This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge]

On: 10 October 2014, At: 04:50

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

All about Agrado, or the sincerity of

camp in Almodóvar's todo sobre mi
madre
Patrick Paul Garlinger
Published online: 23 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Patrick Paul Garlinger (2004) All about Agrado, or the sincerity of camp
in Almodóvar's todo sobre mi madre , Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 5:1, 117-134, DOI:
10.1080/1463620032000173873

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1463620032000173873

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Patrick Paul Garlinger

ALL ABOUT AGRADO, OR THE

SINCERITY OF CAMP IN
ALMODÓVAR’S TODO SOBRE MI
MADRE
P.P.GarlingerDept. of Spanish & PortugueseNorthwestern University1860 Campus Drive-Crowe 1-141EvanstonIL 60208USAp-garlinger@northwestern.edu
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

“Yo lo único que tengo de verdad son los sentimientos y los litros de silicona, que
me pesan como quintales.”
Agrado, Todo sobre mi madre

“Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy night.” The line belongs to
Bette Davis, one of the many quotable gems from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All
About Eve (1950). Bette’s histrionics as Margo Channing, the aging theatre
actress; Anne Baxter’s inimitable performance as the deceitful Eve who
eventually falls prey to the machinations of theater critic Addison DeWitt; and
the brief appearances of the buxom Marilyn Monroe all add up to produce the
film’s high camp quotient. Given the film’s strong association with camp, a
tension around the camp value of Almodóvar’s film surfaced in the reviews in
the U.S. Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “The tone of ‘All
About My Mother’ has the heart-on-the-sleeve emotions of soap opera, but it
is completely sincere and by no means camp” (E3, my emphasis). Philip French
describes the early Almodóvar as “tiresomely camp,” and thus praises Todo
sobre mi madre as his best film to date (qtd. in Maddison 271). As an exception
to the general trend, the “campiness” of Todo sobre mi madre is pointed up by
the reviewer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “In ‘Mother,’ Almodóvar fuses
his love of artifice and exaggeration with deeper emotional resonance than
ever before. […] By this point, you’re likely to be hooked by a movie that
can wink at its own campy sensibility while still grabbing you by the gut”
(1Q).
Implicit in these critical judgments of Almodóvar’s turn to emotion is the
equation of camp with insincerity, of camp with a refusal of authentic
emotion. If Todo sobre mi madre “grabs you by the gut,” it apparently does so
in spite of any camp value it may have. The critical consensus seems to be that

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 February 2004,

pp. 117–134
ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1463620032000173873
 11 8 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Almodóvar has matured as a filmmaker, that he has surpassed his earlier

period of camp frivolity for a new one of emotional gravitas and, if we believe
these critics, so much the better for it. The implication is also that he has
passed through some sort of quasi-Freudian developmental stage from
“frivolity and camp” to “authenticity and sentimentality.” As a result, this new
“mature” Almodóvar is far less gay than in the past, the queer sexuality of
Laberinto de pasiones or La ley del deseo now properly sublimated in favor of
melodramatic heterosexual romance. This is not to say that he has severed all
ties to his past work. The use of Cecilia Roth for the protagonist recalls her
performance as Sexilia in Laberinto de pasiones; the reappearance of transsexu-
ality in the figure of Agrado echoes the figures of Tina from La ley del deseo
and Femme Letale of Tacones lejanos; and the clip of Bette Davis in All About
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

Eve is an oblique allusion to the dubbed clip of Joan Crawford from Johnny
Guitar in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios.
But as reminiscent as it may be of his trademark oeuvre, the tenor of Todo
sobre mi madre is admittedly not that of Mujeres al borde. If not a camp film, do
we simply conclude that Almodóvar has left camp behind? By invoking such
an iconic reference of camp as All About Eve, Almodóvar obliquely insists –
consciously or not – on the role it plays in his filmic production.1 By the same
token, he notes, it is a “false clue” (Strauss, “A couer” 40), or as Paul Julian
Smith puts it, “a red herring” (194). Well, yes and no. If we look for a
one-to-one correspondence, then yes, we are deceived, not unlike Margo
Channing’s initial belief that Eve was just as she seemed. But Todo sobre mi
madre is not as it appears, its camp moments and references pointing us
backwards to an Almodóvar that seemingly no longer exists but leaving us
asking where he is going with his new use of melodrama. By turning away
from the commonplace views of camp as parody and irony, the film offers an
alternative perspective on the affective relationship that obtains between
spectators and the camp spectacle. To put it succinctly, Todo sobre mi madre is
not a camp film but a film about camp.
Let us to turn to Eve. How exactly does Almodóvar rewrite Mankiewicz’s
film and what happens to its camp value? The obvious points of convergence
between the two films are superficial allusions: Huma Rojo’s reference to
Bette Davis as her inspiration and Nina’s accusation that Manuela is “igual a
Eva Harrington.” In terms of basic themes, the emphasis on theatre as a
metaphor for life and the significance of relationships between women are
central to both works. Although ambition is often seen as the primary force
in Eve, what conjoins both movies – and the topic that fascinates Almodóvar
– is the way in which sentimentality and solidarity among women is quite
central to the plot; in his brief review Carlos Boyero denies any sentimentality
when he writes “No hay principios morales en Eva, no hay lugar para
el sentimentalismo” (43). Almodóvar obviously draws on this dimension of
the film yet offers a different outcome for women, emphasizing solidarity
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 11 9

