Narcissism and Bad Faith in Pedro Almodóvar’s La ley del deseo (1987)

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.

Key Words:

• Narcissism
• Bad faith
• Reciprocity
• Existential availability
• Self and Other
• Pedro Almodóvar
• La ley del deseo
• Law of Desire
• Continental philosophy
• Jean Cocteau

On 3 September 2020, at the Venice Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar premiered his first film in English, The Human Voice, ‘freely’ adapted from Jean Cocteau’s play La Voix humaine (1930). Cocteau’s monodrama had already inspired two key Almodóvar films: La ley del deseo (1987) and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988).¹ It is to the first of these films that this article turns. It intervenes in existing discussions of what was described for some time as Almodóvar’s most personal work in three ways.² Firstly, it furnishes a reading of the film’s depictions of narcissism and bad faith, which, I contend, merit closer scrutiny than is currently available in existing scholarship.³ Secondly, this article draws on the existentialist phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it goes on to consider the film’s approach to Self-Other relations in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, basing its definition of narcissism on Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. Thirdly, in the conclusion, it considers the implications of its representations of romantic and erotic relationships for how love and desire are approached in the social media era. La ley del deseo, I argue, reveals that attitude, not technology, impacts our availability to interact with Others within a reciprocal exchange.

This article’s turn to French existentialism, phenomenology and ethics constitutes a departure from existing scholarship on Almodóvar’s films, which is more often informed by psychoanalysis.⁴ The application of French continental philosophy to a Spanish film from the late 1980s extends the cultural interplay evident in La ley del deseo. The protagonist, film/stage director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), is adapting La Voix humaine for the Spanish stage. It was around the time that Cocteau was writing his play that Sartre, Beauvoir and Levinas are said to have encountered the work of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl.⁵ La Voix humaine raises questions about the Self’s interaction with the Other in romantic relationships that were also addressed by existentialist phenomenology, primarily around narcissism, bad faith, reciprocity and existential availability. In this early homage to Cocteau’s play, Almodóvar draws out some of those existential and ethical dilemmas. By reading some of the meanings underlying La ley del deseo through the prism of mid-century French philosophy, as well as considering its handling of Cocteau’s play, this article also adds to existing research on the connections between Almodóvar’s work and aspects of French culture.⁶

However, drawing on existentialist phenomenology and ethics does not preclude the occasional recourse to psychoanalysis where aspects of the film’s representations demand it.⁷ Nevertheless, I argue that La ley del deseo concentrates less on what Jessica Benjamin describes as ‘psychic development’ and more on the external expression and effects of narcissism and bad faith.⁸ This partially reflects Cocteau’s declared intentions, which, according to the play’s preface, sought to resolve issues in a theatrical rather than psychological way.⁹

This article also seeks to intervene in recent considerations of existentialism, phenomenology and ethics in relation to film representations by focusing its attention on a narrative film from Spain.¹⁰ But La ley del deseo is not just any narrative film from Spain. It was Spain’s fourth most commercially successful release of 1987, said to represent Spain more than any other Spanish film at film festivals abroad and offered an unapologetic depiction of queer lifestyles in 1980s Madrid.¹¹ While not detracting from this pivotal aspect of the film’s representations, and while recognizing that some of the philosophers on whom I draw have engaged in problematic characterizations of homosexuality, it is how the film depicts the impacts of negative forms of narcissism and bad faith for selfhood and intersubjective relationships that interests me here.

Denying the Self: The Debilitating Impact of Narcissism in La ley del deseo

According to Sartre, ‘conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others’.¹² Because the Other is a free subject like the Self, a bearer of consciousness, a struggle for mastery between Self and Other can ensue.¹³ Such conflict can be particularly acute in romantic relationships because both Self and Other are thrown into vulnerable situations in which they feel emotionally exposed. Sartre devotes much of his work on ‘being-for-others’ to love and desire. Love and desire as conflict is a central theme of La ley del deseo. Pablo claims he is in love with Juan Bermúdez (Miguel Molina), who, Pablo insists, does not return his love, hence the title, which points to the common anxiety that the one we love and desire does not love and desire us back. Antonio Benítez (Antonio Banderas) becomes infatuated with Pablo and, in a jealous bid to secure him for himself, kills Juan. The film ends with Antonio’s suicide precisely when Pablo recognizes that he loves him in return. For Paul Julian Smith, Pablo ‘fails to note the specificity (the otherness) of his lovers, and can only realize his desire for them when both are dead’.¹⁴ It is through such failure, I argue, that Pablo not only forecloses his lovers’ self-expression, but also denies their role in his self-formation. Pablo’s existence is inhibited by his solipsism.

In an interview with Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar pinpoints the lack of reciprocity in its central tripartite relationship as the principal tragedy depicted in La ley del deseo. Affirming that it is a key film in his career and life, he adds that it represents his vision of desire, which includes ‘la absoluta necesidad de sentirse deseado’, but that two subjects of desire rarely converge and this is one of the greatest tragedies of human existence.¹⁵ What is particularly tragic in La ley del deseo is that its main protagonist Pablo cannot see that his preoccupation with himself prevents him from leading an existence in which he is fulfilled emotionally.

Pablo wishes to be loved and desired, but only if the forms that love and desire take comply with his expectations. His reputation as a successful writer and film/theatre director positions him at the apex of his entourage. His pre-eminence is demonstrated after the narrative’s prologue—which depicts a sexual scene from his latest film, El paradigma del mejillón—when he is celebrating with his admirers at the premiere and, later, when he is a guest on a talk show. As much as in his professional role, Pablo endeavours to direct his existence, to exert mastery over all aspects of his life, including the romantic and the carnal. A key example comes when Pablo asks his lover Juan to send him a love letter from his holiday on the coast. After receiving Juan’s original postcard containing just a few words, Pablo asks Juan to send him the letter that he would have liked to have received, which he drafts for Juan to sign:

Querido Pablo. No dejé Madrid para olvidarte. Porque si me olvido de ti, como me aconsejas, temo quedarme vacío. Cuéntame todo lo que haces. ¿Qué libros lees? ¿Qué películas has visto? ¿Qué discos has comprado? Si te has acatarrado. Quiero compartir todo lo tuyo. Evita únicamente si has conocido a alguien que te gusta. Es lo único que no soportaría compartir. Quiero verte. Decide tú cuando. Te adoro.

