The films of Pedro Almodóvar have become synonymous with what Judith Butler describes as ‘subversive bodily acts.’[1] For Butler, there is no ‘true’ gender identity, but rather naturalised notions of ‘gender’ based upon the idealisation of the reproductive heterosexual. ‘Subversive bodily acts’ are those which disrupt the culturally constructed categories of gender and sexuality and occasion their resignification beyond the binary of male and female.[2] Such destruction of categories defines Almodovar’s work. His films not only foreground those who are marginalised by the male/female binary, such as women, homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals, but they also rupture the relationship between sex and gender upon which this binary is based. I will argue that Almodóvar’s films expose the mechanisms of gender construction by inverting patriarchal filmic conventions. Furthermore, I will suggest that Almodóvar’s films subvert the binary of male and female by questioning the legitimacy of monolithic notions of masculinity and femininity. Finally, I will argue that Almodóvar’s films support Butler’s assertion that gender is ‘performatively constituted.’[3] Unlike conventional ‘leading-ladies,’ I will argue, Almodóvar’s ‘women’ self-consciously perform their identities. As one critic put it, “Almodóvar’s women take gender between their teeth and chew it to a pulp.”[4]
Almodóvar’s inversion of patriarchal filmic conventions draws attention to the mechanisms of gender construction which work to naturalise the binary of male and female. This is particularly evident in his fourth feature ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, in which he consciously subverts what Laura Mulvey describes as ‘the male gaze.’ For Mulvey, narrative cinema simultaneously offers scopophilic and narcissistic pleasure. Scopophilic pleasure involves seeing others as objects of sexual stimulation, while narcissistic pleasure arises from identification with the ‘ideal ego’ that appears on the screen.[5] “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” she argues, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.”[6] Traditional narrative cinema thus typically focuses on a male protagonist and assumes a male spectator. According to Mulvey, such films objectify women on two levels: as an “erotic object for the characters within the screen story and as an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium.”[7] Although Mulvey’s theory is less applicable to modern cinema, in which ‘the gaze’ is adopted by both male and female subjects, her essay, which was originally published in 1975, exposed the mechanisms of gender construction in contemporary film practice. Almodóvar’s early films Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), Laberinto de pasiones (1983) and Entre tinieblas (1983) undermine the male spectators’ narcissistic pleasure; that is, his ability to identify with the ‘ideal ego,’ by portraying strong female protagonists. However, it is the Spanish directors’ first international success, ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? that most clearly subverts ‘the male gaze.’
The opening sequence of ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, which was released in 1984, immediately draws attention to itself as a cinematic construction. The camera swoops into a Madrid square, in which a disheveled woman is shown navigating her way through a group of filmmakers, who are busily working on location. The action unfolds against a soundtrack which Kathleen Vernon has described as reminiscent of the movie scores written by Nino Rota for Italian neorealist films.[8] The films opening credits further create an awareness of the filmic frame, as brightly coloured shots of the film’s title and credits are juxtaposed with images of the unfolding narrative. The camera follows the woman (Gloria), played by Almodóvar’s early muse, Carmen Maura, as she enters a karate studio and goes about her chores as a cleaning woman. Shots of Gloria scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees are juxtaposed almost comically with shots of men in monk-like robes practicing the martial art of kendo, grunting as they strike one another with large sticks. These cinematic caricatures of masculinity and femininity not only parody patriarchal filmic conventions, but also enhance the irony of the next scene in which Almodóvar inverts ‘the male gaze.’
When the studio empties after the kendo class, Gloria is shown finishing her work in a mirrored dressing room. Gloria, who is in the foreground, sees a naked man step into the shower stall just beyond her. She shamelessly stares at the man’s naked body, when he notices her presence and beckons her into the shower. Gloria and the man then attempt to have sex, but he cannot maintain an erection and Gloria leaves the stall dissatisfied, acting out her frustration by picking up one of the kendo sticks and striking furiously into the air. This sequence is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, the man is framed as the object of sexual stimulation, while Gloria is the spectator. Gloria assumes ‘the gaze’ and in contrast to patriarchal filmic convention, remains fully clothed throughout the scene, while the man is naked and vulnerable. Although she is the spectator, there is no ‘ideal ego’ presented here because no pleasure arises from the audience’s identification with the discontented Gloria. ‘The gaze’ thus collapses onto itself, revealing the active/passive binary to be not only a cultural construct, but also a farce.
