Reconsidering matricide in Spanish Cinema of the transition: Furtivos [Poachers]

This article examines the issue of matricide in Spanish cinema of the transition. In contrast to Marsha Kinder's reading, whereby matricide is a substitute for an impossible patricide, my study proceeds from the perspective of the Orestian myth. The result is to shift the terms from parricide, the killing of a parent, to matricide, the killing of the female parent. Matricide is then perceived as a concept not reducible to the logic of the killing of the father. My readings do not entirely abstract the Oedipal, informed as they are by Kristeva's notion of the abject and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather, the Orestian myth serves as a structural constellation alongside Oedipus, in Amber Jacobs' words, that foregrounds the mother as subject and allows for a reading against the grain.