From the Crippled Devil to the Spectacular House: The Visual Representation of Intimacy in Painting, Comics, Film, and Television

Abstract

This work expands the literary topic of the interior of the home to its corresponding visual manifestations. Its main reference, the crippled devil, dates back to seventeenth century picaresque literature. It is the same century as the first visual representations of common, everyday life in Dutch painting. This study focuses on the visual and reflective evolution that is born with these paintings and takes the form of panoramic views in the graphic structure of the mid-nineteenth century vignette. A century later it evolves in comics, and then in cinema and television, emulating the structure of the literary movement. The content—the integration of characters in the same location—updates a satirical exhibition of the comedy of manners. However, television registers hilarious situations between its characters, which explains the success of the emblematic series, Aquí no hay quien viva, where the snooping of the characters is subrogated to the viewer, as Hitchcock did in Rear Window. Its protagonist, a revived crippled devil, goes beyond playful snooping. Thus, the representation of the interior of the home connotes vigilance if one thinks of the last of the houses built ad hoc: those of Big Brother. There, those who see can also take action, but it is a house designed to be looked at.

1. Introduction

The visual representation of the main costumbrista topic in literature centers around the inside of the home, as it developed in the movement in Spain and France during the nineteenth century. Its origins date back to the seventeenth century and the popular, satirical figure of El diablo cojuelo, by Luis Vélez de Guevara. Certain authors (Cuvardic, Escobar Arronis) have supported this idea regarding the enigmatic figure that peers into domestic interiority and who penetrates the realm of literature until reaching an increasingly strong presence in modernity. However, the notion that this chapter articulates is that it is an interdisciplinary motif. In fact, its presence in visual representation has not been studied with the same zeal. In this chapter, we do not neglect its verbal (literary) expression. Based on the above, we intend to examine the visual and narrative possibilities that imply a vision of the other in the intimate through a historical journey. First, in keeping with its literary origins, it is posed as a panoramic vision through supernatural fiction, then as a more or less subtle intrusion, until finally reaching a visual structure that appears in the journalistic movement of the second wave of modernity (Berman). However, it is curious that this form of treatment in art, which, in literature dates back to the seventeenth century with the crippled devil, coincides in graphic expression in a country situated further north in the continent: Dutch painting, whose exponents are the first to depart from traditional and canonical religious and historical topics to deal with issues of their most immediate daily life (Alpers, Todorov). And it is not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a vision is elaborated from a different frame, one which implies a more open blueprint: a diagram built from three floors plus the attic. This outline, clearly simpler than the minutely detailed Dutch pictures, is produced for the purpose of illustrating sketches of manners and soon after becomes autonomous in a structure also intended for a mainstream audience: comics. And yet it is not the culmination of the visual representation because its mass media replacements, cinema and television, take up this structure, as can be seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s paradigmatic Rear Window in the mid-twentieth century and in the successful Spanish series Aquí no hay quien viva at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In these visual proposals, the structure is adapted so the characters can interact in a way that updates the satirical tone of its narrative and visual origins until it becomes the sitcom genre. From a narrative perspective, the physical closeness of the inhabitants who share the same block develops in part from the ramifications of the voyeuristic gaze, not only as a component of the show, but also for the purpose of prying. And even so, its scope continues to expand, since it is a fusion of dimensions that is brought even closer to paroxysm—where silent vision is in action—as can be seen in the dynamics of the Big Brother television contest. This program, whose innovative format combines entertainment and information, is still going strong in some countries as they inaugurate the twenty-first century, as well as its derivative TV programs which continue to this day. What is relevant here is that the house acquires an outstanding function, since it has been expressly built to be looked at and, in particular, for its temporary inhabitants, with which the function of entertainment borders on that of surveillance.

2. Initial stages in folk imaginary: the crippled devil

The motif of the crippled devil should be traced in the folkloric imaginary of the seventeenth century; its development, in turn, begins approximately a century earlier, in the Spanish picaresque novel. At that time, Castilian witches who were poor, needy, and illiterate were prone to repeating prayers to saints and spells to specific demons. The latter came to take the form of a cripple or a minor devil—as opposed to the great or major devils who actually had names: Lucifer, Satan, Barabbas, Belial, and Astaroth—and yet he was the best known and most often identified in literature [1]. In Spanish folklore, so given to jest, the crippled devil was therefore a character of a rather playful nature who explained the hierarchy of the range of these evil figures: dwarfed with respect to the devil, mischievous rather than perverse, he would soon be widely present in literature. He appears in the work of the playwright and novelist of the Golden Age Luis Vélez de Guevara, who took on the job of compiling proverbs and songs from previous popular literature in the satirical and moral novel El diablo cojuelo (1641) [2] (Figure 1). Incidentally, one outstanding element is the author’s particular use of language; Georges Cirot has called attention to this through the presence of neologisms due to the author’s predisposition to speak in popular language and avoid the then current trend toward scholarly and Latinized language ([3], p. 72).

Figure 1.

Cover page from El diablo cojuelo (1641).

The plot is very simple: it begins with a nobleman—Don Cleofás Leandro Pérez Zambullo—fleeing from justice in the rooftops of Madrid, late at night. Upon entering the attic, he accidentally breaks a vial and frees a crippled devil. In gratitude, the latter rewards him by showing him “the most notable thing happening at this hour in this Spanish Babylon” ([2], p. 80). Applying his magic, at first he takes both of them through the air, from where he raises the roofs of buildings to appreciate what is happening inside the houses, and then later they travel to other areas of the country, further away.