The film also parodies cinematic constructions of female passivity. In ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, Gloria’s husband Antonio treats her as a passive sex object. Significantly, Gloria’s economic dependence on her husband underpins her passivity. Antonio finds the idea of his wife earning a living repugnant, yet refuses to give her money for basic requirements such as food and their son’s dental care. Antonio is framed as not only selfish, but delusional, as he is obsessed with his short stint as a chauffeur for the renowned German singer Ingrid Muller. Antonio, who helped Muller forge a series of letters supposedly written by Adolph Hitler, longs for his days in Berlin and rather bizarrely sings German opera as he drives around in his taxi. His irrationality is laughable as he simultaneously complains about not having wine to drink with his meal, while railing against the inappropriateness of Gloria’s work as a cleaner. When Antonio demands that Gloria have sex with him, she derives no pleasure from the act but it allows her to acquire the money she needs. Images of this loveless act are juxtaposed with shots of Gloria’s son and mother-in-law watching a video clip on television, in which Almodóvar appears lip-synching to an Andalusian pop song called La Bien Paga – the well-paid woman.[9] Paul Julian Smith[10] and Susan Martin-Marques[11] have both suggested that this sequence draws a parallel between prostitution and marriage. According to Smith, “Just as the kisses of the woman in the song have been bought ‘for a handful of coins,’ so Gloria has thrown away her life for the meagre income provided by her husband.”[12] Gloria’s subjugation to the altogether ridiculous character of Antonio thus points to the absurdity of cinematic and societal constructions of female passivity.
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) similarly couches female passivity in comic terms. Amidst a personal crisis, the protagonist Pepa (Carmen Maura) receives a frantic phone call from an old friend named Candela, who promptly shows up at Pepa’s doorstep the next morning. Candela reveals that she is on the run from the police as she has discovered that a man she recently shared a brief romance with is a Shiite terrorist involved in a plot to hijack a plane en route to Stockholm. Candela later explains her predicament to Carlos, the son of Pepa’s lover, in terms that parody female passivity. Candela melodramatically claims to have been victimised by ‘the Arab world.’ “Many men have taken advantage of me,” she says, “I have always realised it, but only later.” Ludicrously comparing her terrorist beau with the painfully shy Carlos, played by a scrawny and bespectacled Antonio Banderas, Candela asks, “Why are you men the way you are?” Candela’s exaggeration of her vulnerability to ‘the Arab world’ and men in general similarly highlights the absurdity of constructions of female passivity and points, more broadly, to gender as a cultural construct.
Almodóvar’s films problematise the binary of male and female by questioning the legitimacy of monolithic notions of masculinity and femininity. As Vernon has suggested, although Almodóvar’s films foreground women, they stand in stark contrast to Hollywood’s ‘women’s pictures’ or ‘weepies,’ which were intended to cultivate female audiences through the portrayal of ‘women’s problems and specifically domestic issues.’[13] As Vernon has argued, ‘women’s pictures’ ‘serve up a de-eroticised image of the woman as victim, often as a mother or mental patient.’ Such portrayals ‘literally deflate the threat of female sexuality’ and ‘reduce women to images reassuring to the male viewer.’[14] Almodóvar’s films have quite a different trajectory. This is particularly evident in ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Todo sobre mi madre (1999), in which he inverts the mother/whore dichotomy that underpins conventional cinematic representations of women.[15] In ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? Gloria and her neighbour Cristal, who is a prostitute and aspiring actress, shift between the subjectivities of mother and whore. Although Gloria is married with two children and assumes the identity of ‘housewife’ in the film, the opening sequence shows her engaged in casual sex with a stranger. Gloria’s husband chastises her for spending time with Cristal because she is a prostitute, yet it is Cristal who feeds their young son one evening when Antonio eats all the food, including the scraps of ham intended for his son’s lunch the following day. Cristal, who Antonio frequently calls a ‘whore,’ thus assumes a motherly, nurturing role in a way that works against the dichotomy of mother and whore.