among them over and above attachments to men. In so doing, however, he

captures an often-overlooked aspect of the film. After the Sarah Siddons award
is given to Eve at the end of the film, Margo dryly states, “… I wouldn’t
worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your
heart ought to be.” By then, Margo Channing has realized that in order to
achieve her success as an actress, she has become hardened, less sentimental
(“I detest cheap sentiment,” she exclaims at one point), unwilling to show
herself to be vulnerable with her lover, Bill. At the end of All About Eve,
however, sentiment wins out over ambition. Almodóvar attempts to capture
the heart that Eve lost – for as he himself notes, Todo sobre mi madre is all about
sentiment (Strauss, “A coeur” 40).
If the influence of All About Eve has less to do with specific parallels in the
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

plot than in its basic themes, it must be acknowledged that while he rescues
the original from its conservative portrayal of women’s work as pure
ambition, his treatment in the narrative does not overtly reflect its status as
a camp film. It is important to recall that Mankiewicz’s film is paradigmatic
of a gay male camp fascination with melodrama and the so-called “women’s
picture” produced by Hollywood in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. Mankiewicz’s
film was, in some respects, a camp production from the very beginning. Susan
Sontag said it failed as camp because it tried too hard (282), and while I
disagree with her claim, it is nonetheless true that it wore its irony on its
sleeve (It is not the classic melodrama of Douglas Sirk, it knows its excesses
all too well.) By the 1990s, the film circulated widely among gay audiences,
even producing take-offs such as the gay pornography video, All About Steve
(Shingler 58). Nor is the film’s association with camp and gay audiences
limited to the U.S. context. Terenci Moix’s reference to a 1963 showing of
Eva al desnudo while in Paris captures the camp value through the succinct
description of “el delirio de las mariquitas adeptas al culto de Bette” (610). As
Mark Finch puts it, “Hollywood melodrama – and especially the women’s
picture – has always been the material of camp” (38). Almodóvar’s inclusion
of the Mankiewicz film thus evokes the genre of melodrama and alludes to its
camp potential, particularly for gay audiences, without explicitly declaring it.
In this respect, All About Eve functions like the presence of Lorca’s Bodas
de sangre, whose significance for gay culture is also not stated openly. In his
reading of the film, Stephen Maddison reaches a similar conclusion in his
analysis of how Almodóvar appropriates A Streetcar Named Desire and reworks
it to produce a different message in the movie. In Tennessee Williams’s play,
the extract that is reproduced twice in the film has Blanche taken away by the
doctor, but in the original she is not crazy, and Stanley still controls Stella.
In contrast, Almodóvar’s version has Stella leave with her baby while vowing
never to return. Maddison argues that “the effect here is to make heterosex-
uality seem as intolerable as it is in Williams’ original, while at the same time
 1 20 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

effecting a greater sense that women have choices outside of their relations
with men” (267). Maddison notes that the repetition of this altered scene has
evoked a response from critics similar to those made of Williams, that is, the
inclusion of Williams’s play is read as an oblique reference to Almodóvar’s
homosexuality (268); Almodovár himself has admitted to thinking about
staging A Streetcar Named Desire as a gay drama since he believes that Williams
had in mind a male character when he created the figure of Blanche Dubois
(Strauss, “A coeur” 39). Maddison thus reads the film’s interest in women –
and Tennessee Williams as part of gay culture – as a reflection of Almodóvar’s
own cross-gender identifications.
This argument may strike some as simplistic, and in academic circles
where intentionality and identity are taboo interpretive strategies, to equate
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

the inclusion of A Streetcar Named Desire as a reflection of an identification with

women on the part of a gay director is certain to ruffle a few feathers.
Nevertheless, Maddison’s point is that critics have been reticent about linking
the emotional weightiness of the film and the predominance of women to
homosexuality at all, much less to the director’s own sexuality. The affection
and devotion Almodóvar feels towards women, while duly noted by critics,
is never subjected to further interpretation. No one suggests that there is an
erotic gaze; the implication that Almodóvar is gay left assumed for viewers.
Maddison thus claims, perhaps overstating his case a bit, that without there
containing a single gay male character (with the possible exception of Esteban,
as we will see) it is possibly his gayest film (272). Maddison’s point is that the
“queer” dimension of the film resides in the representation of women by a gay
director whose affection for his female characters is not that of a male
heterosexual spectator. All About Eve, I would argue, plays a similar role in the
film, as both a cipher of homosexuality and, given the significance of the film
for gay culture, a symbol of a camp sensibility.
Almodóvar’s “citation” of Eve thus establishes a certain expectation of
camp for viewers familiar with the film’s contemporary value and who
approach Almodóvar as a gay filmmaker. In spite of the lack of irony, the
spirit of Eve does make its influence felt: Todo sobre mi madre is not completely
devoid of camp humor. In lieu of Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, however, we
are given Agrado. Camp oozes in the dialogue with Agrado – the scene with
the night time pharmacist or her reluctance to go to El Salvador are two
examples. As Almodóvar puts it, “[…] en la pelı́cula también hay humor.
Mucho humor. Siempre que aparece Agrado” (177). Substituting humor for
ambition, Agrado captures a particular type of camp: the essence of a camp
fascination with actresses and stardom. This occurs in several moments in the
film, in particular her praise for Manuela the day after her performance as
Stella and her own monologue.
Face to face with Huma Rojo, she exclaims, “¡Encantada! … Soy fans.
[…] Huma, tú eres una diosa, una leyenda viva. Ya te digo que soy fans, ası́
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 21

en plural, pero cómo estuvo mi Manuela la otra noche … No sé cómo estarı́a
por la tarde, pero por la noche … ¡Lo que pude llorar!” [Agrado está un poco
sobreactuada, pero es sincera]” (Almodóvar 90). Camp emerges here in both
her exaggerated theatricality and in her declaration of adoration for Huma.
She displays the adoration of camp spectators for star actresses, an element of
camp often associated with queer men who exclaim devotion for icons like
Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford. It is by no
means coincidence that earlier Huma mentions Bette Davis as her inspiration,
only to have a fan in the figure of Agrado express admiration, for Bette Davis’s
iconicity is intimately linked to the fact that she captures that unique quality
of the arresting image of the female star that is often at the core of the camp
fascination with the Hollywood movie actress: in a word, glamour. Agrado’s
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

