Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire
By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Bridget Zhang
When Nicholas Ray combined a colorful, vibrant female melodrama with the traditionally masculine Western genre when directing Johnny Guitar (1954), he indirectly opened the imagination of many directors. Pedro Almodóvar was one of them, and he recognized the potential to combine melodrama with other genres, such as film noir. Law of Desire (1987) is the product of that reimagination of a classic Hollywood genre with a radical sight, resulting in the queer melodrama. Melodramas are considered female territory, a type of cinema that delves into domestic situations with a tint of social conflict, primarily caused by patriarchal constructions. Hollywood has a rich tradition of melodramas and so do other national cinemas such as Mexico, India, and Spain. Because of their iconic weight in popular culture and the exploration of the female universe through drama, music, and aesthetics, melodramas are a particularly rich space for queer filmmakers. Law of Desire tells the story of a filmmaker who gets entangled in a complex homosexual relationship with a devoted admirer, while longing for his lost soulmate and navigating an intricate bond with his transgender sister. The film is a distinct melodrama mixing homosexuals, transgender people, passionate crimes, and “la Virgen de la Macarena”. The final scene of Law of Desire encapsulates all of these melodramatic and queer elements. The scene's complexity relates to the setting, the symbols, and the representations that the three main characters embody in a post-dictatorial country that is beginning to explore a liberal future after years of political and social repression. Almodóvar's cinema is crafted around many visual elements charged with cultural considerations within symbolic orders of gender, sexuality, and desire. In the final scene of Law of Desire, Almodóvar uses allegories and symbols to highlight the film's central theme of a new generation of individuals moving on from Spain's political and social dictatorial past.
Almodóvar’s aesthetics constantly challenge hegemonic powers by twisting religious iconography and cultural symbology from a queer perspective. Because of the relationship between film language and social context, Law of Desire reaches a complex significance when analyzed as a cinematic apparatus engaged in an oppositional gaze. From a mainstream perspective, cinema has been analyzed by first interpreting the content and then creating a meaning that can be digested easily. Susan Sontag critiques this analytical dynamic in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. She argues, “by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable [sic]” (Sontag 5). This dominant approach avoids understanding cinema’s form and significance from an ideological perspective, but movies are social agents with the capacity to engage with symbolic meanings and political significance. Jean-Louis Baudry defined cinematographic apparatus as, “[cinematic mechanism] destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization (Note 1) of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (46). While Baudry frames cinema as a mechanism to maintain dominant ideologies, the inverse of this concept is also possible, in which cinema becomes a mechanism against dominant ideologies and symbolic meanings. This framework allows the aesthetic and visual elements of Law of Desire to be analyzed from a queer and deviant perspective.
The particularity of the final scene of Law of Desire lies in its division into two different locations that are interconnected in time and space through sound and editing. At the beginning of the scene, the police inform Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) that his sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), has been held hostage in her apartment by Antonio (Antonio Banderas), his former lover and passionate fan. When Pablo arrives outside the building, he agrees to go upstairs with the police to free Tina. Almodóvar establishes the connection between the two spaces when Antonio appears on the balcony with Tina while the police are stationed downstairs, pointing lights and guns at him. He demands that Pablo come upstairs alone. At this point in the story, the audience is aware that Antonio experiences his homosexuality secretly, far from the sight of his conservative family. Similarly, Tina and Pablo's gender and sexuality (transgender and homosexual, respectively) also experience a degree of privacy from the exterior world. In both cases, this reality creates a personality split between public and private persona in which these queer individuals need enclosed spaces to experience their freedom. As Marta Saavedra suggests in her essay about Almodóvar’s cinematic world, the director “understands the filmic space as a basic element for the emotional development of his characters” (378). In this last scene of Law of Desire, the filmic space reflects the dualities and dichotomies used by the director as the primary mechanism to create the characters and conflicts developed in the plot. The director establishes the spatial connection between both spaces using cross-cutting and diegetic sound continuity, particularly in the form of dialogue and music.
Almodóvar's unique visual world is charged with relevant narrative information, which makes it essential to decoding the melodramatic tension in Law of Desire, especially in the actions done by his characters during the climax of the movie. Cross-cutting and sound editing help unify and create tension by using discontinued spaces connected by sound, music, or dialogue (Bordwell 244). Two examples are the use of the song "Lo Dudo" and the fire. One of the most emphatic moments is when Antonio plays the song "Lo Dudo," and that song becomes a connection between the exterior space where public opinion awaits and the inner space or intimate space of the apartment where desire can exist. Because of Antonio’s secret homosexual desire, his relationship with the exterior (social pressure) and the interior (sexual freedom) of the apartment appear connected through the song, which at the same time speaks to the development of the story. With this song, Almodóvar seems to foreshadow the fatal ending as the lyrics are about a love that was intense and wild, but is now over. While this song could have achieved the same functionality as non-diegetic sound, it is vital to point out that Almodóvar uses it in diegetic form to support the idea that Antonio wants the world to know he loved Pablo, even though it is over because of the social pressure placed on him.
