Pedro Almodovar and "Talk to Her"

　

　





　

　

Almodovar


　

Pedro Almodovar Caballero ("Almodovar") is the most flamboyant and representative figure in la Movida Madrileno – the "Madrid Movement," a cultural explosion arising in the aftermath of Francisco Franco’s death. This efflorescence of the Spanish avant-garde, both in life-style and the arts, spread from Madrid to Barcelona, Bilbao, and other parts of the country. La Movida Madrileno had its own dialects (cheli and posata – working class and slum speech), favored certain kinds of recreational drugs, and inclined toward transgressive art – a landmark of the movement was the display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in a Madrid gallery in this heavily Catholic country. Almodovar, who is homosexual, was part of this sex-friendly counter-cultural revolution and his early films like Labyrinth of Passion depict the sudden, hedonistic, and productive confusion that ensued when Franco’s death released previously repressed energies in Spanish culture.

Like similarly utopian moments in the United States, the movement was crippled by the fact that there was a price to be paid for all of this pleasure. AIDS and drug addiction were the dark side of la Movida Madrileno, and, ultimately, society reverted to some extent to more conservative principles.

In the mid-nineties, a Spanish lawyer interned for a few weeks in our office. The lawyer was a young woman of the aggressive, and fantastically stylish, variety shown in Almodovar’s films. By American standards, the young lawyer was overly made-up and, somewhat, histrionic, bigger than life, in her gestures and demeanor. She walked with a swagger. I took her to court with me to observe the eviction of a welfare mother and her children from HUD housing – our office represented the housing authority. The Spanish lawyer was predictably horrified – the social welfare safety net is much tighter in Spain than in this country. But she was also aristocratic in her perceptions and I understood that she was dismayed by the squalor exhibited by the welfare mother who was being evicted for making threats of deadly violence against other tenants. After the hearing, I met some of my colleagues and we had a few drinks in a downtown bar. I asked the Spanish lady-lawyer what she thought of Pedro Almodovar. She looked at me with mild disdain. "Actually, I have never gone to his movies," she said. My paralegal asked the woman what films she particularly enjoyed. The lady-lawyer said that the best film that she had seen recently was Patch Adams, a comedy starring Robin Williams as an avuncular doctor ministering to sick children.

Almodovar was born in a small village in Castile-La Mancha in 1949. His father was a wine-maker and his mother read and transcribed letters for other villagers who were illiterate. (Later, his parents ran a gas station and bodega where they sold home-made wine.) Almodovar studied for the priesthood but has said that his real education was watching the films of Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish surrealist, then, in exile from the Franco regime.

Almodovar moved to Madrid in 1967. He did not attend film school because Franco had closed that institution. Almodovar supported himself by writing articles for various underground rock music and art journals. He worked in the vanguard theater where he met Carmen Maura, the woman who was his principal actress and muse for a decade. Initially, Almodovar made pornographic films on 8 milimeter. He sang in a parody glam-rock band and wrote critical articles under the pseudonym Susie DiPhusa. Almodovar couldn’t figure out how to synchronize his sound tracks with the 8 mm films that he made so the gave the pictures asynchronous music and sound cues. The short films were shown in bars and at parties and garnered Almodovar some fame, particularly in the homosexual community.

In 1980, Almodovar made his first feature-length film, Pepi,Luci,Bom. The movie became a cult film – it was shown at midnight for three years at one of Madrid’s art houses. (The picture is like a John Waters’ movie crossed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but much more sexually explicit – the film contains an infamous "golden shower" sequence.) Based on the success of his first movie, Almodovar made Labyrinth of Passion (1982), another cult film and Almodovar’s first collaboration with Antonio Banderas, an actor with whom he has made a number of movies.

Almodovar produced a film a year, mostly transgressive "black" comedies for a decade – his European breakthrough film was the 1986 Matador, the first of his pictures to achieve international distribution. (The film is archetypal early Almodovar, extremely violent and filled with graphic sex scenes – I showed the movie in Austin to this group in the early 1990's. The film features both Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas.)

Since Woman on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Almodovar’s films have all been shown to considerable acclaim in the United States. Indeed, he is one of the few foreign film makers whose pictures generally make money in the States. His films have won every possible award and include All About my Mother (1999), Volver (2006), Tie me up, tie me down (1990 – rated X in this country and attacked by feminists), and Bad Education (2004).

