Essay Question: -
Offer a brief definition of ‘ideology’. Using two films of your choice, show precisely how they might be said to challenge it.
The modern theory of ideology originated in the work of Karl Marx, who stated that ideologies were “false systems of political, social, and moral concepts invented and preserved by ruling classes out of self-interest”. Encarta
Every society has an ideology at the base of its structure from which general public opinion and assumptions are formed. This common and prevailing dominant ideology is usually invisible to most people within the society who unknowingly adhere to it. As this core ideology goes largely unnoticed it appears neutral and conventional, and so often goes unchallenged. Alternative ideologies and opinions that stray from the dominant norm stand out boldly against such a neutral invisible background of conformity, and so are seen as radical. In this essay I wish to to look at the work of Spanish Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, and how his work is an example of such a radical breakthrough from the repressive normative ideologies of the Franco Spain society which preceeded it.
The principal traits of 20th-century ideology are the systems of political ideas and the amazing, often unchallenged, control these systems have had, and in some societies still have, over people. Communism and fascism are two major ideologies of the past century which had such extreme influence over entire societies, Spain being one such society.
Fascism is a form of totalitarianism. totalitarianism. It “seeks the strict regimentation of national and individual existence in accordance with nationalist and often militarist ideals; conflicting interests being adjusted by total subordination to the service of the state and unquestioning loyalty to its leader.”
. General
Encarta
Francisco Franco ruled over Spain for almost forty years; during this time his way was the only way, his beliefs were to be his people’s beliefs, his opinion—the Spanish opinion. Franco’s strict militant repressive regime allowed for zero tolerance toward radical view points. He was brutal in his demonstration of power against those who challenged him as is clearly evident from the way he came to power on April 1, 1939 creating “an impregnable dictatorship, dictatorship, coldly presiding over the repression of the defeated Left with nearly 1,000,000 prisoners and 200,000 executed” Encarta. Franco started as he meant to continue and during his time in power challenges to his ideologies were quickly squashed.
“Franco endeavoured to remove all vestiges of parliamentary democracy, which he perceived to be alien to Spanish political traditions. traditions. He outlawed political parties, blaming them for the chaotic conditions that had preceded the
Civil War. He eliminated universal suffrage and severely limited the freedoms of expression and association; he viewed criticism of the regime as treason”.www.countrystudies.us/spain
One might ask how a dictatorship with such controlling ideologies could exist for so long.
In the writings of French theoretician, Louis Althusser, it says that state power is maintained by “repressive structures”.
Beginning Theory p163.
These “repressive
structures” are the state-controlled institutions such as the police force, the court system and the army. However, these alone could not dictate normative behaviour to an entire society. The power of the state is also upheld more subtley, by securing the internal consent of the people themselves through use of what Althusser calls “ideological structures or State ideological apparatuses”. Beginning Theory p163.
These are smaller, closer and more localised networks to the people, with
the power to covertly infiltrate the beliefs of the individual. These “ideological structures” are the schools, the media, the church, the family, and even art. They are structures which can further foster State ideology and reproduce the ideals and attitudes which adhere to the beliefs of the state and the political status quo.
Franco, through censorship and propoganda, heavily manipulated the views and opinions of such structures, which in turn influenced the views of the people. This series of manipulation of minds allows the individual to feel that they are
freely choosing what is in fact being imposed upon them. Thrity five years of this imposition of opinion on a nation left Spain set in its ways and still adhereing to Franco’s ideologies even after his eventual resignation from power in 1974 and his death a few months later.
In 1977 censorship laws in Spain were abolished and by 1980, with Almodovar’s debut feature length film “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls in a Heap”, radical change and a fresh feeling of liberation of thought was beginning to infringe upon Spanish society. Creative free-thinkers seized this opportunity in the breakdown of censorship to make their views and beliefs known. Almodovar was a major contributor in bringing about this transformation and challenging the traditional views of the preceeding era. As a homosexual, issues of gender and sexuality, which had been heavily repressed during Franco’s rule, were at the forefront of his agenda.
The question of gender is central to many of his films, and through his skilled methodology as a director, he succeeds in making a worldwide audience, not just Spanish, challenge some of their own ideologies and previously held assumptions on the subject. In this essay I wish to examine how he does this through a closer look at two of his films - “Law of Desire” Desire” and “All “All About my Mother” and the clever skills and techniques these films employ.
