Download our rapists, ourselves

9
Our Rapists, Ourselves
Women and the Staging of Rape in
the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
Leora Lev
Nearly all of Pedro Almodóvar’s films deal with rape either as a principal action
propelling plot or an insistent narrative trope; in either instance, rape functions
as an objective correlative for, or literal and figurative embodiment of, broader
scenarios regarding the vexed relation between gender, politics, libidinal
economies, and specularizing media landscapes. Various critics and audiences
have characterized these rape scenarios as misogynist, callous, or exploitative,
consonant with a vaunted gender conservatism that idealizes traditional
maternity, essentializes “femininity,” or otherwise re-enacts patriarchal ambivalence about the female body. This essay suggests that Almodóvar’s cinematic
reflections on rape offer a more nuanced, troubling, and necessary analysis that
complicates—even when it’s also clearly grappling with—understandings of
rape both within Spain and beyond in ways that resist reductive categorizations.
Almodóvar’s representations of rape dismantle and critique, rather than espouse,
gender essentialism by staging this act with grotesque, surreal, and darkly camp
mise en scènes that reveal the constructedness of normative notions of gender,
sexuality, matrimony, and the misogyny embedded within them. Crucially, he
also considers rape in terms of its exploitation in the media and its role in catering to consumer appetites for representations of sexual violence.
Almodóvar reveals the multiple ways in which rape—tellingly, violación from
“violar,” to “violate” in Spanish—is not only a brutal physical and psychic assault,
but also a metaphor for and teleological endpoint of oppressive social, cultural,
national, and class ideologies and the secular and religious institutions that support
them. Before the veritable wave of Almodóvar studies that have appeared over the
past decade, Kathleen Vernon and Barbara Morris (1995), in the first anthology to
incorporate international perspectives and the most fruitful skeins from the body
A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, First Edition. Edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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of work known as “Theory” into analysis of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, observed
that despite Almodóvar’s famous assertion that his work had nothing to do with
the Franco era, his cinema did engage with the dictator’s legacy in brilliant,
subversive ways. Indeed, his films explore how the unholy alliance between God
the Father, his earthly House, and the pater familias within a Spain still struggling
with its Francoist past all function according to a logic of violación. Almodóvar’s
meditation on these linkages shares kinship with Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961),
which shows the collusion of Spanish socioeconomic and religious hierarchies
with sexual crimes, and younger directors such as Alejandro Amenábar, whose
film Tesis (1996) probes the specularizing of sadistic sexualized violence within a
mediatized global landscape.
Many of the narrative meanings, intertextual cues, and visual/aural signifiers
in Almodóvar’s films highlight the problematic links between agency, female
desire, rape, misogyny, and retrograde patriarchal values that marred
traditionalist Spain, but are now specularized within mediatized spectacles
whose globalized gloss only further naturalizes la violación for mass markets.
Such staged rape scenes reveal how falsely dichotomized and essentialized
constructions of masculinity/femininity, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and
other vectors of identity formation work destructively on the already complex
negotiation of power and libido within individual and psychocultural spheres,
and, now, vis-à-vis media specularizations. If “no” must still be treated as “no,”
how might we understand this within a context of sexual mores in which “yes”
is still proscribed to women? For even today, supposedly enlightened societies
remain enmeshed within whore/Madonna dichotomies and other essentializing
gender fetishes, and the female body still remains an object of mystification,
fear, and trembling to a heteropatriarchal world view. Women are punished first
by repressing, at great cost, the desire for sexual fulfillment that a misogynist
culture still constructs as not quite “feminine;” they then serve as the vessels
onto which rapists inflict the rage and frustration of not accessing machista
power or sexual prowess as constructed by this same culture; finally, they
experience the violation of a system complicit in covering up the crime, or
subjecting the victim to humiliating legal procedures. As the rape victim Eva
(Eva Cobo) in Matador (1986) says after being forced to relate the experience to
police officers, “Primero te violan, después te hacen hablar de ello” (First they
rape you, then they make you talk about it).
Although nearly all of Almodóvar’s films deal with rape, including rape
between men and child abuse, this essay will focus primarily upon three
emblematic films: ¡Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) and Kika (1993), in
which the act of rape is placed in a contemporaneous specularized media
landscape; followed by Hable con ella/Talk to Her (2002), whose critical
elaboration of rape invokes an earlier intertextual web composed of a
“monstrous feminine” of western cultural fairytales, myths, tropes, and
cinematic representations.
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Specularizing Visions of Excess: Of Human Bondage,
Petits Mortes, Parts Maudites, and Rape
¡Átame! examines sexual assault vis-à-vis a series of mutually nourishing cultural
mythologies and mediatized fantasies that are shown to underwrite seemingly
disparate categories/scenarios: domesticity, pornography, romance, and horror.
The film reveals the improbable similarities that connect these literal and figurative
“set pieces” through a stylized aesthetic of self-referential and meta-cinematic
cues. The elderly, crippled Máximo Espejo (Francisco Rabal), whose name playfully
suggests Max(imum) Mirror, is a director making a B terror film called El fantasma
de medianoche (The Midnight Phantom) that stars an object of his erotic fascination,
Marina (Victoria Abril), a former porn actress and junkie. Ricki (Antonio Banderas),
a young man who had had a brief liaison with Marina after meeting her at a
nightclub appropriately called “Lulu,” has just been released from the mental
hospital where he’s been kept for surveillance. Nonetheless, his fixation on the
actress remains robust. Accordingly, he tracks her to her film set, albeit with a
heart-shaped box of chocolates that metaphorically recalls the sacred hearts
pulsing within the images of Jesus and Mary that had emblazoned the asylum
walls, and metonymically suggests his own beating organ. Riffling through
Marina’s possessions, he discovers and dons a woman’s wig; this is accompanied by
a soundtrack musical leitmotif similar to that of Ur-stalker Norman Bates (Anthony
Perkins) in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966).1
Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece evokes a cultural libidinal schizophrenia whose
unresolved oedipality perpetuates the whore/sacred mother dichotomy
internalized by Bates, who murders Mother only to cannibalistically subsume her
into his fatally split identity as Norman/Mother. Almodóvar elaborates on this,
revealing how horror porn and status quo domesticity have become equally
specularized and fetishized within a mediatized culture that disavows the misogyny
and constructedness of these spectacles. This recognition, latent in Psycho in the
physical similarity between the doomed Marion Crane’s ( Janet Leigh) boyfriend
Sam ( John Gavin) and her other would-be suitor, psychopathic murderer/rapist
Bates,2 is mirrored in Banderas’s resemblance, as a thin, dark, handsome young
man, to the two male characters in Hitchcock’s film. The porousness between
“normal” and psychopathic novio (boyfriend) is later reinforced when the camera
cuts from captor Ricki’s red shirt and white slacks to the duplicate ensemble worn
by a presumably “regular” young fellow promenading with his novia (girlfriend).