As the letter ends, the slow meeting of the inked typewriter keys with the paper is filmed in close-up, a visual and aural marker of Pablo’s need for external affirmation. In voice-over, we hear Juan reading the letter aloud, but, at the point when he asks Pablo which books he is reading, Pablo’s voice accompanies Juan’s—a moment that Paul Julian Smith describes as constituting ‘an auditory equivalent of Pablo’s egotism’.¹⁶ As Almodóvar states, ‘el director vive su vida como cineasta, no como persona, y no admite que las cosas sean como son. Las dirige, las crea, y las impone la forma y la calidad que desea. Prácticamente se convierte en creador de su propia vida’.¹⁷ Romantic and erotic encounters have value by virtue of whether they satisfy Pablo’s perceived needs and flatter his ego. As mentioned, he wants to be adored according to his expectations and it is only via this kind of love, he believes, that he will achieve happiness. Such behaviour recalls Jean Baudrillard’s description of seduction in his discussion of the classic Narcissus myth. Baudrillard cites Vincent Descombes who argues that that which ultimately seduces us is our own seductive appeal: ‘What the person seduced sees in the one who seduces him, the unique object of his fascination, is his own seductive, charming self, his lovable self-image’.¹⁸ For Baudrillard, the translucent surface of the spring in the original myth does not perform a reflective function, but one of absorption in that Narcissus becomes swallowed up in his self-image. Seduction in these terms is not about being seduced by the Other as Other but is instead concerned with how we captivate the Other and this is what makes all seduction narcissistic, according to Baudrillard.¹⁹

We might acknowledge resonances here with Sigmund Freud who observes, unsurprisingly, that our self-regard is raised when we are loved.²⁰ Though the term ‘narcissism’ was reportedly first used by psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis to describe both autoeroticism and self-admiration,²¹ Freud’s paper on narcissism initiated an ongoing series of psychoanalytical interventions. Freud differentiated between primary narcissism, which he saw as a normal stage of childhood, and secondary pathological narcissism, which can occur later.²² Perhaps predictably, Freud ascribed characteristics associated with this narcissism to women, describing how vain women develop ‘self-contentment’ and love themselves ‘with an intensity comparable to that of the man’s love for them’.²³

Psychoanalysts have since developed Freud’s ideas on narcissism. Heinz Kohut saw narcissism as, according to Andrew P. Morrison, a ‘normal developmental need for self-cohesion’,²⁴ but if the child suffers trauma against their self-esteem, as an adult, they can shift recurrently between feelings of grandiosity and inferiority.²⁵ Jacques Lacan argued that a narcissistic identification with a coherent image of Self, reflected back to the boy child when he first encounters himself in the mirror, constitutes an ‘Ideal-I’.²⁶ Beyond psychoanalysis and with altogether contrasting motivations, Beauvoir characterizes narcissism as behaviour that vain women can adopt as a means of responding to their subordination within patriarchy.²⁷ However, for Jacques Derrida, the assumption that there is either narcissism or non-narcissism is misconceived. He asserts that

[…] there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other.²⁸

It is that opening out to the Other as Other that eludes Pablo. In requiring of others that they comply with his demands, Pablo lacks the generosity and hospitality to which Derrida refers. His attentions are turned inwards rather than extending out towards the Other. Pablo’s egotistic approach to love and desire is evidenced further in the scene in which he appears on a talk show, hosted by eventual Almodóvar icon Rossy de Palma who asks what he would seek from his loved one. Seen on the left-hand side of the two-shot with de Palma, Pablo replies:

Que no intente acompañarme a las fiestas pero que se quede en casa para que le cuente los chismes. Que no me interrumpa cuando escribo a máquina, que lea los mismos libros que yo, que tenga conocimientos de medicina, leyes, fontanería, electricidad. En definitivo que me adore, que no me agobie y que acepte que soy un inútil.

Humour is injected when an insect flies around the studio. As Pablo continues to speak, unperturbed by this airborne intruder, the presenter laughs excessively, but this fails to distract Pablo from listing his demands. It is the Other as a desiring subject in themselves, with their own needs and wishes, that is absent from Pablo’s idealized imagined partner, who is expected to shape themselves according to his requirements, Pygmalion-like, even subjugating their tastes in reading to his own.

Such a vision of interpersonal relationships is clearly reductive in terms of how it constructs and positions the Other, but it also denies the role of Others in self-formation. Pablo’s preoccupation with having his seductive appeal validated is both self-inhibiting and self-destructive. One potentially fruitful way of illuminating how this is the case is by turning to the existential phenomenology of Sartre and Beauvoir. Much debate has ensued about whether it was Sartre or Beauvoir who was first interested in the Other’s potential impact on the Self’s subjectivity.²⁹ Scholars agree, however, that, although they share similarities, their conceptualization of this encounter with otherness differs. Ursula Tidd, for example, notes that Sartre represents it ‘as a battle for supremacy’ while Beauvoir ‘emphasises the positive aspects of the self-Other relation’.³⁰ In Being and Nothingness Sartre argues that the presence of the Other forces us to acknowledge the limits of our perceived status as the only creators of meaning in the world. He grounds his philosophy in the argument that being is based on two ontological modes: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Being-in-itself describes objects that are non-transcendent, that can be no more than what they are when they appear to consciousness.³¹ Being-for-itself describes human beings that are free, transcendent and able to subject their actions to scrutiny.³² For Sartre, the Other functions as a disruption since we recognize the existence of another consciousness within our perception of the world. Sartre gives the example of when we notice the Other contemplating a public garden. I and the Other are both located equidistantly (2.20 yards) from the lawn, but, as I observe the Other beholding the same lawn, I realize that it is offered up to them in a manner that I cannot access.³³ Thus, we are conscious of the gaze of the Other, in not only constituting the properties of objects, but in constructing us too. As Robert Misrahi explains, this introduces to us the possibility of us becoming an object of the Other’s gaze, who, in subjecting us to their gaze, becomes an ‘autre-sujet’ (‘Other-subject’).³⁴