Diverse elements can be identified in Vélez de Guevara’s text. On the one hand, the recovery of a character from biblical imaginary with fantastic characteristics whose very nickname calls attention to a physical defect. In the preface, Rodríguez Cepeda argues that this work serves as a metaphor for deformation and the grotesque, as the bad habits and vices that symbolize Spain ([2], p. 17). In this individuation, the physical deficiency is presented in relation to the picaresque tradition, and it will be elaborated in allusion to the figure of the crippled devil as one addressed to a type, that of subjects prone to prying into the privacy of others. In this sense, the text acquires importance as the first critical exploration of everyday life, namely, the intimacy of vices and other practices, in a satirical description of urban customs that will be reworked as a stylistic trend in bourgeois society as of the nineteenth-century costumbrista movement. Subsequent literary and film narratives have dealt with this figure in innumerable ways, but here it was singled out under the guise of this peculiar and even likeable popular character.

Another outstanding aspect of the novel resides in the alternation between depictions: on the one hand, those of a certain dynamism—called trancos—of fast action; on the other, descriptive ones, almost static, so that, according to Alfaro, it is possible to identify two tendencies: “a descriptive one, which leads to pictures of customs, and another narrative one that leads to the adventure novel” ([4], p. 2). As an urban description, Vélez de Guevara’s novel is loaded with notable irony regarding the customs and vices of the city’s inhabitants in their daily practices, without posing a distance—or even a possible condition of superiority—in those it observes; instead the observed are not only defined, but matched to their onlookers.

This is by no means something exclusive to Hispanic culture, since French literature also has its corresponding Le diable boiteux (1707) [5] by Alain-René Lesage which was very successful in France. In the roman, the names of the characters and the essence of Velez de Guevara are preserved. Typical of Latino culture, as Rodríguez Cepeda indicates, the theme of the crippled devil will continue until the beginning of the twentieth century ([2], p. 39).

3. Domestic interiors in Dutch painting

Around that same century, in other geographical coordinates further north—specifically in the Netherlands—science was developing technological instruments based on the optics of the lens which allowed for the description of new realities; one example is the microscope, which would facilitate advances in the study of entomology, among other subjects. This interest in detail also extends to the visual arts, of which painting deserves special attention. Dutch artists were the first to venture into the topic of the immediate domestic environment, dedicating themselves to portraying life inside houses, in what seemed to be a preference for representing bourgeois society in contrast to rurality and giving greater relevance to life within the family, not outside the home ([6], p. 38). This was, however, disruptive because it implied a clear distancing from Italian Renaissance painting, which Svetlana Alpers has defined in contrast to the description of the Nordic interior: “Dutch paintings are rich and varied in their observation of reality, dazzling in their ostentation of mastery, domestic and taming in their affairs” ([7], p. 23), as in Pieter de Hooch’s painting, for example (Figure 2). They were paintings that contained depictions of the domestic and opted for a “description of visible reality, rather than as an imitation of significant human actions” ([7], p. 27). In fact, their acceptance was not easy, because the first considerations pointed to a lack of meaning understood as the narration of a text (biblical, historical, mythological), unlike what happens in Italian art. The Dutch represented scenes of daily life with anonymous subjects: mothers delousing children, tailors working, young people reading letters or playing the clavichord… This practice responds to the formation of a new, more individualistic and private society: If tradition can be said to uphold stories like common legacy, here, the Dutch painters and poets of the seventeenth century were the ones deciding the content ([8], p. 18).

Figure 2.

A woman nursing an infant with a child and a dog (between 1658 and 1660), Pieter de Hoock.

The pictorial representations of the Calvinist Netherlands of the seventeenth century thus carefully portrayed a kind of “human truth” without implying the absence of morality. This made painting a genre of praise (domestic virtues, physical cleanliness as moral purity) and censure (of intemperance and pleasures of the flesh). In this regard, Todorov introduces the difference between the visual image and the written text in representation: Literary quality is incompatible due to an explicit didactic message, such as the one that instead seems to break off from another (later) form of description: that of the Criticism of manners in the nineteenth century. The presence of a moral lesson does not necessarily transform the image.

He says—it is superimposed on it, in contrast to the verbal matter that modifies the work from within. In other words, the way to create meaning is not the same in painting as it is in literature. Hence the prerogative of the visual sign over the written one ([8], p. 45). And the implication of the everyday in these works admits the existence of morality—the one that watches over and that the cripple mocks, and that is taken up again in the sketches of manner. However, their great love of life stands out, a completely voluntary gesture that transcends morality ([8], pp. 72–73). There is an esthetic sublimation of morality, that is, a hope that the beautiful can also reside in the domestic.

This interest in descriptive art is part of what Marshall Berman calls the recognition of an initial phase of modernity, which arises at the beginning of the sixteenth century and lasts until the end of the eighteenth century, in a kind of first contact, more intuitive than formal, where it is lived as an experimentation of modern life ([9], p. 2). It is an essential moment in history in which the formation of a bourgeois ethos as the dominant social class begins and in which existing powers are replaced, not only ecclesiastical but also monarchical. This change that slowly shows its imprint on art and literature begins its journey in specific geographical and sociocultural confines (Dutch painting, popular Mediterranean folk culture) but will expand to the rest of the world in the following phases of modernity.

