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ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. AND ABOUT MY FATHER AS WELL
Isaac Tylim, Psy.D., ABPP
ABSTRACT
Pedro Almodovar’s “All About my Mother” may be regarded as an homage to the director’s
mother, his two sisters, and the many women he came in contact growing up in a small, highly
religious and sexually repressed village called Calzada de Calavata, in La Mancha, Spain.
Almodovar has reported being fascinated by the chat, laughter, and daily exchanges of women who,
during long oppressive childhood years under Franco’s dictatorship, the only fun allowed was to
dress up in costume during Carnival (Salgado, 2001). Yet, the portrayal of the multiple object
relationships confirms the recurrent longing for the absent father.
A psychoanalytic reading of a film must be approached with a modicum of
suspiciousness regarding the alluring, often distracting narrative that occupies the foreground of
the visual representations. The viewer may want to reflect on the dynamic tension between
foreground and background, in other terms, between what is revealed and what remains
concealed. I shall demonstrate how the foreground of “All About my Mother”, like most of the
director’s film, while centering around various portraits of women, it highlights a ‘repressed’
background that conceals a “father-hunger” (Herzog, 2001). Father-hunger is the key to the
whereabouts of the absent father, and the film’s overt representations of stereotyped femininity
will be addressed in connections to powerful nostalgia for a measure of masculinity.
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On Limitations and the Denial of Differences
Films are an ideal medium through which the question of the differences between the sexes may be
addressed. Sexual differences in films are constituted on the visual. The preoccupation with sexual
differences is certainly not restricted to pornography. Representations of sexual differences are
encoded in mainstream, commercial films as well. Whether accentuated or denied, sexual
differences in films leads to the exposure of the ideology of desire and the demystification of
categorical or 'natural' ways of thinking about human sexuality.
The images that compose a film are loaded with allusions to the similarities and differences
between the sexes, presences and absences, appearances and disappearances. The spectator at the
movies is invited to join in a play of hide and seek, a 'now you see now you don't', magical illusory
game. The ambiguities of film images, images which don't stand still, which are there but are not
there, suggest the sense of mystery which surrounds the infant's early curiosity about the primal
scene and the differences between the sexes. In addition, the pleasure one obtains from looking at
the big screen is indeed a multilayer experience that includes the essential passivity of film
spectatorship and the bisexuality inherent in filmmaking and film viewing. As Haskell (1993)
pointed out, at the movies both men and women take pleasure in the spectacle of beautiful women
and beautiful men.
Almodovar’s films explore the ambiguity regarding the differences between the sexes. The
Spanish filmmaker relies on disguises and props to navigate between polarities, obliterating rigid
stereotypes in favor of elusiveness and fluidity of representations. Overall his films play out a revolt
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against fixed categories at all level of human experience. Tough powerful and dominant characters
become soft, nurturing objects capable of containing the oppressed; the torturer becomes the lover,
rescuer of abandoned souls or protector of the weak; the female body contains the male' s body and
the male’s contains the female’s one.
The Spanish filmmaker subverts traditional representations of masculinity and femininity
that dominated Hollywood classical film narrative for decades. His films pertain to a late twentieth
century ‘wave’ that began to experiment with alternative depictions of masculinity and femininity
on big and small screens. Regarding representations of women in films Haskell (1987) equates
traditional representations of women in films with the penis: both had to be kept out of sight.
Contrary to the old canon, Almodovar’s women are courageous creatures that filled the screen
with their chat, colorful attire, and sexuality. They are determined to reconcile maternal longings
with unrestrained femininity.
Historically the movie industry (and advertising in general) has displayed a double
standard under which women nudity was expected, why male's was not. In 1992 Andrews, the
American film critic pointed out how "on film, audiences have come to accept dreadful scenes of
throats being cut, faces bashed in and bodies blown to pieces. In a movie culture in which almost
everything is shown, male nudity is still too scary".
In the last two decades males on the screen have become softer if not weaker, unable or
unwilling to make important decisions in their life, at times trapped in a type of objectification once
applied to women; Along with these changes on how men are represented, the penis has become
more visible. Basic Instinct, Lethal Weapon, Three of Heart just to mention a few films, show a
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nude man in the opening scene. As and aside, the explicit frontal shot of a nude man in the
opening scene of Basic Instinct was not censored allegedly because the man was dead.1
Traditional images of masculinity have been challenged as much of perhaps even more
than the female counterpart. The change is so pronounced that cultural critics are now referring
to a 're-creation of masculinity' (Pollack, 1993). Threat not withstanding, today’s films and
media expose the male nude body almost with the same regularity than females. Objects of
desire were in the past the domain of female representations. Not any more. Men are increasingly
seen as objects, pinups- think of Silvester Stallone nude in the cover of Vogue, or Bruce Willis
naked, as a pregnant man mimicking at the time his pregnant wife who also appeared pregnant
and nude on the cover of a previous issue of the same magazine. Men are taking excursions into
lands that women wanted to get away from: the land of objectification. Shoemer (1993) observed
that in Bad Lieutenant and The Piano, Harvey Keitel "takes off his clothes with the regularity
one might expect of an actress...(note the judgment value implicit in this comment: a devaluation
of the feminine aspects) With his tree-trunk body and knotted chest...(displacement from penis
onto tree-trunk body and knotted chest with omission of the softer, round parts of male
genitalia), Mr. Keitel is coming to represent masculinity in the 1990's..." In a inversion of
stereotype, Keitel in The Piano, playing an English settler in 19th century Victorian New
Zealand, appears undresses before a fully clothed Ada, the mute, determined, female heroine
played by Holly Hunter2.
