Pedro Almodóvar's personal dichotomies have consistently played themselves out within his celluloid creations. In a writing and directing career that has already spanned over a decade, his thematic concerns have been at once male and not-male, flamboyantly gay and disavowedly so, neorealist and baroque, progressive and nostalgic, subversively underground and commercially mainstream, gynocentric and phallocrat. His problematic identity politics, however, both on the screen and within himself, are best summed up under the rubric of nationality. His domestic critics remain acutely critical of his status as a wildly successful filmmaker who is regarded abroad as representative of the "New Spain" but whose style shares little with his Spanish peers. That Almodóvar's contributions stand as an anomaly within the canon of Spanish narrative art is plainly obvious. Marvin D’Lugo asserts that "Almodóvar's cinema represents in most ways an unequivocal stylistic rupture with nearly every Spanish filmic tradition that precedes it" (D'Lugo 481), which behooves us to look elsewhere for his artistic roots.

Luckily, Almodóvar himself reveals his filmic progenitors by means of several homages and quotations within his own texts. In Matador the fated hunters cross paths at a screening of Vidor's Duel in the Sun; Pepa in Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown sees her own life's tragedies replayed in Johnny Guitar. Almodóvar acknowledges his own indebtedness to American melodramas of the 1950's, ultimately directing us to the source of his art. He has embraced the paradoxes of American fifties melodramas as his own, explaining his apparent foreignness to his native audiences and his familiarity to American spectators.

Such a connection makes immediate sense, for the concerns of filmic melodrama are that of identity. Though still a roughly-defined narrative mode in film, recent flurries in scholarship on melodrama have allowed it a larger aesthetic scope than that of mere emotional hyperbole, and invite a coherent investigation of its formal and topical agendas and its points of conflation with Almodóvar's oeuvre. Melodrama, as it has been refined in post-War American cinema, addresses Otherness and the desire of those relegated to the margins of the existing power structures, the Others. Almodóvar consistently unpacks and foregrounds that which Spanish society identifies as Other and the forces which hinder the fulfillment of their desires. Through melodrama's conventional formal tools he questions the identity/identities of post-Franco Spain; and all too often, Almodóvar corresponds with the workings of melodrama by ultimately reconfirming the marginalization of those identities.

This essay proposes to explore the basis of Almodóvar's crises of identity by delineating his explicit ties to the tradition of fifties American melodrama (especially in the form of the "woman's film" genre). I will first attempt to synthesize disparate accounts of melodrama's historic origins, and its consolidation into a (semi-) coherent aesthetic. Secondly, melodrama's focus on issues of identity must be articulated. Lastly, I will argue for Almodóvar's inheritance of this tradition through a formal analysis of his works, especially 1988’s Women . . . and 1991’s High Heels.

Like Almodóvar's cinema, what was originally recognized as melodrama began as an underground dramatic movement. "The conditions for the emergence of melodrama, many histories suggest, were created when, during the eighteenth century," writes Christine Gledhill, the European "bourgeoisie [an overused term, to be sure, here denoting not-the-aristocracy] . . . manoeuvred for cultural hegemony" in the struggle for the legitimacy of "popular culture" (Gledhill 14). A central "site of contestation" for working-class expression was the theatre of England and France, where "there was a ban on the spoken word except in designated 'legitimate' theaters" (ibid., Lang 22). Clandestine theaters thus established a popular theatrical tradition with three major characteristics by "evad[ing] official restrictions" on spoken dialogue:

First, if illegitimate entertainments were to become a viable economic element and professionalised concern, spectacle provided that which could be most fully developed without running the risk of falling into the forbidden category of the 'play' . . . Spectacle in its turn demanded and developed earlier performance traditions such as dumb show [and] pantomime . . . Music constituted a third non-verbal dimension of meaning and link to popular tradition (Gledhill 17-8, all emphases hers).

This third element, "musical accompaniment and song," was regarded as the most integral aspect of these productions, "and led to the emerging genre's appropriation of the French term, 'melo [music] -drame'" (Gledhill 15, 19). In terms of narrative structure, this yet-crude "eighteenth-century sentimental drama" often took the form of a scenario of persecuted innocence and employed a “heroine/villain/hero triad" (17, 20).

