projections and reflections

In the third week of class we watched the film La Ley del Deseo by Pedro Almodóvar. One of the things I found most interesting about this film was how heteronormative gender roles were explored and played with. La Ley del Deseo showed queer folk presented occupying typical heteronormative roles, juxtaposing who one may think ought to fill those roles. Roles such as mother and father are filled by non-heteronormative characters who commit scandalous transgressions against norms. We see how even in a world where scandal and eroticism is the norm, people police other people’s actions and attempt to control how they think others ought to behave.

This theme of one telling another how to act or behave is seen right from the get-go in the opening scene where an unnamed male actor is being directed on how to pleasure himself sexually in front of a camera. Even in an act as personal as ones own sexual pleasure, he is instructed on how to act, even though he is operating outside of traditional heteronormative behavior. This theme of directing other’s behaviors carries throughout the film, where aptly, the main character Pablo, is a director. Pablo plays the role of director in his movies, but it also seems to bleed out into his personal life. In his interactions with his lover Juan, he types out letters which he would like to receive to mail to Juan and have Juan mail them back as if they were written by Juan himself. He is speaking for Juan, and is showing him how he thinks he ought to feel and behave. We see Pablo’s directing also with his sister Tina when he tells Tina he believes she was overacting, interestingly in a scene that to viewers seemed decidedly less overacted than the rest of the film. We see again Pablo intending to speak for others when he tells his sister Tina that he is basing his next film loosely off of her life as a trans woman. We can assume that he is planning to tell her story in they way he thinks it should be told, rather than giving her the agency to control the way her own story is told, which may include how her father had originally directed her to get a sex change when she was a young child having a scandalous affair with him. Between these characters we see how even when individuals transgress against the gendered roles of how they ought to behave, they still attempt to control how they think those around them ought to behave. To a lesser extent, we also see this in the young girl Ada, who rather than attempting to control those around her herself, she prays to La Virgen to direct the behaviors of those around her, and curiously enough, she always seems to get exactly what she prays for.

Pablo tells his sister Tina that he plans to base his next movie off of the story of her life.

In week three’s reading “Tendencies” the author describes being queer as referring to “an open mesh of possibilities“, yet it is interesting to me how it is perhaps a human compulsion to want to exhibit some control over one another, and remove some of those possibilities for others that we deem undesirable. It feels as if we are all actors in within a world where various directors, be they individuals or institutions direct and dictate our behaviors.