Just as the Midnight Phantom makes its entrance in the film being shot by Max
Espejo, Marina commands it to “come out from there” but also, as the crosscutting camera suggests, seems to address Ricki, associating him with the
phantom. Breaking the fourth and fifth walls, Almodóvar creates a series of visual
mirrorings that connect the diegetic space of Máximo’s film to the outer frame
of Marina’s universe and then to ¡Átame!’s spectators’ world. Almodóvar’s
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cross-cutting thus links the impulse driving the mentally unstable Ricki to
sequester Marina to the diegetic and real-time spectators’ own desire to consume
the schlocksploitation film.
Ricki accordingly breaks into Marina’s apartment, imprisoning her on the bed
with elaborate bonds and handcuffs stolen from the movie set. Kidnapping is also
a form of power abuse that always implies rape (or its possibility), as does the
bondage that renders Marina helpless. However, Ricki’s yearning for an idealized
domesticity is performed in fetishistic ways similar to how Espejo builds his horror
film sets; in each case, a fetishistic illusion is created with the aid of artificial props
and the psychic investment in a fantasy that is fragile, perverse, and chimerical.
Espejo’s assistant’s comment, “más que una historia de terror, parece una historia
de amor” (more than a horror story, it seems like a love story), reveals the link
between these two seemingly disparate tropes, while foreshadowing Almodóvar’s
transcending of both in the dénouement of his own film. Sexual violence against
women is shown to be the subtext for both Ricki’s and Max Espejo’s phantasmagoria,
insofar as rape is a channeling of anger and frustration into the overpowering of a
female “other” perceived as punitively elusive, within a masculinist social code that
privileges machista aggression, even as, hypocritically and somewhat nominally, it
punishes rape. Ricki’s impotence as a spurned admirer/asylum inmate is linked to
that of Espejo, an old man whose symbolic castration, marked by his waning
sexual prowess and physical impairment, are suggested as he propels himself in
circles in his wheelchair, a phallic prosthesis equipped with suggestive handles. Yet
Ricky’s crypto-ravishing of Marina via kidnapping is consonant with rape logic,
which channels male fury into the violation of assaultive hyper-domination; he
symbolically enacts the lawless assertion of male power that Espejo can’t.
The film enlists dark camp and grotesque juxtapositions to explore how clichéd
marital scenarios, whose mediatized images increasingly spawn and are fed by
spectators’ own distorted “realities,” share much in common with bondage,
voyeurism, and the eroticizing of the interplay between voluntary submission and
coercion. The couple performs scenes of matrimonial “normality,” dressing to go
out, donning sleepwear, or sharing a meal while handcuffed. As a spousal surprise,
and camp parody of romantic comedies from the 1950s on, Ricki carries the still
bound-and-gagged Marina to the neighbor’s empty apartment next door, which is
decorated with the stylized luxe of a film set. The bed upon which Marina is trussed
is itself adorned with filigree arabesques, and the camera zooms in on Marina’s
face within an ornate mirror whose frame resembles a sunburst. Metonymic chains
of images show characters framed by and/or peering through elaborate apertures,
such as the art nouveau grill work of the elevator in Marina’s building or the bars
of a pharmacy’s security gate, or the film set’s artificial foliage. This underscores
not only the constructedness of horror porn and domestic fantasies, but also their
shared ideological underpinnings. Domesticity has its own fetishistic series of
strictures and regulations, even if the BDSM (bondage/domination, sadism/
masochism) paraphernalia are invisible. By placing the criminal act of kidnapping
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within filigreed frames and baroque set pieces, and by blurring boundaries between
media spectacles, the characters’ diegetic world, and the audience’s, Almodóvar is
highlighting the constructedness of convention as well as criminality, the role that
subjectivity and wish fulfillment play in these fabrications, and cinema’s mediation
of all these registers of fantasy, desire, and reality.
More crucially, Almodóvar underscores not only the generally binding nature of
traditional matrimony and sadomasochism alike, but the asymmetrical power
structures that have culturally constituted these realities as well as their mediatized
images. As noted feminists from Simone de Beauvoir (1949) to Haunani Kay-Trask
(1986) have observed, power imbalances within culturally constructed domesticity,
no matter how repressive for everyone, nonetheless privilege patriarchal
dominance, valorizing masculinist ontologies and realities over those of the
women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this same power asymmetry underwrites social
environments that purport to transgress boring, bourgeois social norms with
subversive libertinage, from l’amour fou as practiced by the Surrealists (Suleiman
1992) to the sexual underworld of latter-day libertines evoked by bourgeois art
historian Catherine Millet in her own rightly notorious autobiography (2002).
An intertext for ¡Átame!, the cult B classic Circus of Horrors (Sydney Hayers, 1960)
highlights these connections. Dr. Schuler (Anton Diffring) is a would-be plastic
surgeon who botches an operation and flees England for France. There he proceeds
to create a circus full of underclass women, erasing through illicit surgery the
scarred visages that signify the always already dissolute femininity that’s led them
to a demimonde of prostitution and alcoholism. But eliminating and cosmeticizing
the literal and figurative blemishes of these prostitutes and alcoholics only
imprisons them as performers in a spectacle fed by its viewers’ voyeuristic fetish
for unnaturally ideal women performing life-threatening tricks. If the ladies
attempt to leave or “tell,” to rip away the façade to reveal the horror show within,
the surgeon as ringmaster will murder his caged starlets. And he will do so as they
perform, thereby creating snuff performance scenarios that anticipate the
emergence of the genre.
Like these performers, Marina too had worked in a circus, riding horses while
striking a sexy, dangerous pose, after which her fall into prostitution and addiction
gave way to a marginally improved existence as a star of B films that nonetheless
feed their viewers’ and director’s fetishistic fantasies of degraded women.
Almodóvar’s insight is to show the kinship between traditional domestic existence
and the circus of horrors as parts of a chain of specularized performances of
women stigmatized by some primordial wound, whether inflicted by their
“naturally” meretricious ways (e.g., Eve, Lilith, Jezebel), or the terrible
incompleteness of spinsterhood.3 In each case, the injured woman is then reshaped
with “beautifying” scalpels that enable her to enact titillating scenarios as a male
ringleader cracks the whip and voyeurs consume the show.
