So we’re not the only ones to be hosting multi-episode train wrecks. Environmental degradation in La Mancha seems to be based on the same combination of greed, marketing savvy(!), corruption and complete lack of consideration for the consequences of unfettered development that we’ve grown to love, plus a little decentralized policy-making mixed in for good measure. In Almodovar’s Volver, the slow turn of the windmills was an easy metaphor toiling in the background that formed the foreground pastiche of return, of coming back. What we keep coming back to again and again is how progress-as-slash-and-burn-development does not work, financially and morally bankrupts a society while laying waste to the patrimony of a country’s heritage. Turn right at “A new way to live!” and before long what you’re left with is a battalion of hideous pre-fab swimming pools standing at attention. Debate over whether some minor aspects of megalithic construction projects are green or not is a joke. They’re not. At. all.
Waiting for any of this to sink in seems redundant.