Almodovar’s three recent films demonstrate the breadth of his talent. The Skin I live in (2011) is horrific torture porn – it is one of the most disturbing films that I have seen, a homage to films like George Franju’s Eyes without a Face. Almodovar followed this film with　I’m so Excited (2013), a very light, almost weightless, comedy about a plane having trouble mid-flight with its landing gear – a trio of homosexual stewards gets the first-class cabin drunk and all is well in the end; the film features song and dance numbers with campy kitsch humor. Almodovar’s most recent feature, Julieta, has been torpedoed by factors outside of his control – the movie was slated for release in the summer of 2016 but has done poorly at the box-office. Almodovar operates a production company called Deseo; the Chief Financial Officer for Deseo is Augustin Almodovar, Pedro’s brother – we see him in a cameo role as a priest officiating at a wedding in Talk to her. When the Panama papers were published, it became clear that Augustin was sheltering income in banks in Panama, a scandal that adversely affected the box office with respect to Julieta. The Almodovar brothers are regarded as figures of national importance in Spain and the revelation that Augustin was hiding money to avoid taxation overshadowed interest in Julieta, by all accounts a modest film about the life of a woman.





Cucurrucucu, Paloma


In Talk to Her, the great Brazilian singer, Caetano Veloso, performs a version of the Mexican song, "Cucurrucucu, Paloma". The song is about lovesickness and sometimes called in English Coo-coo Dove.

On my first night in Mexico City, my wife and I were seated at an outdoor café in an expensive part of downtown. The spectacle of the place was overwhelming: street kids were begging tourists for coins, skinny-looking Indians in ill-fitting khaki uniforms cradled machine-guns in their arms as they guarded ATM machines, crowds of stylishly dressed Mexicans hustled in and out of the Sanborn’s across the street, either buying cups of coffee or using the toilet, and storms of battered-looking VW bugs rushed from streetlight to streetlight, gypsy cabs alternately picking people up or letting them out. Three guys dressed in mariachi outfits, with tasseled sombreros, drum major vests of gold and velvet, and side-arms in rhinestone-adorned holsters, came down the avenue. To my horror, they marched up to my table and the fat leader with the violin called me amigo and asked: "What is your favorite Mexican song, Senor?" I was dumbfounded – I didn’t know any Mexican songs except La Cucharacha and it didn’t seem appropriate for me to ask them to play that tune. I told the man that he should surprise me and that I was sure I would enjoy whatever he played. The mariachi nodded to his compatriots and they began serenading me with the song that I now recognize as Cucurrucucu Paloma. The song was soft and delicately performed with a complex rhythm, huapanga de Mariachi. When the singer reached the refrain where he imitates the sounds of a lovelorn dove, he paused, whistled the tune, and, then, sang it in a high-pitched falsetto with his lips tightly pursed as if he were kissing the air. My wife thought the spectacle amusing: a fat gringo being serenaded by a fat mariachi pretending to be a lovesick dove. I wasn’t sure how much to pay the mariachi band for the serenade. I either overpaid or underpaid them; it doesn’t matter now and I don’t recall anyway.

　



Citations
Almodovar’s cinema has never been sealed or self-contained. His films are open to outside influence. Initially, Almodovar’s movies cited popular telenovelas, homosexual melodrama, the films of Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk, comic books and glam rock bands. As Almodovar’s pictures have become more sophisticated, his allusions to outside art have also progressed in sophistication. Almodovar’s earlier films used allusion and citation to make jokes. Talk to Her uses citations more poetically, as signs that the issues raised in the film are grave, profound, and constant in human affairs.

In Euripides’ Alcestis, a faithful wife exchanges her life for her husband’s continued existence. So that King Admetus can remain alive, and, indeed, even provisionally immortal, he must find someone willing to pay the price of his existence to the dark god, Thanatos. Only his wife, Alcestis, is willing to die for her husband. As Thanatos takes her away, a maidservant tearfully tells the chorus: "She is alive. And dead." Alive and, yet, dead characterizes the ontological status of the two women in Talk to Her – perhaps, the two male lovers are also comatose in a way, trapped in deathly obsession from which they can not escape. Later, in Alcestis, Heracles descends to Hades and rescues Alcestis – she remains on-stage for the last half of the play, but remains veiled and does not speak, a theatrical way of depicting her ambiguous ontological status: not fully alive, but not dead either. As we shall see, the motif of the sleeping and unresponsive beauty is ubiquitous throughout the world. The Bride in Kill Bill, Vol. I is comatose and repeatedly raped by her attendant in that state – her first act after awakening is to slaughter the attendant who has abused her. Yasujiro Kawabata’s 1961 novel, House of the Sleeping Beauties, describes a speciality brothel in which beautiful young women are rendered temporarily comatose by sleeping pills; old men pay handsomely to sleep with them but are not authorized to touch the young and unconscious women. Gabriel Marquez describes a similar whorehouse in his book Memories of my Melancholy Whores. It is not wholly clear what this symbolic structure reveals, but it suffices for us to understand that it is, apparently, archetypal, a motif that arises in many different cultures.