4. Voyeuristic Costumbrismo

The second stage of modernity, according to Berman, begins with the great revolutionary wave—of political, economic, and cultural scope—that takes place at the end of the eighteenth century. It spreads across the continent and consolidates modernity as a new vision of the world (Weltanschaaung), in a scenario progressively saturated by the demographic concentration implicit in modernization: steam engines, the beginnings of industrial automation, railways, huge cities, means of communication able to report on a massive scale ([9], pp. 4–5), such as newspapers and the telegraph. It is precisely from the journalistic genre associated with the emergence of newspapers that continuity with the activity of the crippled devil is produced: the literary movement known as costumbrismo or sketch of manners, where the devil is replaced by the journalist or chronicler.

This panorama provokes a change in cultural habits that involves the literary and journalistic traditions in which observation and description of the nascent bourgeoisie are proposed. The discourse that develops around descriptive, everyday life finds its sources in the process of formation of the article of customs which actually began at the start of the eighteenth century with the writings of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (essay or sketch of manners), from where it would move to France (tableau de moeurs) and from there to Spain (cuadro de costumbres). Its appearance in those countries dates from the middle of that same century and it reaches its peak in the nineteenth century ([10], p. 29). The literary movement in question was interested in the representation of civil life as part of its ideological objective of artistically legitimizing bourgeois spheres of action ([11], p. 117) from a descriptive desire of contemporary daily life [12].

The first expressions of the movement date back to the French playwright, journalist, and sketch of manners writer Étienne de Jouy who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, published several volumes of these sketches from which two of the texts that deal directly with the subject in question emerge; “Les six étages d’une maison de la rue Saint-Honoré” (1818) is about a visit in which the chronicler accompanies a friend who intends to buy a house, for which he came to describe himself as “nouvel Asmodé” ([13], p. 195), and another, later writing: “Une maison de la rue des Arcis” (1823) [14]. Both articles, in which the foundations of this motif are formally located, constitute a genre in which basically descriptive elements take precedence over narrative action, which is why they can be linked to what will later develop into journalistic documents. A few years later, between 1845 and 1846, the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel published a sketch of manners with the eloquent title: Le Diable à Paris. Paris et les Parisiens. Mœurs et coutumes, caractères et portraits des habitants de Paris, tableau complet de leur vie privée, publique, politique, artistique, littéraire, industrielle, which consisted of a history and geography of the capital city.

In Spain, the sketch of manners writers that correspond to Jouy—whose declared obsession includes imitation [14]—are represented by the writer Mariano José de Larra in one of his newspaper articles entitled: “Las casas nuevas” (1833), which refers to the vicissitudes of buying a new home for a friend. Throughout the narrative, Larra proves himself to be an acute observer of customs and the sociopolitical reality of the moment, with a fine handling of irony. There is also an outstanding unknown journalist who signs his articles with the pseudonym El Observador who collaborated with the editor José María de Carnerero in the Correo Literario y Mercantil. Among these texts is one clearly influenced by another French sketch of manners writer, Louis Sébastien Mercier, entitled “Costumbres de Madrid” (1828), which approaches various aspects such as the “portrait of the inhabitants, their public and private customs, their classes, their vices and virtues”; the observation of current affairs; the subject of his writings centered on “what is happening [at court] today”; the critical tone and “festive and decorous criticism”; and finally the moral intention, to correct customs ([15], p. 41).

A few years later, under the pseudonym El Curioso Parlante, the writer and journalist from Madrid, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, signed an article entitled: “Las casas por dentro,” published in Cartas Españolas in July 1832; it later appeared in the collection Escenas Matritenses (1845). This text is narrated in the epistolary style, as the subtitle indicates, “from a curious Provençal to a curious man from Madrid.” After the initial justification for the reasons that gave rise to the theme and once the area where the property of the friend who invites him to his home is located, the narrator goes into a lengthy description of an imaginary route: his entrance, the belongings, the layout of the rooms, the lighting. Finally, he goes on to detail the tenants who inhabit the place, basically with references to their trades: “Well, being who he was, he had two shops, and in them lived a hatter and a cabinetmaker; the shoemaker in the vestibule slept in a garret on the stairwell; a skilled fencer, in the mezzanine; a clerk and a merchant, in the main floor; a school teacher and a tailor, in the second floor; a hostess, a dressmaker and a clothes presser in the third floor; a military musician, an engraver, a translator of comedies and two widows occupied the attic [sic]; and there was even a mathematician who had published several observations on the heights of the globe in the small garret next to this” ([16], p. 59).

This tendency of the genre to clarify of what is described—the logistical arrangement of the house, the references to its inhabitants—together with the written and visual expression, becomes an influence that gives rise to a combination of media in the emergence of a topic that was then new.

