Abstract
This article combines an analysis of the fabrics, surfaces and styles chosen to dress Pedro Almodóvar’s male characters with an exploration of how those codes might be read with respect to the specific and significant shifting historical contexts of 1980s and 1990s Spanish society. Through focusing our interdisciplinary analysis upon Labyrinth of Passions (Almodóvar, 1982) and The Flower of My Secret (Almodóvar, 1995), we will identify the multifarious ways in which the male subject mirrors societal and cultural trends in a rapidly changing Spain during the years following the country’s emergence from isolation after the Franco years, its subsequent return to democracy and the emergence of a high-living, fashionable cosmopolitanism. In examining the tensions that emerge between pairings of key male figures in the Spanish director’s work, we will pay particular attention to their costuming as central to the construction and performance of masculine identities. We will argue that in the films under examination, a series of binary oppositions are offered in which the suited male (whether a doctor or a military general) is self-consciously contrasted with representations that connote shifting bohemian, subcultural (or ‘alternative’) identities that destabilize and reconfigure the construction and performance of masculine identities and their more ‘traditional’ counterparts.
Highlights
Since Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and other Average Girls) (Almodóvar, 1980) was first released, much has been written on Pedro Almodóvar’s women and his gay/queer male protagonists
Whilst the male subject is not absent from Almodóvar’s prolific cinematographic body of work, when such subjects do appear they are usually camp, queer and spectacular – or they are absent, mad or dead. Scholars such as Mark Allinson (2001), Marvin D’Lugo and Vernon (2013), D’Lugo (2006), Kathleen Vernon (1995), Marsha Kinder (1997), Paul Julian Smith (2000), Chris Perriam (2013, 2003), Perriam and Santi Hernández Fouz (2000), Hernández Fouz and Alfredo Martinez-Expósito (2007), Jacky Collins and Perriam (2000), Gemma Pérez-Sánchez (2012), Steven Marsh (2004) have all written at length about notions of identity, gender and sexuality, with respect to this director’s work, and within the extensive scope of Spanish popular culture
Rey indicates that ‘[a]lthough the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men’ (2017: loc 47)
Summary
Since Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and other Average Girls) (Almodóvar, 1980) was first released, much has been written on Pedro Almodóvar’s women and his gay/queer male protagonists. Whereas Almodóvar’s narratives focus upon fabric, fashioning femininities and surfaces, together with psychological and aesthetic notions of embodiment and transcending gender binaries, are obvious recurring thematic preoccupations in the auteur’s oeuvre (Davies 2017), one should not overlook the ways in which Almodóvar’s films explore a complex array of representations of masculine identities.
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