According to Sartre the existence of the Other holds the key to our being.³⁵ We are unable to have ownership of this ‘being’ or any conception of it because it is formed by another consciousness. We are no longer purely a subject acting in and perceiving the world around us, but, via the gaze of the Other, we become an object engaged in acting in and perceiving the world around us, and this is referred to as a ‘transcendance transcendée’ (‘transcended transcendence’).³⁶ As a response to this, we can attempt to absorb the Other’s freedom so that we become the basis of our own being, but this too creates a further set of categorizations of the Self by the Other, and so the cycle continues.³⁷

Beauvoir, by contrast, argues in Pyrrhus et Cinéas that the freedom of the Other is not solely a threat to be overcome. As Nancy Bauer summarizes:

[…] a condition of my freedom, or at least of my being forced to exercise my freedom, is that the Other also be free […] the Other’s freedom is to be seen as not just a threat to my subjectivity, but a necessary condition of its being regularly exercised.³⁸

For Beauvoir, ‘in order for men to be able to give me a place in the world, I must first make a world spring up around me where men have their place; I must love, want, and do’.³⁹ In love, we seek to be loved by a freethinking and free-acting Other who has actively chosen us, who commits to allowing us to enter their world. It is not that we wish to ensnare the Other, but rather we seek to seduce them so that they freely choose to desire and love us.⁴⁰

Viewed from this perspective, Pablo’s endeavours to dictate the form of Juan’s attraction and attachment to him are self-limiting because they deny Juan’s agency as a free subject who chooses Pablo. Juan is reduced to a pure object in this enterprise, but Pablo too seeks to construct himself as a fixed identity with which he can identify. He attempts to circumscribe his subjectivity within the eyes of the Other, as a being who is seduced or a seductive being, so that Juan becomes a pawn in a narrative that he appears to view as self-serving, but which is ultimately self-restricting. Pablo is identifying with an image and investing in a role already known to him, rather than opening himself up to the constant becoming that inheres in existence and which the encounter with the Other has the potential to enrich. He acts like a film director, as it has been demonstrated above that Almodóvar notes, but also as if he were the main protagonist of his own film, its ending already known before it begins. We witness this when he conveys to Juan what he believes to be the hopelessness of his love for him, both face-to-face and by letter, and when he lowers the earpiece of the receiver to his lips when Juan telephones him from his holiday. His attitude has tragic consequences; the love letter he drafts for Juan to send to him triggers the jealousy that ultimately motivates Antonio to murder Juan and that act is what brings about Antonio’s suicide.

As mentioned, it is the manner of loving and desiring that Pablo rejects; Juan is shown to care for him, but in his own way, as he tells Antonio in the murder scene. Earlier, when Pablo sees Juan flirting with a woman in a nightclub and then leaves, Juan looks forlorn, gazing away from the woman, who continues kissing him, to the off-screen space where Pablo makes his exit. Pablo takes a stranger home, and this scene is interspersed with a tracking shot of Juan speeding on his Vespino before arriving at Pablo’s apartment when the stranger is leaving (Pablo sends him away because he is seeking a role in Pablo’s next project). Juan complains that Pablo left without saying goodbye. When Juan pulls Pablo down onto him on the bed, Juan asks ‘¿no te importa que no follemos?’ to which Pablo replies ‘no te preocupes, no haremos nada’ and turns his back on Juan. Here, Juan confronts Pablo with his own needs and emotions, but, because Juan’s love for Pablo does not manifest itself in ways that he countenances, Pablo momentarily interprets this as a further act of rejection. He constructs himself as a victim; moments earlier, when leaving the club, Pablo mounts the Vespino and kisses its handlebars, stating ‘me gustaría guardarla como fetiche’. The Vespino serves momentarily as an inanimate surrogate of Juan, easier and safer to fetishize than a human being who acts in ways that do not conform to the ideal Other that Pablo seeks. But the Vespino will also take Juan away from Pablo, thus enabling his lover’s agency and independence from Pablo.

Pablo’s situation bears some resemblances to that of ‘Elle’, the protagonist of La Voix humaine, which he is adapting in the film. La Voix humaine constitutes a telephone monologue featuring ‘Elle’ who, having learned that her long-term partner is about to marry someone else, makes weak attempts to conceal her devastation at being abandoned. La Voix humaine confronts its audience with the hiatus between the woman’s actions—she passionately kisses his gloves, for instance—and her words as she attempts, at least in the first part of the play, to convince her lover that she accepts their situation. The play thus makes evident the self-denial that can occur when one partner conceals their true feelings and fixes their identity as victim of their love for the one they assume they cannot have. We might read ‘Elle’s’ acts of self-denial as examples of what Sartre characterized as ‘bad faith’. For Sartre, the ‘double property of the human being […] is at once a facticity and a transcendence’.⁴¹ ‘Facticity’ refers to the truths of our existence until now and which we cannot change, while ‘transcendence’ here is understood to describe our attitudes to those truths. People act in bad faith when they knowingly behave in ways that deny that they are free to change their existence. Although on the surface La ley del deseo appears to dispense with such notions of self-denial by portraying the self-absorption of its main protagonist, Pablo, as mentioned, constructs himself as the suffering partner rejected by his lover. Where ‘Elle’ hermetically seals her identity as repudiated ex-lover, Pablo similarly fixes himself as spurned lover, as the shots of him kissing the Vespino illustrate. Almodóvar suffuses these messages with ironic play; Pablo refuses to cast the male stranger because it is a ‘monólogo feminino’, but gives it to Tina, his male-to-female trans sister, played by a cisgender woman whose ex-lover Ada (Bibi Andersen) is played by a trans woman. The gender ambiguity that subtends the original play, which, as will be seen, was interpreted as autobiographical with ‘Elle’ being a surrogate of Cocteau, is transformed into gender parody here, underlined in the rehearsal sequence when Tina as ‘Elle’ is viewed vandalizing the nuptial bedroom set to a backdrop of Maysa Matarazzo’s cover version of Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas, her ‘adopted’ daughter Ada (Manuela Velasco) lip-syncing—doll-like—as Ada’s mother, also named Ada, unexpectedly pays a visit.