　



Pina Bausch


Born in 1940, Pina Bausch is regarded as the greatest choreographer of the last half of the 20^th century. Two of her dance pieces are cited in Talk to Her. These citations appear as an epigraph or introduction to the narrative of the film and, then, at the end of the picture as a kind of coda or afterword.

Bausch attended the Volkzwangschule where she studied with Kurt Joos. Like piano playing and philosophy, dance is taught by imitation – an older master passes the great tradition down to a younger disciple. Joos, born in 1901, was the most important choreographer in Gemany, during the years leading to, and after, World War Two. Joos pioneered a kind of wordless, narrative choreography that was intensely expressive. Bausch learned from Joos and, then, traveled to New York where she trained at Juilliard. In the mid-sixties, she returned to Germany. The great German dance companies are allied with opera – each German opera company has an associated ballet that provides dancers for the opera productions. Bausch’s famous Tanztheater Wuppertal began as the Wuppertal Opera corps d’ ballet. Bausch’s dance productions, many of them lengthy and immensely ambitious, soon outstripped in fame and importance the Wuppertal opera. The Tanztheater became known as the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

Bausch made many famous dances including Café Mueller and Masurca Fogo ("Fiery Mazurka") shown in the film. Her production of The Rite of Spring is performed on an actual sod floor imported into the theater for the dance.

A striking presence, Bausch appears in Fellini’s film And the Ship Sailed On in 1983. (Fellini’s unerring eye grasped Baush’s spectral charisma and she plays a melancholy representative of the doomed Austrian-Hungarian nobility before World War One.) Almodovar’s use of Bausch’s dance pieces in his movie inspired the German director, Wim Wenders, to produce a documentary film about Pina Bausch in 2009. Bausch was a heavy smoker and she died of lung cancer the weekend before Wenders began filming. Wenders persisted in the project, shooting the film in 3D, and his movie, Pina, was released to great critical acclaim in 2011.

Bausch’s dance pieces are complex and exhausting. Masurca Fogo is two-hours and 45 minutes long – it features Portuguese fado music, gamelin orchestras, as well as songs by k.d. lang and jazz interludes to the music of Duke Ellington. Café Mueller is an hour long and, generally, performed after intermission – the first half of the show is Bausch’s dance work for Stravinsky Rite of Spring.

　



Coma

People sometimes awaken from comas. However, there are complex distinctions as to the degree of coma and it is unclear to what degree these distinctions affect outcome. People who are comatose may be in a minimally conscious state or a persistent vegetative state. The prognosis is far worse for those who slip into a persistent vegetative state, but there have been a few cases of people allegedly recovering from this condition.

Jan Grzbski, a Pole, was in a coma of some kind for 19 years as a result of a brain tumor. He emerged from the coma in 2006 wondering what had happened to communism and why the food was so much better. (The strain of his resurrection killed him – he died of heart attack two years after his revival.) Terry Wallis from Arkansas was badly injured with resulting quadriplegia in 1984 – he remained in a "minimally conscious state" for 19 years. When he revived, he thought it was still 1984. The South African Ayanda Niquinan, another automobile accident victim, was comatose for seven years – a regimen of ambien treatment revived him. After one of his motorcycle stunts, Evel Knievel was comatose for 29 days. A few years ago, an unnamed patient in the United States was revived by DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation) after six years in a comatose state.

Rip Van Winkle it may be remembered was apparently comatose for 20 years. Philip Fry in Futurama is comatose for 1000 years. The seven sleepers of Ephesus, seven royal pages who were converts to Christianity and who fled into a cave to avoid persecution, remained unconscious for, at least, 180 years. (Holy Qu’rn says they were comatose for 300 solar years). They awakened during the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius, came into Ephesus to get food because they were very hungry, and promptly died shortly thereafter.

