The Super “Super”

“El Super”, a movie shot in 1979 (in Spanish with English subtitles), depicts the struggles of a Cuban immigrant working as a building superintendent during a frigid New York City winter. The very words in the title of the movie suggest part of the subject matter, that is, the adaptation - and lack thereof - of immigrants to North American culture. For the word super itself is an English word, a transliteration imported into the Spanish language without modification. Likewise, the protagonist has been imported from Cuba without modification, at least initially. The title also seems ironic, since the word super connotes being in charge or in control of something, as in to supervise or superintend something or someone. The movie makes it clear, however, that the events in “El super's” life are beyond his control, at least initially. In this review I will argue that the movie tells the story of how “El super” grapples with the internal forces unleashed by his immigration and his subsequent experiences in the New World.

In the comical opening scene of the movie, we see Roberto, the super, being woken up early on a Sunday morning by tenants banging on their water pipes, threatening him, and demanding that he turn the boiler on so they can have hot water. He realizes that he forgot to turn the boiler on the previous evening, so he clambers out of bed, grumbling all the while about not being left in peace. In a funny reference to an old Cuban superstition (Eire, 2003), his wife tells him to cover his mouth to protect himself from the cold outside so he will not get sick as he exits the apartment door. He walks from his basement apartment to the furnace, opens its access door, and as he does this recoils from its heat and intensity. So, already at the movie's inception, certain themes in the super's personality are on display - a feared intensity and defenses against it, such as avoidance and repression, manifest in his forgetting to turn the boiler on the previous night. Th