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Abstract
Pedro Almodóvar’s first film in English, The Human Voice (2021), was adapted from Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (1930), which had already inspired two of his earlier films: La ley del deseo (1987) and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988). Drawing on French continental philosophy, this article examines how La ley del deseo approaches the themes of narcissism, bad faith, reciprocity and existential availability, which were already present in Cocteau’s work. Additionally, the conclusion argues that La ley del deseo can be read as prophetic in that its discourse on self-absorption still resonates today.
Notes
1 Almodóvar recalls that it was Carmen Maura’s performance in the adaptation of La Voix humaine within La ley del deseo that inspired him to adapt Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios from Cocteau’s play (Nuria Vidal, El cine de Pedro Almodóvar [Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1988], 258).
2 See Barbara Morris, ‘Almodóvar’s Laws of Subjectivity and Desire’, in Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, ed. Kathleen M. Vernon & Barbara Morris (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 87–97 (p. 61).
3 These themes are mentioned, but not explored in depth. See, for example, Paul Julian Smith, ‘Pedro Almodóvar's Cinema of Desire’, in Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960–1990 (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1992), 163–99 (p. 197); and Bruce Williams, ‘Playgrounds of Desire: Almodóvar, Fetishism, and the Male Ideal Ego’, Journal of Film and Video, 52:2 (2000), 28–40.
4 See, for example, Morris, ‘Almodóvar’s Laws of Subjectivity and Desire’, and Williams, ‘Playgrounds of Desire’. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla does address ethics in relation to Almodóvar’s cinema, although he focuses on the themes of trauma and memory, stating that ‘psychoanalysis remains a promising epistemological framework and critical resource for thinking about traumas’ (Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar [Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2017], 8–9). He also acknowledges ‘Almodóvar’s own ambivalent attitude vis-à-vis psychoanalysis’ (8), which, one might argue, La ley del deseo illustrates.
5 Levinas studied under Husserl in Freiburg between 1928 and 1929, while Raymond Aron is said to have introduced the work of Husserl to Sartre and Beauvoir in 1932. See Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 7.
6 Jean-Claude Seguin has asked provocatively whether ‘the Spanish Almodóvar might also, in part, be a French Almodóvar’ (see ‘Is there a French Almodóvar?’, in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. Marvin D’Lugo & Kathleen M. Vernon [Chichester/Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2013], 432–52 [p. 432]). Almodóvar recognizes that La ley del deseo pays ‘una especie de homenaje inconsciente’ to French culture by adapting La Voix humaine and the prominence of the song ‘Ne me quitte pas’ in the score, although its writer and original performer, Jacques Brel, was Belgian (see Frédéric Strauss, Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar [Madrid: Akal, 2001], 69).
7 Distinctions between psychoanalysis and philosophy are not always clear cut. Jessica Benjamin acknowledges that the concept of intersubjectivity ‘has been brought into psychoanalysis from philosophy’ (see her Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference [New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1995], 30). Benjamin also informs her discussion of master/slave relations using the work of both Georg Hegel and Sigmund Freud (see her The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination [New York: Pantheon Books, 1988], 51–84). Marie-Andrée Charbonneau includes Sartre and Jacques Lacan in what Vincent Descombes referred to as the ‘ “generation of the 3Hs” ’ (quoted in Marie-Andrée Charbonneau, ‘An Encounter between Sartre and Lacan’, Sartre Studies International, 5:2 [1999], 33–44 [p. 33]). Elsewhere, Patrick Fuery argues that ‘so much of Lacan’s theorising of the gaze originates from Sartre’s ideas in Being and Nothingness’ (see his New Developments in Film Theory [London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 176, note 5).
8 Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 30.
9 Jean Cocteau, La Voix humaine (Paris: Stock, 1930), 10.
10 See Lisa Downing & Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (London/New York: Routledge, 2009); Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective, ed. Jean-Pierre Boulé & Enda McCaffrey (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011); and Jean-Pierre Boulé & Ursula Tidd, Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).