　


One way of looking at Talk to Her


But that what you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.
William Blake writing to Dr. John Trusler, August 23, 1799

Talk to Her is a fable, a kind of myth or fairy tale. The elements of the narrative are familiar to us from ancient stories: a sleeping princess under some kind of malign enchantment, an ardent lover, the devouring mother, a forbidden object of desire – these are the components of stories as diverse as The Golden Ass by Apuleis, Wagner’s Die Walkyrie and Siegfried, and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. By presenting us two parallel stories of sleeping beauties, Almodovar boldly suggests that these motifs are not particular, or individual, but universal. The strategy is similar to that deployed in Shakespeare’s King Lear – both the principal plot and the subplot involve the revolt of children against their elderly parents and toxic sibling rivalry. When plot and subplot double one another, the artist is suggesting that the dilemma is an affliction not unique to one set of characters but something suffered by all of us.

Almodovar is a homosexual raised under a right-wing dictatorship in a repressive Catholic culture. From earliest childhood, Almodovar was taught that his objects of desire were forbidden. Accordingly, one of the director’s great, and persistent, themes is that forbidden object of desire – this subject is also characteristically Spanish; we need consider only the films of Luis Bunuel to be persuaded of this fact. Almodovar now lives (and loves) in a sexually emancipated country. But his early education persuades him that all objects of desire are, perhaps, initially off-limits – indeed, the piquancy of desire is that it seeks that which attracts because it is inaccessible or forbidden. In Talk to Her, several forbidden objects of desire are suggested: first, there is the comatose, sleeping beauty whose body should be off-limits because she is unable to consent to Benigno’s caresses; second, Marco‘s love for the skeletal and morose female matador seems to contain elements of the perverse – indeed, even a suggestion of homosexuality (in Almodovar films. bullfighting and matadors symbolize a repressive inversion of the libido that transforms eros into a death instinct); third, Benigno is under the thrall of his mother and, probably, also a closeted homosexual – it seems that he is in love with Marco at the end of the film. These forbidden objects of desire are contrasted with ordinary, banal heterosexual love. The plain-looking nurse who works with Benigno clearly desires him. Her plight resembles that of the character played by Barbara Bel Geddes in Hitchcock’s similarly perverse and obsessive Vertigo – Jimmy Stewart is in love with a dead woman, callously rejecting the pathetic advances of his very much alive, and loyal, gal pal. Indeed, a characteristic of forbidden love is obsession, the force of perverse passion that overcomes the resistance of the censorious super-ego to the prohibited object of desire. Obsession is the engine that drives great art – the ballet-master seems obsessive and, perhaps, she also loves her student, Alicia, resurrected from her four-year coma. At the end of the film, Geraldine Chaplin’s ballet teacher jealously watches over the resurrected dancer – she wants that dancer all to herself and, in the final scenes of the movie, appears as another embodiment of obsession, a chaperone resentfully obstructing Marco from romantic access to Alicia. (It is a measure of the film’s subtle and generous complexity that the dance instructor’s jealousy can, also, be interpreted as solicitude and kindness, an attempt to protect a naive and vulnerable young woman from an older man.)

Obsession, one of the film’s great subjects, is notoriously blind. This is dramatized in the opening dance sequence, the scene from Pina Bausch’s Café Mueller, in which two women who seem to be blind repeatedly hurl themselves at a wall while a male figure, subservient to their obsessive and repetitive actions, clears the way for them. As in Vertigo, the male character’s obsession entirely denies humanity and ordinary transactional agency to the beloved – Jimmy Stewart dresses and stages Kim Novak’s hair as if she were a doll. Benigno’s obsessive love for the comatose Alicia is dependent on the fact that the object of his desire is silent and wholly passive – a contrast, one supposes, with Benigno’s demanding mother. An obsession is not a relationship. One who loves obsessively, in fact, doesn’t really care about the well-being of the object of that obsession. The object of the obsession is, in fact, almost wholly imaginary, a creature devised and loved in the eye of the beholder but otherwise denied any capacity to act or have any feelings or ideas of her own. The severely damaged Benigno would not love Alicia if she were able to speak and interact with her – his relationship with her is essentially necrophiliac, that is, dependant on her corpse-like passivity.

