Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito: Of Late Style and Erotic Conservatism

Abstract

In this article, I read Almodóvar's film La piel que habito (2011) as an example of what Edward Said calls late style. However, unlike the perfecting or visionary style of artists' later works, Almodóvar's late style, lacking the counter-cultural ground provided by La movida, the urban movement in post-Francoist Spain, becomes self-referential, not only in the repeated allusions to his earlier films, but also in his readiness to imitate Hollywood's canonical cinematic language. In fact, I argue that La piel que habito maintains an internal dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The avant-garde aura identified with Almodóvar's cinema is often related to La Movida. Yet, as Eduardo Subirats contends in Modernidad y exilio, this cultural movement never attempted to revise the political, social and cultural content remaining from the fascist rule but rather recycled them into a form of cultural transvestism. I argue that, beyond its liberated disguise, Almodóvar's conception of sexuality is ideologically conservative, hinging on an understanding of gender relations that corroborate the tenets of Laura Mulvey's classic critique of the patriarchal gaze in Hollywood narrative cinema. The conservatism unearthed in this article refers to patriarchal conceptions of courtly love developed by Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Particularly, I look at the construction of the feminine that results from Almodóvar's erotic conservatism.