own desire for glamour, reflected in the image of Huma, emerges when she
says, confused about the job being offered her, “¿Yo haciendo de Stella?
(Decepcionada.) Pues me veo más de Blanche …” (90).
Agrado achieves that touch of glamour, if only briefly, in her single
appearance on stage (fig. 1). It is also, incidentally, a scene that unites her
with the figure of Eve, who, by virtue of the absence of the star, finally makes
her way to the stage. Indeed, while Manuela is most often linked to Eve
Harrington, given Nina’s accusation, Agrado too is a substitute. Referring to
both Manuela and Agrado, Almodóvar states in an interview that “[t]hey have
no ambition, they are the anti-Eve Harrington of All About Eve. Agrado takes
the stage, of which she has always dreamed, but it is to tell that which is most
important in life, that is to say, her own life” (Strauss, “A couer” 40, my
translation). Her monologue, which Saša Markuš dubs “el credo del camp”
(85), drips with camp in its embrace of theatricality. In her extemporaneous
performance, Agrado entertains the public with the details of her surgical
transformations, humorously pointing out the excessive costs and damages
wrought by her profession as a prostitute.
In the process, she exposes her lack of glamour, demonstrating that she
does not embody the essence of stardom like Bette or Huma. Rather,
Agrado’s emphasis on the amount of “work” that goes into her body inverts
and camps up Bette Davis’s own performance in Eve. The aging actress fending
off the machinations of the deceitful ingénue, Margo Channing confesses to
Karen Richards that during her career to be an actress, she forgot to work at
being a woman: “One career all females have in common: being a woman.
Sooner or later we’ve got to work at it.” Where Margo works as an
actress but not as a woman, Agrado takes the work of a woman – the work
it takes to be a woman – and turns it into the performance of an actress.
Agrado uses the work done to her body not to service her clients but to
entertain the public, transforming the labor of prostitution and plastic surgery
into a work of art. In fact, prior to this scene, her campiest lines have
foreshadowed this moment with references to her “work” in both senses of the
 1 22 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

FIGURE 1. Pedro Almodóvar and Antonia San Juan rehearse Agrado’s monologue in
Todo sobre madre (1999) (Photo courtesy of El Deseo, S.A.)

word: “Es lo malo de esta profesión, ¡que tienes que estar mona por cojones!
¡Y siempre al loro de los últimos avances tecnológicos en cirujı́a y cosmética!”
(46).
Agrado’s monologue calls to mind Matthew Tinkcom’s recent efforts to
reconceptualize camp as the deliberate attempt by queer men in the Holly-
wood film system (or at its margins) to infuse formulaic expressions such as
the musical and melodrama with a different affective energy. By “camping up”
homogenized modes of filmic narrative, they introduced an element of
pleasure into the domain of labor by elaborating an aesthetic production not
reducible to the circuit of production and consumption: “[…] their work [the
labors of queer subjects in the production of commodities of entertainment]
is often disguised as precisely through what Arendt calls its ‘playfulness’” (12).
Although Tinkcom does not focus primarily on the labors of actresses, he does
note that the camp fascination with Hollywood icons and glamour has a great
deal to do with the understanding of the amount of labor that goes into the
production of a star (84). Agrado captures this dimension of camp as a form
of “play” within the labor of entertainment, for the very function of her
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 23

monologue is to strip bare the process of “constructing” a female figure for the
public’s consumption.2
In defiance of Sontag’s original claim about the apolitical nature of camp,
critical writings on the subject often extol the capacity of theatricality and
exaggeration to expose the constructed nature of dominant modes of gender
and sexuality. But as much as Agrado’s monologue participates in such a
project, it also suggests that we miss something about camp when we only
approach it in terms of an ironic deconstruction of gender norms.3 Her
performance is less an embrace of the constructedness of gender than a
declaration of the authenticity of feeling that her literal construction as a
woman reflects: “Lo que les estaba diciendo, ¡cuesta mucho ser auténtica!
Pero no hay que ser tacaña, con nuestra apariencia. Una es más auténtica
cuando más se parece a lo que ha soñado de sı́ misma” (Almodóvar 104).4
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

Prior to this scene, Agrado has already prepared the viewer for her mono-
logue when she exclaimed, “No hay nada como un Chanel para sentirse
respetable” (46). Although the glamour of an authentic Chanel is economically
unattainable for Agrado, the feeling the fake one produces is, for her at least,
very real. “Yo lo único que tengo de verdad son los sentimientos y los litros
de silicona, que me pesan como quintales,” she quips. What is authentic are
her sentiments and silicone. As Annabel Martı́n has convincingly shown,
Almódovar often uses sentiment as the vehicle through which his characters,
particularly women, come to understand themselves: he moves our focus
from the realm of epistemology to the realm of sentiment, or, to put it more
precisely, to the realm of sentiment as a form of epistemology. Sentiment,
rather than subversion, is the mot de jour when it comes to Agrado’s style of
camp.
Authenticity of sentiment is, in a word, sincerity. As much as Agrado
makes fun of herself in an excessive, theatrical manner she is, in the end,
profoundly sincere. Sincerity and authenticity are of course not precisely
synonyms. In his classic study, Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling
distinguished sincerity and authenticity as two historically grounded modes of
conceptualizing an ideal moral state of being. As a form of moral ideal,
Trilling argues, sincerity, as a “congruence between avowal and actual
feeling,” was the “sentiment of being” (Rousseau’s term) to which one aspired
(2). During the modern era, authenticity became the ideal form of being true
to oneself, for while sincerity sustained an adherence to an already established
self, authenticity saw the self as an ideal to be obtained. Authenticity became
a broader, more encompassing form of “being true to oneself” and superseded
sincerity. Nevertheless, in the context of Todo sobre mi madre, “sincerity” and
“authenticity” remain fundamentally connected: for all her humor, her avowal
of sentiment about her body is sincere, and that sincerity is part and parcel
of her allegiance to authenticity.5 Her sincerity is what prevents her mono-
logue from merely deconstructing the binary opposition between authenticity
 1 24 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