11 Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London/New York: Verso, 2000), 88. The representations of homosexuality in La ley del deseo have elicited much debate. Among the contributors to these discussions, Paul Julian Smith describes the film as the ‘first […] by Almodóvar in which male homosexuality is consistently centre-frame’, he commends ‘the unselfconscious way in which it captures the everyday domesticity of gay ménages’, but reminds us that Almodóvar repeatedly denied that it was ‘about homosexuality’ (Smith, Laws of Desire, 190–91). Chris Perriam argues that, though ‘generally gay affirmative’, it has a ‘sexual-political indeterminacy […] involving, for example, the assertion for dramatic purposes of the inevitability and even acceptability of internalized homophobia, and of extreme bad faith as a good engine for narrative and emotional movement’ (Chris Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema [Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 2003], 55). Elsewhere, Perriam, with Santiago Fouz Hernández, argues that La ley del deseo ‘ “straightens out” ’ its queerness (Santiago Fouz Hernández & Chris Perriam, ‘Beyond Almodóvar: “Homosexuality” in Spanish Cinema of the 1990s’, in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. David Alderson & Linda Anderson [Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 2000], 96–111 [p. 99]). By contrast, for José Quiroga, viewing La ley del deseo was the first time he had seen a ‘movie [that] was not about the homosexual right to love […] but about homosexual desire’ (José Quiroga Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic [Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009], 17).
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, intro. by Richard Eyre (London/New York: Routledge, 2003 [1st French ed. 1943]), 386.
13 See Robert Misrahi, Qui est l’autre? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999), 22. Self and Other are capitalized in this article to refer to a situated subject to coincide with the French ‘autrui’. Where a lack of capitals is used, a more universalized, abstract ‘other’ is implied.
14 Smith, Laws of Desire, 197.
15 Strauss, Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar, 68.
16 Smith, Laws of Desire, 193.
17 Strauss, Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar, 69.
18 Quoted in Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 [1st French ed. 1979]), 68.
19 Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Singer, 68.
20 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, trans. James Strachey, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison (New York/London: New York U. P., 1986 [1st German ed. 1914]), 17–43 (p. 41).
21 See Andrew P. Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Morrison, 1–12 [p. 1].
22 Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 40. Freud also defined narcissism as the ‘libidinal investment of the ego (including a heightened importance of the self over the object and a relative lack of importance of object relations), and the specific attributes of self-regard over the ego-ideal’ (Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Morrison, 1).
23 Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 25.
24 Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Morrison, 2.
25 Heinz Kohut, ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Morrison, 61–88 (pp. 68–69).
26 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, with a foreword by Malcolm Bowie (New York/London: Routledge, 2001 [1st French ed. 1966]), 2.
27 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, intro. by Judith Thurman (New York: Vintage, 2011 [1st French ed. 1949]), 691.
28 Jacques Derrida, ‘ “There is No One Narcissism” (Autobiophotographies)’, in his Points … : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1992), 196–215 (p. 199).
29 For Beauvoir, the ‘problem … of the other’s consciousness’ was her problem before it was Sartre’s (see Margaret A. Simons & Jessica Benjamin, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview’, Feminist Studies, 5:2 [1979], 330–45 [p. 339]). Sonia Kruks notes that ‘Beauvoir’s early diaries clearly establish that she had been meditating on the problem of “the Other” well before she had even met Sartre’ and identifies a ‘criss-crossing of ideas […] at play’ over the years of their relationship (Sonia Kruks, Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity [London/New York: Oxford U. P., 2012], 10–11).
30 Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 32.
31 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 18–23 & 97–103.
32 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 98. See also Jack Reynolds, Understanding Existentialism (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), 58–59.
33 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 278.
34 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 19–20; my translation.
35 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 385.
36 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre ?, 20; my translation.