Similarly, in Todo sobre mi madre the mother-whore dichotomy is challenged through the characters of Manuela and Agrado. Having recently lost her young son in a car accident in Madrid, Manuela returns to Barcelona, where she reunites with her old friend Agrado, a transsexual prostitute. Although the women’s physical appearances correspond with their identities, they both assume the subjectivities of mother, as well as whore. At the beginning of the film, Manuela is shown to be a caring and attentive mother to her son Esteban. Interestingly, while they are eating dinner, she jokingly tells him to eat more food because he may need to ‘work the streets to keep her one day.’ When Esteban asks his mother if she would prostitute herself for him, she tells him that she has done just about everything else. To some extent, this conversation foreshadows the revelation that Esteban’s father, whom he has never met, is a transsexual prostitute. Manuela’s identity as a ‘mother’ thus moves away from traditional cinematic constructions. This is also evident when Manuela dresses as a prostitute to go with Agrado to a sex-workers’ shelter, where they seek employment outside of the sex industry. Manuela admits to one of the Sisters, “I’m not a whore despite how I’ve been treated sometimes.”[16] Manuela is obviously referring to Esteban’s father here and interestingly, as Mark Allinson has pointed out, ‘equates ‘whore’ with what is done to someone rather than what they do.’[17]
Manuela is also shown to be a supportive friend to Sister Rosa, who is suffering from a difficult pregnancy due to the fact that she is HIV positive and prone to hypertension. As we learn, Sister Rosa was impregnated by the same transsexual prostitute who fathered Esteban. This is an interesting subversion of the virgin/whore dichotomy, as Sister Rosa, who is played by an uncharacteristically demure Penelope Cruz, never reveals why she chose to break her vow of chastity with a transsexual prostitute whom she was helping withdraw from heroin. Agrado, who is also a transsexual prostitute, similarly surprises the audience as he/she reveals her maternal side. As Allinson points out, Agrado says that her role in life is to ‘make other people’s lives happier,’ which is in essence, the role of a mother. More importantly, when Agrado gives a young heroin-addicted actress a stern lecture about her drug abuse, she assumes a firm maternal voice. “You’ve got talent. Limited, but you’ve got it. And above all, a woman who loves you. And you trade it all for smack. You think it’s worth it? Well, it isn’t. It isn’t worth it.” In subverting the dichotomies of mother/whore and virgin/whore, Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre rejects the monolithic constructions of femininity found in traditional narrative cinema. The representations of women in ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Todo sobre mi madre thus point to femininity as a cultural construct, the effect of which is to rupture the relationship between sex and gender.
Having established that Almodóvar’s ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios and Todo sobre mi madre reject the binary of male and female, I would like to suggest that Almodóvar’s films support Judith Butler’s assertion that gender is ‘performatively constituted.’ In her influential work Gender Trouble, Butler argues that “gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts.”[18] Gender identity, she argues, is created through ‘sustained social performance,’ therefore “genders can neither be true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived.”[19] This notion of gender as a performance can be seen in several of Almodóvar’s films. In Tacones lejanos (1991), for example, the three central characters Becky, Rebecca and Manuel attend a drag show by an artist called Femme Letal, According to Butler, drag performances are ‘subversive bodily acts,’ in that they ‘subvert the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mock the notion of a true gender identity.’[20] This is certainly evident in the character of Femme Letal. At one point, Manuel asks Letal whether he is male or female, to which he replies that he can be ‘a woman or a man depending on the performance.’ Interestingly, like Esteban’s transsexual father in Todo sobre mi madre, Letal is heterosexual, which further subverts the ‘myth’ that sex, gender and sexuality exist in a single relationship to one another.