The echoes between La ley del deseo and La Voix humaine are also evident given that commentators have—to varying degrees—invoked autobiographical connections between Almodóvar and his main protagonist. While Almodóvar claims he was more interested in the facets of Pablo that were less autobiographical, he concedes that they share some experiences,⁴² in particular how the life of a director can become saturated with his work; he observes that Pablo

[…] ‘vampiriza’ su propia existencia y parece vivir únicamente para escribir historias […] la unión entre su vida y su máquina de escribir se convierte en algo casi monstruoso, en el sentido de que puede llegar a resultar peligroso para él y para los demás.⁴³

As mentioned above, viewers and critics saw ‘Elle’ as a surrogate of Cocteau, one of the most high-profile queer male directors and writers of twentieth-century France who reportedly enjoyed a string of relationships with younger, cultivated men, including Raymond Radiguet and Jean Desbordes, and a long-term relationship with actor Jean Marais. Although Cocteau officially wrote La Voix humaine for Belgian theatre actor Berthe Bovy, the play is said to be ‘directly inspired by his frustrating experience with Desbordes’, hence why a spectator (reportedly encouraged by surrealist Paul Éluard) claimed that Desbordes was on the other end of the telephone line as ‘Elle’ speaks to her ex-lover when it premiered in 1930.⁴⁴ Desbordes supposedly enjoyed affairs with women and men, which caused tensions in his relationship with Cocteau. Given that Cocteau refers to his protagonist as ‘Elle’, the potential that ‘she’ could be a self-representation is significant; as Williams puts it ‘the play must be read as a thinly disguised account of a real gay relationship, where the confines of institutionalized marriage were not (at least during that period) an issue’.⁴⁵ La ley del deseo adapts this autobiographical connection by showing Juan flirting with the woman in the nightclub. It is via this inter-/extra-textuality that, it can be argued, we gain a sense of Juan’s potential bisexuality, an interpretation strengthened by the reaction shot which, as mentioned, depicts Juan’s apparent sadness at Pablo’s sudden departure.

We might also say that the themes of abandonment and bad faith mobilized in La Voix humaine are depicted in Tina, a point recognized by Pablo who warns her that her role as ‘Elle’ might evoke painful memories of her own experience. Where ‘Elle’ feels unable to live after her lover leaves her, Tina transforms such abandonment into a definitive characteristic of her subjectivity. For Almodóvar, ‘no es sólo una mujer abandonada […] Si tuviera que poner su nombre y appellidos en el carnet diría: mujer abandonada por todos’.⁴⁶ At three points—when Father Constantino (Germán Cobos), tells her that she cannot sing in the choir at his church (because, it is suggested, they had an illegal relationship when she lived as a boy), when she refuses to allow Pablo to base his work on her romantic failures and when she thanks Pablo for not judging her relationship with their father—Tina exclaims that her memories, past failures with men and Pablo himself are all she has. Her past is characterized as so fundamental to her sense of Self that she refuses Pablo’s attempts to exploit it for his work, exclaiming ‘mis fracasos con los hombres son algo más que el argumento de un guión’. Tina also humorously displays obvious narcissistic character traits. When Pablo offers her the only role in La Voix humaine her ecstasy is superseded by fears about her looks and the state of her skin.

By allowing her past abandonments to govern her present and constrict her future Tina is acting in bad faith. Refusing for instance to have another relationship until Antonio seduces her, she tells Father Constantino ‘me temo que estoy condenada a la soledad’. Here, she transfers her sense of abandonment by Others into a self-abandonment to an unwritten, self-imposed fate. Tina thus embodies a possible intertextual connection with ‘Elle’, and, in identifying with a fixed state as abandoned lover who will never be loved again, her attitude bears a resemblance to Pablo’s. Father Constantino’s own bad faith in urging her to ‘flee’ her memories as he has—‘huye de ellos como yo he huido’—does not prompt her to reject the Church. On the contrary, she constructs a cruz de mayo in her apartment, which, though adorned with kitsch objects and, as we are humorously told by Ada’s real mother who is astonished, is displayed one month late in June, symbolizes her state as constrained by her past: the concha shell reminds her of Morocco where she fled with her father and had sex reassignment surgery. There is obvious satire and camp irony in her turning towards the ultimate Christian father figure as a response to her abandonment and abhorrent treatment by two fathers—one biological, the other spiritual. And yet, despite the potential irony of her acts, the campness of her melodramatic personality and the kitschness of the cruz de mayo, Tina illustrates how people indulge in practices that reaffirm value systems that stifle their existence rather than claiming their freedom and acting for themselves. Even Tina’s decision to have sex reassignment surgery is portrayed as having been heavily influenced by her love for her father and fear of losing him. While possibly referring to Antonio or Pablo, in Tina too we see how Almodóvar’s comment that La ley del deseo is about ‘une vie à la merci d’une passion’ (‘a life at the mercy of a passion’)⁴⁷ is played out; it is not only the passions from her past, but also her passion for that past that shapes her existence and constrains her potential of present being and future becoming.

From ‘Killing’ the ‘Other’ to Achieving Reciprocity

By portraying Pablo as endeavouring to negate Juan’s freedom for his own purposes, the film also gestures towards the ethical implications of reducing the Other to an object that Emmanuel Levinas explores in his discussion of alterity in Totalité et infini. Levinas’ conceptualization of Self-Other relations counters that of Sartre. As Robin Podolsky observes: ‘Levinas emphasises his distance from the Sartrean notion that the other represents an equal freedom with which the subject must contend for mastery’.⁴⁸ Where, for Sartre, the gaze of the Other represents their presence as another free consciousness equal to the Self and this can then constitute the basis for conflict, for Levinas, the face of the Other invites the Self’s vision, but inhibits the Self from reducing the Other to a pure object of their vision.⁴⁹ Where Sartre viewed the Other as fundamental to self-construction, for Levinas, it is through the encounter with the Other that the Self realizes that the Other is radically separate from them. The face in Levinas’ view is less a physiological form given to vision and more an affirmation of this absolute separateness.⁵⁰ For Levinas, the Other ‘opposes to me not a greater force […] but the very transcendence of his being; […] not some superlative of power, but precisely the infinity of his transcendence’—an infinity, he argues, that ‘already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: “you shall not commit murder” ’—to commit murder is taken metaphorically as the overwhelming of the subjectivity of the Other by the Self.⁵¹