Most critics identify post-Revolutionary France and Europe as the arena for melodrama's generic codification. On a superficial level, the "popular" theatres appropriated the tragic outlook of Neoclassical theater but eliminated the tragic hero's typically aristocratic origins. But more profoundly, the nineteenth-century imparted upon melodrama a distinctly moral emphasis, owing to its origins during a time of "intense social and ideological crisis" (Cunningham 349). The collapse of the traditional sacred order engendered a subsequent search for a new set of relevant values: "desacralization is dialectically responded to by operations of resacralization" (ibid.).

As Peter Brooks writes, melodrama matured into a distinct theatrical genre "in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instaturation as a way of life, is of immediate daily political concern" (Brooks 15). As the authorities of God and hierarchical society were withdrawn, "[i]t bec[ame] impossible to conceive sacralization other than in personal terms"; and popular narrative forms (which express the social as personal) were impressed with the task of "uncovering, demonstrating and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era" (Dermody 89, Brooks 15).

Morality is thus "the air that melodrama breathes," argues Susan Dermody, and Lynne Joyrich sums up the enduring agenda of melodrama: "the melodramatic mode, above all, expresses the desire to find true stakes of meaning, morality, and truth" (Joyrich 137). Melodrama's narrative structure becomes a Manichean "struggle between strictly polarized forces of good and evil," striving to make "the world morally legible" (Dermody 88, Brooks 42). Ultimately, the melodramatic mode sought to invest "individual everyday lives with significance and justification":

The melodramatic imagination is therefore the expression of a refusal, or inability, to accept insignificant everyday life as banal and meaningless, and is born of a vague, inarticulate dissatisfaction with existence here and now . . . In a life in which every immanent meaning is constantly questioned and in which traditions no longer have a firm hold, a need exists for reassurance that life can in fact have meaning and therefore life is worth the trouble, in spite of all appearances to the contrary (Gledhill 29, Joyrich 148).

This search for a viable ethical system through melodrama had a transformative effect on the genre's essentially tragic narrative structure. Instead of employing the ending to pontificate from a particular moral stance (as typified Neoclassical tragedy), the resolution was left deliberately ambiguous, for it was less important what values were being touted rather than that there were values being exercised. "Combating the anxiety produced by a new order which can no longer assure us of the operation, or even existence, of fundamental social, moral, or 'natural' truths," melodrama "arises to demonstrate that it is still possible to find and to show the operation of basic ethical imperatives . . . That they can be staged 'proves' that they exist" (Joyrich 137, Brooks 200-1). Melodrama's "function" was therefore "a kind of moral-aesthetic 'performative': a discourse which, by virtue of its being spoken (and in this case performed popularly and ritually), accomplishes some action" (Cunningham 350). Thus melodrama's ostensible narrative caprice actually fulfills its generic mission.

By the time of melodrama's arrival to America, the genre had "consolidated a sophisticated mise en scene" reinforced by a musical undercurrent (Gledhill 18). Though restrictions on spoken dialogue were abolished in 1789 in France and 1843 in England melodrama "did not abandon its spectacular practices" (22). Instead the visual aspect became increasingly ornate and elaborate, and "[t]he proscenium arch became a picture frame": the painting of scenic tableaux, the devising of special effects, the sensational use of lighting, and the construction of quasi-expressionistic sets all served as a visual commentary on the dramatic action (ibid.). An ever-present musical accompaniment foregrounded emotional trajectories, "orchestrating the emotional ups and downs of the intrigue" and constituting a sort of narrative punctuation and syntax (Elsaesser 50).

America was particularly receptive to melodrama's democratic and classless impulses, accounting for its longevity on "the nineteenth-century American stage" even after the form's waning in Europe (Gledhill 24). Indeed, "the delay, relative to European developments, in the maturing of a native melodrama was important to America's taking the form into the twentieth century" and hence into early cinematic narrative forms (25). In order to compete for audiences with the stage, early motion pictures appropriated the theatre's melodramatic basis, a move that "would lay the basis for the film industry to come":

. . . [P]art of cinema's success was its capacity to reweld the symbiosis of 'photographic realism' and 'pictorial sensationalism' [which the theatre had previously monopolized] . . . Film offered the photographic naturalism to which audiences had become accustomed through . . . the new staging techniques of the metropolitan centres, while editing could reproduce at a fraction of the cost the narrative continuity which in the theatre demanded either complex and labour intensive machinery, or 'non-naturalistic' sets and backdrops. Cinema, moreover, could bring the sophistication and spectacle of the metropolitan theatres to provincial and working-class audiences. It offered to twentieth-century society a renewed site of cultural cohesion (25, 27).