5. Image and word in domestic descriptions

The meticulous description in the representation of a reference reality that is common both to painting in the Netherlands and to literary costumbrismo—an eminent perspectivist genre according to Escobar Arronis [15]—goes through some adjustments in regard to components such as temporality in narrative language. In homologation with the nature of the word, narration inevitably refers to past events ([17], p. 40), for which certain modifications are required that come to account for the fact that in costumbrismo time seems to be suspended, always in the present—hence the predomination of the imperfect past tense and the gerund. Reason appears to evoke the procedure of ekphrasis with the obligatory variant that what it describes be filtered by a novel component that breaks into the descriptive genre: the humor that is so typical of its antecedent: the picaresque novel. As stated, Dutch painting does not deny virtues and vices, but rather transcends them in face of the existence of the world ([8], p. 73). Both in Dutch painting and in the sketches of manners, the main theme is the representation of the everyday, domesticity, but whereas the first sought the transcendence of what was represented, in the second there is, above all, a critique of habits and practices—as will also be present in the caricatures of nineteenth-century France, with Grandville and Daumier. The obvious difference resides in the fact that in Dutch painting everyday gestures serve to illustrate moral principles ([8], p. 75), while in the written expression of literary costumbrismo, the tendency is oriented toward exhibition and criticism which takes the form of jest in the texts of the Golden Age and in the moral criticism of the nineteenth century. The situations described in detail can lead to absurd circumstances that, if subjected to irony, demonstrate less seriousness and investiture; since its origins in Classical Greece, comedy was born as a devalued genre. Likewise, the complementarity between written and visual texts is reinforced by the fact that customary discourse is often accompanied by engravings. As early as in seventeenth-century editions, these discourses were complemented by images, such as the one illustrated by the artist Napoléon Thomas in 1707 for Le diable boiteux.

It is appropriate now to dwell on a couple of illustrations regarding Lesage’s novel. The first is Thomas’s image of the intruders who appear to levitate furtively in the same space, not through a window, as if they were glimpsing the libidinous practices of the inhabitants of an urban interior, where they share a privileged position, as in the front row of a show (Figure 3). From here, anonymous daily life is presented as a spectacular act, worthy of being viewed. The group’s superior and invisible arrangement also indicates the optics through which they contemplate minor miseries. In Thomas’s work, this particular distinction entails integrating in the same space the central role of the snooper with the object of contemplation. Although curiosity is proverbially related to the figure of the reader in the narrative (prose) genre, it can also be considered extensible to one of the forms in which visuality derives: the voyeur. In costumbrista literature, this function is delegated to the cripple and to Asmodeo. On the other hand, there is a greater abundance of representations of the crippled devil (engravings in biblical or literary editions) than of the act of vision itself, due to the fascination that the fantastic figure generated. For a relative identification or coincidence with the perspective of Asmodeo and Cleofás, the hypothetical corresponding image would have to present a zenithal view of the visual space that is very hard to execute, as evidence that the perspective of the characters must adapt to the two-dimensional characteristics of the representation implemented later.

Figure 3.

Illustration of Le diable boiteux (1707), Napoleón Thomas.

The other image from the French edition, by an anonymous author, from around 1737, shows an in depth view of the different floors which allows them to be contemplated from a different angle than that which will later become convention: the frontal structure. The aforementioned French edition by Hetzel, from 1845 to 1846, Le diable à Paris was also illustrated with engravings by various artists, including some by the caricaturist Charles Albert d’Arnoux, better known as Bertall, where the image of the property is based on the frontal arrangement that would become popular in the following century.¹ The structure allows us to verify a series of patterns common to these blocks of flats: the number of floors—between four and five—the presence of an attic and of a stairwell, which is either located on the right or on the left, and, of course, the existence of inhabitants (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Cartoon of Le diable à Paris (1845), Bertall.

In the same year, 1845, the edition of Escenas Matritenses which includes an article by Mesonero Romanos titled “The houses inside” was accompanied by an engraving attributed to an artist named Vallejo, which takes up Bertrall’s compositional idea. In this regard, Escobar Arronis maintains that the image represents the cross section of a building which allows visualizing the entire location from the ground floor to the attic and all their respective rooms ([14], p. 44). In this way, the graphic text complements the possibility of visualizing scenes that are typical of the human types. Since Vélez de Guevara’s novel it has been defined as social types due to their satirical nature: “a phantasmagoria of Quevedesque style in which the author satirizes human defects, especially those of the nascent petty bourgeoisie” ([4], p. 1). In this case, these types are defined by their trades and located in each of the rooms they inhabit that inhabit each of the rooms as defined by their trades: the hatter, the cabinetmaker, the shoemaker, the fencing master, etc., but from a strikingly different angle than that of Vélez de Guevara’s character: “Instead of raising the roof, as the Crippled Devil would have done, the artist has to remove the façade of the building so that one can see what is happening inside” ([14], p. 44).

This will become the frame (horizontal, of the whole) that is established for the convention of the representation of the interior of houses in subsequent and contemporary graphic histories. Without intending to revive the phantasmagorical illusion of the précinema, Cirot has referred to the speed, variety, and density of vision in El diablo cojuelo as “cinematographic.” The internal reason for this speed of action and contemplation is concentrated in the expression there is no time to waste: “Dans le Tranco II il nous fait jeter un regard rapide su des quantités de tableaux qui se succèdent à vive allure. C’est qu’il n’ya pas de temps à perdre. Il faut profiter de la nuit et du sortilège. On voit défiler trente-deux de ces ‘cinematographies’” (emphasis added) ([3], p. 69). It is typical of the language of comics, whose graphic simplicity has allowed the display of extravagant or impossible worlds that do not pose technical problems for the cartoonist to solve with his pen ([18], p. 44).