Gender and sexuality is very much an individual trait, varying from person to person. Almodovar highlights this fact. During Franco’s dictatorship, gender was a fixed notion, stable and static. Men were men and women were women. In his movies Almodovar subverts all previously held ideas about the notion of normality. He makes what is abnormal seem normal and acceptable, whilst questioning what is considered normal by presenting it as unappealing and repressive. Many of the male characters in his films are often rooted in the melodramatic clichés of Spanish men. They are ‘normal’ and stable. They are bullfighters, detectives, priests, husbands, prisoners and sons dominated by the women in their lives. These straight ‘men as men’ characters in his films are often presented in a negative light as they are traditional and boring in comparison to the other ‘queer’ men with their hybrid and unusual sexualities. “Many of the male characters in Almoldovar’s films may be interpreted as failed attempts at hegemonic notions of masculinity or a ‘machista ideal’ – archetypes of Spanish machismo subverted by the story and are also structurally subservient to their female counterparts in the film.” (Jose Arroyo Oxford guide to film studies p492)
He has often been termed a women’s director as the female characters are generally at the heart of his brilliance; they appear to transcend the gender boundaries of society and identity within his stories. He empowers women in his movies, once again defying ideologies of the male dominated Franco era. His
women challenge “the best efforts of the Franco regime to mass-produce Spanish women in the traditional role of wife, mother, and loyal unswerving babyhttp://goliath.ecnext.com – – gender in Franco Spain Aurora G Morcillo producer for the state” http://goliath.ecnext.com
Almodovar’s women are complex. They are not easily stereotyped stereotyped like many of his ‘macho’ men. They are nuns, lawyers, actresses, writers, mothers and daughters often “seeking to fulfil their socially transgressive emotional and sexual desires”. (Jose Arroyo Oxford guide to film studies p492) Such characters include “Luci”, a masochist who desires to be beaten up, “Sexilia” who’s a nymphomaniac, “Mother Superior” Superior” a nun but also a lesbian drug addict and “Maria” who gets turned on by killing her sexual partners during orgasm. Almodovar takes the melodramatic format and infiltrates it with unique characters like these and unusual plots to question the audience’s perception of the world. Multiple perspectives, personalities and possible spectatorships are created through questioning sexuality and creating hybrid sexual identities. During the Franco era gender was viewed as a certainty. Almodovar movies de-centre traditional notions of socio-sexual identity and focus on gender construction and the individual. The subject of the anatomical differences of the sexes and gender distinctions are at the forefront of his work. In “Law of Desire” and “All About my Mother” these distinctions can be seen in the various ways people treat post-op transsexual Tina and transsexuals Aghrado and Lola.
To family and people close they are female and are treated as women. It is the gender role that they see and so they refer to them using the female pronoun “she”. Other characters within the films however, view these characters in terms of their sex and so they literally view them as ‘not-man’ yet not woman.
“She almost looks like a real girl” – Pablo’s lawyer. “You’re no woman!” – The ‘scrupulous’ policeman. (Dialogue form “Law of Desire”)
The deconstruction of a dichotomy between the male and female, and the deconstruction of connection between questions of pleasure, identification and anatomical difference reinterpret and challenge the accepted and expected gender ideologies. Almodovar replaces the black and white view of the sexes with a wider understanding of sexual differences and gendered roles. In “All about my Mother”, Rosa’s mother, is presented as traditional and ignorant in her views on such gender deconstruction and refers to Lola as “that monster”. Through this character Almodovar shows that many still consider such trans-gendered individuals unnatural and monstrous like Frankenstein’s creation. In his movies this is shown to be a narrow-minded view of gender and it is overtly being challenged. The audience is shown that they are not monsters as they are often presented as the most sympathetic and endearing characters.