and artificiality in a way that simply leads us to see the two concepts as
conventions. The erasure of the difference between artificiality and authentic-
ity assimilates the former to the latter. Artificiality, as well as theatricality, is
shown to be authenticity: authenticity still remains intact as a signifier and
value.6
Sontag describes camp in similar terms – “artifice as an ideal, theatricality”
(288). But as most readers know, the association of camp with parody, irony,
irreverence, and mockery invariably suggests that camp casts a long shadow of
insincerity and inauthenticity. In her analysis of lo cursi, that uniquely Spanish
hand-made cultural production that reflects nineteenth-century bourgeois
concerns with taste, Margarite Rivière writes that “el culto a la apariencia se
convierte en el camp en justificación y exaltación de una insinceridad propia de
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

toda vida civilizada” (104, my emphasis). Leopoldo Alas attempts to dis-

tinguish lo cursi from kitsch (often aligned closely with camp) by calling the
former “sincero y sentimental” and the latter “intelectual y buscado”
(“Sinceramente” 15). Cursilerı́a, as a desire to improve one’s social class, is
sincere, whereas camp and kitsch are not. For her part, Sontag quotes Wilde’s
statement that “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not
sincerity, but style” and that one is drawn to camp when one realizes that
“‘sincerity’ is not enough” (288).
True, sincerity alone is not camp. But does that mean that sincerity, in
some fashion, is not part of camp? For Wilde also asserted that “[w]e should
treat all the trivial things in life very seriously, and all the serious things of
life with sincere and studied triviality” (Tydeman 41). Wilde’s own calls to
embrace style, to be a work of art, are both campy and sincere. Referring to
Wilde’s plays, A. B. Walkley writes,

Superficially, these are all style and no sincerity. But we must distinguish.
Without sincerity there can be no style: only flatulence, stereotypes,
empty verbiage, what in Paris they call le poncif. Without, that is to say,
the artist’s sincerity of presentation, the true expression of his intentions.
[…] And so, when all his personages are insincere, as all are in The
Importance of Being Earnest, he is most sincere, his style is at his best. (ix-x)

Walkley concludes in terms that could well apply to Almodóvar, known for
his own brand of stylish cinema, that “Style with sincerity, then ‘is the vital
thing’” (xii). Rivière too touches upon the fundamental ambiguity of seeing
camp as a form of sincerity when she interrogates its capacity to undermine
dominant culture: “¿Es ésta la mayor expresión de insinceridad o, por el
contrario hay que creer sincera esta búsqueda?” (104).
Camp, in the context of the present discussion, should be understood less
in terms of what it reveals about the construction of spectacle than about the
affective connection that camp establishes between the object and its specta-
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 25

tor. What makes Agrado’s camp spectacle an intervention in sincerity is that

by vindicating artificiality as authentic in terms of sentiment, Agrado raises the
viewer’s awareness of the affectionate investment the camp spectator has in
the camp figure. The sincerity of her intervention begets the sincerity of the
audience: we don’t laugh at Agrado, we laugh with her. Parody and irony do
not exhaust the range of emotions produced for the individual who derives
pleasure from the experience of camp, just as all forms of parody and irony
should not necessarily be equated with camp (Sontag 288). This is not, to be
sure, an argument about camp tout court, but rather, about a specific mode of
camp strongly associated with gay men: the adoration of the female star.
Camp can of course be bitchy and irreverent, and the pleasure garnered from
such a posture is questionable, since it borders on schadenfreude.
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

But it is easy to overplay the issue of misogyny while forgetting that camp
also displays a great deal of affection for the object (Booth 99); Sontag too
described it as a “tender feeling” and “a kind of love” (291, 292).7 It is quite
obvious from the portrayal of Agrado, for example, that she is meant to be
adored by the audience. As Markuš writes: “Se puede decir que el camp hace
posible que Almodóvar demuestre de una manera más fácil que sus personajes
tengan dignidad y que merezcan el afecto del espectador” (96–97, my emphasis).
The adoration of fans – and of Mario, who prior to this point wanted nothing
more than to be “serviced” – is a reflection of her queer labor, to recall
Tinkcom’s phrase: a testament to her capacity to transform the exploitation
of her body and produce an alternative source of affective pleasure not
anticipated by the circuit of capital that had originally compelled her to expose
her body as a spectacle. This sense of adoration is particularly important to
understanding camp because at the root of Agrado’s performance, there is an
element of abjection, of monstrosity, that she unveils on stage.8 She conveys
her own sense of monstrosity during the performance itself, in the form of a
negative statement: “No soy ningún monstruo,” a line that harkens back to the
moment she looks in the mirror and sees her swollen reflection the night after
being beaten by a client. As Caryl Flinn has shown, camp displays a morbid
fascination with “the decaying diva” – the figure of the glamourous star who,
now aging, becomes something of a shadow of her former self (437, 443).
Indeed, All About Eve (as well as other camp films such as Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane? and Mommy Dearest) participates in this sensibility through its
portrayal of Bette’s declining presence as an aging theatre star. What Agrado’s
performance does, however, is to remove the sting of the camp perspective:
the monstrosity is not a sign of abjection so much as it is the key point of
identification with the camp spectacle. Camp turns the potential rejection of
the aging star into its greatest asset, allowing for a continued affection in spite
of the star’s loss of glamour. The camp fascination with abjection is a way of
sustaining the affection that engendered the relationship between spectator
and actress in the first place.
 1 26 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Not all spectators, certainly, will adopt this stance; a few even leave the
theatre as Agrado announces her substitute performance. But the film strives
to produce this spectatorial position, a position that correlates with that of
Almodóvar himself, as reviewers continually acknowledge that the film reflects
his strong devotion towards women and actresses. Almodóvar has claimed that
even at his most artificial his own relationship to his cinema is one of sincerity:
“All my films are sincere […] If I summoned up my most artificial side, the
film [La flor de mi secreto] would be as sincere as the others, but with a baggage
of visual elements” (Strauss, Almodóvar 168). A similar sense of sincerity
emerges when he remarks that “the actresses who sit in my private pantheon
are the great actresses of the Forties and Fifties […] That somewhat idealized
image of women was very influential” (Strauss, Almodóvar 9). (We should not
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

