The Mexican romantic sex comedy: the emergence of Mexican middlebrow filmmaking in the 1990s

This chapter charts the rise of a new genre in Mexican cinema in the 1990s: the romantic sex comedy, a middlebrow cultural form that was born from changes in a national cinema culture that saw the development of the multiplex in Mexican cities, and the development of a new professional bourgeoisie working in new mediascapes. This, together with a funding landscape that was moving away from a state sponsored national arts cinema, resulted in more commercial forms of filmmaking that created a new cinema-going middle class. In the light of these social and cultural shifts, this chapter reinterprets Bourdieu’s notion of the middlebrow (culture moyenne) as a ‘second rate imitation of legitimate culture’ (1999: 323). It argues that what constitutes the middlebrow is not fixed, and can and has changed as the nature of the middle classes themselves changes, and the national context to which it is applied shifts.