Almodóvar, Mi Amor

Do straight people exist?

Since September, almost the only thing I’ve been watching is the work of the Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, and I highly recommend this kind of focused investigation of a single auteur. (Agnes Varda is next.)

From Tacones Lejanos (High Heels)

Prior to this I had seen a couple of his films and I’d liked them, but looking at his entire body of work and seeing the themes that recur has been really rewarding and exciting. I’m a little more than half way done with seeing his 23 features.

The first thing that stands out about them is that they are almost exclusively populated with strong, complex female characters. I defy anyone to name another male director who even comes close to him in this regard.

From ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! (What Have I Done to Deserve This?)

Almodóvar’s women are not exactly realistic (very little is realistic in his films) and you’ll very rarely have the feeling like you’ve gone through something that his characters are going through, yet somehow, mysteriously, his women are extremely relatable. Even when they’re doing something unhinged, it seems logical, even honorable.

More than once, a female Almadóvar character has a bad day and decides to just abandon her apartment. Oh there’s a snake in my apartment? No problem, I will just never come back. A woman blends opiates into her gazpacho and accidentally doses another into a deep sleep. A woman gets head from a man cross-dressing as her own mother. A woman sets fire to her own bed, throws out her cheating lover’s clothes, and of course all the women know how to use a gun. More than one daughter kills her mother’s husband, then the mother helps cover the tracks. The trans women tend to be the only truly untroubled characters, and they tend to save the day.¹ It almost goes without saying that all the women are always amazingly dressed and they live in gorgeous, insanely colorful apartments.

From Mujeres al borde de un ataque del nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)

What few people ever talk about, however, is his depiction of straight people; perhaps that’s because, in the Almodóvar universe, nothing is more absurd than a straight person, especially a straight man.

In fact, if we were just going to draw conclusions about him based on these films, I’m not sure Pedro Almodóvar really believes that straight people exist, which is fine with me since I’m not sure I totally believe they exist either. (If you’re a straight person agitated by this comment, first of all, how did you get this number? and second of all— relax. We are indeed aware that you exist.)

From Hable con ella (Talk to Her) in which a man ends up in prison.

In general, Almodóvar writes straight men like an alien who has never met a straight man, but instead believes four facts about them:

1. They are obsessed with sports.

2. They are obsessed with women’s bodies.

3. They are obsessed with having power and being seen as tough.

4. Their grip on their masculinity is EXTREMELY fragile and when it is set off they become violent and diabolical.

Contrary to earlier jokes, I don’t think this is because Almodóvar really thinks straight people are like this, but rather because the universe he’s creating in his films is one in which queerness and femininity are the norms and heterosexuality is something extreme and a bit demented. This, to me, is the heart of what is so refreshing and yet unreal about his films. It’s nowhere near the world we actually live in, but it says something about the hidden, internal worlds that exist between queer people and women.

If there is a moral in any of his films it is usually a variation on the idea that straight men cannot be trusted. If you fall for one of them (his characters often do, despite themselves) good luck because that man is going to systematically ruin your life.

For a very good reason, she’s about to shoot a man in La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) which may be the most twisted of all his movies.

Take his film Carne tremula (Live Flesh) for example. There are three straight male main characters in that film. One of them is so obsessed with basketball that he turns his apartment into a basketball court (one of the few hideous apartments in all of Almodóvar). Basketball Man’s wife puts up with it because 1) he saved her life and 2) he is in a wheelchair because he saved her life and 3) he is hot as hell (it’s Javier Bardem, Lord save me). But she’s miserable! And she leaves him for someone even worse! And this is partially, I think, due to his horrible apartment.

From Carne tremula (Live Flesh). There is an actual basketball hoop in their living room; how is this woman supposed to survive?

The second male lead in Carne tremula is a total psychopath obsessed with sex and revenge. The third male lead is just your standard violent, philandering, sexist drunk. The only one you can remotely care about is Basketball Man, which is PAINFUL because the apartment is so so so ugly AND he’s a cop AND he does not seem to have any inner life whatsoever. His one redeeming quality is that he, like many of Almodóvar’s men, seems to be really good at giving head to a woman. (I could write a whole other piece on his sex scenes.)

In his later films, there are sometimes nice straight men (it makes you think maybe Almodóvar finally met some of them) but the men are rarely (if ever?) the heroes or providing much meaningful insight to the women and gays around them.

Then again, maybe the inherent message in his films is less about distrusting straight men, specifically, and more about how it’s no fun to be locked into a strict identity. Priests are often horrific villains. The most likeable men tend to cross-dress occasionally. So, taking yourself too seriously seems to be the main sin in the Almodóvarverse. The only extremes, in fact, are the bright colors and wild plot lines. Everything else remains flexible.

1. Before my deep dive, I had some trepidation about the role trans female characters seemed to have in his films, especially since those characters have mostly (exclusively?) been played by cis-gendered men, but given that the trans women are often the only sane characters, and that he was writing them in the 80s and 90s, I am not going to be the one to interrogate that issue (though I would love to read a piece that does unpack this.)