The heterosexual man is a rarity in Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre; as Paul Julian Smith notes in ‘Desire Unlimited’, a reviewer at the Spanish daily periodical El Mundo complained upon the release of All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) in 1999 that he “failed to recognize himself” in Almodóvar’s depiction of Spain: “a nation exclusively composed of lesbians, drag queens and junkies.” In Almodóvar’s capable hands queer desire flourishes, and under his playful directorial gaze gender and sexuality are treated as fluid, constantly being made and shaped rather than standing as fixed entities of identity.
As Isolina Ballesteros writes in ‘All About Almodóvar’, “Homosexuality here enjoys the same ‘taken-for-grantedness’ as heterosexuality, and coexists easily with transvestism, transexualism, and pansexualism. The ‘non-revelatory’ nature of gay identity in Almodóvar’s films mirrors the director’s […] reluctance to engage in identity politics and to endorse its often rigid categorizations in favor of ambiguity and queerness.” Fluidity is similarly embraced with respect to gender in Almodóvar’s films and casting choices, which treat gender as paradoxically all-important and largely irrelevant.
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Law of Desire (La ley del deseo) is considered a turning point in Almodóvar’s career – the first of his films to explicitly focus on homosexual desire. It centers around prominent film director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), who is enamored with his younger lover Juan (Miguel Molina) and ends up in an unwilling possessive relationship with Antonio (Antonio Banderas). Antonio, the son of a conservative politician, fixates on Pablo after watching his most recent release and has his first homosexual experience after calculatedly seducing him. Pablo, preoccupied with thoughts of Juan, considers the tryst to be a throwaway incident, but Antonio’s desire proves to be all-encompassing. Due to his conservative family, Antonio insists that Pablo signs his letters using an assumed feminine name, and similarly, Antonio addresses him as such; Pablo adopts a different gender identity in writing in order to pass as having a heterosexual and conservatively appropriate relationship.
Trans identity is dealt with more explicitly in Law of Desire through Pablo’s sister Tina (Carmen Maura), who is a canonically trans character in the film but portrayed by a cis actress. Conversely, Tina’s cisgender former lesbian lover is played by trans actress Bibi Andersen, a public figure to Spanish audiences of the time of release and thus a bending of traditional gender casting that would have been recognizable to the viewer. Maura’s performance as Tina has been characterized as excessive and exaggerated in its femininity; Almodóvar not only has Maura acting as a man who has transitioned into living life as a woman, but, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit note in ‘All About Almodóvar’, Maura’s exaggerated performance of femininity serves to “simultaneously hid[e] and theatrically expos[e] the construction” of female identity while driving home the notion that cis women are themselves often forced into performance of gender by the patriarchy.
Tina’s performance in Cocteau’s The Human Voice, a role she is cast in by her brother Pablo, allows her the literal stage to vocalize her feeling of being jilted. Pablo, Tina, and Ada – Tina’s former lover’s daughter whom she has left in Tina’s care – form an unlikely family unit that serves as a narrative foil to the tension, thrill, and violence of the male love triangle formed by Pablo, Juan, and Antonio. After Antonio murders Juan so as to be the only object of Pablo’s affection, and Pablo becomes the prime suspect in the case, Pablo suffers from a car accident that leaves him amnesic. Tina visits him in the hospital, claiming that his “amnesia leaves [her] with no past,” and reveals to him their shared traumatic family history – that she had an affair with their father, breaking up their parents’ marriage, and then followed him to Morocco, where she transitioned, as they had decided before leaving. In a startling moment of reveal, Pablo asks Tina “Did you decide, or did he?” to which Tina replies “Does it matter?” During an emotionally charged moment that could be read as taking the matter of transness flippantly, Almodóvar reveals his overarching ethos toward gender and identity politics: “Does it matter?”
Almodóvar’s most internationally successful film, All About My Mother, further complicates his depiction of transness and gender on screen. Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is a nurse and single mother to Esteban, an aspiring writer who dreams of the world of the stage. After Esteban loses his life in a freak accident, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona in a quest to find Esteban’s father, who is now living as a woman by the name of Lola. Upon arrival, she reunites with an old friend Agrado, a transgender sex worker again played by a cis actress (Antonia San Juan), who claims that Lola has disappeared after cleaning out her home. Agrado takes Manuela to the convent to help her find work, where they meet Sister Rosa, an impregnated nun. A circle of female community is soon formed between Agrado, Manuela, and Sister Rosa, whom Manuela ends up taking in and caring for in a pseudo-maternal manner.
Early on in the film, Agrado goes on a diatribe, claiming that she “can’t stand the drag queens…[who] confuse transvestism with a circus. Worse, with mime! A woman is her hair, her nails, lips for sucking or for bitching.” Here a cis actress portraying a transwoman decries those who participate in drag culture, though she is herself merely performing transness. Alongside this, Almodóvar had featured drag prominently in earlier films, even appearing in it himself on multiple occasions as Isolina Ballesteros notes.