Such historical underpinnings suggest a melodramatic basis for all of narrative cinema. Whereas melodrama existed in theatre as a distinct genre, in film it has been diffused throughout all of its narrative forms. Robert Lang argues that melodrama is "the model for all film genres. Melodrama is genre's archetype" (Lang 47). Referring to the American Film Institute Feature Film Catalogue of 1921-1930, he notes that "almost every feature film was understood at the time to be a melodrama," as he cites a list of "rural melodramas, western melodramas, Gothic melodramas, sentimental melodramas, and so on" (46). Ultimately "the word 'melodrama' denoted, or perhaps only connoted, a certain approach to material that became synonymous with the Hollywood formula" (ibid.). "[l]t is doubtful whether Hollywood's major genres veered from their melodramatic predispositions," agrees Gledhill, but the name was dropped from its genre categories since it constituted somewhat of a tautology (Gledhill 34). Lang ultimately extends his argument to recognize melodrama as a distinctly American social form:

[T]he most remarkably distinctive, and valuable, thing about American culture is the pervasive presence of the melodramatic in its representations. And the American cinema, I felt, could explain it all. The Hollywood movie, as one of America's greatest achievements in the arts - certainly a richly and vividly melodramatic one - could tell me what it means to live in America or to be an American (Lang x).

Lang argues for a consistent melodramatic thread throughout the Hollywood cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, identified by its "veritable romance with the notion of the family, bordering sometimes on obsession" (x). "[T]he family is Hollywood's one true subject," he writes, for it is through the microcosm of the home -that Hollywood has addressed the societal macrocosm (ix). While "the melodramatic imagination" acts as "a tuning fork that resonates to the tone of . . . 'current times"' and compresses ideological concerns into the personal narrative arena, Hollywood's investigations on "the extent to which social conditions determine [people's] destinies" has translated into the "essential struggle . . for individual identity within a familial context" (Dermody 91, Lang 3).

Critics point to the 1950's for the coming-of-age of the cinematic family/ bourgeois/domestic melodrama, distinguished by the arrival of a distinct "woman's film" genre. The "woman's film" embodies the acme of contemporary melodrama and reveals melodrama's ultimate concerns as those of identity. As melodramatic strategies are culturally coded as "feminine" and hence polarized from more "masculine" genres (gangster films, westerns, war films, policiers, ad infinitum), melodrama's "tuning fork" now turns to bourgeois ideology's notions of gendered identity construction. Gledhill accounts for this seemingly "commonsense identification of melodrama with women" by noting that

The designation of the family as a bourgeois institution, the perceived materialisation of bourgeois ideology in these films in a sphere conventionally assigned to women - the home, family relations, domestic trivia, consumption, fantasy and romance, sentiment - all imply equivalence between the 'feminine' and bourgeois ideology (Gledhill 12).

Lang explains melodrama's eventual preoccupation with gender identity and evolution into the "woman's film" by stating that "[i]t becomes apparent in the course of the American film melodrama's development that the conflict, finally, is with our patriarchy" (Lang 3). "[T]he cinema begin[s] consciously to reflect the gathering conviction that a great deal of what is wrong with the world is owed directly or indirectly to the . . . relations of domination of women by men," he continues, and to the fact that "the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects" (3-4). The final filmic manifestation of melodrama constitutes therefore "a struggle against, or within, the patriarchy, and what seeks release and definition is a repressed [female] identity" (ibid.).

The first of Hollywood fifties melodrama's "cherished conventions" is thus "the predominance of a female protagonist" (Rheuban 12). Lang continues his explanation of why this feminine cynosure transforms the melodrama into "a drama of identity":

A woman (or a woman's point of view) often dominates the narrative of the family melodrama because individual identity within the patriarchal context - always defined by a masculine standard - is problematic for women . . . what is at stake in the melodrama will be a question of identity - of a failure to be masculine, or a failure to accept the repressive, subjectivity-denying terms of patriarchal femininity. Patriarchy, it should be reiterated, understands femininity as a failure to be masculine (Lang 8).

