Sexual and cinematic commodities: Bigas Luna’s Chambermaid ‘and’ the Titanic

Bigas Luna’s career as graphic designer and film-maker embodies Andy Warhol’s credo of the interchangeability of art and commerce, most famously depicted in his comic masterpiece Jamón, jamón (1992). Less frequently noted by commentators are the strategies he uses to critique the way consumerist culture has fetishized art as a mere commodity. This theme achieves a new narrative centrality in La Femme de Chambre du Titanic/La camarera del Titanic/The Chambermaid of the Titanic (1997). His version of the story of the ill-fated ocean liner, embodied in a postcardsized photograph, becomes the object of multiple commercial and erotic exchanges between the characters and their audience. Bigas’s interest here is twofold: to underscore the erotic impulse in his audiences; to combine that impulse with a parody of Hollywood’s obsession with a cinema of spectacle. In the film’s design, the commodification of desire embodied in the ship mirrors the commodification of the audience’s desire in cinema.