“Women are negatively represented as ‘not man’”(Johnston – Classic Film Narrative, The Cinema Book p353) ,
not as woman as a construct in itself. Almodovar uses
traditional conventions of the melodramatic genre and rather than reproduce them, he twists the very structures of the genre to create something new and challenging. Tina, Aghrado and Lola embody this feature of the classical melodramatic narrative as they too are often recognised for what they are not, i.e., ‘not man’. The ‘woman-as-woman’ is absent from the melodramatic text of film, as is the case in “Law of Desire”, Desire”, but in this instance instance it is intentional as Almodovar questions gender ideologies of the genre itself, and gender ideologies behind film in general, by literally incorporating them into his films. Not only does Almodovar push the boundaries within the characters themselves, he further questions gender roles in his casting techniques. In “Law of Desire” the role of Tina is played by Carmen Maura while the role of Ada’s biological mother is played by Bibi Andersson a well known Spanish transsexual. The fact that this transfer of gender roles by the sexes often goes unnoticed highlights Almodovar’s view that it should, in fact, go unnoticed. The need for distinction between sex and gender, as was previously always applied, perhaps should no longer be needed within a modern diverse society. Almodovar invites the audience to ponder this possibility. “The psychoanalytic distinction between desire and identification fails to address different constructions of desire. A more flexible model of cinematic
spectatorship is needed so as to avoid a facile binarism that maps homosexuality onto the opposition of masculinity and femininity” (Stacy 1987 The Cinema Book p359) This idea of a new flexible cinematic spectatorship is exactly what Almodovar creates in his films through his innovative approach to sexuality. Law of Desire is his first film with a homosexual relationship relationship as its central focus and in “All about my Mother”, Rosa is a nun who is pregnant with a transsexual’s child. Under Franco’s restricting censorship laws, such stories would not have been possible. The abandonment of the classic story based on male-female distinctions produces new and previously unimaginable narrative permutations. Although this movie, as with classical melodrama, has a relationship and it’s turmoil at the heart of its plot, the characters and story are hardly conventional. Almodovar takes many classical features of the melodrama and manipulates them to further question ideologies which are widely accepted and taken for granted to be right and true. He does this particularly well through his inclusion of music as an integral part of his texts. As the term suggests music is an important element in the melodramatic genre. In melodrama, it is used to great effect to heighten emotion, add to suspense or to manipulate and lead the audience’s mind down a set path of thought, usually a path in keeping with common ideologies. Almodovar takes this knowledge of the power of music in film and uses it to strengthen his own point of view. Music within an Almodovar movie does not aim
to reproduce common ideology, but stimulates the audience to follow a different way of thinking. “I doubt that you will ever love me like I love you” – lyrics of a song while Antonio embraces Pablo – from Law of Desire
These lyrics repeated throughout this film not only add to the feeling and poignancy created in these scenes but they encourage the viewer to consider the validity of the love in question, an unconventional love; the love between two men. In this way he normalises alternatives to commonly held ideologies, such as heterosexual love. As the most successful Spanish director since Luis Bunuel, the name Pedro Almodovar now connotes a whole evolution in cinematic achievement. From his debut feature length in 1980 “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls in a Heap” to 2006’s “Volver”, his work is seen to represent an era of new feeling in post Franco Spain. Director, screenwriter, composer and actor, he has succeeded in pushing the boundaries of film, shattering the limits of convention, both in his cinematic style and in the stories and characters themselves. Almodovar continues to admirably challenge the rigid ideological structures of the world around him. Through his manipulation of the melodramatic form, his breakdown of the socially accepted gender roles and his unique cinematic style, he forces us to rethink the notion of prescribed sexual identity. The resistance he provides to powerful, firmly established sexual ideologies allows his work a universal application.
Through avant-garde strategies like these, Almodovar offers a unique contribution to the world of the movies. His quasi-classical, quasi-classical, quasi-eccentric liberating approach to film is unique and unrivalled. His movies invite the audience into a new perception of the world, the world of an Almodovar movie, where ideologies are tested and new ideals are formed. He demonstrates that what society deems normal isn’t always the best or only option. As members of a society he invites the viewers to question the status quo, to think outside the box and challenge the world as they perceive it.
Bibliography Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory . Theory . Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. Cook, Pam, Bernink, Mieke, Eds. The Cinema Book 2nd Edition. Edition. London, The British Film Institute Publishing, 1999.
Hill, John. Church Gibson, Pamela, Eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies .Oxford University Press. 1996.
Films Used “All About my Mother”. Dir. Pedro Almodovar. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999.
“Law of Desire” . Dir. Pedro Almodovar. Twentieth Century Fox, 1987.
Sources Also Cited Microsoft Micros oft Standa. Encarta Encyclopedia Encyclope dia 2006: 2006: Franco. www.countrystudies.us/spain
http://goliath.ecnext.com – gender in Franco Spain Aurora G Morcillo