Manuela’s relationship with Lola, Esteban’s father in Todo sobre mi madre similarly ruptures the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, while highlighting gender as a performance. As Manuela explains to Sister Rosa, she met and married Lola in Argentina, her place of birth, before he became a transsexual. Lola spent some time working in Paris, before they were to reunite in Barcelona, but when Manuela arrived in Barcelona she learned that while in Paris, both her husband and Agrado had gotten breast implants. “Apart from the tits,” Manuela explains, “her husband hadn’t changed that much, so she accepted him the way he was.” Lamenting Lola’s controlling ways, she recalls wondering ‘how someone could be machista with such tits.’ Crucially, it is not Lola’s ambiguous gender that drives Manuela away, but rather his/her heroin abuse and attempts to control her. The fact that two beautiful heterosexual women, Manuela and Sister Rosa, chose to have sexual relationships with Lola points to the categorical relation of sex, gender and sexuality as a farce. These relationships are deviant because of Lola’s ambiguous gender, yet as Butler has suggested, gender is neither original nor derived, because in all forms, it is a cultural construct. Manuela and Sister Rosa thus desire Lola, regardless of his performance.
Almodóvar’s inversion of patriarchal filmic conventions draws attention to the mechanisms of gender construction which work to naturalise the binary of male and female. This is particularly evident in his fourth feature ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, in which he consciously subverts what Laura Mulvey describes as ‘the male gaze.’ For Mulvey, narrative cinema simultaneously offers scopophilic and narcissistic pleasure. Scopophilic pleasure involves seeing others as objects of sexual stimulation, while narcissistic pleasure arises from identification with the ‘ideal ego’ that appears on the screen.[5] “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” she argues, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.”[6] Traditional narrative cinema thus typically focuses on a male protagonist and assumes a male spectator. According to Mulvey, such films objectify women on two levels: as an “erotic object for the characters within the screen story and as an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium.”[7] Although Mulvey’s theory is less applicable to modern cinema, in which ‘the gaze’ is adopted by both male and female subjects, her essay, which was originally published in 1975, exposed the mechanisms of gender construction in contemporary film practice. Almodóvar’s early films Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), Laberinto de pasiones (1983) and Entre tinieblas (1983) undermine the male spectators’ narcissistic pleasure; that is, his ability to identify with the ‘ideal ego,’ by portraying strong female protagonists. However, it is the Spanish directors’ first international success, ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? that most clearly subverts ‘the male gaze.’
The opening sequence of ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, which was released in 1984, immediately draws attention to itself as a cinematic construction. The camera swoops into a Madrid square, in which a disheveled woman is shown navigating her way through a group of filmmakers, who are busily working on location. The action unfolds against a soundtrack which Kathleen Vernon has described as reminiscent of the movie scores written by Nino Rota for Italian neorealist films.[8] The films opening credits further create an awareness of the filmic frame, as brightly coloured shots of the film’s title and credits are juxtaposed with images of the unfolding narrative. The camera follows the woman (Gloria), played by Almodóvar’s early muse, Carmen Maura, as she enters a karate studio and goes about her chores as a cleaning woman. Shots of Gloria scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees are juxtaposed almost comically with shots of men in monk-like robes practicing the martial art of kendo, grunting as they strike one another with large sticks. These cinematic caricatures of masculinity and femininity not only parody patriarchal filmic conventions, but also enhance the irony of the next scene in which Almodóvar inverts ‘the male gaze.’
When the studio empties after the kendo class, Gloria is shown finishing her work in a mirrored dressing room. Gloria, who is in the foreground, sees a naked man step into the shower stall just beyond her. She shamelessly stares at the man’s naked body, when he notices her presence and beckons her into the shower. Gloria and the man then attempt to have sex, but he cannot maintain an erection and Gloria leaves the stall dissatisfied, acting out her frustration by picking up one of the kendo sticks and striking furiously into the air. This sequence is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, the man is framed as the object of sexual stimulation, while Gloria is the spectator. Gloria assumes ‘the gaze’ and in contrast to patriarchal filmic convention, remains fully clothed throughout the scene, while the man is naked and vulnerable. Although she is the spectator, there is no ‘ideal ego’ presented here because no pleasure arises from the audience’s identification with the discontented Gloria. ‘The gaze’ thus collapses onto itself, revealing the active/passive binary to be not only a cultural construct, but also a farce.