of course make the mistake of taking his sincerity all too sincerely: as sincere
as his identifications may be, they nonetheless run the risk of reifying the
idealized femininity that he extols.)
While Almodóvar is generally reticent, if not hostile, to questions about
his sexuality, he does admit that his passionate devotion to women and
actresses can be traced back to the films of his youth, the American comedies
of Billy Wilder, the Italian neo-realists, and he comments on how they
touched him profoundly, as if he felt strangely close to the world they
described. In particular, he notes an identification with Monica Vitti in
Antonioni’s L’Avventura: “I felt exactly like Monica Vitti does in the film. […]
In retrospect, my reaction seems rather kitsch, maybe it has something to do
with my gay sensibility, but it was sincere, I felt the same” (Strauss, Almodóvar
3, my emphasis). Although Almodóvar uses the word “kitsch” here to describe
his reaction, his emphasis is on the reception of an object (rather than the
production of a mass culture object of questionable taste most often associated
with the term “kitsch”). Sincerity emerges here as an honesty about attach-
ment, a feeling of being touched by that world, a proximity to it, even an
identification. What was once sincere is now camp, or “kitsch,” in the sense
that it appears excessive, exaggerated from a contemporary vantage point. In
some respects, this is a text-book definition of camp, which casts as outmoded
the codes of expression and styles through which emotional conflicts and
familial disputes are communicated (Klinger 144). On the other hand,
Almodóvar insists that beneath the surface of what will later become camp lies
a sincerity that might otherwise go unnoticed.
More to the point, what Almodóvar admits is that the sentiments he felt
towards those cinematic productions and the female actresses of his youth may
be indelibly tied to his own sense of being gay. In the dedication at the end
of Todo sobre mi madre, Almodóvar lists Bette Davis, Gina Rowland, and Romy
Schneider as three examples of “las [actrices] que más emoción me han
deparado,” which he extends in his notes to the script to include “[…] en un
terreno más ‘camp’, El valle de las muñecas, La leyenda de Lyla Clare (de Robert
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 27

Aldrich), Heat (Paul Morrissey), Harlow con Carrol Baker, Mommie

Dearest… muchas más que probablemente he olvidado” (Almodóvar 173–74).
As mentioned earlier, Maddison is one of the few who reads Almodóvar’s
dedication, which includes men who want to be women, as a reflection of
how Almodóvar conceptualizes his homosexuality in terms of a cross-gender
identification (280–81). Leopoldo Alas reaches a similar conclusion when he
affirms this connection between the filmmaker and women as “una auténtica
y sentida identificación” (“Un grado más” 76). Reiterating this point, in
another context Almodóvar casts himself as a woman and mother and his first
five production companies as a fathers (Strauss, Almodóvar 65), and at the 2002
Oscars he described the emotions he felt upon receiving the award for Todo
sobre mi madre in terms of giving birth.
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

This spectatorial perspective finds its analogue in the film in the under-
studied character of Esteban. Esteban is the viewer interested in All About Eve,
who is willing to stand in the rain to get an autograph from Huma Rojo, who
clearly displays an affection for his mother, going so far as to watch her
performance as an amateur actress in the hospital simulations. In his interview
with Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar admits that the character he most resembles
is Esteban (“A couer” 38). Not surprisingly, Esteban has been interpreted as
gay by several critics, because of the parallels between him and Almodóvar
that the narrative establishes and because of his interest in Truman Capote, All
About Eve, and Huma Rojo-Bette Davis (Sofair 42; Maddison 272). Upon
viewing the clip of Eva al desnudo with his mother, Esteban writes “Todo sobre
mi madre” in his notebook, the camera perspective allowing the pencil to
write on the screen as if he were himself writing the screenplay that follows;
he also mentions that if his mother were an actress, he’d write parts for her
and that he is writing a story about her for submission to a literary
competition. In other words, the film establishes a parallel between Esteban
and Almodóvar as the author of the narrative that is reiterated at the film’s
close when Almodóvar includes his mother in the dedication of the film,
although he has also said, “Nunca he hecho ni nunca haré verdaderamente una
pelı́cula sobre mi madre” (Rioyo 11). The relationship between mother and
son is likewise presented as a clue that offers insight into Esteban. Upon his
death, he reappears in his voice-over, the first in the film, in which he states:
“A los chicos que vivimos solos con nuestra madre se nos pone una cara
especial, más seria de lo normal, como de intelectual o escritor” (Almodóvar
32). His line plays with the idea that “we all know what that means” when that
is a boy who lives alone with his mother.
As Almodóvar’s supposedly “gayest film,” to recall Maddison’s claim,
homosexuality nevertheless takes on a much more ambiguous and less explicit
valence than in his earlier works.9 This ambiguity is further punctuated by the
erasure of Esteban from the film early on, his death ending any further
investigation into his subjectivity. In this respect, one of the additional
 1 28 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