Levinas’ ethics were reportedly informed by his Jewish faith, a fact that for some might undermine his perceived relevance for an interpretation of Self-Other relations in a queer film that appears to mock religion, albeit Christianity. Moreover, since Le Deuxième sexe, in which Beauvoir read Levinas’ reference to the ‘feminine’ in his definition of the absolute other in Le Temps et l’autre (1980) as signifying ‘woman’, the appropriateness of Levinas for feminist thought has been questioned.⁵² And yet, some feminist and queer scholars have identified value in his work for considering the materialities of experience for both women and queer people.⁵³ With regard to the latter especially, Podolsky recalls Levinas’ re-gendering of the masculine loved one as the feminine beloved (‘l’aimé qui est l’aimée’) and argues that the ‘Lover and Beloved are positions that […] may be assumed by anyone of any gender’.⁵⁴ If we adopt such insights, Levinas’ idea that the Other is always radically different from the Self can be fruitfully invoked in our reading of Pablo’s actions towards Juan. Pablo’s behaviour is depicted as seeking to overwhelm Juan’s subjectivity—as refusing the command expressed and embodied by Juan to recognize him as a separate being. Writing and speaking on the telephone are the means through which Pablo attempts to foreclose Juan’s potential to exist within his world as an Other-subject, separate from him. In the letter exchange above, he endeavours to write Juan as consciousness out of their interaction. Another example comes when Juan telephones Pablo from the coast. Here, Juan declares his compliance with Pablo’s wishes: ‘estoy dispuesto para hacer lo que quieras pero tienes que enseñarme a darte lo que necesitas’. This is arguably disappointing because Juan has embodied a free subjectivity. Juans’ choice of verb, with its double meaning of to show and to teach, has interesting resonances when considered in the light of Levinas’ philosophy. According to Levinas, the Other’s ‘alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches’.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Pablo’s is unable to recognize Juan’s affirmation of his will. He cuts off Juan in full flow on the telephone and speaks over him, uttering condescendingly ‘eso no se enseña’. Depicted as disinterested in encountering Juan on Juan’s terms, in addressing him as a free subject, or in responding to Juan’s declared wishes, Pablo is unable to apprehend Juan’s free choice to give him what he wants. Juan is overwritten, spoken over and not listened to, visualized in the telephone conversation when Pablo lowers the receiver as Juan vainly makes his declaration of love.

In spite of this Juan—and later Antonio—reminds Pablo that however much he might want to dismiss his lovers as objects, his fantasy of solipsism is futile. Here, we might say that the film nods to Levinas’ development of his ethics of Self-Other relations in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974). In this work, as Robert Eaglestone summarizes, Levinas argues that we are all already responsible for Others ‘before we can place the other in relation to our own being’.⁵⁶ As Eaglestone affirms, the ‘otherwise than being, the totally other, comes before our being’—that is to say that the world is populated by others before we come into it and this thus imposes upon us a responsibility to the Other.⁵⁷ In visiting Pablo after the party, sending him the original postcard and then telephoning him from the coast, Juan reminds Pablo of his pre-existing responsibility for others. In fact, Juan’s affirmation of himself is already suggested when Pablo receives back the letter he drafted for Juan to sign, which contains one additional question asking whether he has stopped taking cocaine, which was absent from the earlier scene. Read from this perspective, Pablo’s actions of writing or speaking over Juan, allowing the receiver to drop and turning away from him are all responses forced upon him by Juan and thus evidence that, ultimately, he cannot enjoy an existence in which he is not confronted with his lover’s will and alterity.

The opening sequence, from Pablo’s film El paradigma del mejillón, gestures towards the Self’s indisposition to recognize the Other as transcendent consciousness. Inter-subjective exchange is superseded in a scene assembled along the lines of a soft pornographic scenario. A young man enters an untidy bedroom and hears a voice-over in which he is told to undress to his underpants, caress, kiss and rub himself against a mirror, caress himself on the bed, remove his underwear and ask the owner of the voice to penetrate him. At this point, the speaker is revealed sitting in a sound booth watching the actor with a colleague, both with microphones reading a script. The second man dubs the actor’s groans. The men behind the glass screen make the actor the scene’s object. He is voiceless, simply there to perform, seemingly for the audience who might desire him or want to be him, or both. In both, his transcendence is transcended.

Antonio represents an ambivalent figure within the film’s depictions of love and desire. His presence causes a shift in the film’s genre, from a queer romance/urban comedy to a thriller, therefore dictating its very form. He also enjoys agency in the lives of Pablo and Tina, even if that agency is shaped by his love for Pablo. Additionally, he is the bearer of instinctive, embodied emotions and desires. He wittingly devotes himself to his desire for Pablo and, as Mark Allinson argues, drawing on Juan Cobos and Miguel Marías, he chooses this freely and is ultimately ‘ready to pay the price for what he wants’.⁵⁸ Antonio experiences attraction through the body in ways that elude Pablo, even though, as Chris Perriam observes ‘his kisses are too fierce, he is graceless and clueless in bed’.⁵⁹ Passion and desire guide his choices, thoughts and actions, as Almodóvar confirms: ‘para Antonio, el deseo es algo inmediato que se transforma en energía motora’.⁶⁰ He is, as Paul Julian Smith observes, ‘the figure of passion, absolute and unqualified’.⁶¹ We witness these qualities in his first appearance in the shots of him masturbating in the toilets as he repeats the line ‘fóllame’, the spontaneity of his desire contrasting with the contrived sexual scenario for commercial gain we have just witnessed in the scene from El paradigma del mejillón.

