bag down, and gives herself up to the party. To perrear, to play strip poker and to whatever takes place. Everything unless she calls him soda again.
In reality, Berta and José Ramón, brought to life with an impassive and masterful rictus by Esperanza Pedreño and Raúl Cimas, have almost everything one can hope for in this life: stable jobs that they don't dislike, he as a jury security guard and she as an educator in a kindergarten (she calls it "nursery"), a comfortable apartment in a neighborhood where almost all errands can surely be done in 15 minutes, where they have a dense network of affection and a bar of reference, and a solid family around. Although it includes Berta's sister, pulling on the edge, and the lunatic mother of José Ramón (a brilliant Marta Fernández Muro). In addition to all this, they also have the certainty that, barring some eventual calamity, their days and years will continue to pass without much changing. An ideal of life or hell, depending on how you look at it.
“When we define the series as Life is an adventure, we say it jokingly, but it is true: that is the adventure of 99% of people, their daily life. And if you look at it with interest, it has its epic. The series represents what no one teaches about their life, what you don't usually tell, and there, although no one admits it, I think we are all very equal, ”explains Pepón Montero, co-creator of the series together with his regular partner, Juan Maidagán . Both adapted Camera Café, filmed Los del túnel and have fine-tuned a formula of absurd-costumbrista humor that draws from Azcona and Dino Risi. Montero believes that in the sixties, when these filmmakers and others like Berlanga or the Italian Mario Monicelli were at their professional peak, more fiction was made about people like Berta and José Ramón (who, Montero insists, are characters in themselves, with all the that makes them special and unique, not prototypes), but in recent years they have been left aside. “Azcona said that the cinema moved away from the public when the scriptwriters stopped going by subway. I don't think that is currently the problem, all of us screenwriters go by subway, but it is true that the market demands other types of series, ”he reflects.
In networks, however, the debate about whether boredom, or what is perceived from the outside as a boring existence, is aspirational or a form of slow suicide, is hotter than ever. None of the videos that Pantomime Full has produced in recent seasons has given as much buzz as the titled Conformist Couple, which has 1.3 million views on YouTube. In it, a couple who wears tracksuits and lives in a PAU that is intuited to be mid-range, describes their lifestyle in this way with phrases like: “In the end, relationships are finding someone who fits you. We put up with it”, “yesterday we saw a movie they were showing on TV and I fell asleep”, “some silly Friday we go to Telepi”, “kids? We are in it because it is what it touches ”, “the gig? Well, it's a gig like all of them”. The superimposed captions that the duo often punctuate their videos with say things like: “desidealista.com” and “they threw in the towel on life”.
stung. All the newspapers dedicated more or less analytical articles to the video, which lasts only one minute and 31 seconds. In this one, by Miguel Echarri for El País, the political scientist Pablo Simón pointed out that he had succeeded in the generational portrait, of those born in the 80s and 90s who have already assumed that they will live worse (or differently) than their parents, and the sociologist Marga Torre pointed out the growing desire for stability in a particularly wobbly world, in which historical events take place. There is data that supports it, such as the massive number of opponents and applicants for public employment, the most solid sector to have a "job like all jobs." In general, and it can be seen in the comments section of the video on YouTube, for every ten notes that point out the "terror" generated by these conformist lives and the accuracy of the analysis, there is at least one that says: and what's up? There is nothing wrong with this, with having dinner for Valentine's Day at La Tagliatella and spending the summer every year in Santa Pola, especially when the alternatives are never dining out and not being able to go on vacation.
Just a couple of months after this debate took place here, a viral video on Tik Tok reproduced an almost identical give and take first in the United States and then throughout the world. The content could not be more mundane. It is part of the subgenre, very common in Tik Tok, which consists of telling "a day in the life" of someone in the first person. In the case in question, a 28-year-old boy explains his routine: he gets up, goes to his "normal" job, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., takes a break to eat, plays with his dog, goes to the gym, gets a haircut , eat a kind of healthy frozen pizza, save half for the next day and put some content on platforms, before going to sleep and preparing to repeat the cycle the next day.
The reactions to such a nondescript video (the droning music that accompanies it and the protagonist's indistinguishable white boy-indistinguishable-from-his-kind look helped) tended to the drastic. The person who viralized it tweeted it – in this migration, from Tik Tok to Twitter, the bitingness in the comments always multiplies – with the following text: “it is so depressing that I started to cry watching it”. And almost all the answers were against. A boy who before the age of 30 has gotten a job with good conditions, has a pet and a stable life? Good for him, they came to say.
The initial tweet has more than 50,000 quotes, ranging from “I would hit my knees with a hammer for this to be my life for the next five years” to “Amazing how alienation caused by wage labor has become hegemony. We have assimilated that leading a depressing life is normal.”
A recent article in The Guardian that touched on the subject of the desirable routine pointed out that there is a "quiet conservatism" in this idea of valuing the normal and that these values are also often expressed in networks with a "prideish tone". One only has to look at the comments in these two virals or the monologue, also widely shared, by Victoria Martín on her podcast singing the virtues of monogamous life in a mortgaged urbanization villa. “This fits with an under-reported narrative emerging about Generation Z: that despite their reputation for being socially open, many young people embrace puritanical views on things like sex, dating, or alcohol,” the letter wrote. columnist Sarah Manavis, perhaps without taking into account the exercise involved in labeling a whole group that only has in common the date of birth.
The journalist Rita Rakosnik, an expert in combing social trends that are cooking in networks, points out: “the younger generations have grown up with an idea of success and ultra-individualistic, neoliberal and delusional ambition. Seeing a guy with a 9 to 5 job, average, can clash with these expectations of greatness and confront us with the idea that we will not be like the Disney Channel stars we grew up with and who never tire of telling us that with effort everything is possible. Anything that gives us an illusion of order and tranquility can be very pleasant in our context. Another thing is if we think that this type of life is desirable. Rakosnik is also scared of the "reactionary drift" that may be behind these messages and also of the so-called beigefluencers, young digital content creators like Molly-Mae Hague and Matilda Djerf who combine a very specific aesthetic, based on an almost comical palette. monochrome of off-white, beige, and off-white with an equally monochrome life.
On TikTok it is no longer necessary to go to festivals and get on boats like in the old Instagram to accumulate views and followers, just buy flowers, light candles, cook dinner at home (if possible not a frozen pizza like the one from the tiktoker of the boring life), read a book in a coffee shop, always wash your face and burn incense. Romanticize (the key verb in that social network in which everything is susceptible to romanticize, even Logroño) the small acts of a simple routine and setting an orderly life as the goal are the new posturing, it seems. “Whose heritage is this aestheticized routine? Of white, wealthy, property-owning people, and in many cases heterosexual”, believes Rita Rakosnik, who also suspects that every influencer is basically a beigefluencer.
“This culture is born and has its raison d'être in eventism, whatever the content that is shared and monetized, the accumulation of unique experiences is equivalent to social capital and there are those who have known how to monetize it and live from it. This supposed uniqueness could not exist if it did not have routine as a backdrop, the stability that allows us to experience moments of temporary impasse, trips, concerts and dinners. One thing is not understood without the other”. For her, there is an interesting part in romanticizing one's life "in the sense that it can help us appreciate what we have more", but it would be convenient to start by understanding "that there is nothing cute or aspirational or romantic in a tiny room without electricity in a shared apartment and a bank account in red numbers”.
