Doubled brothers: misfitted male bodies and minoritized Basque culture in Handia (2017)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the critically acclaimed Basque-language period drama Handia (The Giant, 2017), directed by Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño. Handia, which won 10 Goyas, is the most viewed Basque film in history. Based on the true story of Miguel Joaquín Eleizegui Arteaga (1818–1861), a man with acromegaly who traveled throughout Spain and Europe as a freak show attraction, Handia centers on the complicated relationship between brothers Joaquín (the titular “giant”) and Martín, who are raised in a farmhouse near the tiny Gipuzkoan village of Altzo. Handia documents the brothers’ struggle to come to terms with the liberal victory in the First Carlist War and the overturning of the Ancien Régime. Martín seeks to escape the agrarian lifestyle of his upbringing, while Joaquín longs to remain on the homestead. I interpret the brothers as doubles who narratively and visually separate and merge throughout the film. As Martín strives to blend into urban settings by adopting the trappings of the European bourgeois man, the reluctant Joaquín’s body grows increasingly large, peculiar and conspicuous. Through the lenses of disability and gender theory, I contend that Joaquín’s nonstandard body represents an othered, agrarian Basque culture facing extinction within a modernizing Europe, and that the resolution of the conflict between Martín and Joaquín models a minority culture’s survival by embracing change without erasing its essential difference. To do this, I will illustrate how the portrayal of fitting and misfitting bodies in Handia articulates an alternative way of being characterized by interdependency, vulnerability, non-heteronormativity and stubborn resistance to homogenizing external forces. I conclude that Handia exemplifies how the Basques may continually redefine themselves – through strategic misfitting – in a way that merges the dichotomies of change and tradition, universality and particularity and wanderlust and rootedness.