To some extent, we might interpret this depiction of a being driven by visceral carnal attractions through the prism of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed the ‘sexual schema’ in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). For Merleau-Ponty, desire precedes reflection, it is like an ‘original intentionality’, precognitive and ‘has internal links with the whole active and cognitive being’.⁶² For Merleau-Ponty, erotic perception ‘takes place in the world and not in a consciousness’.⁶³ The ‘sexual schema’ is grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s premise that it is through embodied consciousness that the Self encounters and experiences the world. As Gayle Salamon summarizes, sexuality is a condition of ‘life itself’:

I […] am brought into being through desire or love. The beloved other comes to exist in my phenomenological field as such to the extent that she comes to exist for me. But I, too, come to exist for myself in this scenario.⁶⁴

Desire is ‘a being toward the other, and this necessarily conjoins me with, makes me part of, the world’.⁶⁵ The materiality of desire is intentional in the phenomenological sense in that it is desiring of someone. For Salamon,

[…] it is through sexuality that the body—and thus the self—is transformed from a thing that is concerned with itself to a thing that is concerned with others. Sexuality as a mutual project offers another person’s body to me as an object of desire […] and my body in turn is visible and vulnerable to the other in this same way.⁶⁶

Reciprocity is thus a key feature of Merleau-Ponty’s sexual schema as interpreted by Salamon. Subjects and existences are enhanced through joint exchange and objectification is, in this context, mutual. Commenting on heterosexual romantic and erotic relationships, and devoted to exposing the gendered power imbalance that renders reciprocity between women and men difficult to achieve,⁶⁷ Beauvoir recognizes that the conflict between Self and Other ‘can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement’.⁶⁸ Reciprocity for Beauvoir is not about establishing equality or parity, but about the coming together of two consciousnesses with each one recognizing the freedom of the Other. An ‘authentic love’, she argues, must be based on the mutual recognition of ‘two freedoms’ and would not require either partner to renounce their freedom, or transcendence.⁶⁹

It is this idea of reciprocity which is absent from Antonio’s attitude towards Pablo. Although, as mentioned, he is constructed as a being driven by his passion, he seeks to secure Pablo as his lover through coercive tactics. His all-consuming love for Pablo is portrayed as deadly, obsessive and dangerously possessive. He procures the same shirt that Pablo wears to the film premiere, listens attentively when watching the talk show as Pablo lists his demands for his ideal lover and, of course, commits the ultimate acts of amour fou by murdering his assumed rival and killing himself. The merging of desire for the Other and self-love in the opening scene—the actor is commanded to kiss himself twice in the mirror while imagining that it is the anonymous owner of the commanding voice that he is kissing—is extended through the depiction of Antonio in the murder scene. Wearing his copy of Pablo’s shirt, he tells Juan after having attempted to kiss him that he wants to ‘poseer todo lo que ha sido de Pablo, porque le quiero’. Unlike Juan’s appeal to be taught about Pablo’s needs, Antonio endeavours to conquer Pablo by occupying what he sees as belonging to him: Juan. Against such efforts to possess him, Juan exclaims ‘no soy de nadie’.⁷⁰

Elsewhere, Antonio endeavours to prove himself indispensable to Pablo—and in the process foster Pablo’s dependency on him—by offering him the kind of fulfilment that Pablo claims to want from Juan. After repairing his light-switch and painting his ceiling, Antonio states ‘eres tan inútil’, which, we recall, echoes Pablo’s final wish in the talk show. While we could argue that Antonio attempts to occupy a subjectivity as Pablo’s pure object, he also endeavours to subject Pablo to his demands. He lists his requirements of Pablo, some of which echo that which Pablo had hoped to hear from Juan: ‘no quiero enterarme que sales con otros chicos y no quiero que vuelvas a tomar cocaína. Cuando yo te lo digo, vendrás a verme y nos iremos dos semanas a hacer vela solos’.

However, neither strategy works because—trapped in his own self-absorption—Pablo outwardly rejects him, at least until the final scene. When Antonio characterizes him as a man who pretends to be frivolous, but who needs affection, Pablo concedes, but then adds ‘no todo me sirve’. After Antonio endeavours to improve Pablo’s domestic environment, Pablo writes him a letter: ‘Antonio cariño, aunque tu lo hayas decidido así, no estoy enamorado de tí. Me emociona tu ternura, pero no te recomiendo que te enamores de mí. Soy demasiado egoísta y llevo una vida incompartible’. Unperturbed in his coerciveness and wilfully blind to Pablo’s expressed wishes, Antonio tells Pablo that he read the letter and then tore it up. Whichever method of seduction Antonio attempts, therefore, founders because Pablo does not openly acknowledge him as his lover. As Jessica Benjamin has argued in her account of intersubjectivity:

[…] if the other denies me recognition, my acts have no meaning: if he is so far above me that nothing I do can alter his attitude toward me, I can only submit. My desire and agency can find no outlet, except in the form of obedience.⁷¹

Antonio’s displacement from Pablo’s consciousness is visually conveyed in the opening medium-long shot of the domestic sequence through use of visual planes and screen space. Pablo is seen waking up in the foreground, occupying most of the shot, with Antonio contained in the background, in the upper-left corner painting the ceiling. In such a relentless pursuit of Pablo, Antonio fails to demonstrate respect for the incommensurability of the Other that we have seen in Levinas’ writings or embody the ‘openness’, ‘generosity’ and ‘hospitality’ towards the Other which Derrida posited as ‘positive’ forms of narcissism.

Elsewhere, in Antonio, we witness the bad faith that can inhere when men-who-desire-men live a closeted existence. Anxious about his sexuality being discovered by his mother, Antonio demands that Pablo write to him using a feminine alias—Laura P., the name of the protagonist of Pablo’s next film. He embodies a conservative character within the film’s otherwise queer universe—Almodóvar characterizes him as ‘jerezano, machista y convencional’, expressed diegetically when Pablo describes him as ‘un poquitín reaccionario’.⁷² As such, he interestingly embodies an inversion of Sartre’s use of the ‘homosexual’ as an example of bad faith in L'Être et le néant. Sartre has unsurprisingly been heavily criticized for arguing that homosexuals live in bad faith, not because they deny the truth of their homosexuality, but because they believe that their homosexual acts predetermine their existence.⁷³ For Terri Murray, such a perspective overlooks how the ‘homosexual is “thrown into the world” which contains his own homosexual orientation as one of its facts, and homophobia as another’.⁷⁴ Here, then, we have an example of how, as Nancy Bauer has recognized in the context of gender relations, Sartre’s work is ‘incompatible with any robust conception of oppression’.⁷⁵ But beyond a couple of scenes showing a homophobic and transphobic police detective, whom the film ridicules, and an unscrupulous journalist who seeks to create gossip from Tina’s assumed status as a lesbian, La ley del deseo pays limited attention to the structures that oppress homosexuality—in fact, one of the archetypal guardians of Spanish patriarchal authority, a Guardia Civil officer, informs Pablo that Juan loved him following his murder. Within such a system of representations, Antonio’s inability to assume his sexuality is implied as the consequence of him allowing his existence to be inhibited by his perceived situation as a male with homosexual desires that, he feels, cannot be avowed.