dimensions of All About Eve that Almodóvar’s film assimilates is the way in
which homosexuality enters, or does not enter, the visual realm. While
heterosexual romance dominates the film, there is evidence that some viewers
perceived the ambiguities of sexuality in the film beginning in the late ‘60s,
even if most reviewers did not: Ken Geist, in his biography of Mankiewicz,
notes that the director admitted to receiving fan mail starting in 1968 about
the gay subtext. Eve was perceived early on to be possibly a lesbian – her
shortly-cropped hairstyle, the intimacy with which she walks upstairs with her
boarding house roommate, and Phoebe’s (the new Eve that appears at the
film’s end) over-night stay in her hotel room were interpreted as coded signs
(Haun 78). In 1981 Vito Russo claimed more definitively that Eve and
Addison DeWitt were gay characters (Shingler 58). Even as Todo sobre mi madre
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

establishes an implicit parallel between Esteban and Almodóvar, the former’s

sexuality is only queer by virtue of veiled allusions and coded signs of
homosexuality; the lesbian subtext between Nina and Huma is much more
explicit, although no physical contact is seen. Presented as a series of codes
that point to a sexuality not yet articulated, a sort of inchoate desire that
manifests itself in terms of cultural objects associated with gay culture,
Esteban’s homosexuality is not the hyper-liberated, post-Franco, postmodern
sexuality characteristic of Almodóvar’s earlier films.
Grappling with the nexus of homosexuality, gender, and camp in Todo
sobre mi madre is thus an uncomfortable task for many critics, since one could
easily condemn it for assembling a bag of clichés about gay men being women
trapped in a man’s body or about a potentially gay male who has yet to figure
out his sexuality but who loves his mother. This is, to be sure, a rather
unpopular approach to both gay male sexuality and to camp, since it reaffirms
an association with femininity that queer studies has attempted to dismantle.
In a recent evaluation of queer theory and gay male subjectivity, for example,
David Halperin discusses the resistance to older forms of gay culture such as
the Broadway musical. Drawing on D.A. Miller’s Place for Us [Essay on the
Broadway Musical], he writes: “Miller suggests that it is the outmoded brands
of sentimentality mobilized by the Broadway musical that have come to mark
it as defining an immature and now-outgrown stage in the development of the
gay male subject” (23). Halperin is suspicious of the critical repression of those
residual queer affects such as loneliness, lovelessness, hopelessness, isolation,
and sentimentality (all of which seem to be the melodramatic core of
Almodóvar’s films) that seemingly go against our current brand of gay
identity. The refusal to entertain such notions as a “gay sensibility” stems from
the entrenched anti-essentialism of queer theory. “But there is almost nothing
written about the relation between gay men and those aesthetic forms
[Broadway musical, Hollywood cinema, grand opera, classical and popular
music], about the gayness of those forms themselves, or about the reasons for
gay men’s personal investment in them,” Halperin writes (34). Contemporary
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 29

gay male culture only allows for the representation of desire – and pride about
desire. The “expressive repertory,” as Halperin puts it, of gay male subjec-
tivity is rather narrow (32).
A similar argument can be made about camp and about the camp
fascination with femininity and in particular, Hollywood actresses. The refusal
to engage critically with the sentimental investment of gay men in the cultural
objects they consume leaves camp where it has been traditionally been
treated: in the realm of parody and irony. Although camp is associated with
the pre-Stonewall era in the U.S. and Britain and with the post-Franco period
in Spain, prior to gay liberation and the permissible expression of homosexual
desire, its persistence as a sensibility, as a style, as a desire for certain icons
or figures bespeaks something other than a merely conscious, self-motivated
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

rejection of high art and canonical taste or of normative modes of gender and
sexuality. Camp is often viewed as a now antiquated means of achieving and
sustaining group solidarity through a shared set of aesthetic codes and
responses that served as a defense mechanism against homophobia. Cultural
forms such as the melodrama played a crucial role in fostering that sense of
solidarity, for a camp perspective provided gay men and women with the
capacity to establish forms of identification, as spectators, that were denied to
them by the heterosexual relations at the core of the films’ narratives (Ross
323). This explains, in part, the adoration of female film stars. As Andrew
Ross puts it, “gay male identification with the power and prestige of the
female star was, first and foremost, an identification with women as emotional
subjects in a film world in which men ‘acted’ and women ‘felt’” (323). The
melodramatic performance captures the difficulties of life through an exorbi-
tant, over-the-top display of emotion. Camp thus allowed queer men to
approach the strong sentimentality expressed towards men by women in
melodrama through the lens of the outmoded and unappreciated. The viewer
appreciates the camp value of the star actress precisely because her labor is no
longer valued, her sentimental excesses outmoded and unappreciated. Such
outlandish expressions of desire capture precisely that feeling of
“inappropriateness” that accompanied queer expressions of sentimentality and
love for another male.
The foregoing argument is not meant to suggest that one is “truly” gay or
“more” gay by virtue of having a taste for camp, but rather, that the
sentiments produced by camp for the gay male spectator may be, as
Almodóvar put it, a sincere expression of a “gay sensibility,” of an
identification with and adoration of female stars that is seen as an authentic
part of one’s gay subjectivity. Camp’s relationship to melodrama may be
considered an earlier form of gay male reappropriation of dominant culture,
but Almodóvar’s use of All About Eve attests to the cultural force that camp still
wields. Eve – the reader will recall – doesn’t have a heart. In Almodóvar’s
version, the one without a heart is Esteban, whose heart is literally taken away
 1 30 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