37 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 385. See also Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 23; and Chris Stevens, ‘A Critical Discussion of Sartre on Love’, Stance. An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal, 1:1 (2008), 2–7 (p. 3) (available online at <https://openjournals.bsu.edu/stance/article/view/1687> [accessed 16 November 2022]).
38 Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia U. P., 2001), 149.
39 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’ (1944), intro. Debra Bergoffen, trans. Marybeth Timmerman & Stacy Keltner, in Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman & Mary Beth Mader, with a foreword by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press), 77–151 (p. 135).
40 See Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 24.
41 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 79; original emphasis.
42 These links to Almodóvar’s life experience have been the subject of some debate. Víctor Fuentes argues that in La ley del deseo ‘the autobiographical resonances are the most compelling and complex’ (‘Bad Education: Fictional Autobiography and Meta-Film Noir’, in All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, ed. Brad Epps & Despina Kakoudaki [Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009], 429–45 [p. 431]). Contrastingly, Alberto Mira reminds us that, although the director ‘made a film which seemed to hint at some private truth’, he claimed ‘cheekily that Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) is a more accurate account of his true self’ (‘A Life, Imagined and Otherwise: The Limits and Uses of Autobiography in Almodóvar’s Films’, in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, ed. D’Lugo & Vernon, 88–104 [p. 89]).
43 Strauss, Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar, 68.
44 James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 146–47.
45 Williams, Jean Cocteau, 148.
46 See Vidal, El cine de Pedro Almodóvar, 235–36; original emphasis.
47 Thomas Sotinel, Pedro Almodóvar (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007), 37; my translation.
48 Robin Podolsky, ‘L’aimé qui est l’aimée: Can Levinas’ Beloved be Queer?’, European Judaism. A Journal for the New Europe, 49:2 (2016), 50–70 (p. 55).
49 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, with an intro. by John Wild (Pittsburgh: Duquesne U. P., 1969), 197.
50 See Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction, 46.
51 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, 199; original emphasis.
52 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, 6. Similarly, Luce Irigaray reads Levinas’ chapter on the ‘Phenomenology of Eros’ as gendering the Other as feminine (‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros” ’, in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Tina Chanter [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State U. P., 2001], 119–44).
53 For Tina Chanter, Beauvoir ‘fails to engage with Levinas’s overall philosophical project, which is to elevate the notion of alterity above the notion of totality’ (see her ‘Introduction’, in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Chanter, 1–28 [p. 2]). However, Ellie Anderson argues that Beauvoir is ‘much closer to Levinas on the topic of otherness than has been generally acknowledged’, although Beauvoir is ‘more successful in accounting for ethical responsiveness’ (Ellie Anderson, ‘From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir’s Alternative to Levinas’, Continental Philosophy Review, 52:2 [2019], 171–89 [p. 172]).
54 See Podolsky, ‘L’aimé qui est l’aimée’, 65.
55 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, 171.
56 Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1997), 138.
57 Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism, 138.
58 Juan Cobos & Miguel Marías, ‘Almodóvar secreto’, Nickel Odeon, 1 (1995), 74–149, quoted in Mark Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London/New York: I. B. Tauris), 107.
59 Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema, 55.
60 Strauss, Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar, 68.
61 Smith, Desire Unlimited, 83.
62 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London/New York: Routledge, 2002 [1st French ed. 1945]), 182.
63 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, 181.
64 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia U. P., 2010), 46; original emphasis.
65 Salamon, Assuming a Body, 50.
66 Salamon, Assuming a Body, 57; original emphasis.
67 Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, 55.
68 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, 163.
69 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, 723.
70 The images of Antonio attempting to seduce and then killing Juan while wearing a copy of Pablo’s shirt might also be said to parody Freudian interpretations of homosexuality as narcissistic. Freud’s theories of narcissism and homosexuality are complex, but in a footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality he argues that men-who-desire-men ‘proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them’ (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, trans. James Strachey [Mansfield Center: Martino Publishing, 2011 (1st German ed. 1905)], 23, note 1; original emphasis).