Unlike Antonio, Pablo evaluates erotic desire and romantic attachment in terms of their self-affirmative value. It is because of his negatively narcissistic attitude, not his age, professional status nor celebrity, that Pablo casts love and sex as transactions rather than embodied, reciprocal romantic and erotic encounters with a free Other. Pablo apprehends love and desire in the mind rather than experiencing from within the body the kind of pre-reflective desire for the Other that Antonio is shown to enjoy. In fact, the film strongly suggests that his initial attraction towards Antonio is inspired by a desire for conquest, as he tells him ‘desde que te vi en la discoteca solo pensaba en follarte’. It is impossible to let go when our primary concern is whether our perceived needs are being served or our ego is being stroked in anticipated ways. And because he does not desire in this physical, embodied, contingent way, but rather he requires of his partners a list of pre-established qualities that reflect a sense of his self-worth, he remains a ‘thing that is concerned with itself’ to adapt Salamon, unable to apprehend love and erotic exchange as a means through which his own existence might be enhanced by his relationship with a free Other. In Pablo, we witness the contrasting drives triggered when we enter desiring or loving relationships with the Other. As Misrahi affirms, in love, we want our lovers to be both free and not free.⁷⁶ In short, Pablo fails to give himself, not as pure object, but as a partner in a reciprocal erotic and romantic exchange.

This notion of giving ourselves up to the Other is distinct from relinquishing our agency. It is about having the confidence to open outwards to the full potentialities offered by the exchange with the Other in terms of life experience and subjectivity formation. It is a grounding in the present, but which leans towards the future in that it is an acceptance that any new encounter today can engender changes in our existence tomorrow. Drawing on the work of Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers, Misrahi highlights the importance of ‘existential availability’ (‘disponibilité’) as the first condition of authentic personal relationships.⁷⁷ This availability is defined by an opening outwards towards the possibility wrought by new encounters, and which allows the subject to step outside of their empirical status or identity. It is defined by its temporal relationship with the future and the possibilities that that future offers, in which the subject shows availability to enter new relationships.⁷⁸

Though surface similarities might be identified between this kind of availability and that transmitted by the literature of André Gide, Pablo inhabits a world in which gay men are more liberated than during Gide’s time.⁷⁹ He is a key figure in an alternative queer community that closely resembles the movida madrileña, the queer-punk counter-cultural movement that emerged in the Spanish capital in the wake of the death of Franco in 1975 and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, of which Pablo’s creator Almodóvar is perhaps its most famous representative. And this is the crux. For, despite all this apparent freedom, Pablo lacks existential availability, that readiness for everything that can be enabled by the coming together of free consciousnesses that have mutually chosen each other.

In such availability, according to Misrahi, a matching occurs, a reciprocal accord within which each partner accepts the freedom of the Other, and through the presence of each one within the world of the Other, they can express their individuality. For Misrahi, in such ideal authentic relationships, the Self accepts that the Other is a freedom who can make unpredictable decisions that they are not necessarily required to explain. This acceptance of the freedom of the Other, and the respect for the otherness of the Other it entails, according to Misrahi, ‘contribuent à l’élaboration d’une relation oblative et généreuse et non pas captative et narcissiste’ (‘contributes to the fashioning of an oblative and generous relationship and not a captative and narcissistic relationship’)—narcissistic being described here in its negative form.⁸⁰ If the Other might be said to hold the key to my being, I connect myself to the Other as Other and not to myself through the mediation of the Other.⁸¹ In such reciprocal relationships, Pablo would open himself up to Juan and Antonio, and embrace them as free subjects, thus recognizing their enabling potential in terms of his own existence, rather than seeing them as pure objects that are expected to confirm a fixed identity he has assumed for himself.

Pablo’s potential of achieving selfhood, if that selfhood is defined by what it is and the infinite possibilities of what it has yet to become, is constrained by his egotism. Although, as mentioned, on the surface he contrasts with ‘Elle’ in La Voix humaine, like ‘Elle’, Pablo is—perhaps wilfully—blind to the potential becoming other of his existence. Music underlines the constraining resonances of this attitude for Pablo, with ‘Ne me quitte pas’ returning at strategic moments and receiving its first airing when Juan visits Pablo after the party. Brel’s song, just like Cocteau’s play, is concerned with the desperation caused by a lover’s departure, but, where ‘Elle’ vainly seeks to hide her despair from her lover, the narrator of ‘Ne me quitte pas’ explicitly expresses their feelings of total hopelessness. In the play, the song and the film, each protagonist ignores existential becoming and thus abandons themselves to their current situation.

However, it is in the final scene that Pablo is finally shown to apprehend his lover as an Other-subject. In fact, we could argue that the scene achieves some of the queer potentialities of Levinas’ characterization of the beloved as outlined by Podolsky discussed above. The scene shifts the film’s mood from conflict to reciprocity, from seeking to conquer to demonstrating vulnerability. According to Levinas, what causes the transition from ‘l’aimé’—the masculine loved—to ‘l’aimée’—the feminine beloved—is ‘frailty’ (‘la faiblesse’). Frailty is, as Podolsky observes, ‘a quality […] that makes the difference in how we approach the Other and that turns him into the Beloved’⁸² who is according to Levinas, ‘but one with her regime of tenderness’.⁸³ These two qualities of frailty and tenderness are on display in Pablo and Antonio’s behaviour towards each other in these concluding moments. Pablo is only able to move around on crutches after his car crash on his return to Madrid after Antonio confesses to murdering Juan. Antonio carefully lifts Pablo up as he sings along to the Los Panchos track ‘Lo Dudo’ playing in the background and in which the song’s narrator expresses their doubts that their beloved will ever find a love as pure as the one they offer. Pablo is portrayed as undergoing an awakening or, more aptly, an epiphany, his emotional frailty creating the conditions within which a receptivity towards Antonio can at last unfold. A sense of reciprocity arises, visualized in the two-shot close-up in which both characters face each other and kiss, their heads on the pillows, an image that contrasts with that of Pablo turning his back on Juan earlier in the film. That Antonio has finally become an Other-subject for Pablo is confirmed when Pablo fixes him in his own tender gaze and then pulls him into his body, allowing, through his gestures, Antonio as Other to enter his world. Antonio tells Pablo that he knew that the price of loving him would be high from the first time he had seen him. That price is ultimately his suicide. Antonio’s penultimate gesture is a final display of his generosity, warning Pablo not to approach him as he shoots himself. Pablo’s act of calling out Antonio’s name as if to try to prevent him from taking his life demonstrates how he has finally opened out to the Other.