However, Almodóvar offers an alternative dénouement to these specularizations
of implied or actual sexual violence against women. Máximo Espejo decides not to
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kill off Marina within El fantasma de medianoche, but instead to use her circus
prowess to lasso her assailant and escape. Outside that film’s diegetic space, Marina
does fall in love with Ricki, but not as an internalizing of misogyny via acceptance
of male dominance. As Chris Perriam observes, the film parodies oppressive
gender norms, and rejects an easy Stockholm syndrome answer (2003: 61). And, as
Paul Julian Smith has noted, it’s only when Ricki’s masculine aggression is
challenged, and he’s injured while attempting to find black market medication to
alleviate Marina’s pain, thus breaking the power imbalance of masculine/feminine,
captor/captive, that Marina experiences desire for him (1994: 115). Ricki’s
wounding by his assailants positions him with the scarred women of Circus of
Horrors and with Marina, whose abusive past has created physical and affective
wounds, an objective correlative for which is her persistent toothache.
As Marina and Ricki consummate a passion that is shown to unite them as
equals, the camera multiplies mirrored reflections of their entwined bodies
beneath Marina’s naïf-style paintings of Jesus and Mary, with Ricki’s repeated
movements suggesting those of prayer. The androgynous Jesus and Mary images,
visually echoing those at Ricki’s mental institution, which had throbbed with
unintentionally macabre sacred hearts, are as culturally constructed as any other
signifier/scenario. Perhaps true experiences of salvation occur with the rejection
of older, kitschy, mass-marketed religious icons as well as more “modern” fetishes,
such as mediatized specularizations of women’s subjugation, abuse, or implied or
actual rape. Deviance from the patriarchal power structures mapped by these
status quo signifiers and spectacles is what proffers epiphany.
Ricki abandons misogynist norms to become Marina’s partner; yet he shares
intertextual kinship with Banderas’s other stalker character Antonio in La ley del
deseo/Law of Desire (1987), who pursues the filmmaker Pablo to become a caretaker,
symbolic parent, devoté, and fan; and with Matador’s Ángel Jiménez, an aspiring
torero and introvert who identifies with his bullfighter-mentor Diego, and attempts
to rape Diego’s girlfriend Eva to prove his masculinity or perhaps vicariously
experience sex with him, but fails when he ejaculates before penetrating her. The
son of a rigid, Opus Dei mother and absent father, Angel seems to express the
conflicts, burdens, and possible redemptions of post-Francoist masculinity. The
remorse over his deed, expressed in false confessions of crimes that Diego, a closet
serial killer, has committed, “feminizes” him, revealing him to be a mystic who
faints at the sight of blood and has hysterical visions à la Santa Teresa as he helps
the police discover the literal and figurative bodies in the backyard. Almodóvar’s
films feature numerous male characters whose deviation from culturally
constructed “masculinity” renders them a more positive alternative to the Francoist
patriarch: the empathic taxi-driver (Guillermo Montesinos) who tearfully offers
the struggling protagonist Pepa (Carmen Maura) hankies, aspirin, and music in
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
(1988); the judge/transvestite (Miguel Bosé) and the compassionate television
newsman ( Javier Bardem in a cameo) who comfort Rebecca (Victoria Abril) in
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Tacones lejanos/High Heels (1991); and many more. If rape exemplifies machista
abuse, then the repentant suitor figures played by Banderas, of fluid gender and/
or sexuality identification, suggest a more flexible version of masculinity that for
Almodóvar is clearly preferable to one modeled after the dictator Franco.
Masters of Delusion
If ¡Átame! raised many a critical hackle for audiences and critics who perceived it as
condoning machista domination and implied sexual assault, Kika, Almodóvar’s
most controversial film to date, was roundly condemned for a vaunted misogyny
that trivialized rape and sensationalized its visual representation. However
understandable such responses may be, the film’s exaggerated staging of la
violación rewards further—necessarily uncomfortable—viewings with a nuanced
meditation on the connection between cultural constructions of femininity and
masculinity, specifically Spanish gender myths that perpetuate household angel vs.
whore dichotomies dating back to medieval Marianism, and a contemporaneous
media landscape. For the latter both spawns and is fed by the delirium symptomatic
of this new society of spectacles that perform even while disavowing their fetishistic
relation to these cultural mythologies.
Kika stars Verónica Forqué, whose role as the prostitute Cristal in ¿Qué he hecho
yo para merecer esto!/What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) becomes an important
intertext for this film’s representation of rape. In both films, Forqué plays a
woman whose job it is to realize the fantasies that issue from her clients’ libidos
and are also purveyed by vertiginous processions of media simulacra in an
undecidable moebius strip. She literally and figuratively cosmeticizes herself and
her customers, creating scenarios to sate the multiply mediated desires of these
consumer-voyeurs. As Cristal, she fabricates scenarios to gratify her tricks’ clichéd
erotic fantasies; in Kika, she’s a makeup artist who creates illusions for clients
who are now, a decade after Qué he hecho yo, even hungrier for airbrushed
spectacles, whether starring a deceased loved one on display in a coffin, a celebrity,
or one’s own mediatized persona enjoying his or her fifteen minutes or seconds
of fame. As with Antonio Banderas’s characters in La ley del deseo and Matador,
Forqué’s intracinematic personae refract each other to elaborate the relations
between eroticism, sexual violence, fantasy, voyeurism, and their mediatized
specularization.
Kika’s inaugural moment is the image of a keyhole, primordial signifier for all
the apparatuses of voyeurism—whether penny arcade, viewfinder, telescope,
chink in wall or curtain, illuminated window at night, or film screen itself—
through which the viewer is invited to “peep” at the spectacle of a winsome
lingerie model undressing to be photographed by Ramón (Alex Casanovas), an
inveterate voyeur who will become Kika’s lover. Camera in hand, he mounts his
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Figure 9.1 Newscaster Andrea Caracortada on the prowl for “The Worst of the Day” in
Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993; prod. El Deseo, S.A.). © El Deseo, S.A., S.L.U. © Jean Marie
Leroy.
subject à la fashion photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) in Blow-Up
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), which, as Marvin D’Lugo has observed (2006:
83), references the infamous scene in which Thomas shoots supermodel Verushka
as an overdetermined allegory for sex. This dynamic foreshadows Ramon’s
fetishistic filming of his liaisons with Kika, which reiterate the tension between
male photographer/subject/sexual aggressor and female visual/sexual object.
This also connects him to the shocksploitative newscaster Andrea Caracortada
(Victoria Abril), or “She of the Scarred Face.” Garbed in Gaultier cyborg-wear, she
too flaunts a camera, but one affixed to her forehead, that elongates into an erect
prosthetic phallus, all the better to film the latest horror show for her bottomfeeding “news” television program “Lo Peor del Día” (The Worst of the Day).