The "woman's film" thus explores this "legally established social order . . . founded on . . . the difference between the sexes" by situating a female protagonist who "compet[es] successfully, for a time at least, in a male world. Sexual roles are reversed and thereby put into question" (Lang 9, Rheuban 12). The "woman's film" asks of its heroine "what does she want?" and foregrounds impediments to her desire.

Jeremy Butler notes that these heroines are far from completely masculinized, however, for their primary concerns revolve around romance. In phallocentric genres, "love merely enters as an inconvenience; in melodrama it remains the central concern" (Fischer 291). Love is not simply an answer to characters' problems, it is itself the problem: melodrama's conflict arises "not between enemies, but between people tied by blood or love" (Mulvey 53). (In many cases, Butler notes, the female protagonist is torn by competing forms of devotion, as "[r]omantic love . . . confronts domestic love [291].)

Jackie Byars argues that the narrative thrust of these "female-oriented" fifties melodramas are activated by "the absence of a patriarchal figure" (Byars 147). Fifties melodramatic women challenge the Law of the Sexes in order "[t]o achieve integration into the (heterosexual) social order", for "the female protagonist . . . must acquire a mate and participate in a heterosexual dyad" (ibid.). These women are thus characterized by a "contradictory combination of female independence (the willingness to confront social norms) and dependence (the need for male companionship)" in abeyance to social norms (149). In essence, these women exercise autonomy only insofar as it can gain them a male partner to whom they can willingly relinquish their autonomy.

The "woman's film" thus maintains a paradoxical character by simultaneously questioning and reconfirming issues of identity. Fifties melodrama retains its originally subversive approach to narrative closure, one avoiding overt moral comment. In the case of the "woman's film" this narrative waffling takes the form of the "happy ending," but it "offers a resolution that proves far more complex than is immediately apparent," an ending at least ambiguous and at most "overtly ironic" (Rheuban 13). "In the Hollywood domestic melodrama, the happy ending returns the woman to a place, her place, from which she can no longer threaten society's sexual equilibrium. But whether the central conflict is truly resolved is open to doubt" (ibid.). This ambiguity serves to dislodge the spectator and effectively question the immutability of sexual roles.

Steve Neale reiterates that melodrama's historic status as moral-aesthetic "performative" exempts it from a satisfying narrative resolution, for "[t]he pleasure of fantasy lies in the setting out, not the having of the object":

In any story, pleasure comes primarily from the process of its telling, rather than from the nature of its ending. Moreover, if that ending articulates the fulfillment of a wish, the attainment of the function of object of desire, any satisfaction that may come will always be accompanied by a sense of loss . . . an 'unhappy' ending can as a means of postponing rather than destroying the possibility fulfillment of a wish. An 'unhappy' ending may function as a means of satisfying a wish to have the wish unfulfilled - in order that it can be preserved and re-stated rather than abandoned altogether (Neale 20-1).

Thus melodrama's historical strictures sustain its critical agenda, simply by illustrating the interplay of values rather than finally resolving them.

Hollywood has preserved melodrama's other historical conventions, such as music, mise en scène, and coincidence. Music still plays an important role in melodramatic discourse, its narrative salience reinforced by melodrama's symbiosis with the feminine. Andrew Higson notes that music has also "been traditionally associated by male critics with the feminine" and thus adds to women's voice in film; thus the "woman's film"'s musical punctuation can "offer woman a discursive place in which her desire is provisionally articulated" (Higson 5). These films also exploit a complex mise-en-scène as did earlier forms of melodrama, providing a visual commentary on the action. Lang writes that "in melodrama, to an unprecedented degree, the picture tells the story . . . [spectacle in melodrama] is important because it affects and influences characters, because struggles so often are between characters and environment . . . or because it reflects their inner states" (Lang 24-5).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder writes of Douglas Sirks' All That Heaven Allows, "people are always placed in rooms heavily marked by their social situation. The rooms are incredibly exact. In Jane's house there is only one way in which one could possibly move" (Rheuban 199). Regarding Written on the Wind he notes that

the house in which it all takes place [is] [g]overned, so to speak, by one huge staircase. And mirrors. And endless flowers. And gold. And coldness. A house such as one would build if one had a lot of money. A house with all the props that go with having real money, and in which one cannot feel at ease (201).