By concluding his film in this way, Almodóvar might be said to endow his narrative with potentially liberating meanings. Antonio’s death functions as a paradoxical act of salvation since it potentially prompts the demise of the egotistical Pablo and, potentially, the birth of a new Pablo open to the world and its possibilities. The typewriter is used as a symbol for this transition. While Tina’s cruz de mayo burns at the end of the film, Pablo lobs the machine out of the window, with it finally landing in a skip whereupon it explodes. Brígida M. Pastor argues that the religious connotations serve to redeem Antonio ‘for his imposed cultural “sin” ’ and the mise-en-scène ‘offers a religiously purifying setting’.⁸⁴ Yet, while the pose of the characters in the image of Pablo holding Antonio is saturated with symbolism around the recovery of Christ’s body from the cross and recalls Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà, Christianity as a spiritual doctrine and value system is symbolically rejected in the burning of the kitsch shrine behind them. The answer to Pablo’s—and indeed Tina’s— dilemma is neither in rediscovering faith in a metaphysical entity nor in withdrawing once again into an interiority in which he is the fantasized absolute subject, but it is to be found out in the world, in the encounter with the Other as a conscious being endowed with free choice.

Conclusion

In the last moments of La ley del deseo, Antonio ultimately enables Pablo’s emancipation from a constricting preoccupation with himself to an awareness of the free subjects around him. The irony, as seen, is that the seemingly emancipated Pablo requires a saviour, Antonio, to liberate him from his constrictive self-absorption. Thus, rather than simply a frothy melo-thriller-comedy fusion, La ley del deseo contains stark warnings about how solipsism can inhibit existence and a preoccupation with what we think we desire in, and require from, the Other can cause us to lose contact with our material, embodied self. This is portrayed as limiting because it forecloses the role in identity formation played by the Other as a free subject, whose presence in our life can move us into new territory, engender new experiences, thoughts and pleasures and allow us to engage more fully in the becoming that inheres in existence.

Looking back at La ley del deseo from a 2023 vantage point, the moment when Pablo throws the typewriter into the skip assumes additional symbolic meanings and resonance. It suggests how technology can hinder, rather than enable, actual, material Self-Other interaction. Such a message is apposite today when we are constantly reminded of the apparently damaging impact of social media, which is often dismissed as perpetuating narcissistic self-absorption of a kind not dissimilar to Pablo’s.⁸⁵ We are told that it can dupe us into believing that what matters above all is the Self and projecting a fixed and idealized version of that Self outwards to the world, of which, we may assume, Others will approve. This Self is thus mediated, at times embellished by photographic enhancement software, and might be seen as an illustration of Baudrillard’s hyperreal—a simulacrum (online identity) that assumes more importance and meaning than the original (material, social person) of which it constitutes a digital enhancement.⁸⁶ Social media can narrow our phenomenological field by recurrently presenting to us concerns and Others that we already accept as mattering and with whom we agree, thus restricting our access to alternative outlooks on the world. In such a dynamic, the Other is accepted by virtue of their similarity to the Self, as opposed to someone who is embraced as a free subject, recognized as radically separate, and narcissism is one prominent strategy that the requirement to ‘self-mediatize’ via social media might be said to encourage.

Superficially, dating applications appear to function in this way.⁸⁷ For example, in an echo of Pablo, Joel Simkhai, the founder of Grindr, a popular dating application that caters to men-seeking-men, talks about how it responds to ‘the desire […] to be desired’ and adds that he ‘upped his game’ by going to the gym in order to attract the type of desire he sought and from a certain kind of male partner.⁸⁸ As such, Simkhai might be said to be attempting to fix his physical appearance by corresponding to an already existing model and to satisfy an already known list of requirements he expects from the Others with whom he engages. Subjectivity as an existential work in progress and recognition that the Other is a freedom that surges up in our perceptive and experiential sphere seem absent in much the same way as they were in the list Pablo gave to the chat show host in La ley del deseo.

Yet empirical research and anecdotal evidence reveal that such applications also serve as portals for material encounters with the Other as a free subject, in which reciprocity and the surprises wrought by an openness towards the world and its possibilities can engender.⁸⁹ As Simkhai notes ‘there’s always the possibility you will hit the jackpot and find someone who will move you. It has this potential for making a huge impact in your life’.⁹⁰ Viewed from this perspective, contemporary social media applications can facilitate material encounters between a free Self and a free Other, in which the Other as Other is recognized and valued as a potentially formative partner within the ongoing, evolving project of our existence. Where some perceive Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios as anticipating international terrorism, La ley del deseo might be said to predict this apparent ‘hyper-narcissism’ allegedly wrought by social media. But if it is prophetic in any way, it is in its message that the means of communication—whether a typewriter, telephone or smart mobile device—does not determine the nature of the encounter between ourselves and others, a perspective perhaps informed by Almodóvar’s previous occupation as an administrative assistant for the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica. In La ley del deseo, which is as relevant today as it was when it was made, attitude, rather than technology, status, occupation or lifestyle, facilitates enriching encounters with Others and, by extension, the kind of freedom that eludes Pablo.*

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 [1^st 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 [1^st 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 [1^st 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 [1^st 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 [1^st 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 [1^st 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 (1^st 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 [1^st French ed. 1923]); and Karl Jaspers, Philosophie (Paris/Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989 [1^st 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.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.