Through these characters, for whom the photographic act is a stand-in not only
for erotic depredation but for murderous sexual assault, Almodóvar is glossing the
ways in which films such as The Prowler ( Joseph Losey, 1951), Peeping Tom (Michael
Powell, 1960), and Blow-Up, have anticipated an historico-cultural “twilight of the
gods,” in which voyeurism, technology, and an increasing hunger for sensation
have colluded. Their offspring are ever gorier “reality TV” and video games that
make gladiatorial spectacles look quaint; exploitative, “truthy” news programs;
and torture porn delivered via a free-floating, 24/7, live-streamed carnival feed
sustained by consumers’ and producers’ collective libido. Seemingly infinite
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211
voyeurs within Kika film, spy on, survey, purvey, and otherwise infiltrate each
others’ private worlds, enlisting this footage for private or public perversions
and lucre. But it is specifically the female body that is a casualty of this fetishizing;
rape might be an apt metaphor for this free-floating appetite for murderous
violation, but it is also a real-time, ugly, traumatic fallout of this brave new world.
The connection between rape, fetishism, and mediatized psychosexual
phantasms is explored through the cultural production of Ramón, Andrea
Caracortada, and Ramón’s stepfather, aptly named Nicholas Pierce. The latter is
an American writer and sexual predator/serial killer, played with louche brilliance
by Peter Coyote, who beds Kika after she’s done his makeup for a television
appearance. His son will similarly desire Kika after she’s cosmeticized what seems
to be his corpse, but is only his swooning body, in preparation for the funeral vigil.
The “work” of all three reveals a neurotic ambivalence toward the female body,
eroticism, and pleasure that persists within a supposedly evolved late twentiethcentury, western world, but, Almodóvar suggests, has also been performed by
Spanish religious and lay cultural spectacles since the Middle Ages.
Ramón’s art collages associate holy virgin figures with fleshy naked woman
whose juicy femininity is indicated metonymically by fruit or flowers. A poster for
his exhibition titled “La Mujer Florera” hovers above altar-like curiosity cabinets
showcasing images of the Virgin Mary and the sexy, evil stepmother of Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty. His, in his own words, “amor sucio” (dirty love) objectifies Kika on
the one hand as a voluptuous older woman/sacred mother figure to be obsessively
filmed during sex (whore) and, on the other, and without her consent, performing
household tasks (Madonna). Ramón’s conflictual fetish for artificial cultural
fantasies of whore/Madonna figures, which he shares with the Disney franchise,
the Church, and much of western culture, forecloses any possibility of interacting
with Kika as an actual woman. Although so mild-mannered as to suggest a
pathologically regressive niño mimado (spoiled child), Ramón’s predatory
proclivities are connected to his father’s and to Andrea Caracortada’s; all three
obsessively stage, film, and/or perform spectacles that fetishize and degrade
female bodies, suggesting that even within the newly globalized Spanish capital,
vestiges of essentialist conceptions of femininity compete with more enlightened
understandings of gender and sexuality.
Andrea’s winking, whirring phallic videocams, armored breastplates with
nipple-shaped camera lights, and prosthetic extremities all suggest a futuristic
androgyny beyond gender. These photographic prostheses, however, are ideal for
mass production and marketing of misogynist sex-and-violence fantasies whose
simulation comes ever closer to the ultimate pornographic “money shot,” the
capturing of actual jouissance on screen that Linda Williams has characterized as
the goal of all pornography (1999). Andrea perpetually quests after this “real” akin
to the Lacanian réel, the abyss that gapes open when the censors that construct our
tenuously ordered consciousness collapse into pre- or trans-verbal freefall in which
abjection and ecstasy mingle. This associates her not only with Blow-Up’s Mark,
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but also with Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) of Peeping Tom, the psychopathic
filmmaker who fits his machine with a spear that murders his female models so
that both they and he can see the women observing themselves dying and being
filmed as they do so.
Andrea’s post-apocalyptic flamenco couture features crimson slashes of fabric
and a raven updo with curls that mime the curlicue of her self-inflicted face wound,
itself mirrored by faux-bandaged finger prostheses; this dismemberment chic
suggests symbolic castration that is overcompensated for with multiply penetrating
camera devices, as it was with Max Espejo and his wheelchair prosthesis. These
hyper-stylized vestments specularize the constructedness and artificiality of value
systems, traditions, and social codes previously naturalized within the older Spain’s
lay and religious festivals, whether flamenco, corridas de toro, or Santa Semana
processions. They also highlight the orientalist consumption of an exoticized
“femininity”/Spanishness as performed by flamenco for its foreign consumers,
from Prosper Merimée on, echoing a critique articulated by Buñuel in That Obscure
Object of Desire (1977), as Kathleen Vernon has analyzed (2004). The Buñuelian
barb is mirrored in Nicholas Pierce’s depredations of both Spanish culture and
women, which/who become figurative and all too literal fodder for his fiction.
Yet if the orientalist fetish of femininity as enacted by flamenco has
metamorphosed into the sartorial futuristic cyber-spectacle quite literally mounted
by Andrea, Kika makes the point that the persistent misogyny of the old Spain,
internalized by the many women who also enable it, is only exacerbated within
this new, mediatized world. Andrea’s self-scarring, caused by despair at her
abandonment by Ramón, her former patient, bespeaks a vulnerability whose
visual aestheticizing within necrophilic fashion and media spectacles improves
little upon the old models of gender performance issuing from traditionalist Spain.
This insight had already been articulated by Almodóvar himself, in the ultimate
self-referential cameo as director of a fashion extravaganza in Matador: after his
model Eva is bruised during Antonio’s attempted rape, Almodóvar as fashionista
urges his makeup artist to emphasize the purple wound even further, against her
mother’s (Chus Lampreave) protest, “What’s this? A fashion show or an antiaesthetic farce?”
It is in this context that Kika’s infamous rape scene is staged. The rape occurs
when Pablo Méndez, alias Paul Bazzo (Santiago Lajusticia), a mentally impaired
porn star who is the brother of Kika’s maid Juana (Rossy de Palma), escapes from
prison and eventually flees to Kika’s apartment, having first pretended to join the
religious Procesión de los Picados, a parade of self-flagellants. Andrea’s camera
zooms in upon the pinpricks and slashes inscribed like ciphers and feminine
“wounds” on the flagellants’ skin, revealing the spectacle as a site of sadomasochistic
fetishism both enabled and disavowed by participants and viewers. This elaborates
Luis Buñuel’s deconstruction of religious festivals in L’Âge d’Or (1930), Él (1953),
and Viridiana (1961). Kika’s close-ups of Spanish religious festivals emphasize the
perverse, specularizing nature of these traditional lay and religious spectacles.
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Figure 9.2 Staging rape in Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993; prod. El Deseo, S.A.).
© El Deseo, S.A., S.L.U. © Jean Marie Leroy.
Almodóvar links their disavowal, and thus normalization, of sexual violence and
its fetishism to those of an apparently transnational landscape of sensationalistic,
mediatized spectacles.
This linkage underwrites the film’s infamous rape scene. Greatly concerned
because her mistress is slumbering nearby, Juana offers to collaborate in Paul’s
theft of Ramón’s video equipment. She also offers to have sex with Pablo to aid
him in discharging his outsized desires, if he promises just to take the loot and run.
