“It is serious, it is very serious. Let’s get off the drugs now. It is that neither coke, nor keta, nor speed, nor LSD, nor joints, nor marijuana, nor eme, nor opium, nor GHB, nor anything, “Berta Prieto cries in the trailer of the Spanish series Self-Defense while they follow one another at a heart rate techno music and after-party scenes with close-ups of the two twenty-something protagonists —Prieto herself and Belén Barenys— getting into everything.
And then? A wave of criticism and thousands of tweets that divide the Internet between lovers and detractors of the series. In fact, the second part has generated so much criticism that Prieto herself has responded to “the angry people on Twitter” in a video entitled “What do you say hater?”
Self-defense (for those who haven’t seen it) explores the intimate universe of its two protagonists using crude sex, drug use, cynicism, cruelty, narcissism and large doses of self-indulgence. “Real youth is not like that,” denounces one of his haters. And Prieto responds: “We never intended to make a generational series (…) It is a series that talks about very specific young women. They are young people who dedicate themselves to something more or less cultural, who are from the city and who have a more or less privileged environment”. “Will they ever make a series of people not take drugs?” asks another viewer. And Prieto sentences: “I think that perhaps it makes people angry to see aunts having a good time or doing a little whatever they want.
And in this frivolous and tricky response, where she unabashedly insinuates that taking drugs is feminist, she lets us see the central problem of her work: an unforgivable lack of discourse about what is being told. A lack that concerns not only the issue of drugs, but all those that she addresses such as sexual consent, mental health or religion.
That we live in a society of drug addicts where the majority of social and political behaviors are crossed by the consumption of “substances” (whether legal or not) is something that we all know. What is uncomfortable is not the subject, but the way of approaching it. Thus, Self-Defense is presented as a caricature of drug use that avoids delving into a repugnant problem that our society is going through. And as such, it is to be expected that the creators will encounter the moral reproach of many. “My brother was a drug addict and two years ago he died because of it, so the fact that you take the issue of addictions as if it were a fucking game is not funny to me,” La Ró tweets. But beyond the moral criticism, Self-Defense deserves a narrative reproach. Because if you make a story about a problem that is in society and you ask yourself less questions than society itself about it, then you are not making a story, but a video clip. We are therefore before an audiovisual production capable of relating events without an optical center or narrative perspective. This makes it an aesthetically sophisticated but empty product at the same time. “This is about screwing up, about not demonizing sex or drugs, about being able to be wrong,” Prieto has defended. And he has succeeded. Because giving up narrative responsibility is a shit. This makes it an aesthetically sophisticated but empty product at the same time. “This is about screwing up, about not demonizing sex or drugs, about being able to be wrong,” Prieto has defended. And he has succeeded. Because giving up narrative responsibility is a shit. This makes it an aesthetically sophisticated but empty product at the same time. “This is about screwing up, about not demonizing sex or drugs, about being able to be wrong,” Prieto has defended. And he has succeeded. Because giving up narrative responsibility is a shit.
