Introduction

After so many years of international applause for Barcelona's monumental and spectacular built environment, at long last Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (2010) shows, as this essay explores, not a dystopic future Barcelona but the dark underbelly of the Barcelona that already exists. Opposed to the city's traditional casting as a beautiful backdrop – as arguably represented in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – here we have not the acclaimed ‘model’ Barcelona but the ‘real’ Barcelona (in the sense of the term as employed by Slavoj Žižek, see the ‘Introduction’ in Kay 2003) – that is, the drab, grimy city full of labour inequality, the collusion of police with multinationals, the reality of sickness (cancer) and the lack of real possibilities for the immigrants who come from abroad hoping to make a better life for themselves and for their families. Just like this article's epigraph penned by Barcelona-based critical urban theorist Manuel Delgado Ruiz (1956–), the filmic image of the Catalan capital presented in Iñárritu's film calls attention to the distance between self-congratulatory discourses of Barcelona as the modern city por antonomasia on one side, and the injustices faced by so many of its urbanites on the other (Delgado 2007a: 17).