Having tied up and hit Juana with her consent to render the scenario more
“auténtico” (authentic), he gets sidetracked by the sleeping Kika and proceeds to
rape her. Critical controversy emerged from the scene’s prolonged, uncomfortable,
quasi-camp staging: the rape continues as Kika awakens, tries to reason with Pablo,
who threatens her with a knife, and Juana, still tied to her chair, enters the room
and also attempts to negotiate with him to stop the violación at three climaxes.
Is Almodóvar saying that rape is funny or trivial? Patricia Hart asks the
understandable question, “Can a Feminist Sit Through Kika?” (1997). Perhaps
another question that is consonant with the film’s queries is whether feminists, or
anybody with an iota of social and ethical conscience/consciousness, can or should
sit through the violent sexploitation that had already become banalized in 1993
within mainstream culture and its mediatized representations. For the difficulty of
watching this scene does, indeed, seem to be its point. Jouissance is undercut by
the scene’s refusal of illusionistic eroticizing or aestheticizing, and its
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overdetermined layers of performativity. These alienating strategies run counter
to the goal of pornography, which seeks to suture the gap between mediatized
fantasy and “reality” as seamlessly as possible. The scene is cross-cut with point-ofview shots, from an anonymous voyeur’s camera, of the sleeping Kika and Paul’s
break-in. This emphasizes the multiple frames and filters that specularize media
fantasies for viewer/participants in the contemporaneous voyeuristically fixated
world. Simultaneously, close-ups of furniture, which we later learn contain the
dismembered pieces of one of Nicholas Pierce’s victims, are shown being hauled
via pulleys from the latter’s upstairs apartment in a surreal defenestration recalling
Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or. Other framing shots feature Kika’s face between Paul’s denimclad legs, and the typically impotent Almodovarian police who arrive belatedly,
keystone-cop style, reflected within a round hallway mirror.
Jouissance is also undermined by the camera’s signaling how, in many real-life
erotic liaisons and their mediatized pornographic simulacra, heterosexual
masculinity is a performance that has nothing to do with women’s physiognomy
or desire, but rather with the dissemination of myths of male virility, while
requiring a performance of acquiescent “femininity” by women. Paul is a
handsome porn star whose exclamation “I’m good! They all said so on the set! I
can achieve five climaxes without withdrawing!” emblematizes this reality. And, as
Marvin D’Lugo (2006) and Susan Martin-Márquez (1999) have observed, his
exclamation reveals his inability to distinguish between life and cinema. Pablo’s
solipsistic declaration literally bespeaks the performativity that marks both “real
life” and simulated sexual encounters which, despite claims to “money shot”
verisimilitude, are all revealed to be constructed scenarios predetermined by
misogynist cultural mythologies.
The point is reinforced when the camera focuses on Ramón’s art collage,
featuring a passive, naked woman splayed above a suggestively placed apple; Paul
had mimicked this suggestive scenario by penetrating Kika with an orange section
prior to the rape. Rape is a specific violation irreducible to any other; however, it’s
shown here to be connected to the misogynist fetishism that “inspires” all Ramón’s
artwork and prevents him from deriving sexual fulfillment with Kika unless he’s
filming her. Pablo is only enacting what is latent within Ramón’s perverse shadow
boxes, as did Ricki with Max Espejo’s B film visions. Almodóvar is highlighting the
web of mediatized violation, sexploitation, and misogyny that may not directly
produce acts of rape, but does perpetuate the dehumanization, objectification,
and subordinate status of women and “femininity” in ways that minimize la
violación’s seriousness, and erode its epistemological, psychosexual, and legal status
as real-world trauma and crime.
Juana, who awakens, charges into Kika’s room still tied to her chair, whose
spokes evoke the horns of a charging bull and, inevitably, a corrida de toros. Although
Juana had urged her brother to make the crime scene “auténtico,” the selfreferentiality of this scenario persists in reminding us that what’s unfolding before
us is staged. This is not a rape, and nor is it meant to simulate the “real” or “réel”
Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
215
of rape, as would a typically misogynist heterosexual pornographic film. Rather, it
is a performance that comments upon and deconstructs the complex relation
between misogynist fantasies, the banalization of sexual violence, and the
increasingly mediatized landscapes through which Spanish and global citizens
negotiate ever-multiplying sexploitative fantasies/urges/desires. And Juana’s
depiction as a lesbian who aspires to be a prison matron, because “soy muy
auténtica” (I am very authentic), is also a parody of homophobic clichés about
lesbianism via a camp deconstruction of “authenticity,” while her visual association
with a toro dismantles the corrida as a fetishized site of Spanish hetero-masculinity
and national identity par excellence.
Kika’s attempt to escape her rapist through pretense and negotiation metacinematically references Forqué’s character Cristal’s attempt to rid herself of her
exhibitionist client by feigning complicity with his machista fantasy in ¿Qué he hecho
yo para merecer esto!. Rape is, of course, different from any other sexual interaction
because it’s a vicious act of domination meant to disempower and humiliate the
victim. However, this intertextual link between the two female characters suggests
that for Almodóvar, rape must be viewed in conjunction with a persistent climate
of misogyny that has also problematized female sexual desire. These cinematic
intertexts thus represent women’s double bind: being required to massage
oversized male egos, while all too rarely experiencing jouissance issuing from the
supposed virility that’s propped up these egos, but all too often being victimized by
the eruption of misogynist anger and thwarted masculinist pride then channeled
into a traumatizing sexual attack. Either a paucity, or a violating surfeit.
Cristal’s enactment of pleasure, produced for tricks for whom the female body
is only a vessel through which to assert their virility, is aligned with her neighbor
Gloria’s (Carmen Maura) continual sexual frustration with selfish machista
partners. Gloria, roped into playing the role of voyeur for an exhibitionist client
(played by filmmaker Jaime Chávarri), and Cristal are shown self-consciously
cheering on his vaunted erectile miracle as he strips. Cristal’s feigned orgasm as he
squirms above her is aligned with Gloria’s caressing of the booty paid for by her
stint, a curling iron that’s far more satisfying than its phallic metonym performing
dubious incursions mere inches away. Although it cannot be overstated that rape is
a unique violation, incommensurate with any other, Almodóvar’s linkage of
Cristal’s and Kika’s tortuous and torturous gender role-play suggests that he’s
concerned with the problems of gender essentialism, and the violence and inequity
that these ideologies spawn within specific gendered interactions. Cristal’s
subjection to a system of class and gender inequity within which prostitution
seems, ironically, the only viable economic opportunity, requires complying with
the fantasy of her arrogant and insecure client.