6. The satirical alternative: comic strips in the twentieth century

The representation of this structure, similar to a fish tank, is present not only in the film genre but also in drawing, and it will evolve in the comic or graphic novel genre. Basic equivalences are maintained: the descriptive function, the simplicity of the structure (in contrast to the detail of Dutch painting), and the possibility—carried out in previous satirical and critical texts—of developing a satirical vein, as in humor. In later, more popular variants will give way to more recent televisión series with choral plots as of the beginning of the twenty-first century in Spain.

The first attempts correspond to a format that begins its evolution in newspaper spreads. In 1902, Joaquim Xauradó published “A house on Christmas Eve” in the magazine Blanco y negro. A few decades later, in the late 40s and early 50s, the cartoonist Manuel Vázquez Gallego took the same structure as a basis for “A day in villa Pulgarcito” (1959) from his comic Pulgarcito published by Brugera. It was a macrostructure matched to the size of the page where the cartoons were distributed corresponding to houses and their respective characters: Mofeta, Jimmy Pintamonas, Gildo…. It is the same model on which Francisco Ibáñez would base his famous comic magazine Tío Vivo with the strip 13 Rue del Percebe (1961–1970), which had notable commercial success. Its title, which refers to the physical address where the property in question is located, pays tribute and gives continuity to the influence of nineteenth-century French draftsmen. Ibáñez strengthens the idea that timidly emerged with Gallego by combining the frontal plane that Bertall inaugurated but solving its rigidity with a short extension or small expansion to the side that creates the effect of depth, in addition to the addition of other spaces, such as the elevator and the roof next to the attic.² It should be remembered that the production of these images of urban interiors was not exclusive to the old continent, since around 1949 a renowned artist dedicated to caricatures and architectural drawing based in the United States, Saul Steimberg, published The Art of Living with drawings of urban interiors. One of the best known drawings from this collection includes a variant of the established structure: It is divided into three vertical strips, the first describes the building from an external, frontal perspective, and the rest is dedicated to the interiors with a cross section, maintaining the tonic of its European predecessors.

From the three, an evolution can be seen that goes from the simplest, with a more basic frame, to the more complex, with a greater amount of detail, of defined characters, the addition of color, etc. But all of them offer the possibility of being read horizontally or vertically. One particularity is that the shape is adapted to the support, since each page corresponds to a vignette of one floor of a block or community of neighbors, each of which has a window. On the ground floor, there is a grocery store, the concierge and the elevator and on the three upper floors, the neighbors who inhabit the building: a veterinarian, the owner of a pension, an old woman, a scientist, a thief who steals useless things, a woman with her naughty children. Ibáñez pays homage to Vázquez Gallego by dedicating the rather secondary character known as Vázquez, the defaulter who lives on the roof, to him.

However, this abrupt independence is not always present because, although they are cells with autarchic conflicts, what happens in each one is sometimes linked by common events that affect some of their neighbors or the entire block. There is one paradigmatic case in Playtime (1967), where the director Jacques Tati raises the clash of technique that is imposed in an increasingly technological world, a futuristic Paris made of glass and steel, in which this scenario is parodied. In it, the astonished protagonist looks at a new construction of flats in the style of comic cells where the circumstances in which some residents live find its respective prolongation in the window of the block next door. In a certain way, the satirical disposition works as an update of the types of characters that distinguish the costumbrismo of El diablo cojuelo in an expansion of the market given by the medium—as with popular folklore. And yet, despite the commercial success, it seems that its author found 13 Rue del Percebe too claustrophobic—the condensation of a fixed box for each character on a single page—which is why in 1987 he created Rebolling Street, where he repeated the formula but in double the pages and with a greater number of characters.

This representation, which has gained sediment from the mental image that originates in the costumbrista text, is reinforced as a result of the subsequent proliferation of supports and projection of forms that develop at an iconographic level. Thus, one would be in a later stage of the production of the practice in the genre that takes the big screen to the small screen, that is, to domesticity itself, with a device that over time has been equally domesticated [19]: television.

7. The new cripple

As expected, the audiovisual invention will also colonize this trend for the visualization of intimacy, in an expansion of reflections on the new medium such as the exercise of the gaze and the spectator. The quintessential film that condenses this situation is Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock, which adapts Cornell Woolrich’s story “It Had to Be Murder” (1954) and questions the integration of intimacy and spectacle. In fact, it begins with the opening of a curtain, in a theatrical style, to show the action that takes place behind the windows of other apartments, inhabited by neighbors who are part of the show. The season of the year, summer, with temperatures of 92°F makes it that much easier, since most of the characters open their windows and even sleep on their balconies; all of this invites the protagonist, Jeff, to peer (Figure 5). But he becomes so obsessed by this dangerous three-dimensional screen that he is even willing to risk his life.

Figure 5.

The protagonists with Alfred Hitchcock in the scenario of Rear Window (1954).