The power of Talk to Her lies in our recognition that the mythic scenes that the film presents are representations of the universal. All love runs the risk of becoming obsessive. Indeed, at its inception, romantic love is characteristically obsessive. The challenge for the lover is to progress from obsessive, delirious amour fou toward something like love based upon friendship and mutual understanding. Almodovar’s model for true, mature love expressed in Talk to Her is Marco’s friendship with the wounded Benigno – although Marco knows that Benigno has done a terrible thing, he remains loyal to him and seeks his friend’s well-being to the film’s bitter (or bittersweet) end. Fairy tales present love in this light. The princess is sleeping and can not be aroused except in a certain magical way – her plight symbolizes the "marriage of death", the imprisonment of the soul in the purely carnal; this is Psyche’s state before she dares gaze upon Eros. Purely sexual love is obsessional and bestial – it is like being trapped in the "donkey-skin" in Apuleis The Golden Ass. The sexual lover appears in fairy tales as a toad or a frog demanding to be brought into the maiden’s bed, as a debased animal. Romantic love humanizes the sexual relationship and restores the elements of friendship, comity and mutuality to the intercourse between lovers. Benigno commits a rape because he loves a body (and an imaginary woman) who is without a soul. At the end of the film through a series of trials, Marco seems on the verge of becoming a human lover – the desired woman is the man’s soul. (This is the message of Plato’s Symposium, a work imagining carnal love rising by stages to spiritual love and the radiance of the truth.) At the end of the film, we see lover’s dancing in an elaborately formal style – their bodies are controlled and regimented by the dance: this is an image for romantic love that has escaped the temptation of the merely obsessive. Almodovar signals this by imposing a title on the film: Alicia y Marco – that is, Alicia and Marco will now be a couple.

As Camille Paglia, and many others, have pointed out, male sexuality, not controlled by the limits of reproduction, is highly abstract, conceptual, and prone to fetishism. For women, sexual desire has a reproductive component that physiologically precludes (in most cases) the sort of obsessive and bizarrely abstract fetishism to which men are prone. Men can fall in love with leather whips, shoes, stallions. I know of one case in which a man fell in love with his front-end loader, gave the machine a name, and caressed and made love to that implement – the result was, as you might imagine, ultimately fatal. As shown by Talk to Her, the lure of eros carries the risk of excess, the danger of either too much or too little. Benigno is complete lord and master over Alicia’s corpse-like body – in the throes of his obsession, he treats her as a body without a soul. It is important to understand that this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love her – the problem (and this is characteristic of male sexuality) is that he loves her too much and in the wrong way. The reason Benigno has fallen into this necrophiliac obsession is that he was totally subservient to his mother. With Benigno, relationships with women have always been all or nothing – either he is in complete control when he caresses Alicia’s body without a soul or he has no control at all. This is demonstrated in powerfully archetypal terms in the silent film that "screens" or conceals, as it were, the physical fact of Benigno’s rape of Alicia. The silent film represents the aspect of male sexuality that is completely submissive, wholly masochistic, powerless between the thighs of the great and all-devouring Mother. In the silent film, we see the male shrinking into insignificance and, then, creeping into the Great Earth Mother’s womb – at least, he can provide her with some pleasure before he shrinks into invisibility. The silent movie at the center of Talk to Her accordingly provides us with a key to Benigno’s sexuality – his sadistic manipulation (rape) of the unconscious Alicia is merely the inverse of his completely submissive, wholly masochistic sexual fantasies. For Benigno, the woman is either someone who devours you or a completely passive body without a soul. Any man who has thought about this subject knows not to scoff at Benigno’s plight. How many of us have engaged in love affairs that have oscillated wildly, and violently, between the demand for complete and selfish dominance and total humiliating abjection? Benigno, the fetishist, invades Alicia’s private living space before she becomes comatose and steals her hair-clip. The toothed hair clip that Benigno manipulates obsessively provides us with an image of the tooth-mother, the dangerous vagina dentata – a fetish of Alicia that colludes with Benigno’s self-destructive relationship with his mother (who, in effect, devoured him) and that represents his desire to be wholly consumed by the female, to return to her womb and die, thus, the motif of the stillborn son. Benigno has never really been born – he has not successfully exited his mother’s womb.

Talk to Her is probably Almodovar’s greatest film to date. It is the function of great art to show us the truth by devising ways to make that truth visible. One way to make the truth visible is to exaggerate. Almodovar contrives a freakish and unnatural situation – as freakish and unnatural as Psyche’s rape by Eros or Apuleis transformation into an ass. By embodying universal aspects of the human imagination in a grotesque, but gripping way, Almodovar educates us as to what it means to be fully human.