Kika’s parallel subjugation is, of course, far worse, because at least Cristal has
exercised some agency in submitting herself to degrading transactions. But Kika is
attacked, and unable to reason with Pablo, who cannot seem to understand the
difference between his film sets and “una violación real.” His dim-wittedness may
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be seen as the blind will to power that spurs men to rape, as well as an allusion to
the “thinking with his penis” problem, given that that organ most determines his
rape-and-pillage trajectory. Once again, the discomfort incited by viewing this
scene, whose affective tenor is tinged with camp noir, is meant to emphasize the
impossible predicament of women’s persistent objectification within a mediatized
environment that formulates new, virulent strains of misogyny while continuing
to privilege the hyper-masculinity that enables rape culture.
The scene is then recycled as fodder for newscaster Andrea Caracortada’s show,
“Lo Peor del Día,” a blistering comment on the devolution of news into porn, but
also on the extent to which nightmarish societies of the spectacle, with signifiers
unhinged from signifieds, simulacra from historical referents, have fulfilled
Baudrillard’s warnings. Andrea essentially breaks into the apartment, as had Pablo
and the police before her, and assaults the traumatized Kika with invasive questions
concerning the rape, including whether she experienced an orgasm. When Kika
indignantly refuses to answer, Andrea astonishingly accuses her of attacking
liberty of expression, and continues to film the devastation with her phallic
photographic headgear. Even after Andrea is thrown out, she attempts to film
from the sidewalk, at which she receives a single drop of Paul’s semen on her
forehead, closing her eyes beatifically. A benediction, in the spirit of Jean Genet,
but testifying now to an unholy veneration of the mediatized capturing of
abjection, and, unlike in Genet’s all-male world, how women are targets of
scopophilic sadism within a system of asymmetrical power.
Footage of the scene is then transmitted via television screen in a cannibalistic,
unhinged production/consumption of specularized violence. An illuminated Sony
sign upstages a hyper-real moon, which morphs into the porthole of a glass
laundry machine door and then an eyeball-shaped ceramic flower pot, in a
metonymic chain echoing proto-Surrealist Odilon Redon’s eyeballs and those of
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929), and Georges Bataille’s
L’histoire de l’oeil (1928). The historic hunger for voyeuristic pleasure and perpetual
surveillance chronicled by these Surrealist image-makers is now enabled by infinite
ocular prostheses, perpetuated within a mise en abyme of gazes ever hungrier for
lurid spectacles. The succession of fringed orbs suggests eyeball, testicle, vulva,
and the connection between de-oculation, castration, and their symbolic stand-ins
and attendant anxieties. This in turn points to the wielding of camera lens as an
overcompensating gesture of masculinist violation, endlessly re-enacting a selfsituation as subject/voyeur dominating a vulnerable object—even when the
Andrea Caracortadas of the world internalize this misogyny and grab the lens.
Although Almodóvar is not suggesting a reductive causality between screen and
real-life rape, he is revealing the deleterious ways in which this specularizing orgy
persists in objectifying the female body in extremis, permitting new strains of
misogyny to be performed in spectacles whose slippage between simulated and
real time becomes increasingly porous.
Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
217
The scene’s prolonged, repellent character, and simultaneously self-referential
and meta-cinematic staging, thus acts against the banalization of trash spectacles
that a globalized world has only provided new modes of producing and consuming,
while disavowing the problem of cultural ideologies and systems that still enable
rape. Almodóvar’s strategies here are in notable contrast both to heterosexual
pornography, and to mainstream Hollywood films that feature grand guignol
massacres of and by cartoonish women action figures who embody sexist, racist
“ideals” of beauty but whose aestheticized, balletic filming is meant to elevate all
this to art, and distract from the primordially adolescent, arrested-development
nature of these spectacles.
However, as in ¡Átame!, which ends with Marina and Ricki tracing a new route
away from their past, Kika suddenly changes paths, having dispatched her duty and
seen Ramón to safety via medical care for yet another faux deathly swoon, when a
handsome young man offers her a ride through fields of flowers. Credits roll as the
characters are literally and figuratively conducted away from traumatizing
spectacles along an open road, toward a freer future.
Immaterial Girls: Of Graves and Private Places
Hable con ella, for many audiences and critics a film equally as controversial as Kika,
features protagonist Benigno ( Javier Cámara), a male nurse who both cares for and
loves the dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling), who has fallen into a coma, and Marco
(Dario Grandinetti), who befriends Benigno when his own bullfighter girlfriend
(Rosario Flores) meets Alicia’s fate. Certainly, the dynamic of two powerful women
reduced to a vegetative state while their boyfriends attend to them lends a
necrophilic tenor to the film on multiple levels. The women are dressed, posed,
and even accessorized, like life-sized dolls, a misogynist uncanny whose referent is,
of course, the female corpse. Such scenes reference the plethora of moribund,
morbidly passive, or actual dead female bodies that have been fetishized, eroticized,
aestheticized and projected onto, within western arts, fairytales, and mythologies
by male artists for male audiences, as Elisabeth Bronfen (1992) and Bram Dijkstra
(1986) have observed, as well for the female spectators who have internalized such
misogynistic gazes as status quo. Poe’s (1986) assertion that “there is no more
poetical topic than the death of a beautiful woman” underwrites fairytales such as
“Sleeping Beauty,” which is clearly an intertext of Hable con ella. Normalizing and
romanticizing a fetish for the slumbering lady arrayed so beautifully in her vitrine,
to be kissed by the prince in a blissful teleology of matrimonial enshrinement, lays
rest to any troublesome narrative peripeteia concerning women’s quest toward
being-in-the-world. This trope has whitewashed necrophilia with surprising
success.
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However, are the film’s critics conflating the problematic comportment of some
of its characters with Almodóvar’s own perspectives? The camera shows Benigno
spying on Alicia from his apartment as she dances in the studio across the way,
before her accident; and then washing her, brushing her hair, doing her nails, and
gently providing sanitary napkins for her. This is all before he commits the act of
crypto-necrophilic rape. So, yes, he is a psychopath whom Norman Bates would
envy. But when he tells a horrified Marco that he has a better relationship with
Alicia than do most married couples, he is revealing a disturbing insight about
matrimony’s constructedness within the cultural imaginary, evidenced both in
traditional rituals and newer mediatized spectacles. This echoes ¡Átame!, in which
Ricki orders Marina to literally and figuratively make herself up so that they may
“go out, just like a normal couple,” and the two accordingly attend to their
grooming in the bathroom mirror while handcuffed to each other. In that film,
Almodóvar was revealing the cultural constructedness of Ricki’s notions of
domesticity, and the link between these and other fetishistic rituals, including those
that underwrite horror porn. Benigno’s fetishistic devotion to Alicia, not to
mention the actual rape, which is never seen, are not eroticized or aestheticized;
rather, they reveal the extent to which matrimony and domesticity, even in
“enlightened” democracies, still run according to “Sleeping Beauty” logic. The
dark camp here is not mocking sexual assault, but suggesting that Benigno’s prerape ministrations are, in fact, gentler than many supposedly “normal” masculinist
husbandries of wives, and no less fetishistic.