The film also works as a representation of everyday life equated to the artistic world: Stam and Pearson argue that this vision constitutes a social microcosm that functions like a tableaux vivant: “The architectonic stylization and painterly artifice of the set betray what is transparently a studio product […] Virtually all the members of this cinemato-graphicum mundi are artists or actors, or are engaged in an entertainment-related profession” ([20], p. 200): The workers on the scaffolding are reminiscent of the carpenters who prepare the scenes, of the characters, the bachelor is a pianist, Miss Torso is a dancer, the neighbor who lives on the ground floor is a sculptor, even Thorwald himself is a jewelry salesman, Lisa works for a magazine…. This is the reason why for Román Gubern, it becomes a theatrum mundi—where the central theme is love or the lack of it—([21], p. 198) which one attends from the window that offers a view to the show, and its protagonist, like the crippled devil, has a wounded leg and dedicates his time to looking out the window (Figure 6). In this case, he does not resort to the fantastic element of flight, but his privileged vision, despite being exercised in the rear wing of the building, happens in a place that lends itself to the contemplation of his neighbors; shortly after, he adds, accessories to expand his vision, such as the camera which allows magnification and a telescope. Hitchcock’s contribution to the literary text consists in enriching the protagonist, or rather, the complexity of his conflicted psyche in a personal situation: Jeff sees his hitherto life of risk and adventure in jeopardy for one of stability phases of life and marriage (boredom, in his own words)—which is underlined in the windows that allude to the different phases of life, both for couples and for individuals. Therefore, his activity stems from a source of anxiety that he manages to infect to his interlocutors—his employee, Stella and his girlfriend Lisa—unlike Don Cleofás.² And it could not be otherwise because the visual drive is an undeniable part of our instinctive nature; in his famous interview with Truffaut, the English director stated that 9 out of 10 subjects who have the option of peeking at what is happening behind a window, do so ([22], p. 79). Without it being possible to suggest an influence between these two productions, so far apart geographically and temporally, this coincidence accounts for a common cultural pattern that is maintained and expressed with the inevitable variants. What seems to be behind it is precisely the animal nature of human beings.

Figure 6.

James Stewart with his broken leg in Rear Window (1954).

The vision does not emanate, as with Vélez de Guevara, from above, zenithally—except for a quick allusion in one of the initial moments in which, from the aerial perspective of a mischievous helicopter pilot, the camera zooms in to look at some young women sunbathing on the rooftops. Rear Window proceeds by identifying with the spectator, leveling the viewer’s gaze to that of the protagonist. Without implying a cross section in the structure of the block, as in the illustrations by Bertall and Vallejo, the English director manages to build an equivalent image from a level shot, positioning himself as a character who obsessively looks out the window, and this poses an analogous situation with filmic expectation. The composition of this shot has been repeated by other directors, such as Jacques Tati in Playtime or Pedro Almodóvar in Kika (1993). In those cases, the action takes place in large western cities: Manhattan, Paris, and Madrid, which are so densely populated that the housing trend consists of vertical constructions.

But in Rear Window, which deals with the functioning of expectation, the fishbowl structuring of the dwellings functions as a possibility for spectacle, and there is a consensus among critics that it constitutes a metaphor for cinematic expectation: immobility, darkness, attention embedded in the facing image, that is, the screen of entertainment, namely, the reverse shot whose basic structure will be popularized in graphic novels.

8. From comics to television

The aforementioned visual structure of the exterior of a building divided into four segments where the action takes place is directly indebted to cartoons or comics. Events happen in a building with a sectioned façade that make the residential interiors visible, in the style of a doll’s house (whose origins are not always related to children’s games). In the seventeenth century, the latter were display cabinets full miniature rooms on a scale of 1:12, with all the architectural details and minuscule household objects; they were collected by a few matrons residing in Germany, England, and Holland. In some European capitals, these types of constructions of flats that house nuclear family groups are very common.

In the twentieth century, the small screen resumes this graphic tradition with notable products that also draw on comic book sources. One striking example is the successful series Aquí no hay quien viva (Antena 3, 2003–2006)—created by Iñaki Ariztimuño and the siblings Alberto and Laura Caballero—which continued (actors, rhythm, idea, only this time in a building located in an area far from downtown) in La que se avecina (Tele5, 2007-)—created by the Caballero siblings and Daniel Deorador. Its format can be thought of as an adaptation from comics, both in the configuration of the character types and in the structure of the frontal building.

The presentation of the opening credits is in keeping with the television of the time: It begins with an aerial shot of the Earth, which is crossed by a satellite from which, in a supersonic tracking shot, the camera enters the orb and penetrates until it lands on the mentioned block—in a convenient technique developed in nineteenth-century narration in which a place is chosen at random to begin the narration. In this introduction, a view of the building from the outside is shown and then the main characters appear to the sound of a catchy musical rhythm. This opening fragment has a double purpose: On the one hand, to give credit to the actors who represent the characters and on the other hand, to present them on their respective floors. In this way, there is a general perspective (the block) that in a close-up gives rise to other more individualized viewpoints of cells that look like floors and are divided by strips that represent walls, evoking the graphic tradition of comic strips. In the development of the fiction, this structure is also evident in the elements of the shots from the horizontal or vertical panning, as appropriate. This structure is clearly directly indebted to the aforementioned cartoons by Bertall, Xauradó, Vázquez Gallego, and Ibáñez.