Furthermore, Almodóvar uses fire as a symbol of the inevitable tragedy pushed by the external (law, order, conservative society) and the internal (the passion of an impossible love). The aesthetic relationship between love and death through the fire inside the apartment serves as a powerful melodramatic mechanism to finish a love story that is still not easy to showcase in the exterior of the apartment. As José Quiroga points out in his book Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic, “Almodóvar found a cinematic language that allowed him to represent both aesthetic distance from a sentimental notion of life, and the affective triggers that allow for identification with life” (15). The other fire in the scene is happening outside of the building, in front of the police cars. The presence of fire in both public and private spaces links the two worlds together, symbolizing a society that is changing and still dealing with a traumatic past. This convergence of spaces and dualities created first by diegetic music and later by the two fires is essential to understanding the visual and dramatic complexities of the movie.
On top of the visual elements mentioned, Almodóvar uses another significant aesthetic element charged with critical semiotic significance throughout the scene: the religious installation. The Virgen de la Macarena is an essential symbol that illustrates a radical understanding of sexual repression and liberation from a queer perspective. The director employs such religious symbols to delve into the complex social conflicts of the film. While religious symbolism can be associated with sexual repression and violence, for instance, the controlling mother and the priest who abused Tina as a child, Almodóvar subverts their meaning to something almost mestizo. As Brígida M. Pastor affirms, "the inversion implies the transgression of a culturally designed model of conduct that is heterosexual and therefore implies the complete negation of that model or norm" (8). The Virgin in Tina's house becomes a positive symbol, a female one whom she and Ada trust for protection and the one that will become an almost mystic observer of Pablo and Antonio's love and tragedy. Almodóvar's use of religious symbology combined with Hollywood iconography aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz coined as the disidentification process. Disidentification is the strategy used by minority groups to manage historical trauma and systemic violence by reassembling how the majority sees and oppresses them (Muñoz 35). In the movie, the Virgin, Saints illustrations, crosses, and candles are detached from a Christian meaning to become protective symbols and objects of worship and inspiration almost equal to posters of old Hollywood actresses (Saavedra 382). The fact that a negative symbol in Pablo and Tina's world becomes positive reflects a queer perspective that reclaims traditional symbols from mainstream and conservative spaces to a more radical one. Through this, queer artists developed a complex analysis of the dichotomy between tradition and queerness, which is vital in the last scene of the movie Law of Desire.
Consequently, it is essential to understand how Almodóvar creates the scene using excesses in his narrative language through the combination of melodrama and film noir as well as the radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. This use of well-known social norms and beliefs in an opposite and radical way is essential as part of the queer narrative present in the film. As Pastor points out in her article, "Almodóvar's insistence on adopting culturally established roles [police] and attitudes [repression] that are performed through parody and a stereotypical exaggeration, generates a detachment on the part of his characters in relation to the cultural reality that surrounds them" (13). The melodramatic scene works thanks to the extravagant construction and connection between characters and the art direction surrounding them, such as the use of folkloric and religious iconography, music, and passionate love scenes. These symbolic and emotional constructions have a dialectical relationship pointing out the dictatorial society and the new liberal one. In their new present, queer characters are reconstructing their identities within a space that provides new meanings to the conservative world of the past (folkloric and religious elements) and the postmodern reality of the mid-1980s (sexual freedom).
In conclusion, the final scene of Law of Desire showcases Almodóvar's talent in blending melodrama and film noir aesthetics, exploring a subgenre in which he can employ a radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. By transgressing established social norms and beliefs, Almodóvar creates a unique queer perspective that not only challenges conventional roles and attitudes, but also generates detachment from the cultural reality surrounding the characters. The scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation. Almodóvar's cinematic style aligns with other filmmakers of his time, such as John Waters, Derek Jarman, or Todd Haynes, who similarly explored this radical vision of social conventions and helped to create queer visual representation. The intricacy and elaboration of the visual settings in the movie serve to support its complex characters and their connections to post-dictatorial Spain, highlighting the rich world of gender diversity. Almodóvar's film form, characterized by duality, provides a profound and incisive critique of conservatism in society and explores the contrast between public and private personalities influenced by societal decorum. Finally, the microcosm of the scene in the movie serves as a representation of the larger social issues that Pedro Almodóvar explores in the film such as repression, sexuality, and passion, three elements that are all linked to General Franco’s dictatorial period (1936-1975). Almodóvar's distinct and influential cinematic style has become largely influential worldwide to such an extent that his name has become an adjective, "almodovarian," which refers to this stylization of queer and folkloric Spanish social issues that thanks to him have become universal.
Notes
1. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, fantasmatization refers to the creation of a visual illusion through images, sounds, and colors. Baudry affirms that fantasmatization is a method to create visual reality according to ideological ideals that appears to be objective.
Works Cited
Almodóvar, Pedro. Law of Desire, feature film, El Deseo/Lauren Films, 1987. Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin; “Chapter 6: The Relation of Shot to Shot”. Film Art. An Introduction. McGraw-Hill Education 12th Edition, 2020.
Quiroga, Jose. “Introduction : Queer Melodrama.” Law of Desire, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999
Pastor, Brígida M. "Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar's Law of Desire (1987)—The Real 'Sexual Revolution'." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006, pp. 7-23. doi:10.1386/seci.3.1.7/1.
M. Saavedra Llamas and N. Grijalba de la Calle, “The creative cinematographic process at the service of national identity: Pedro almodÓvar and the promotion of spanish stereotypes,” Creativity studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 369–386, 2020, doi: 10.3846/cs.2020.8563.