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Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodóvar photographed by Nico Bustos, 2019

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La Piel que habito aka The Skin I Live in (2011), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

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La piel que habito (2011) Pedro Almodóvar

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The Skin I Live In (Spain, 2011)

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Gender and Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In

There is no doubt that this film makes for uncomfortable viewing. Like most of Almodovar’s work, the themes are complex and painful. The Skin I Live In is predominantly filmed in Toledo with some scenes shot in Galicia. The Guardian review of the film describes it as the fusion of “dark thriller, gothic horror story and poetic myth” visiting most of Almodovar’s predominant themes over his almost 40 year long career, “from maternal devotion through sexual identity to obsessional activity” (The Guardian).

The overt focus of The Skin I Live In is anatomy and corporeal entrapment. The film is heavy with intertextuality. Almodovar bases the story on French novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet - the story of a French plastic surgeon who has a private clinic in a mansion in which he keeps a submissive partner and a daughter in an asylum - strong similarities to the characters Gal, Marilia, Vicente/Vera and Nora. A further literary parallel is Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Women imprisoned in the interior of the home, as if pets, is a strong theme in common between the 19th century play and this 21st century film.

The Skin I Live In is also highly comparable to Almodovar’s earlier 2002 film Talk to Her. The main difference between the two films is the presence of the female voice. While all women in The Skin I Live In have compromised realities and limits to their autonomy, they are still able to articulate themselves. The corporeal jail is more literal in Talk to Her due to the women’s comatose states.

I will focus on the theme of historical trauma; how family, and cultural, history repeats itself. The most obvious example of this is Norma’s suicide; she dies the same way her mother did. Marilia warns Robert that she believes the same fate will come of Vera, suggesting Robert kill her before she kills herself: “If you don’t kill her, she’ll kill herself” (Marilia to Robert, at the kitchen table).

Marilia is an interesting example of a woman who despairs due to the limits of her power and positionality as a woman. She has given birth to two sons - Robert and Zeca - who both turn out to be monsters, the perpetrators of pain. This begs the question if mothers on their own have the power to shape their sons when societal forces are also at work in forming men’s character. In other words, it is through Marilia that we see cultural machinations of machismo override maternal power.

I see allusions to Lorca’s Yerma throughout The Skin I Live In. For example, Marilia laments that it was she who gave birth to Robert but Mrs. Ledgard, who was unable to bear her own children, raised him. Marilia is horrified by the men she has inadvertently produced; she states “I’ve got insanity in my entrails”. Although Vera is the character whose captivity is most explicit, I think Marilia is also imprisoned. She confides in Vera that she has worked for the Ledgards since she was a child. Moreover, in conversation with her odious son Zeca, she states “I am just a servant” - she is aware that her status is lowly.

To me, one of the most moving scenes in The Skin I Live In is the candid conversation between Marilia and Vera in which the former explains everything that culminated in where they find themselves in that moment. Vera, having just experienced brutal violation, sits in a daze smoking a cigarette. Vicente is quickly initiated into the violence that comes along with inhabiting a female body. Marilia orates her history in a matter of fact way while cleaning up the blood soaked sheets, the aftermath of homicide - not any homicide - the slaying of one of her sons by the other. Almodovar’s plot is bloody and convoluted in epic proportion. As we have seen in his other movies, Almodovar’s female characters are typically the ones relegated to cleaning up, or hiding, men’s violence. Marilia does not cry, nor does she exhibit extreme emotion. She simply collects the sheets as if she knows that this is what women have to do.

Almodovar portrays feminine qualities in a positive light that is not afforded to the men in The Skin I Live In. Robert is an example of hubris and contempt. He typifies male chauvinism and exhibits an extreme psychological need to have absolute control over his surroundings, including the people in his proximity. I question whether his daughter Norma was inherently mentally unstable or whether her psychical fragility is the result of his megalomania. She lists an astonishing number of drugs to Vicente; it is no wonder she is in a stupor. Moreover, Norma exhibits an overt fear of all things male. Upon seeing her father in the hospital, she becomes fearful and hides in the closet. The only way the woman doctor can coax her out is by announcing that all the men have left the room.I think Norma is an explicit trope of what Almodovar is trying to communicate throughout The Skin I Live In - the dangers inherent in the stereotypes of masculinity: aggression and subjugation of others.

In my view Robert exemplifies the intellectual dangers of hyper-masculinity - the perils of thinking we have the power of the Gods to create and destroy as we wish. Zeca, on the other hands, represents bodily, visceral dangers of “machismo”. Zeca is a rapist. His primal urges rule him; we see little of Zeca’s rational faculties in action. He is savage, explicitly seen in his apt tiger costume as well his licking of the security footage screen - he wishes to “have”, to consume, Vera. Indeed, the fact that he mistakes Vera for Gal shows that, to Zeca, all women are reducible to one another.

Martín argues that “the most brutalizing (monologue) of the film” (Gendered Logics of Violence, p. 114) is the one in which Robert instructs Vicente-turned-Vera to self-dilate using a series of different size speculums. This scene is so horrendous because of its reductive approach toward femininity. In that moment, all that is “female” is reduced to an orifice. Is Vicente/Vera’s experience true to the female experience? Martín says that he lives his “future sexuality as a pathology (as many women are taught to do)” (Gendered Logics of Violence, p. 115). Indeed, with the rise of cosmetic surgery and invasive manipulations of the body, the “sci-fi” elements of The Skin I Live In are disturbingly more reality than fiction.

In a similar vein to Robert, Zeva does not have the sophistication to see the individuality of women-bodied persons. One would assume that in such intimate proximity with another human (when he is violating her), the discovery would be made that Vera and Gal are not in fact the same person; Vera is a mere doppelganger (done by Robert on purpose to resemble his late wife with whom Zeca had an affair).

Indeed, it is Zeca’s affair with Gal which seems to catalyse the series of anguishing events. Robert is cuckolded by Zeca and thus his masculinity and ego have been severely wounded. His failure to control the lives and circumstances of his wife, Gal, and daughter, Norma’s, lives leaves him a “failure” within the narrow confines of the hegemonic structures of masculinity. It is thus that all of the horror and violence of The Skin I Live In can be explained in gendered terms.

Martín posits that “on one level, the film would appear to be a story of revenge: one of an angry father” (Gendered Logics of Violence, p. 111) vengefully pursuing a man, Vicente, who has wronged his daughter and in so doing insulted his masculinity - the typical wound inflicted upon a man in an “honour” society. However, I think the genius of The Skin I Live In is that it transcends the personal in order to critically expose the perverse beliefs which underpin Western social structures. This is one of the main reasons that The Skin I Live In is so uncomfortable - because we can see our own ugly realities in the extremity of the plot. Almodovar successfully shines a light on the misogyny and domestic captivity which we so easily overlook.

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The skin I live in (2011)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

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I breathe. I breathe. I breathe. I know I breathe.

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La Piel que habito aka The Skin I Live in (2011), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

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If you wanted to die, you would have cut your jugular.

The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011) dir Pedro Almodóvar

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La Piel que habito aka The Skin I Live in (2011), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

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La Piel Que Habito (2011)

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La piel que habito (a.k.a. The Skin I Live In) (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011): empty spaces

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Les Yeux Sans Visage, George Franju (1960) // La Piel Que Habito, Pedro Almodovar (2011)

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“You are different. I am different as well.”

The Skin I Live In (2011) dir. Pedro Almodóvar