As in the previous comics we have discussed, the script for La que se avecina is set in a specific block in a fictitious street in Madrid: Desengaño 21. The building has three floors above the reception area, the entrance, and a video club. Its façade functions as the framework in which the plot of the sitcom unfolds, where two factors are essential: the physical proximity of the dwellings and its characters (inhabitants and visitors). As expected, the latter are highly divergent and contrast with each other: Some gossipy old ladies, a gay couple, a separated, promiscuous father, a family that is conventional only in appearance, some unruly single women and a young recently married couple. It is, in any case, a structure that is obviously related to its own architectural configuration—which, at a characterological level, has no protagonists, but rather is posed as a choir. This circumstance, in turn, facilitates the hiring and firing of actors for each season, and favors contracting contingencies that allow wide flexibility in the script.

The plot is conceived for a particular configuration of human types, as Balzac would say, who inhabit each dwelling. In a way, these human types refer to what Robertson Wojcik calls the apartment plot, which designates a space that arises from the opposition of the house as a private, family, independent unit as the key signifier of urban life after the American post-war period—until its zenith in the mid-1970s. However, the apartment plot refers to a block or group of houses that imply a different notion of units, whether they are owned or rental units, with multiple dwellings in a single location of subdivided houses [23]. Once again it is necessary to emphasize the aforementioned physical proximity as decisive in the adventures that lend themselves to humor or satire.

It has already been mentioned that, in diegetic terms, proximity to neighbors has consequences. To begin with, the secrecy that is so typical of intimacy is lost, and in this sense, Aquí no hay quien viva and La que se avecina can be thought of as a caricature of the panorama proposed by Pierre Nora: “In large building complexes, constructed with concrete and without any frills after World War II, family secrets can hardly be kept” ([24], p. 162). In these properties, the acoustics of the interior patios favor the dissemination of speech more than actual communication: commentaries and gossip among the neighbors in what is known as “Radio Patio”. This constitutes another sample of a space for socialization integrated into individual dwellings, similar to the neighborly interaction of other residencies, such as Monsieur Hulot’s in Mon oncle (1957) by Jacques Tati; in order to access his own home, Monsieur Hulot must travel through an intricate path that forces him to socialize with his neighbors.

Lastly, we still have not mentioned that in the structural composition of the building there is a final level which, in the initial external image, corresponds rather to two upper spaces that timidly appear on its sides: the attic.¹ This is not an innocent place: Traditionally it is the space where old objects of little use are destined, as a metaphor of those who are excluded from the dynamic core. It is the same sense that the literary theorists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose from a feminist orientation in the title of their well-known book [25]. But it does not always have a negative scope: Finding oneself in a corner (the upper one) becomes a way, according to Bachelard, of filling the void with human life ([26], p. 130), of managing to dominate the entire property with its organic presence. And incidentally, it also contrasts radically with another symbolic sense of that same location: the luxurious penthouse of the playboy James Bond, although in this case it is a room linked to the heights that are metaphorically associated with his socioeconomic condition.

9. Television homes: from spectacle to surveillance

The metafiction of spectacular reception as posed in Rear Window and in graphic cartoons expands to another representation of the domestic space in a different medium—television—as of the emergence of the genres that arose from the macro-genre of the infoshow. This category is reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s types, which integrate news and fiction ([27], p. 151) in what he called neotelevision. Infoshows contained the reality shows (1999) that would change television in the twenty-first century.

Although there were isolated precursors in the 70s and later, the quintessential space is the Dutch program Big Brother (Endemol TV) (Figure 7) which had editions all over the world and changed the way we consume television. It was a contest in which, in contrast to what happened in previous television programming—paleotelevision for Eco—the anonymous contestants who appeared went on to became famous—and television became a medium ruled by “nobodies,” according to Prado et al. ([28], p. 201). In fact, the process began earlier, in the massive open call which attracted thousands of young people, and during the show’s broadcast in the daily domestic life of a house equipped with cameras and microphones that recorded uninterruptedly for a period of 24 hours during approximately three by parallel transmissions, such as weekly galas, daily summaries, and talk shows on the same channel where the show was discussed, which all ended up referring to the essence of neo-television as pointed out by Eco: self-referentiality [27].

Figure 7.

One of Big Brother’s promotional logos.

In the non-visible process of election, the criterion was the coming together of contrasting personalities conducive to clashes—as in the case of comics and sitcoms such as Aquí no hay quien viva. Then, different situations were provoked, such as the successive expulsions that resulted from the contestant’s own “nominations” and the audience’s weekly votes (an audience who was encouraged to identify with their favorite) until the show ended with the last broadcast. In short, we were faced with an exasperated domestic daily life based on a spectacle that, from the beginning, reached the character of a media event.³

The house—or the set built as a house—that temporarily accommodated the contestants was typical of a globalized civilization (with a sybaritic equipment of lubricious pleasures: swimming pool, jacuzzi, sauna, the suite). However, not everything was so routine and the experience, like the house, was actually a simulation [29] not so much due to the presence of technical equipment as because of its isolation: the contestants could not leave the house, there was an imposed restriction on any visits from family or friends, as well as on any printed, electronic or digital media, and devices, contrary to what has become inevitable in our current domesticity. Such a panorama contributed to the constitution of a hyper-communicated society of the twenty-first century based on the spectacle of human miseries. The intimacy of everyday life typical of a reality show has no other way to present itself than through its own simulation ([30], p. 54) because that is what used to be the object of the spectacle. And the space that undoubtedly best represents this spirit was the room paradoxically called the confessional, where contestants were called to explain their sentimentality before a faceless voice that questioned them.