The film also parodies cinematic constructions of female passivity. In ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, Gloria’s husband Antonio treats her as a passive sex object. Significantly, Gloria’s economic dependence on her husband underpins her passivity. Antonio finds the idea of his wife earning a living repugnant, yet refuses to give her money for basic requirements such as food and their son’s dental care. Antonio is framed as not only selfish, but delusional, as he is obsessed with his short stint as a chauffeur for the renowned German singer Ingrid Muller. Antonio, who helped Muller forge a series of letters supposedly written by Adolph Hitler, longs for his days in Berlin and rather bizarrely sings German opera as he drives around in his taxi. His irrationality is laughable as he simultaneously complains about not having wine to drink with his meal, while railing against the inappropriateness of Gloria’s work as a cleaner. When Antonio demands that Gloria have sex with him, she derives no pleasure from the act but it allows her to acquire the money she needs. Images of this loveless act are juxtaposed with shots of Gloria’s son and mother-in-law watching a video clip on television, in which Almodóvar appears lip-synching to an Andalusian pop song called La Bien Paga – the well-paid woman.[9] Paul Julian Smith[10] and Susan Martin-Marques[11] have both suggested that this sequence draws a parallel between prostitution and marriage. According to Smith, “Just as the kisses of the woman in the song have been bought ‘for a handful of coins,’ so Gloria has thrown away her life for the meagre income provided by her husband.”[12] Gloria’s subjugation to the altogether ridiculous character of Antonio thus points to the absurdity of cinematic and societal constructions of female passivity.
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) similarly couches female passivity in comic terms. Amidst a personal crisis, the protagonist Pepa (Carmen Maura) receives a frantic phone call from an old friend named Candela, who promptly shows up at Pepa’s doorstep the next morning. Candela reveals that she is on the run from the police as she has discovered that a man she recently shared a brief romance with is a Shiite terrorist involved in a plot to hijack a plane en route to Stockholm. Candela later explains her predicament to Carlos, the son of Pepa’s lover, in terms that parody female passivity. Candela melodramatically claims to have been victimised by ‘the Arab world.’ “Many men have taken advantage of me,” she says, “I have always realised it, but only later.” Ludicrously comparing her terrorist beau with the painfully shy Carlos, played by a scrawny and bespectacled Antonio Banderas, Candela asks, “Why are you men the way you are?” Candela’s exaggeration of her vulnerability to ‘the Arab world’ and men in general similarly highlights the absurdity of constructions of female passivity and points, more broadly, to gender as a cultural construct.
Almodóvar’s films problematise the binary of male and female by questioning the legitimacy of monolithic notions of masculinity and femininity. As Vernon has suggested, although Almodóvar’s films foreground women, they stand in stark contrast to Hollywood’s ‘women’s pictures’ or ‘weepies,’ which were intended to cultivate female audiences through the portrayal of ‘women’s problems and specifically domestic issues.’[13] As Vernon has argued, ‘women’s pictures’ ‘serve up a de-eroticised image of the woman as victim, often as a mother or mental patient.’ Such portrayals ‘literally deflate the threat of female sexuality’ and ‘reduce women to images reassuring to the male viewer.’[14] Almodóvar’s films have quite a different trajectory. This is particularly evident in ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Todo sobre mi madre (1999), in which he inverts the mother/whore dichotomy that underpins conventional cinematic representations of women.[15] In ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? Gloria and her neighbour Cristal, who is a prostitute and aspiring actress, shift between the subjectivities of mother and whore. Although Gloria is married with two children and assumes the identity of ‘housewife’ in the film, the opening sequence shows her engaged in casual sex with a stranger. Gloria’s husband chastises her for spending time with Cristal because she is a prostitute, yet it is Cristal who feeds their young son one evening when Antonio eats all the food, including the scraps of ham intended for his son’s lunch the following day. Cristal, who Antonio frequently calls a ‘whore,’ thus assumes a motherly, nurturing role in a way that works against the dichotomy of mother and whore.
