I started my current project on ¡Atame! because my Spanish 1 professor said it was her favorite movie, and Almodóvar seemed like the kind of director I would love: antic and irreverent. Andy Warhol, Luis Buñuel, John Waters.*
Then I watched it. In early 2018. A terrible time to watch a film about a kidnapped woman who eventually “falls in love” with her captor. An even more terrible time for that film to continue to be labelled a “Dark Romance.” Then I found out that Miramax distributed it in the U.S. And sued MPAA to fight the X rating.**
So, naturally, I had to find out everything. One discovery is that most criticism of Almodóvar’s work, which includes an incredible amount of rape, treats the preponderance of rape, sexual violence, and coercive sexuality as subversive. Or camp. Or postmodern.
In these contexts, “postmodern”*** seems to mean the absolute elimination of politics where politics means an engagement with social reality and the lived experience of material beings in a specific spatio-temporal context. Which is apparently what it means for critics. It’s essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card.
What’s even more galling is that Almodóvar is also lauded as the greatest storyteller of Spanish women’s stories.
The essay I’m writing looks at the film, its production and promotion, and its reception. But it also makes the connection to the now-disgraced Harvey Weinstein, who distributed the film in the U.S. and whose choice to sue the MPAA helped frame the viewing of the film. According to the Miramax argument, the film’s representation of sexual violence against women isn’t problematic, it’s just that Americans are too puritanical.
This echoes, in some way, critical responses that treat all of the sexuality in Almodóvar’s films as subversive and liberatory. People who can’t celebrate and enjoy it, are mocked as scolds.
But now that #MeToo has made it impossible to forget that people living in female-gendered bodies have a different experience of the violation of those bodies, and that people like Harvey Weinstein have a vested interest in normalizing sexual violence, it seems important to look back on these works and ask: Why are you showing me this?
It is difficult, and according to New Critics a horrible fallacy, to try to suss out a filmmaker or producer’s motivation. But when the producer of hundreds of films turns out to be a serial sex predator, it strikes me as very important work.
*I know that all of these directors whose work I’ve loved for so long depict women in problematic ways. Someone has to look at that. After watching all of Almodóvar’s movies as a part of this project, I can tell you with some certainty that it’s not going to be me.
** That rating was not for violence against the female lead, or the eroticization of violence, but about a scene where the female lead masturbates in the tub, but let’s bracket that for now because the fact that the people who have been elected or chosen to protect us do not have our best interests in mind is going to be a major theme of this blog.
***I get the irony of putting “postmodern” in scare quotes.