From there an infinite variety of possibilities is gestated for television shows that play with the illusion of reality. Location begins to acquire a decisive role as receptacle for goods and services offered as merchandise by an enthusiastic consumer society, where one’s dwelling is shaped as a mimetic objectification of its owner. Examples abound: Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2000–2012) about a team of designers who spend a week reconstructing a demolished home; House Hunters (1999–) about the process of moving and buying a house; Brothers (2011–2015) about two brothers who help families find and repair the house they want; Love It or List It (2008–) in which the presenters remodel a house the owners are not comfortable with. Although these programs are made in the United States or Canada, other countries have developed their own, such as La casa de tu vida (2004–2007) in Spain or La casa (2016) in Chile, which deals with the construction of a home that in the end it will be the prize for one of the participating couples. The house, then, acquires a leading role along with the contestants.

And as can be directly inferred from foundational reality—in the present day and not only on television—the idea of surveillance is inseparable from transparency. This notion was already present in the block of flats glimpsed by the protagonist of Rear Window, where each neighbor dwells in his own cell, like a prisoner, similar to a panoptic structure as proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century [31]. But Jeff is not a jailer and merely contemplates other people’s intimacies as a recreational act to avoid the boredom of passivity. Clearly, the initial entertainment given by this visual panorama transforms into an obsession for the character who Hitchcock and his screenwriter, John Michael Hayes, charged with high psychological complexity. The protagonist’s gaze holds a nuance of spectacle that will later lead to surveillance.

Byung-Chul Han argues that in modern Western society surveillance is encouraged as an aspiration ([32], p. 67), in contrast to the separation between public and private that still held sway in the eighteenth century. For Juan Martín Prada, surveillance cameras, with their ways of seeing and influencing the behavior of those who are observed, have assumed a palpable role in creative practices for decades, producing a way of working that could be called “surveillance camera aesthetics” ([33], p. 152). The articulation between spectacle and intimate life has been developing since the emergence of generalist television channels in the early nineteenth century. And it can also be appreciated in cinema, as in Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), where the screen appears divided into four, showing continuous shots and simultaneous action converging, as Prada points out, in a visual experience evocative of the monitoring of various characters in a security camera guardhouse ([33], p. 152). As in these places, the viewer finds himself, like Bentham’s watchman, in a position of power associated with surveillance, in one case by intervening (voting) and in the other, by changing the channel.

In Big Brother, the contestant who manages to stay until the last day is the winner, but like the rest of contenders, he or she must do everything possible to avoid being evicted—in a kind of perverse anticipation of the reality brought about by the global economic crisis (2008–2014). This involved cooperating, cleaning, consoling, crying, lying, manipulating, offending: a circumstance that metaphorizes the human condition that is extrapolated to one of the basic needs of citizenship: the right to decent housing, although in this case because it is mediated by spectacle, the dignity factor is the first to be lost.

10. Conclusions

The topos of the representation of domestic interiors as it is appreciated in the narrative and visual arts of today has a base that can be traced back to the seventeenth century on two sides: one of them is visual, the painting of the Netherlands. At the time of its appearance, it implied a break with the post-Renaissance tradition by taking distance from the source of creation linked to history, religion, that is, to supranational issues, in order to deal with what concerns the individual, the private, the domestic, in short, the mundane. Almost at the same time but in another geographical context in the same continent, a fantastic character associated with the phenomenon of scrutinizing the daily lives of the inhabitants of urban areas appeared in popular folklore and later in literature. In the nineteenth century, this interest was resumed in the costumbrismo literary movement, which put the accent on meticulous, detailed and precise description. It is a form of constant vision, beyond cultural and historical differences, on the traditions that stand at the very foundation of creation.

In the development of representation, this topos has gone through phases that incorporate variables that entail the suspension of disbelief with which an attempt is made to identify the viewer in narration: from a devil who is more mischievous than evil and has the ability to fly over and raise roofs, to the obsessive photographer who makes use of his resources, and even including the most recent manifestation in television series: the elimination of the fourth wall—specifically notable in sitcoms like I Love Lucy (1951–1057), The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–2019) and even in the introduction of The Simpsons (20th Television, 1989–), where the characters appear in front of a location (a wall, a television) that represents the camera. This then gives way to the representation of domestic daily life in different media, forms, genres, characters. The present work has tried to demonstrate strategies of visualization of domestic interiors through history until reaching an approach in which the private is transformed by virtue of public entertainment and, ultimately, by the spectacle. However, it does not end there, since in recent times this process entails the recreation of privacy, anonymity, depersonalization, and lately a new manifestation: constant vigilance over the subjects under observation. It is the reason why Rear Window was so disturbing: because identification with Jeff was equal to not just looking, but being looked at by the killer.

In short, due to its transdisciplinary nature that includes narrative fiction, architecture, interior design, the stories that are part of this topos of voyeurism around a house, tend to favor anonymous, every-day, domestic stories. In a certain sense, some practices, such as the comic strip, insinuated a new return to costumbrismo which also allows a rearticulation that goes beyond the descriptive model of the topos—subjected to the limitations of picturesqueness—from which it opens to other spaces, such as those that derive in forms like melodrama in contemporary practice, with variants that imply complex relationships of bourgeois life, not always equivalent to boredom.

Translation by Carla Ros.