Similarly, in Todo sobre mi madre the mother-whore dichotomy is challenged through the characters of Manuela and Agrado. Having recently lost her young son in a car accident in Madrid, Manuela returns to Barcelona, where she reunites with her old friend Agrado, a transsexual prostitute. Although the women’s physical appearances correspond with their identities, they both assume the subjectivities of mother, as well as whore. At the beginning of the film, Manuela is shown to be a caring and attentive mother to her son Esteban. Interestingly, while they are eating dinner, she jokingly tells him to eat more food because he may need to ‘work the streets to keep her one day.’ When Esteban asks his mother if she would prostitute herself for him, she tells him that she has done just about everything else. To some extent, this conversation foreshadows the revelation that Esteban’s father, whom he has never met, is a transsexual prostitute. Manuela’s identity as a ‘mother’ thus moves away from traditional cinematic constructions. This is also evident when Manuela dresses as a prostitute to go with Agrado to a sex-workers’ shelter, where they seek employment outside of the sex industry. Manuela admits to one of the Sisters, “I’m not a whore despite how I’ve been treated sometimes.”[16] Manuela is obviously referring to Esteban’s father here and interestingly, as Mark Allinson has pointed out, ‘equates ‘whore’ with what is done to someone rather than what they do.’[17]
Manuela is also shown to be a supportive friend to Sister Rosa, who is suffering from a difficult pregnancy due to the fact that she is HIV positive and prone to hypertension. As we learn, Sister Rosa was impregnated by the same transsexual prostitute who fathered Esteban. This is an interesting subversion of the virgin/whore dichotomy, as Sister Rosa, who is played by an uncharacteristically demure Penelope Cruz, never reveals why she chose to break her vow of chastity with a transsexual prostitute whom she was helping withdraw from heroin. Agrado, who is also a transsexual prostitute, similarly surprises the audience as he/she reveals her maternal side. As Allinson points out, Agrado says that her role in life is to ‘make other people’s lives happier,’ which is in essence, the role of a mother. More importantly, when Agrado gives a young heroin-addicted actress a stern lecture about her drug abuse, she assumes a firm maternal voice. “You’ve got talent. Limited, but you’ve got it. And above all, a woman who loves you. And you trade it all for smack. You think it’s worth it? Well, it isn’t. It isn’t worth it.” In subverting the dichotomies of mother/whore and virgin/whore, Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre rejects the monolithic constructions of femininity found in traditional narrative cinema. The representations of women in ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Todo sobre mi madre thus point to femininity as a cultural construct, the effect of which is to rupture the relationship between sex and gender.
Having established that Almodóvar’s ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios and Todo sobre mi madre reject the binary of male and female, I would like to suggest that Almodóvar’s films support Judith Butler’s assertion that gender is ‘performatively constituted.’ In her influential work Gender Trouble, Butler argues that “gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts.”[18] Gender identity, she argues, is created through ‘sustained social performance,’ therefore “genders can neither be true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived.”[19] This notion of gender as a performance can be seen in several of Almodóvar’s films. In Tacones lejanos (1991), for example, the three central characters Becky, Rebecca and Manuel attend a drag show by an artist called Femme Letal, According to Butler, drag performances are ‘subversive bodily acts,’ in that they ‘subvert the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mock the notion of a true gender identity.’[20] This is certainly evident in the character of Femme Letal. At one point, Manuel asks Letal whether he is male or female, to which he replies that he can be ‘a woman or a man depending on the performance.’ Interestingly, like Esteban’s transsexual father in Todo sobre mi madre, Letal is heterosexual, which further subverts the ‘myth’ that sex, gender and sexuality exist in a single relationship to one another.