The Mexican film critic Núria Vidal wrote in The Films of Pedro Almodóvar that Almodóvar “is concerned with suspending that distinction between artifice and truth which has so oppressed sexual dissidents of all kinds.” Almodóvar’s playful casting and emphasis on performance force his audience to suspend disbelief and preconceived notions of gender, and who can perform as whom. Truth and authenticity in his films exist only within the context of the film’s framing and narrative, with Almodóvar pulling and manipulating the strings.
Within the logic of this particular film, Almodóvar argues for an alternative to the patriarchal family unit, one that is maternally and communally led. Womanhood here becomes nearly synonymous with motherhood and caretaking – from Manuela’s caring for Rosa throughout her pregnancy to the actress that Manuela works for as an assistant, Huma Rojo, looking after her co-star Nina. Paul Julian Smith writes in Desire Unlimited that All About My Mother differs from its predecessor, Live Flesh, in that “the bond between the characters is not sex, but rather simple solidarity.” This solidarity “is based on the breaking down of barriers…the themes of the film, weighty but never ponderous, point to a cohabitation without limits.” (The theme of maternally led non-traditional family units and friendships as family are further explored in later Almodóvar works, including Volver, which centers around a matriarchal lineage and intergenerational patterns of trauma, and Parallel Mothers, which follows the intertwined paths of two women who meet and bond in the maternity ward.)
Manuela finds a new family in her female friendships in Barcelona, with Agrado and Sister Rosa and Huma, even after Sister Rosa reveals her pregnancy and her fear of HIV positivity given that Lola is the “father.” Manuela tells Rosa that Lola “is the worst of a man and the worst of a woman,” and that she stayed with Lola after her transition because “apart from the tits he hadn’t changed.” In her absence Lola is treated as a hybridized gendered figure, at once a woman and not, seemingly as she did in her own life; following the modification of her body her behavior toward Manuela remained patriarchal and controlling, causing Manuela to wonder aloud to Rosa “how could someone act so macho with a pair of tits.” Gender in Almodóvar’s cinematic world is as much behaviorally and performance-based as it is biological; the violence of patriarchy and machismo has itself been the focus of subsequent films, perhaps most notably Volver.
All the world’s a stage, and for Almodóvar this manifests in intricate nested narrative structures, of performances within performances in his films. The viewer is watching actors perform in an Almodóvar film, and the actors are themselves often acting on the stage or in film within the film’s narrative, a layering of characterization and performance that is also used to subvert traditional gender norms and roles. In All About My Mother, Huma and Nina are starring in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. When Nina is unable to perform due to her ongoing struggle with addiction, Manuela steps in to play Stella, a full circle moment as she played the same character in the same production when she first met Lola, then Esteban, who starred opposite her. In this recurrent performance of the role, Manuela is allowed the opportunity to work through on the stage her difficult feelings toward Lola, and to channel the grief over her son’s death into performance.
Again in ‘All About Almodóvar’, Ballesteros writes, “All About My Mother deals, among other things, with the power of live performance to activate agency and to create solidarity among women.” When Agrado is given her turn on stage, she details the cost of her transition for the captive audience, claiming that “you are more authentic the more you resemble what you dream of being.” Agrado’s speech, which details the construction of her present physical body, embellishes the nature of her gender and identity as fluid and able to be morphed — as itself a construction. Here Almodóvar points to an authentic selfhood to be accessed through performance and representation, applicable both in the context of Agrado’s gender transition and in Manuela’s journey of self-discovery and grief processing.
The viewer is introduced to Lola only in the film’s final scenes, at Sister Rosa’s funeral after she has passed away during childbirth from AIDS. Rosa’s family entreats Esteban, Rosa and Lola’s child, to Manuela’s care. Manuela is here given a second lease on life in the form of a second Esteban to raise as her own. She takes the baby to meet Lola, who tells him “You’re with Dad.” Later, when Rosa’s mother interrogates Manuela as to who she allowed to meet the baby, Manuela tells her “That woman is his father.” The gender designations and gendered identifiers of parenthood are again muddled in this dialogue; it is perhaps important to note here that Spanish is itself a gendered language, with male and female identifiers built into the language itself and its usage. The seemingly contradictory nature of these lines is emblematic of the fluid approach to gender that Almodóvar embraces and proposes through his work. The film is dedicated to “all the actresses who play actresses, to all the women who act, to men who act and become women, to all mothers,” pointing to the relationship between performance and lived reality, particularly as it relates to gender.
