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Transcript
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. 204 Leora Lev 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. Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 205 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 206 Leora Lev 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 Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 207 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 208 Leora Lev 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 Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 209 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 210 Leora Lev 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 Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 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, 212 Leora Lev 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. Women and the Staging of Rape in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar 213 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 214 Leora Lev 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 216 Leora Lev 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. 218 Leora Lev 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 220 Leora Lev 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). 222 Leora Lev 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. Davies, A. (2007). Pedro Almodóvar. London: Grant & Cutler. De Beauvoir, S. (1949). Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Dijkstra, B. (1986). 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