Abstract
The instinct to tame and preserve and the longing for eternal beauty makes skin a crucial element in the genre of the Body Horror. By applying a gendered reading to the art of destruction and reconstruction of an ephemeral body, this paper explores the significant role of skin that clothes a protean body in Almodóvar’s unconventional Body Horror, “The Skin I Live In” (2011). Helpless vulnerable female bodies stretched on beds and close shots of naked perfect skin of those bodies are a frequent feature in Almodóvar films. Skin stained and blotched in “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1989), nurtured and replenished in “Talk to Her” (2002), patched up and stitched in “The Skin I Live In”, becomes a key ingredient in Almodóvar’s films that celebrate the fluidity of human anatomy and sexuality. The article situates “The Skin I Live In” in the filmic continuum of Body Horrors that focus primarily on skin, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960), and touching on films like Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006) and attempts to understand how the exploited bodies that have been culturally and socially subjugated have shaped the course of the history of Body Horrors in cinema. In “The Skin I Live In” the destruction of Vicente’s body and its recreation into Vera follow a mad scientist’s urge to dominate an unattainable body, but this ghastly assault on the body has the onscreen appearance of a routine surgical operation by an expert cosmetologist in a well-lit, sanitized mise-en-scène, suggesting that the uncanny does not need a dungeon to lurk in. The exploited body on the other hand may be seen not as a passive victim, but as a site of alterity and rebellion. Anatomically a complete opposite of Frankenstein’s Creature, Vicente/Vera’s body, perfect, beautiful but beset with a problematized identity, is etched with the history of conversion, suppression, and the eternal quest for an ephemeral object. Yet it also acts as an active site of resistance.
Highlights
From the humanities and social sciences to physiology and cosmetology, most disciplines have charted their own ever-evolving theoretical concerns on human skin
By applying a gendered reading to the art of destruction and reconstruction of an ephemeral body, this paper explores the significant role of skin that clothes a protean body in Almodóvar’s unconventional Body Horror, “The Skin I Live In” (2011)
Skin may act as mediums of control by ironically bearing the brunt of such containment, as in the case of “Psycho”, “The Silence of the Lambs”, “Perfume” and “The Skin I Live In”
Summary
From the humanities and social sciences to physiology and cosmetology, most disciplines have charted their own ever-evolving theoretical concerns on human skin. Vera’s constant efforts to escape, her refusal to accept the clothes and cosmetics that would adorn her refashioned female body, and her slashing of her own throat and self-mutilation with the sharp edges of books, as desperate measures to destroy the work of art that her body has become shows how this created woman attempts not to succumb to the social and sexual role assigned to her by her creator. From cosmetic surgery to body modification and sex change operations the present world of medical science has transformed the idea of “the socially constructed nature of all forms of dress” Power-play and futility are etched on the very construction of these empty bodies veiled by a skin once lived or, as in the case of “The Skin I Live In”, never lived
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