Manuela’s relationship with Lola, Esteban’s father in Todo sobre mi madre similarly ruptures the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, while highlighting gender as a performance. As Manuela explains to Sister Rosa, she met and married Lola in Argentina, her place of birth, before he became a transsexual. Lola spent some time working in Paris, before they were to reunite in Barcelona, but when Manuela arrived in Barcelona she learned that while in Paris, both her husband and Agrado had gotten breast implants. “Apart from the tits,” Manuela explains, “her husband hadn’t changed that much, so she accepted him the way he was.” Lamenting Lola’s controlling ways, she recalls wondering ‘how someone could be machista with such tits.’ Crucially, it is not Lola’s ambiguous gender that drives Manuela away, but rather his/her heroin abuse and attempts to control her. The fact that two beautiful heterosexual women, Manuela and Sister Rosa, chose to have sexual relationships with Lola points to the categorical relation of sex, gender and sexuality as a farce. These relationships are deviant because of Lola’s ambiguous gender, yet as Butler has suggested, gender is neither original nor derived, because in all forms, it is a cultural construct. Manuela and Sister Rosa thus desire Lola, regardless of his performance.
This notion of gender as a performance is however, most evident in Agrado’s monologue towards the end of the film. At this point, Agrado is working as an assistant to the aforementioned heroin-addicted actress (Nina) and her lover (Huma), who are both performing in a production of A streetcar named desire. Agrado is forced to entertain the crowd one evening after the performance is cancelled because Nina has overdosed on heroin. They call me Agrado, because all my life I have only ever wanted to make life agreeable for others. Besides being agreeable, I am very authentic. Look at this body: all custom made. Eyes eighty thousand (pesetas); nose two hundred…tits, two, because I am no monster, seventy each. Silicone: lips, forehead, cheekbones, hips, ass…It costs a lot to be authentic, Lady, and for these things, one shouldn’t be stingy, because one is more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are. As Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz eloquently observes, Agrado’s performance ‘offers no actors, no play and no theatrical mise-en-scene,’ but rather a “recognition of identity based on the instability of transition, of acceptance, of authenticity centered on reinvention, on ‘what you have dreamed of yourself.’[21]
The films of Pedro Almodóvar rupture the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality. As I have shown, films such as ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios invert patriarchal filmic conventions and parody cinematic constructions of femininity, in order to draw attention to the ‘constructedness’ of the male/female binary. In their representations of women Almodóvar’s ¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto? and Todo sobre mi madre reject monolithic notions of femininity, particularly in relation to the mother/whore and virgin/whore dichotomies. These films, I have argued, problematise the binary of male and female by drawing attention to the contradictions inherent in our culturally constructed notions of gender. Finally, I have suggested that Almodóvar’s films can be read in relation to Judith Butler’s influential thesis of gender as a ‘sustained cultural performance.’ This is most evident in his films Tacones lejanos and Todo sobre mi madre, in which those who are born male or female are equally able to perform the identity of ‘woman.’ Almodóvar’s ‘subersive bodily acts’ thus denaturalise ‘gender,’ revealing it to be a cinematic and societal construct. As Almodóvar said of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, “Theatre; it’s just theater.” [22]
[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp.101-180.
[2] Butler, Gender Trouble, p.31.
[3] Butler, Gender Trouble, p.179.
[4] Neva Chonin, ‘Auteur and provateur: all about Almodóvar’, San Francisco Chronicle (September 1 2006)p.1.
[5] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.’ Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Patricia Erens (ed.), (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.32.
[6] Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, p. 35.
[7] Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, p. 33.
[8] Kathleen M. Vernon, ‘Melodrama against Itself: Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘What have I done to deserve this?,’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No.3, (1993), p.30.
[9] Paul J. Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London, New York: Verso, 2000), p.54.
[10] Smith, Desire Unlimited, p.54.
[11] Susan Martin-Marques, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.31.
[12] Smith, Desire Unlimited, p.54.
[13] Vernon, ‘Melodrama against itself,’ p.32.
[14] Vernon, ‘Melodrama against itself,’ p.32.
[15] Mark Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London: I.B Tauris, 2001), p.74.
[16] Allison, A Spanish Labyrinth, p.74.
[17] Allison, A Spanish Labyrinth, p.74.
[18] Butler, Gender Trouble, p.179.
[19] Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 180.
[20] Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 174.
[21] Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz, ‘The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 21, No. 2, (2004), p.35.
[22] Pedro Almodóvar quoted in Smith, Desire Unlimited, p.101.
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