What about ‘Self

“I wish men could eat our pussy as well as they eat our coconuts.” “Which do you think is more important: that women come home safely and there are no rapes or that there is a universal basic income?” “Fucking is like going to mass, you know what’s going to happen.” In Self defense, the phrases of its interpreters function as tweets destined to go viral. And its chapters, without specific footage or a traditional story arc, look like we’re doing jump-starts. scroll with their lives. If 2022 has been the year in which it was agreed that “If the voice of Twitter exists, it is that of an anxious and hot young woman”, it is not surprising that the first Spanish autofiction that looks like we look at the internet (in fragments and without order or concert) looks out, precisely, at the universe of two twenty-somethings who believe they are taking advantage of the rest.

After the commotion generated by the trailer and the first five chapters of the new Filmin series, the second batch of the production that most polarizes the digital conversation will premiere on December 6. With Self defenseas with the trending topics, or one is very in favor or very against. Created and written by six hands by the playwright and actress Berta Prieto, the artist Belén Barenys (Meme) and the manager Miguel Angel Blancain this 10-episode production that takes place in Barcelona, ​​Prieto and Barenys play themselves leading their lives to the point of parody and vital excess, anxious to be able to feel something, putting on the table a good part of the debates that go through us and that we still don’t know how to face.

From anxiety to abuse

Between the uncomfortable humor, the absurd and the most self-indulgent psychoanalysis, the series that takes place in Barcelona has been sold as “a mixture of Girls with the Kids by Harmony Korine. In the first five episodes of her she has discussed sexual consent (feel wanted), the mental health crisis (Anxietywhere Eloy Fernández Porta makes a cameo as a master chemist of microdoses), the constant need to represent oneself and differentiate oneself in this era (be a conceptwhich was born from a TikTok meme), the perversion of therapeutic language (shine bright) or what we women do with that desire that we no longer know if it pleases us or is built to conform to the gaze of others (Fancy).

In this second round, the bar is no lower: here the myth of the poor imbecile is put to the test and why women are taught to please others (hate men), this desire for pleasure and instant gratification is reinforced before facing reality itself (Back home Y looking after) or shame, silence, and hypocrisy are exhibited in the face of the culture of abuse in Spanish cinema (Collective acts). An episode inspired by real cases and in which phrases such as “if I were Penélope Cruz I could report abuse, but I am a young and precarious actress, I am cannon fodder for abusers”, “we can make a fan for the red carpet” are heard and put on a little bow for women, but all this, what good is it? or “I don’t know if I want to be an actress or a singer or whatever, but what I do know is that I don’t want to have to suck anyone’s dick to find out.”

And everything has been cooked with eloquent dialogues that do not deny self-parody or irritate the viewer, where women allow themselves and embrace the possibility of being cynical and cruel, feeling the smartest of the game. Plots that function as capsules with their own narrative and aesthetics, sometimes overexposed and dirty to embrace chaos, just as their protagonists long for.

Neither traumatized nor saints

“I really like to see people do what they want. Like when you go to a concert and see people who sing terrible, but they are having a great time. There is no mistake there because it is something genuine. This is about screwing up, about not demonizing sex or drugs, about being able to be wrong”, defends Berta Prieto about the essence of this project in a three-way talk, accompanied by the rest of the creators.

There they clarify that the series was born after the director of Magaluf Ghost Town (2021) and singer of Manos de Topo, Miguel Ángel Blanca, saw a clip of Prieto and Barenys’ vacations on Instagram and contacted them to develop a project. and what started as mamarrachas I end up being Self defense, where Filmin has given the footage complete freedom: here there is raw, unchoreographed sex, hard-on penises in close-up or women urinating in the street facing the camera. Something difficult to fit into another platform and unthinkable on public television.

The objective, the creators agree, is to bet on plots in which women are not tied to trauma in order to tell themselves. “It seems that I only have the right to explain my story if something very strong has happened to me. If I am very poor, or if I have been raped, or if I had a horrible childhood. It gives the impression that only if I have gone through this penance as a woman, I will be able to tell my story and that will be valid”, Prieto highlights about the reason for the evasive and self-congratulatory attitude of her characters. “An uncle does not have to tell his traumas, he does not have to ask for this permission to tell the first person about him. Why is it more valid to show my point of view according to the scale of how good or bad I have been through in my life? ”, He adds.

Neither traumatized nor saints. In Self defense women claim their right to be executioners and not just victims of patriarchy. “In the series we are bastards and we are bad people, and that is something that is not usually seen in female characters,” says Barenys. “Here there is a lot of social criticism, but we place ourselves as the subject of that criticism, showing our fucking shit,” adds Prieto. Something that Blanca confirms: “Belén and Berta have been very brave. Normally, people don’t want to expose their shit. Here everyone makes their films and builds their characters to show the world what they have learned from life and how empathetic they are, but in reality no one exposes themselves and they have done it, ”she defends.

the spiritual dregs

On the religious residue that accompanies the series (the character of Belén, who comes from a Christian upbringing in the Teresianas of Barcelona, ​​is the one who talks about it the most in the first round and in the second a four-minute episode is raised that it is a Gospel taught by both of them), Blanca assures that the search for spirituality was one of the key themes when facing the edition. “I am from the generation that kills all religious issues, but I have realized that spirituality is in fashion. I don’t know if it is because the miracle of technology has been normalized or if it is returning to another type of more classical spirituality, but it has returned not only on a spiritual level, but also on an aesthetic one”.

For Barenys, the idea is to show the influence of Christianity, but without claiming it: “I have had a very Christian upbringing, both at home and at my school, it was my environment, that has led me to want to do the opposite, to define myself in opposition to that. But neither deny that it is part of me, ”he points out. And Prieto, who did not go to a religious school and does not feel that it influenced her, is the most emphatic in this regard: “This Christian return scares me a little, now it seems that it is modern to be religious. That has a lot to do with a rather right-wing and retrograde thinking. We have overcome too many things to have to go back there. We women do not deserve the feeling of guilt, ”she says.

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