Abstract
Infused with the sense that life and theater are only a heartbeat away from each other, Pedro Almodóvar’s films fully embody the melodramatic ethos. Almodóvar’s films have insistently made the point that the purely illusory medium of film is the director’s only recourse to representing the world and its emotive register—that which we may otherwise call reality. Melodrama understands reality theatrically, which is a way of saying that melodrama acknowledges that reality is inaccessible beyond the modes we have for representing it—for making reality’s representation visible and rendering that visibility legible. In Almodóvar’s films, a performance is often staged within the course of a given film, an element that the director uses to highlight his sense that performance is an integral part of every day life. Thus, taking a page from Douglas Sirk, and pushing it a little further, Almodóvar’s films overflow with the knowledge that life is to be found in its imitation. As many critics of the director’s work have noted, and Almodóvar himself has often acknowledged, he inherits his characteristic penchant for a subversive style of melodrama from directors such as Sirk, R. W. Fassbinder, and Luis Buñuel.1 At the same time, Almodóvar also pays homage to a long tradition of on- and offscreen melodrama, including that of classical-era Hollywood. In doing so, he has pioneered his own, idiosyncratic mode of melodrama, one that ranges from the painstaking attention to decor, which makes his films instantly recognizable, to the elaborate plots that intersect multiple stories, narrative twists, and characters’ fates.
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Notes
Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume I) (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 142–143.
Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI, 1994): 7.
One of the earliest collections of essays to establish this line of inquiry was Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, eds. Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). Also Marsha Kinder’s analysis of Almodóvar’s films in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991): 6.
See, as just some examples, Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004)
Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)
]Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008).
Here, one might also consider the centrality more recently ascribed to the concept of immunity in historical and/or philosophical accounts of the sociopolitical constitution of the modern body and the work of establishing (a national) community. See Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991)
Roberto Esposito, “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,” trans. Zakiya Hanafi, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.3 (2013): 83–90.
On melodrama as “pressuring” the visual field for meaning, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
Here, I echo a construction that Stanley Cavell uses in relation to the women of classical Hollywood melodrama, particularly Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, especially given her penchant toward theatricality: “She is and is not what she is. Here is the pivotal irony in this member [Now, Voyager] of a genre of irony. It is true that she is the fat lady, not merely was true when she was in fact fat. And it is false that she is the fat lady, and was false when she was in fact fat, because she was always, for example, an ugly duckling, that is, unrecognized” (134, emphases in original). I would claim that Talk to Her and The Skin I Live In are films that share the generic and philosophical bent that Cavell has coined and delimited as the “unknown woman” melodrama (in the case of Talk to Her, I would claim Benigno rather than Alicia fits this mold, or at the very least that the characters are meant to embody opposite sides of the same coin). This not a claim that I can develop here beyond noting that echoes of Cavell’s formulation are relevant to Almodóvar’s work. Part of the link, or the inheritance played out in Almodóvar’s films from this period of the Hollywood melodrama, has to do with Cavell’s sense that the women of such melodramas judge the world as second-rate (127). In that judgment, the demand and possibility for a world that would actually accommodate their desire is opened and declared. At the end of Talk to Her, Alicia meets Marco, a man well acquainted with her history and the realm of sadness, while Vicente-as-Vera at the end of The Skin I Live In, for all the harrowing violence he has had to endure, just might get the girl he had desired by film’s end (Cristina, a lesbian, who had earlier rejected his advances). See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Agamben cites the redefinition of the comatose state after the advent of life support technology in the 1960s as an example for how the distinction between life and death blurred, not only in medical terms but also in legal ones. He also notes how the necessity to classify comatose patients was informed by the fact that they were the ideal patients for the harvesting of transplant organs right at the time when the technology was being developed and refined. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998): 160–165.
Marsha Kinder, “Reinventing the Motherland: Almodóvar’s Brain-Dead Trilogy,,” Film Quarterly 58.2 (Winter 2004): 11.
See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 61.
See Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 32
Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 70.
See, in particular, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) who, expanding Anderson’s concept, claims that “the work of the imagination [is] a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity” (3).
Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 52.
On Alicia as sleeping beauty, see Adriana Novoa, “Whose Talk Is It? Almodóvar and the Fairy Tale in Talkto Her,” Marvels and Tales 19.2 (2005): 224–248.
On prosthetic memory’s capacity to activate empathy for the historical experience of others, see Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
See Kakoudaki, “Intimate Strangers;” Kinder, “Reinventing the Motherland;” and Novoa, “Whose Talk Is It?”; also, Kevin Ohi, “Voyeurism and Annunciation in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” Criticism 51.4 (Fall 2010): 521–557; Mark Allinson, “Mimeses and Diegisis: Almodóvar and the Limits of Melodrama,” All about Almodóvar, 141–165
Carla Marcantonio, “Undoing Performance: The Mute Female Body and Narrative Dispossession in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17.1 (2007): 1–18.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, in Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 20.
For an overview of how this issue has reemerged in the face of Spain’s first attempt to employ a transitional measure that addresses the crimes against humanity committed during Franco’s regime, see Peter Burbidge, “Waking the Dead of the Spanish Civil War: Judge Baltasar Garzón and the Spanish Law of Historical Memory,,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 9 (2011): 753–781.
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© 2015 Carla Marcantonio
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Marcantonio, C. (2015). Biopolitical Embodiments: Talk to Her and The Skin I Live In. In: Global Melodrama. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528193_2
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