71 Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 53.
72 Vidal, El cine de Pedro Almodóvar, 217.
73 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, 86–88.
74 Terri Murray, ‘Is Homosexuality “Bad Faith” ’, Philosophy Now, n.d., <https://philosophynow.org/issues/39/Is_Homosexuality_Bad_Faith> (accessed 10 February 2022). Lawrence R. Schehr argued that ‘the figure of the male homosexual’ in Sartre’s work is ‘complex and multiple’ (see his Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses in French Literature, [Redwood, Stanford U. P., 1995], 68). Sartre’s writing is littered with examples ‘in which he refuses to believe in the homosexuality of the other’, illustrated particularly in his tome on Jean Genet in which ‘Sartre reinvents a homosexual Jean Genet, not the pour soi that Genet might be, but some en soi homosexual in a perpetual bad faith because he has assumed “that” as his identity’ (Alcibiades at the Door, 80–81). In an example of how Genet’s sexual politics elicits multiple interpretations, Paul Julian Smith associates Almodóvar with Genet as evidence his disavowal of gay narratives in his films and in La ley del deseo (Smith, Laws of Desire, 165).
75 Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, 136.
76 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 24.
77 Martin Buber, Je et tu (Paris: Broché, 2012 [1st French ed. 1923]); and Karl Jaspers, Philosophie (Paris/Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989 [1st French ed. 1932]).
78 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 146–47.
79 For Henri Freyburger, Gidean availability is best understood through the metaphor of the arc (L’Évolution de la disponibilité Gidienne [Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1970], 93). In its most idealistic form, as perhaps illustrated in Gide’s poetic work Les Nourritures terrestres (1897), it refuses compromise, is neither restricted by past experiences nor future projects. By the time Gide wrote L’Immoraliste (1902) a more situated availability is said to have emerged in which decisions are informed but not impeded by present situations.
80 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 148; my translation. Oblative love signifies a love in which the freedom of the Other is not constrained by the Self’s needs. This latter is what is meant by captative love.
81 Misrahi, Qui est l’autre?, 148.
82 Podolsky, ‘L’aimé qui est l’aimée’, 59; and Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, 256.
83 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, 256; original emphasis.
84 Brígida M. Pastor, ‘Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar’s Law of Desire (1987)—the Real “Sexual” Revolution’, Studies in European Cinema, 3:1 (2006), 7–23 (p. 19).
85 For more on the social and psychological impacts of social media, see Patricia Wallace, The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge U. P., 1999); and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
86 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Broché, 1981).
87 See Nicole B. Ellison, Jeffrey T. Hancock & Catalina L. Toma, ‘Profile As Promise: A Framework for Conceptualising Veracity in Online Dating Self-Presentations’, New Media and Society, 14:1 (2011), 45–62; and Courtney Blackwell, Jeremy Birnholtz & Charles Abbot, ‘Seeing and Being Seen: Co-Situation and Impression Formation Using Grindr, a Location Aware Dating App’, New Media and Society, 17:7 (2015), 1117–36.
88 Guy Trebay, ‘The Sex Education of Grindr’s Joel Simkhai’, The New York Times, 12 December 2014, n.p.; available at <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/fashion/the-sex-education-of-grindrs-joel-simkhai.html> (accessed 17 November 2022).
89 See Dominique Pierre Batiste, ‘ “0 Feet Away”: the Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 22:2 (2013), 111–32; and Chad Van De Wiele & Stephanie Tom Tong, ‘Breaking Boundaries: The Uses and Gratifications of Grindr’, in Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, ed. A. J. Brush et al. (n.p.: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014), 619–30.
90 Trebay, The Sex Education of Grindr’s Joel Simkhai’, n.p.
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