These ideas are developed in the film’s silent film-within-a-film, El amante
menguante (The Shrinking Lover), which has achieved a cult status all its own, and
bears a complex, provocative relationship to Hable con ella’s diegetic world. Amparo
(Paz Vega), a mad scientist with a distaff twist, is working on a weight-loss formula.
Her plump husband Alfredo (Fele Martínez) drinks the potion to test it for Amparo
and also, it’s suggested, to atone for his selfishness. Shrink he does, to their horror,
until he’s small enough to be carried in Amparo’s handbag, as she desperately
searches for a cure. This wink at Freudian dream signification posits the receptacle
(like its family relations the jewelry box and cigar case) as a metaphor for female
genitals and a foreshadowing of Alfredo’s fate. The surreal dénouement features the
sleeping Amparo’s bodily landscape, which, shot from Alfredo’s point of view, has
become gargantuan, like one of Dalí’s human/mineral topographies. He crawls
across her Brobdingnagian breasts and discovers the primordial chute from which
all humans emerge, inevitably diving into the waters inside the darkest of Freudian
territories, the very terrain that had the good Doktor, as well as endless others
before and after him, wonder despairingly, at the end of a long psychoanalytic life,
just what it is that women want.
As Ann Davies has observed, “Both Benigno and Alfredo gladly accept the
dominance of the woman, but the ideas expressed here have deep roots in older and
negative ideas about women as dangerous to men, devouring and castrating” (2007:
113). It’s certainly true that images and texts from time immemorial have expressed
Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
219
Figure 9.3 The look of love: female pleasure magnified in the silent film El amante
menguante in Hable con ella (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002; prod. El Deseo, S.A.). © El Deseo, S.A.,
S.L.U.
a misogynist ambivalence toward the female body as impossibly, maddeningly
alluring and castrating in equal parts. As Louise Kaplan asserts, even Freud was
unable to recognize the difference between his own irrational fears and those of
pre-Oedipal boys regarding female genitals; namely, that the latter signal a terrible
wound or absence and that female body parts are not merely different from, but
constitute a nightmarish, irredeemably lacking, version of men’s (Kaplan 1991).4
However, are the “negative ideas about women” here Almodóvar’s, or those of a
phallocentric culture that is being critiqued? Amparo’s vulva is fringed with astroturfesque pubic hair, and her enormity suggests earth goddess as well as Medusa,
vagina-dentata wielding sorceress, The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960), The Attack
of the Fifty-Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958), vampire, succubus, vessel for creation
and destruction—anything, in fact, but a dimensional, faceted human being. Given
that El amante menguante is a self-referential and meta-cinematic commentary on
silent and B-grade mid-century terror films grappling with contemporaneous
societal terrors, it seems likelier that Almodóvar’s short is not assenting with but
rather parodying and problematizing the misogynist phantasmagoria that Barbara
Creed has aptly called “the monstrous feminine” (1993).
A series of classic as well as B films expressing these ambivalent approach–
avoidance attitudes are explicitly referenced in Hable con Ella as in ¡Átame! and Kika.
In The Fifty-Foot Woman, protagonist Harry Archer (William Hudson) is both
attracted to and preyed upon by his “pathologically” jealous wife Nancy (Allison
Hayes). Nancy’s well-founded fears about her inveterate philanderer of a husband’s
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fidelity are shown to be symptomatic of a free-floating, generalized, female
madness lurking just beneath the surface of her well-lacquered, soigné 1950s
feminine appearance and its extension, the psychopathically ordered domestic
space. When Nancy is infected by an alien whom nobody else believes she’s seen,
she morphs into the titular giantess, literally breaking the chains that bind her to
the bed to seek out her cheating man. In a climax of feminine fury replete with
wildly outsized appetite, she wreaks havoc on the town, lays waste to its puny
diner, and grabs her tiny, cowering husband, who dies in her enormous hands as
she’s electrified to death in an inversion of the Frankenstein life-jolt. Hable con ella
understands that these visions of gargantuan women and Lilliputian menfolk
express both terror and desire for re-absorption into the womb, a regression to, or
consumption by, the primordial female body. Indeed, the real-life fetish of
Voraphelia, or “Vore,” has spawned an entire underground pop-cultural literature
and artwork representing this fetish for consumption by an enormous (usually
female) figure. Ramón’s obsessive depictions of oversized women in Kika, “La
mujer florera,” certainly suggest this fetish as well.
Further, the concoction is a diet formula, a stand-in for products that primarily
target women with the necrophilic message that far, far less is more, causing a raft
of body dysmorphia-related maladies that court and sometimes result in the death
that is misogyny’s purest physiological manifestation, “Sleeping Beauty” once
more. Here, the potion is an instrument by which a man, overfed by his egotism,
shrinks until the fear of/desire for re-absorption into the woman’s watery
chambers via her vagina becomes a reality. This seems a rather ingenious parody
of misogynist equations of the female body with a monstrous feminine, as
expressed in early film, throughout western culture, and in the legal and social
practices that are the endpoint and concrete manifestation of such anxieties.
Alfredo’s venturing into Amparo visually recalls Dante’s descent into the dark
hole that Gustave Doré evidently envisions Inferno’s antechamber to be, as well as
Norman Bates’s sliding the automobile that functions as his bodily extension into
the huge swamp out back.
This entrance is non-consensual, since Amparo is sleeping, yet the two are a
couple very much in love, and Amparo’s smile reveals her pleasure. The scene
asks us to consider the complexities of agency, pleasure, and feminine jouissance,
as does the scene’s intertext from ¡Átame!, in which Marina relaxes in a bath with
the aid of a scuba diver-shaped dildo. The miniaturized Alfredo’s plunge into
Amparo’s deeps, effected through his agency, must be distinguished from Marina’s
conscious controlling of her pleasure via the mechanized Cousteau; nonetheless,
these cinematic mirrorings share suggestive commonalities. Both Amparo and
Marino’s full-sized lovers or suitors have shown aggressive and/or machista traits;
Alfredo’s selfishness is implied, while both Máximo and Ricki attempt “entry”
into Marina’s graces and body, through fetishistic voyeurism and pursuit. Before
these two respective scenes, all three men’s machista impulses expressed a desire
to conquer the dark feminine continent, dehumanizing the women into alluring,
Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
221
mysterious, fragmented landscapes. Yet the surreal metamorphosis of Alfredo
into a de facto dildo might be understood as a surrendering of a misogynist will to
power that causes Amparo to experience pleasure, in the same way that the
mechanized deep-sea explorer enables Marina’s jouissance.