Lastly, a narrative conceit consistent with melodrama's nineteenth--century theatrical forms is "the reliance on coincidence as the basis of plot development" (Rheuban 13). Susan Dermody cites the genre's guilty pleasure of "the long arm of coincidence, which pushes aside probability again and again, to enclose the possibilities of plot in a sense of fate, to ensure excruciating agonies, to bring things full circle, to stage amazing revelations that will drop the happy ending into place with a slightly false click" (Dermody 86). Neale writes that "melodramas are marked by chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last- minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings" (Neale 6). Rheuban incorporates the "woman's film"'s exploitation of implausible coincidence into melodrama's intentions to expose ideology, for it "tends to undermine one generally recognized objective of fiction: the suspension of disbelief" (Rheuban 13). This Brechtian strategy "has the effect of arousing doubt in the most receptive spectator" and throwing into question the film's resolutions (ibid.). Thus, though these films' messages may be ostensibly about "the glory of self-sacrifice" of female autonomy, their formal conventions seek to defuse any simple readings of identity politics (Fischer 291).

Joyrich notes that, as with its genesis, "melodrama's popularity has historically coincided with times of intense social and ideological crisis," an appropriate description of Almodóvar's historical context (Joyrich 135). The end of the Francoist "traditionalist, patriarchal order" in Spain ushered in cultural movements that "challenge[d] traditional values by tearing down and rebuilding the moral institutions of Spanish life" and framed Almodóvar's cinematic advent (D'Lugo 47). The East-West Film Journal devoted an issue to the growth of filmic melodrama in Asian cinemas, arguing that the form arose in the Far East as a response to "pressures of modernization," pressures contemporary Spain acutely recognizes (East-West 5). Stuart Hall argues that all of annus mirabilis European cinema is "on the verge of a nervous breakdown," in the middle of a crisis of identity and thus self-representation (Hall 45). Such circumstances would seem highly fortuitous for melodrama, especially since "the postmodern age is certainly characterized by its many theorists as the age of crisis" (Joyrich 135). Almodóvar has thus placed his melodramatic self at the vanguard of the cinematic search for "a new post-Francoist cultural esthetic," a rewriting of cultural identity that "affirm[s] . . . a new social logic of toleration and openness" and redefines the notion of the family (D'Lugo 47, 50).

If any contemporary European society can be called patriarchal, it is that of Spain. The conservative identity politics of the Francoist regime refused women the right to divorce or abortion (rights won only in the 1980's), and kept more women out of the workplace than in any other European Community nation. Subjectivity of Spain's Others is thus a central concern for Almodóvar, but he does not limit Otherness to simply women. Almodóvar combats all forms of "Francoist social and sexual repression" and addresses the desires of gays, lesbians, transvestites, transgendered individuals, and even the elderly (D'Lugo 49). His films constitute an "assult [sic] on conventional categories of sexuality" as well as a "site of female empowerment" (52-3). Almodóvar democratically transgresses boundaries of class, gender, and sexuality in his investigations of patriarchy through the conventions of fifties melodrama, as Spain crosses eras from tradition to modernity.

Almodóvar thus appropriated the critical agendas of the "woman's film" and made them his own, much as had Fassbinder who saw in the mode "the possibilities for criticizing the unquestioned values of a middle-class culture within the framework of a popular genre with admitted entertainment aims" (Rheuban 11-2). But like Fassbinder, Almodóvar "was not obliged to resort to the subterfuges made necessary by official and unofficial censorship" as was the Hollywood studio system (12). As Rheuban analyzes the melodramatic workings of Fassbinder's oeuvre, one can easily substitute Almodóvar's name:

And because he was responsible for his own scripts, he was also not bound to "tack on" a superficial happy ending or falsely reassuring resolution to the problems raised in the film . . .Fassbinder therefore took some of melodrama's cherished conventions – the predominance of a female protagonist, the obligatory happy ending, and profusion of coincidence - but employed them in his own unique way (ibid.).

What we encounter is a distinctly Spanish version of the fifties filmic melodrama, familiar though it may feel to American audiences.