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New York Times critic who asserts that female front nudity is more common than male's ("the penis is a terrible,
terrible actor,...it overacts..." (Annaud discussing The Lover in the NY Times 11/1/92 article by S. Andrews).
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The explicit representation of the ‘difference’ diverts the audience's attention from a background where the denial
of the differences between the sexes is maintained. The foreground acknowledges differences, the background
harbors the illusion that the differences do not really exist, and that the threat of castration and fears of passivity may
be easily dispelled. The exposure or overexposure of the male nude body may be read as a strategy that serves to
conceal and at the same time reveal men's passive longings.
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A soon to be release sitcom features a male high school teacher whose marriage is fallen
apart. Endowed with a big penis he decides to become a male prostitute. The title of the show –
Hung (Barry, 2009, NYT, Arts and Leisure Section, p. 18, 28).
A psychoanalytic reading of a film must be approached with a modicum of
suspiciousness of the alluring, often distracting narrative that occupies the foreground of the
visual representations. The viewer may want to reflect on the dynamic tension between
foreground and background (Kaplan, 1993), in other terms, between what is revealed and what
remains concealed.
Almodovar success lies in combining post-modern sensibility with tradition, repeatedly
referring to the history of theater, cinema, TV (soap operas) as is so evident in All About my
Mother with its references to, Tennessee Williams, Hollywood –All About Eve with B. Davis and
A. Baxter. In this marriage between new and old representations of masculinity and femininity lies
Almodovar’s appeal. He presents something outrageous in a familiar context. His films are both
camp-artificial, anti-natural, and kitsch- striving to shock while substituting ethical goals with
esthetic ones.
The foreground of “All About my Mother”, like so many of Almodovar’s films, portrays
mothers and other female characters. Women from all walks of life crossed each other paths
weaving an original tapestry of caricature and stereotypes with soul. The background on the
other hand, points to what I like to refer as the repressed or concealed sub-texts of the narrative.
This sub-text is one where the longing for the father, or “father-hunger” (Herzog, 2001) seems
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to prevail. Indeed, a striking appetite to know about the absent rather than lost father permeates
the tense foreground-background tension where devoted mother figure colludes with a profound
nostalgia for the father.
In All About my Mother Lola, is the absent, longed father, a transvestite. It is possible to
address to the question of differences and similarities by analyzing the way women and men are
impersonated in films (Bell-Metereau, 1993). Anxiety about gender roles is mirrored by the changes
in representations not just of men and women – as stated above- but also in the changes of
representations of male and female impersonators. While in the 1960's impersonations tended to be
humiliating (I Was a Male War Bride), misogynists (Some Like it Hot), or psychotic (Psycho), from
the mid 1970's on, the viewer was able to observe a more sympathetic representation of
impersonators (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, La Cage aux Folles, Victor-Victoria, Tootsie, The
Crying Game, Mrs. Doubtfire).
Bell-Metereau regards cross-dressing as a reference to the relationship between authority
and freedom: male or female impersonators explore differences and similarities by opposing
institutionalized binarity in matters of sex and gender.
In All About my Mother Lola, the father appears as signifier of the rupture with binary
categories. Masculine and feminine, maternal and paternal merge. Esteban’s father (Lola) seems to
have regarded fatherhood as a burden.
To reject fatherhood may be interpreted as act of
rebellion against Spain old political repressive institution and, at the same time, an affirmation of
a new post-Franco radical freedom marked by a deep intolerance towards dichotomy categories.
The film is constructed around the wish to reconnect with the father kept concealed by the
mother. The Lacanian will claim that Manuela is precluding access to the symbolic order. The father
as a transvestite reinforces this assertion in the sense that the transvestite in some form is longing to
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return to mother, away from the symbolic order. Esteban’s dead may be regarded as further
confirmation of the wish to remain under the umbrella of the mother.
The Foreground
“All About my Mother” may be regarded as an homage to the director’s mother, his two
sisters, and the many women he came in contact growing up in a small, highly religious and
sexually repressed village called Calzada de Calavata, in La Mancha, Spain. Almodovar has
reported being fascinated by the chat, laughter, and daily exchanges of women who, during long
oppressive childhood years under Franco’s dictatorship, the only fun allowed was to dress up in
costume during Carnival (Salgado, 2001).
