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 look at the work of 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. 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.” Encarta . General

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, 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. 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” and “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 baby-

producer for the state” http://goliath.ecnext.com – gender in Franco Spain Aurora G Morcillo

Almodovar’s women are complex. They are not easily 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” 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”, but in this 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 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-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 . Manchester and New York: Manchester University

Press, 2002.

Cook, Pam, Bernink, Mieke, Eds. The Cinema Book 2nd 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 Standa. Encarta Encyclopedia 2006: Franco.

www.countrystudies.us/spain

http://goliath.ecnext.com – gender in Franco Spain Aurora G Morcillo