Echoing Lang's comments on Hollywood melodrama, Almodóvar reveals a romance of his own with the family. But instead of simply arguing for woman's voice within the domestic arena, Almodóvar constructs his own alternative familial models. We see mother-child and sibling relationships at play from Pepi, Luci, Bom to the present, but few are conventional. As Paul Julian Smith writes, "Almodóvar reveals no nostalgia for the heterosexual family, but rather takes for granted the existence of homosexual 'pretend families': lesbian mothers, communities of women, looser groupings of same-sex friends" (Smith 170). He employs an unself-conscious "assimilation of homosexual relations to the family" by "calling attention to the daily life of 'pretended families' who do not experience their position as marginal" (191-2). Almodóvar thus claims domesticity for various manifestations of Spain's Otherness.

In What Have I Done to Deserve This? his protagonist is a Madrid housewife who, Smith argues, "represents a grotesque deformation of the Catholic ideal of the married woman" who "combines the roles of woman (happy, tender, and compassionate by nature); selfless companion to husband; tireless homemaker; and ideal mother" but who ultimately appropriates phallic power and murders her husband (Smith 251). As befits the machinations of melodrama, though, her freedom from patriarchy is brief, as her youngest son later takes charge of the family, declaring "This house needs a man." (Almodóvar problematizes this reaffirmation of patriarchal rule, however, by coding the son as gay.) Almodóvar's critique of masculine power is also illustrated in the scene where she attempts to have sex with a showering martial arts student; the impotent student cannot perform, and afterwards she vents her frustration with a phallic kendo stick, indicating the transference of phallic power. In Matador as well, Almodóvar suggests through a fantastic disavowal of sexual difference between the two protagonists that masculine power is entirely substitutable between genders.

In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Almodóvar concentrates his melodramatic impulses toward a further investigation of masculinity and a proliferation of coincidence. Echoing the analyses of Byars, the film's narrative impetus is provided by the lack of a male figure, as Pepa spends the entire film trying to locate her capricious lover Ivan. From the start Almodóvar presents us a sexual role-reversal: Ivan is clearly a weak-willed, cowardly male, while it is Pepa who appropriates the masculine qualities of action. (Ivan's son from a previous marriage, Carlos, is equally emasculated by his stuttering and awkwardness.) The diegesis is further propelled by moments of incredible coincidence. It is Carlos who visits Pepa's apartment with hopes to sublet. When Pepa sits in the waiting room of Paulina de Moralis, a "feminist lawyer," the phone rings; Pepa answers, and it is Ivan. It turns out Paulina is Ivan's new girlfriend.

Pepa later takes Ivan's belongings to a trash dumpster outside her penthouse, just passing by Ivan in a phone booth who is leaving a message on Pepa's answering machine. All three times in the movie when Pepa calls a cab, the closest one is the so-called "Mambo Taxi." Almodóvar relentlessly milks melodrama's conceit of coincidence to such an extreme that when two detectives come to Pepa's place to question her, they cannot believe all the coincidences that brought all the characters together; Pepa herself even says once, "The strangest things can happen suddenly." Almodóvar himself foregrounds, by means of overkill, melodrama's investment in coincidence. In the end he thwarts melodrama's typical fulfillment of the heterosexual dyad, however, as Pepa rejects Ivan and befriends Carlos' girlfriend. Once again he rejects conventionally patriarchal familial links for a more progressive sense of community.

In Women . . . Almodóvar also touches upon a concern upon which he would expand in High Heels, the notion of motherhood. Pepa (who plays the mother of the "Crossroads Killer" on TV) is pregnant at the film's start. She gradually takes on maternal qualities as the film progresses: at first she tends to ducks and plants, later she thanklessly saves Ivan's life at the airport, at the film's close she tucks her guests ("the kids," she calls them) in bed. Almodóvar juxtaposes Pepa's mothering impulses with those of Carlos' clinically insane mother who seeks revenge on Ivan and Pepa. In Matador Almodóvar juxtaposed Angel's oppressive matriarch with Eva's open-minded mother, and frequently pays homage to motherhood by inserting his own mother on the screen. Almodóvar's fascination with mother ideology comes to full term in High Heels, a film that aggressively explores the latitude of women's roles as wife and mother in contemporary Spanish society.