upon his death and given to another. By taking away Esteban’s heart,
Almodóvar draws attention to the limits of gay subjectivity as they are
currently represented: gay men are not allowed to voice the expressions of
sentiment–love, loneliness, affection–generally associated with women in
melodrama. And here is where Agrado’s notion of sincerity becomes central
to the film’s commentary about sentiment: Agrado, as the object of camp
affection and, for some, identification (Maddison 280), embraces and ex-
presses her campiness as a form of authenticity. As such, within the narrative
logic of the film, Almodóvar suggests that camp – the camp devotion for divas
– is an authentic part of the various identifications that, for some gay men at
least, constitute what it means to be gay. Camp here appears not simply as
the coded reappropriation of queer spectators, but also and more importantly
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

as an oblique commentary on the ways in which historically coded films and

icons such as All About Eve or Bette Davis still have much to tell us about the
affective life of gay men.
Such a position adopts a different approach to the value of mass culture
and the recycling of history often associated with camp. Criticism on camp
generally characterizes the effect of queer spectatorship on cultural commodi-
ties in terms of a subversion of their original value. The mainstreaming of
camp in the form of pop and mass camp in the 1960s reinstalled camp in a
dialectic between critique and complicity, raising the question of capital’s
capacity to assimilate camp as a form of commodity, reintegrating into the
circuit of commodification at the margins of which camp initially stood. A
shrewd auteur who understands the power of the market and enjoys a
privileged position in the Spanish film industry now that his films are
co-produced by the French group Ciby 2000 (Vernon and Morris 15; Besas
257) and by Renn Productions/France 2 Cinema, the “mature” Almodóvar
appears at first glance to have foregone camp by turning to the emotional
conflicts of the melodramatic genre that sells so well. His success at Cannes
and the numerous accolades such as the Goya and the Oscar, propelling him
to even greater heights of fame and marketability, convey the impression, for
some at least, that his aspirations are more commercial.10
Yet Todo sobre mi madre, as we have seen, slips in a different sort of
message through the mass culture mercantilization of emotion. In his dis-
cussion of John Waters’s generic manipulations of melodrama, Tinkcom
advances an argument that could very well describe Almodóvar’s approach to
cinema: “Waters’s later career has been less concerned with accommodating
‘hip,’ knowing urban spectators than with smuggling a camp reading of the
melodrama into the venue of melodrama itself; Waters distances himself from
camp to install it before his unsuspecting viewers in the new formations of the
Hollywood Cinema” (159).11 If Almodóvar “works like a homosexual,” to
paraphrase Tinkcom, his queer labor as a filmmaker allows him smuggle
within his melodrama a camp sensibility rather than producing a film that is
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 31

explicitly camp. A character like Esteban or the use of All About Eve – what
we might call older forms of gay representation – are not, then, simply a
reflection of Almodóvar’s reluctance to represent homosexuality openly,
although no doubt such criticisms have an element of truth to them. His use
of A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve is not a sign of deep-seated doubt
about a lingering cultural atraso in Spain, it is not the plagiaristic search for
originality of la movida madrileña (Yarza 17). No longer invested in the project
of parodying Francoist culture, Almodóvar’s turn to 1950s melodrama adopts
a different approach to camp, an approach not invested in subversion and
complicity, but in sentiment. This reading of Almodóvar’s film as a form of
sincere camp may seem a bit idealistic, for not all camp succeeds in blunting
its more parodic, and at times misogynistic, edge. But then again, that
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

idealism is what gives Agrado her namesake. It is with that spirit in mind that
we can perhaps read her famous line – “una es más auténtica cuanto más
parece lo que ha soñado de sı́ misma” – not as the essence of a woman, but
as the essence of the camp sensibility she embodies.

Notes
* I would like to express my thanks to L. Elena Delgado, Dara Goldman,
Rob Rushing, Joyce Tolliver, Shioban Somerville, and John Wilcox for
their constructive criticism on an earlier version of this essay.

1 He admits that “[t]here are a lot of things that I’m not conscious of in the
film. I wrote and filmed it conscious of the language I was employing, but
without being conscious of the meaning of that language” (Strauss, “A
couer” 39, my translation).
2 Agrado “camps up” precisely what makes a figure like Joan Crawford an
icon. Few actresses exemplify the “self-made” woman better than Lucille Le
Sueur. Studio publicity established her as a working girl who, through hard
work and dedication, became a star who played working girls in films
striving for a better life. Crawford was dropped by MGM in the ‘40s, and
although she made a “comeback” with Mildred Pierce (1945), her posterior
works such Johnny Guitar and Berzerk are testament to her increasing status
in Hollywood as a “camp” figure (Robertson 89-90).
3 Agrado’s performance on-stage in Barcelona evokes the figure of Ocaña,
but the Catalonian context is all but effaced in the film, and the political
overtones of authenticity and spectacle so central to Ocaña’s performances
on the Ramblas are removed. This is not a late 1990s Ocaña, but a ‘90s
cross between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
4 Booth alerts us to the authenticity of camp performances when he suggests
a form of identification of the performer with the original model: “A
non-camp cabaret impressionist may impersonate many film stars, but only
 1 32 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

so fleetingly and superficially that there is no suggestion that he actually sees

himself in terms of these stars. A camp female impersonator, on the other
hand, may well continue to use the mannerisms of Bette Davis or Joan
Crawford off-stage in a way which says as much about himself as it does
about the stars” (69).
5 Boris Izaguirre argues, campily, for a similar claim when extols the
surgically-enhanced virtues of Anya, his favorite character from the reality
television show Gran Hermano, because of the heart-felt expression of
artificiality as authenticity that she divulged to him during an interview:
“Fue total esta intervención: todo el tiempo sosteniendo mi mano y todo
el tiempo haciéndome ver que en este nuevo siglo, más que ser famosos,
tenemos el poder de convertirnos en aquello que más deseamos ser, en la
mujer que llevamos dentro como aseguraba Agrado en Todo sobre mi madre”
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