The notion of gender as performative and its counterplay in lived reality reappear as motifs in Bad Education (La mala educación), which features a nested narrative structure and was noted upon release to draw upon the director’s own biography. Film director Enrique (Fele Martinez) is suffering from writer’s block when he is paid a surprise visit by Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal), a former boarding school friend and his first love, an actor who now goes by the name Ángel. Ignacio gifts him with a story, “The Visit” which follows a transgender woman, Zahara, who returns to her childhood Catholic boarding school in an attempt to blackmail the priest, Father Manolo, who abused her, threatening him with a story that is also titled “The Visit.”
In a flashback, the childhood love affair between the two boys, seemingly inspired by Enrique and Ignacio themselves, plays out; the boys are discovered by Father Manolo and it is implied that Ignacio suffered from abuse at the Father’s hands in an attempt to evade punishment, only for Enrique to be expelled regardless. Enrique is thrilled by the story and tells Ángel that he would like to adapt it to the screen; Ángel insists on playing the lead role of Zahara. At this point it is made clear to the viewer that previously interspersed scenes of Garcia Bernal dressed as a woman are scenes from Enrique’s movie.
Enrique ultimately learns that the real Ignacio, who had been living as a woman, had passed away several years prior, and that Ángel was actually his younger brother, Juan. The ridiculous yet entertaining layers to Garcia Bernal’s performance are laid bare here: he portrays Juan, who is himself portraying Ignacio in real life and Zahara in film. Garcia Bernal plays a cis gay male who is performing transness for the camera and an eventual audience. Bad Education takes Judith Butler’s conception in Gender Trouble that “all gender is performatively constituted,” to its logical extreme until gender identity is so buried and obfuscated between layers of performance and storytelling that it is nearly impossible not to notice their malleability and fluctuation.
The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), described by Almodóvar in its original public announcement as “a horror story without screams or frights,” takes the theme of gender fluidity and transness in a twisted and sinister direction. The film follows Robert Ledgard, a doctor who has perfected a synthetic skin for burn victims and has illicitly tested it on Vera, a young woman whom he keeps under lock, key and surveillance in his home. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that Vera is in fact Vicente, a young man from a nearby village whom Ledgard believes defiled and sexually assaulted his (now deceased) teenage daughter at a wedding.
Ledgard, a skilled plastic surgeon, molded Vicente and his body into Vera through a series of gender reassignment surgeries. Kept captive, Vera acts as though she has developed genuine feelings for Ledgard in order to eventually make her escape, killing him and another in the process, and returns to her mother’s dress shop to deliver the film’s final line — “Soy Vicente” — revealing that he ultimately still identifies as male.
The Skin I Live In depicts an unusual perversion of transness, in which on one hand transness is meted out as a punishment in an act of vengeance by Ledgard. On the other hand, the viewer is directly confronted with the confusion, pain, and consequences of being forced to live in a physical body that does not match one’s internal conception of one’s own gender. As Susan Stryker wrote in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science…It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”
“Vera” is a monstrous construction of Ledgard’s creation, and “her” body is treated as monstrous even by its inhabitant, Vicente, who did not himself wish to transition. Here gender is revealed to be all important in the particular situation of being trapped societally in the trappings and context of a gender other than your own. Performance is equally paired with spectatorship, acknowledging the role that external perception plays in gender identity. It’s confusing sometimes to be a girl, particularly if you haven’t yourself chosen to be one.
“Vera” is shown rejecting gifts of dresses and makeup, and thus rejecting the gender that has been chosen for her. Performance is here used as a means of survival; “Vera” is merely a character that Vicente plays until he can escape his captors and reclaim his true gender identity in the public eye. Identity and authenticity are explored in that ultimately, what Vicente holds to be true is the reality that he has chosen for himself.
The weight of the psychological damage done to Vicente after years of gendered performance can be felt through the emotional confrontation by “Vera” at the film’s conclusion. There is a sterility and brightness to the scenes of this film, in line with the clinical and medical context of Ledgrand’s gender-based experiments. It is a film that is deeply unsettling in both its premise and its execution; fittingly, there is a visceral and bodily reaction to this film, as dread and fear descend upon the viewer as the story unfolds.
In an interview with June Thomas for The Advocate prior to the release of Julieta in 2016, Almodóvar said “I made a point to include [gay and transgender] characters, because they were part of my life. I tried to treat them with the same naturalness that I would bring to a housewife or any other character. I wasn’t talking about their problems, or The Transgender Problem – I was saying that they exist and their lives are as legitimate as any other.” Almodóvar has approached the subjects of gender and transness with signature cheek and playfulness throughout his career.
In doing so, he reveals gender to be fluid, malleable, and constructed, something that is performed and reflexively witnessed. As viewers, we are afforded entry into worlds devoid of the rigidity of gender, sexuality, and identity that mark our own world; Almodóvar offers us visions of alternative manners of being and living in a largely heteronormative and cisgender society through the normalization of queer and trans life, and novel pathways of being in community and solidarity with one another.