E. Ann Kaplan cogently limned ideologies of domestic motherhood in post-Industrial Revolution society, identifying its dominant theme as one of maternal self-sacrifice. "The mother's own needs and desires have no place," she writes, for her responsibility is solely to the well-being of her children (Kaplan 123). Mary Ann Doane argues that "the true mother is defined in terms of pure presence: she is the one who is there" (Doane 84). Almodóvar surely recognized patriarchal society's insistence that "presence . . . is absolutely necessary for adequate mothering," for in High Heels he deliberately presents a mother who actively transgresses such a rule (ibid.). Becky del Paramo asks at the film's opening "Why can't a married woman be an actress?", and her pre-adolescent daughter, Rebecca, completes the syllogism by murdering her step-father. Becky indulges her own desires by abandoning Rebecca and flying off to Mexico for fifteen years, absolutely abdicating society's imperative that she sacrifice her career to attend to her daughter's healthy development.

Becky serves to question reigning notions of the incompatibility of motherhood and sexuality, as she soon sleeps with Rebecca's husband; Almodóvar sacrifices her in the end, however, to the cult of the sacrificial mother. To absolve her daughter of the murder of her husband, the ailing Becky impresses her fingerprints on the murder weapon, saying "let my death be of use to her . . . I regret having caused so much unhappiness." She then dies under a wedding portrait. Rebecca inherits the maternal role through her pregnancy by Judge Dominguez, a private investigator who Rebecca knew in the guise of a drag artist who impersonated Becky, Femme Lethal. In a (distinctly Almodóvarian) sense Becky becomes the father of Rebecca's child, expressed by Lethal's wish to be "more than a mother" to her. Almodóvar complexly explores the mother-daughter rapport, following in the footsteps of fifties "women's films." (Almodóvar also exploits coincidence - "Sometimes all things happen at once" - and music in High Heels, the traditional connection between female expression and music illustrated through Becky's career as a singer.)

One final comment on melodramatic closure must be articulated, however, especially in light of Almodóvar's distinct tendency to end his films by infusing his protagonists with aspects of the maternal. Griselda Pollock suggests that "[t]he closures of . . . Hollywood melodramas . . . end with the relocation of women in their socially determined place as mothers" (Heath 110). Almodóvar follows suit in most of his films by placing his protagonists within the bounds of a new familial structure. In What . . . the mother is reunited with her gay son who takes over the rule of the house. In Law of Desire the gay protagonist cradles his now-dead lover in a pose reminiscent of a maternal pieta. Pepa's burgeoning mother-love in Women . . . has already been discussed, and at the end of High Heels Rebecca is on the verge of starting a new family with her child and Lethal. Such consistent endings are disconcerting with regards to Almodóvar's originally subversive intentions to question the trappings of patriarchy. Whereas past critics have applauded Almodóvar's works as expressing "sympathy for the downtrodden" and a "commitment to the analysis of sexism, the position of women, and the family," he remains as paradoxical as his melodramatic inheritance (Smith 258).

It is clear that the subtitle of our course ("Gender, Nationality, Homosexuality") is especially appropriate for a study of Almodóvar, for his explicitly melodramatic predilections incorporate all three concepts. Whether his work is additionally informed by a uniquely Spanish melodramatic tradition is unclear, but Almodóvar is certainly crossing national boundaries through his cinema. Just as Stuart Hall suggests that the rapid reconfigurations of Europe are breaking traditional borders, so Almodóvar internationalizes melodrama, delivering the form from its nineteenth-century theatrical and twentieth-century Hollywood cradles into the postmodern twenty-first century. In times of social and ideological crisis people have always turned to the media for their values, from whence melodrama surfaces to organize the search. Cultural critics now look to television for the most recent melodramatic manifestation, the soap opera. Almodóvar himself illustrates this changing of the guard through his repeated parodies of television in his films (and whose excesses and absurdities constitute the apparent focus of his latest work, Kika.) Almodóvar's Spanish critics may be correct in castigating his un-Spanish cinematic approach, but in light of melodrama, his idiosyncrasies are perfectly natural.

May 1994

Bibliography

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Dermody, Susan. "The Register of Nightmare: Melodrama as It (Dis)appears in Australian Film." East-West Film Journal 5 (1991): 82-106.

D'Lugo, Marvin. "Almodóvar's City of Desire." Quarterly Review of Film & Video 13: 47-65.

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---. Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960-1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.