It’s difficult to see Alfredo’s metamorphosis into a sort of human dildo cum fetus
as condoning rather than critiquing the misogynist terrors vis-à-vis women’s
genitals disseminated by the heteropatriarchal, which is to say the cultural,
imaginary throughout human history; or as condoning the phenomenon of rape
as logic and act that actualize this fear and hatred. This is further reinforced by the
fact that the short film is then shown to be a surrealist allegory and foreshadowing
of the criminal event at the core of the outer film, Benigno’s rape of Alicia, which
results in a stillborn fetus, after which she awakens from the coma. None of this is
shown, but instead related by various characters. But does the film promote
dangerous ideas about women or rape logic, as it’s been charged with doing? That
Benigno’s violation of Alicia is connected to El amante menguante, a film that has
“disturbed,” and fascinated him, suggests that his incursion into the sleeping
woman is, among other things, an expression of ambivalence toward the monstrous
feminine, as was Alfredo’s. Rape is always a violation, always about the untenable
assertion of power, even if in this case, the conquest is not of a struggling woman,
but a sleeping goddess and object of veneration with whom Benigno is obsessed.
Still, the act expresses terror of, vulnerability to, and longing for the monstrous
feminine, all of which are channeled into an act of depredation meant to master
the anxiety and yearning for a return “home.”
El amante menguante’s cinematic and symbolic exploration of connections
between feminine jouissance, male aggression, and mediatized cultural spectacles
is connected to but also distanced from Benigno’s actual rape of Alicia. For in
Almodóvar’s cinematic vision, there is no place for sexual predators, whether
men who embody Franco-era machista brutality, or the more mild-mannered,
tormented fetishists who harbor “un amor sucio,” such as Benigno or Ramón.
Benigno is imprisoned, and subsequently commits suicide; Marco visits his grave
to mark his passing. Finally, having learned the lesson that he must listen better
to women, his egotistic effacing of Lydia’s voice with his own having lost him his
torera girlfriend, first to her previous torero boyfriend, then to the corrida’s duende
(the spirit that emblematizes death and passion’s secret connection, and, within
Spanish culture, haunts any true artist), Marco finds himself in the same theater
whose spectacle inaugurated the film: the magisterial Pina Bausch work in which
male dancers rush to remove obstacles from female figures pursuing an oracular
dream trajectory. Instead of sitting next to Benigno, as he had at the film’s
beginning, he’s near a radiant Alicia. A new dance performance shows a woman
being borne aloft by men who offer her a microphone, support her, help her
open her arms in flight. After the trauma wrought by machista violations, the
film encourages a precarious hope for new horizons, and perhaps this time, un
amor limpio (a clean, honest love).
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Almodóvar’s staging of rape in disturbing nuance within a decidedly iconoclastic,
non-Anglo cinematic aesthetic continually returns to the unwelcome persistence
of disconnects between libidinal fantasies and individual or psychocultural
ideologies with respect to the expression and satisfaction of desire, including dark
frictions that underwrite some family romances. His provocative cinematic
language expresses the inconsistencies, blind spots, and paradoxes that mar Spanish
and western “enlightened” discourses about rape, power, desire, gender, and the
consequences of their specularizing within fetishistic spectacles that disavow and
thus naturalize their own rape logic. Almodóvar’s staging of rape is the unwelcome
mirror image whose very distortions and dark camp tenor speak uncomfortable,
even unbearable, truth to power, and in doing so, also refuse reductive discourses
featuring predator/victim and self/other binaries. This forces viewers to
acknowledge their own complicity in perpetuating ideologies and practices that
enable rape culture and rape itself.
Volver’s (2006) young heroine Paula (Yohana Cobo) accidentally murders her
would-be rapist stepfather, and her mother Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), who is
also her sister (shades of Chinatown [Roman Polanski, 1974]), hides the corpse. The
body, stored temporarily in a freezer around which Raimunda will create a new,
vibrant, gastronomic livelihood, is then permanently buried, displaced by a future
that abandons the old narratives and old ways. Cemetery plots, film plots, and
plots of land are all carefully cultivated by the women under the presiding spirit of
Irene, a return of the feminine repressed who cannily enlists traditionalist Spain’s
village culture of folkloric superstition to perform a feminist justice that human
courts of law still fall short of actualizing. Pretending to be the ghost that the
villagers think she is, Irene forges a new language of existential freedom from the
machista confines of the pueblo that Federico García Lorca and a spectrum of
brilliant Spanish cineasts had written of and filmed. Under the iconic sign of
windmills, Raimunda and Irene join forces to fabricate fictions that form the
visionary core of this film, even if the world is not yet ready for them. Like the
subjunctive intimation of wholeness experienced by the child in Lacan’s mirror
stage, Almodóvar’s films narrate a—what-might-be, after the trauma of
disempowerment and malaise that mark current fetishizing of the female body in
pieces is superseded. In Volver’s case, the subjunctive celluloid dream imagines a
moment in which the fragmentation of female bodies and psychosexual landscapes,
as dictated by a rape logic inherent to both older cultural spectacles and newer
media specularizations, is countered by a creative female spirit. Carmen Maura’s
magisterial fantasma Irene, who promptly gets her hair done upon returning from
the crypt, enlists the magic of art and illusionism like Kika, Marina, and Hable con
ella’s women dancers, to create new visions no longer beholden to predatory
voyeurs and their dehumanizing specularizations of femininity. These magic
lantern phantasmagoria are animated by moving images no less vivid for being
wrought of ephemeral light and shadows.
Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
223
Notes
1
For an analysis of the influence of Hitchcock on Almodóvar’s films, see Dona Kercher,
chapter 3, this volume.
2 Bates’s stabbing of Crane is clearly a stand-in for the sexual penetration he can’t
perform.
3 A notion still endlessly iterated within the marriage industrial complex and its armory
of bridal magazines, improving little over Freud’s insight that women marry and have
children so as to acquire by proxy the phallus whose absence mars them and signals
their primordial wound.
4 Kaplan observes that “To this day, some psychoanalysts speak like King Lear, Gustave
Flaubert, and four-year-old boys, as though the inevitable fright of castration has something
to do with the inevitably horrifying vision of the sexual organs that lie beneath the female
waist. Freud did not help to dissuade his colleagues from these impacted stereotypes of
the female body when in his later paper on male castration anxiety and female penis envy
he reinforced the tendency to portray the female genitals as castrated or absent organs . . .
even an intelligent and otherwise realistic adult can unconsciously reexperience the fear
and discomforts he felt as a little boy. Freud was no exception (1991: 46–47).
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bataille, G. (1928), L’histoire de l’oeil. Paris: Minuit, Paris.
Bronfen, E. (1992). Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge.
Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
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