Spain, for Berger, stretches on the rack, suspended between modernity and the medieval, locked in an endless cycle of poverty and disinvestment. The Spanish civil war was a doomed tragedy for Berger precisely because it took place in a society where proletarian (and capitalist!) classes hadn't formed, let alone proletarian class consciousness and solidarity.

I returned to this image of Spain on "the terrible equilibrium of the rack" over and over as I watched The Devil's Backbone, a film that's instantly become my favorite Guillermo Del Toro work. It's a ghost story that features a couple of actual specters, and is not shy at all about positioning its living characters as a kind of walking dead. The revolution is doomed, in its last days, and its remnants are old poets, maimed caretakers, and orphaned children.