(42).
6 It is noteworthy that Almodóvar asserts in an interview that the travestı́s are
“auténticas” and not actors, thereby maintaining a distinction between
artificiality and authenticity that his film belies (Rioyo 11).
7 Ross also points out the ways in which the feminist appraisal of powerful
female stars and gay male camp fascination both idolize the independence
and strength of the women over their sexuality (324).
8 From a psychoanalytic perspective, Kim Michasiw argues that camp perfor-
mances function as a form of identification: the performer who parodies
and “camps up” femininity engages in an identification with precisely the
most abject, excessive dimensions of the feminine, as constructed by
masculinity (162).
9 James Mandrell argues that Almodóvar maintains an edgy ambivalence
towards gay culture and the representation of gay sexuality in his films. For
Mandrell, this ambivalence complicates the critical embrace of Almodóvar’s
work and the articulation of an “ideal” gay spectator for his films (55).
10 For a deft analysis of hysteria as a symptom of the conflict between critique
and commercialism, between politics and the market, in three of Almod-
óvar’s films, see Epps.
11 Waters and Almodóvar, the latter influenced by the former’s Pink Flamingos
(Strauss, Almodóvar 13), share a curious parallel in their approaches to film,
as both began as underground directors whose fascination with melodrama
and narrative have allowed each to achieve commercial success.

Works Cited
Alas Mı́nguez, Leopoldo. “Sinceramente kitsch.” El kitsch español. Ed. Antonio
Sánchez Casado. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1988. 9-12.
Alas Mı́nguez, Leopoldo. “Un grado más.” Academia 26 (1999): 72-77.
Almodóvar, Pedro. Todo sobre mi madre: Edición definitiva del guión de la
 A L M O D Ó V A R S T O D O S O B R E M I M A D R E 1 33

pelı́cula con algunas reflexiones, fotografi´as y textos del autor. Madrid: El Deseo,
1999.
Besas, Peter. “The Financial Structure of Spanish Cinema.” Refiguring Spain:
Cinema/Media/Representation. Ed. Marsha Kinder. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
241-59.
Booth, Mark. “Campe-toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp.” Cleto
66-79.
Boyero, Carlos. Rev. of All About Eve. Casablanca 14 (1982): 43.
Cleto, Fabio, ed. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.
Epps, Brad. “Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro
Almodóvar.” Vernon and Morris 99-124.
Finch, Mark. “Sex and Address in Dynasty.” Screen 27.6 (1986): 24-42.
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

Flinn, Caryl. “The Deaths of Camp.” Cleto 433-57.

Graham, Bob. “Almodóvar Knows His Women: Quirky Characters Get Sympath-
etic Treatment.” The San Francisco Chronicle 22 Dec. 1991: E3.
Halperin, David M. “Homosexuality’s Closet.” Michigan Quarterly Review 41.1
(2002): 21-54.
Haun, Harry. “All About Eve.” Films in Review 43.3-5 (1991): 74-83.
Izaguirre, Boris. Morir de glamour: crónica de la sociedad de fin de siglo. Madrid:
Espasa Calpe, 2000.
Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas
Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
Maddison, Steve. “All About Women: Pedro Almodóvar and the Heterosocial
Dynamic.” Textual Practice 14.2 (2000): 265-84.
Mandrell, James. “Sense and Sensibility, or Latent Heterosexuality and Labyrinth
of Passions.” Vernon and Morris 41-57.
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., dir. All About Eve. 20th Century-Fox, 1950.
Markuš, Saša. La poética de Pedro Almodóvar. Trans. Maja Andrijević. Barcelona:
Littera, 2001.
Martı́n, Annabel. “Almodóvar se tiñe de rosa: Reinscripciones melodramáticas del
conocimiento y del sentir.” Cine-Lit III: Essays on Hispanic Film and Fiction.
Ed. George Cabello-Castelet, Jaume Martı́-Olivella, and Guy H. Wood.
Corvallis, OR: Oregon State U, 1997. 14-22.
Michasiw, Kim. “Camp, Masculinity, Masquerade.” Differences 6.2-3 (1994):
146-73.
Moix, Terenci. El beso de Peter Pan. Barcelona: Planeta, 1998.
Murray, Steve. “Dark Wisdom Runs Through Campy ‘Mother.’” The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution 17 Dec. 1999: 1Q.
Rioyo, Javier, and Javier Angulo. “Una pareja estable.” Cinemanı́a 43 (1999):
8-11.
Rivière, Margarita. Lo cursi y el poder de la moda. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1992.
Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna.
Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” 1988. Cleto 308-29.
 1 34 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Shingler, Martin. “Interpreting All About Eve: A Study in Historical Reception.”

Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences. Ed. Melvyn
Stokes and Richard Maltby. London: British Film Institute, 2001. 46-62.
Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. 2nd ed.
London: Verso, 2000.
Sofair, Michael. Rev. of Todo sobre mi madre. Film Quarterly 55.2 (2001): 40-47.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New
York: Farrar, 1986. 275-92.
Strauss, Frédéric, ed. Almodóvar on Almodóvar. Trans. Yves Baignères. London:
Faber and Faber, 1996.
Strauss, Frédéric. “A coeur ouvert: Entretien avec Pedro Almodóvar.” Cahiers du
cinéma 535 (1999): 36-40.
Tinkcom, Matthew. Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema. Durham:
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 04:50 10 October 2014

Duke UP, 2002.

Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972.
Tydeman, William, ed. Wilde: Comedies. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Vernon, Kathleen M. and Barbara Morris. “Pedro Almodóvar, Postmodern
Auteur.” Introduction. Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar.
Ed. Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris. Westport, CT: Greenwood
P, 1995. 1-23.
Yarza, Alejandro. Un canı́bal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia
en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias-Prodhufi, 1999.