Voyeurism and Annunciation in Almodóvar’s <i>Talk to Her</i>

Abstract

Voyeurism and Annunciation in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her Kevin Ohi A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. —Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed1 The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”2 To begin with an axiom whose interest for cinematic spectatorship will, I hope, become apparent: voyeurism is the effort to see the world without oneself in it. Or, perhaps: to see oneself as absent from or in the world. However straightforward a description of what voyeurism’s appeal must be, it is not one that could be deduced from references to the term in psychiatry, popular culture, or film criticism. There, voyeurism, like homosexuality and other sexual deviations, often appears as an infraction at once faintly ridiculous and deeply threatening—where, moreover, the standard of proof is so low as to make manifest that when it comes to sexual crimes, no standard is low enough. Thus, Joseph Davis writes, “although a correlation does not mean a certain causation, research on serial rapists and sexual murderers has shown that a majority of the perpetrators studied had histories of voyeuristic-type behavior”—where acknowledging the potential cum hoc fallacy allows him to proceed as though causality were thereby settled.3 Repeatedly, the fact that violent sexual criminals confess to having been voyeurs “proves” that voyeurs are, or become, violent sexual criminals, or that voyeurism “leads” to violence. Voyeurs, however, have intellectually more rigorous enemies, and enemies perhaps less invested in sexual repression for its own sake. The case against voyeurs is not made only by latter-day moralists seeking to prod [End Page 521] a dozing vigilance (and punitive legal apparatus) insufficiently attentive to putatively harmless sexual peccadilloes;4 in territory familiar from the pornography debates, voyeurism is, for some feminists, all but synonymous with sexual violence.5 Pathetic, yet deeply dangerous: made manifest is an opacity in the relays linking sight to embodiment, for voyeurism, like vision, operates at a distance. On the one hand, voyeurism is sex at a distance or, to some, therefore, not sex at all—pathetic because it substitutes a hallucinated connection for actual contact with another. On the other, that distance is understood as objectifying and consequently as a form of sadism: sight is mastery, and exposure is disempowerment.6 Voyeurism therefore often appears in accounts of cinema spectatorship as shorthand for gendered dynamics of power; the homology between the cinematic apparatus and the subjugation of women relies on understanding the act of unseen gazing as a form of sexual domination.7 These two conceptions of distance—pathetic substitution and sadistic mastery—are not, of course, opposed, and both help keep sex in the domain of a subject—by providing, as different modes of miscarriage (or improper objectification), instances of the pathology that proves the norm. What if, however, voyeurism is the effort to see the world without oneself in it? Voyeurism, thus understood, is not about subjects and objects: the effort to see the world without oneself in it is also an effort to see the world without the subject. (Whether total impersonality is actually possible is perhaps another question: to comprise one’s own disappearance may, in the end, be hard to separate from mastery, but whatever effects of mastery appear there are not reducible to one subject’s appropriation of power over another.) Psychiatric accounts and film theory implicitly reverse engineer their accounts of voyeurism from the experience of being seen; to be seen by a voyeur may be an experience (exciting or terrifying) that, riveting one to the particularities of one’s body or identity, perhaps makes one feel the object of a sadistic drive.8 But why deduce the voyeur’s motivations or experience from the experience of being seen by him? Above all, such a deduction secures complementarity, and secures (a certain kind of) relation. Set against this background, Talk to Her (Hable con ella, dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2002) refreshingly unsettles such assumptions and therefore asks for a different...