Almodovar proclaims: mothers are most important. However his cinematic mothers are
also women. Underneath the farce, the director’s admiration for women’ courage and
determination is repeatedly conveyed. At the start of the film Manuela is introduced- as most
Almodovar’s women tend to be- first as worker then as a mother. Manuela is a nurse, Alegro is a
prostitute, Rosa works with Orphans, Huma is an actress. In so doing, Almodovar manages to
touch upon a myriad of issues concerning women not as male fetish, passive objects of desire,
but as subjects attempting to integrate work, femininity and strong maternal longings. Manuela
suffers from wounded motherhood; Rosa is a dying mother-to-be (she dies after delivering her
child). Rosa’s mother is a rejecting mother (Rosa’s mother) while Huma is a frustrated one
(Huma in her attempt to love and protect Nina).
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In the filmmaker’s world women are powerful despite their vulnerability. They are so
powerful that even men (Lola) want to become women. Subverting the existing bourgeois order,
Almodovar presents an alternative family configuration where a non-biological mother and a
grandmother may share motherhood, and where the differences between the sexes is not a
necessary component of the new arrangement. At the manifest level of the narrative men seem
to have been pushed to the background. The viewer may be misled to them as secondary
characters of a melodrama waiting to be called in.
The Background
One may argue that the first relationship is the one that didn’t last: Manuela and Lola- a
version of the primal scene that the arrival of the third (the child Esteban) broke. Father and son are
named Esteban, although the father, a transvestite, became Lola and is dying from drug-addiction
and “the virus.” Esteban experiences the vacuum of not knowing his father, knowledge hidden by
his mother who tries to shield him from the negative aspects of the past.
Manuela’s son, Esteban, says to his mother early in the film: “one day you would have to
tell me all about my father. Is not enough to tell him he died before he was born. The
knowledge about his father is meant to be Esteban’s birthday present.
Manuela’s son died in a car accident. His heart is donated for a transplant. After the
transplant has taken place, Manuela “follows his heart” – her son’s to the north of Spain, La
Coruna. In Esteban hearts is the longing to know about his father. Manuela wishing to fulfill her
son’s last wish travels from La Coruna to Barcelona. All About my Mother is All About my
Father After Esteban Jr.’s death, Manuela identifies herself with Esteban and she begins to look for
her son’s father.
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Manuela adored her son, Esteban. Her life becomes disrupted after he dies tragically
during that fated rainy day. In life Esteban was not allowed to meet his father, having surrender
to his mother’s symbiotic embrace. Is death the only way out from the maternal web, the “All
About my Mother” ’s trap? Having lost her son Manuela is propelled to look for her son’s
father. She wants to fill the vacuum of the loss with the potential reconnecting to the absent
father. She moves then from Madrid to Barcelona. The search for the father appears as the subtext of a narrative that focuses on women and their rich relationships. The absence of the father
becomes a presence only towards the end of the film with the appearance of Lola/Esteban.
Agrado facilitates the reconnection with the positive aspects of the past (agrado means pleasant,
nice). She is the first link in the chain that will lead Manuela to Esteban’s father (Lola).
Esteban is man with whom Manuela conceived Esteban Jr. Loss leads to desire. Manuela
nurtured a strong longing to re-establish the primary maternal bond that only women are capable
of, albeit with a little help from men. Once Manuela’s most significant relationship
(mother/child) has been broken, the desire for the father becomes prominent. However this desire
for the father –unlike mother/ child relationship- is tenuous, evanescent like a passing streetcar.
The father as a transvestite – in transition to something else- appears as signifier of the return to
mother.
Manuela and Esteban/Lola met, at a performance of A Streetcar named Desire. This
casual encounter ended up giving life to Esteban Jr.–but also death since the son died en route to
a new performance of Tennessee Williams’ most famous play. A Street Car Name Desire is the
link between fiction and reality, between life and death, knowledge and ignorance about the father.
The search for the father is symbolically realized in Manuela asking for Huma’s autograph- another
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signifier of Manuela’s identification with her son and attempting to complete that that has
remained incomplete.
Manuela may be guilty of having kept the father hidden from her son. This is confirmed
later in the film when Rosa, on her deathbed, makes Manuela promised that she won’t hide
anything from the baby she is then entrusting her with, that is to say knowledge. Two men
named Esteban died, the third Esteban -miraculously born free from the virus- will survive allowing
reparation for past losses. Mother/son pair that was destroyed at the beginning of the film is
recreated at the end when Manuela adopts the orphan Esteban, Rosa’s child.
Manuela and Rosa are mothers with absent fathers. Lola/Esteban, the first absent father,
impregnated both Manuela and Rosa- the circle of life. They shared maternity, hope and renewal
closing the circle that starts with the death of Manuela’s son and the birth of Rosa’s son. In regards
to Rosa we find a second absent father. Rosa, the pregnant nun, is also searching for her father
who is absent in his presence. He walks the dog, and when he runs into Rosa he fails to
recognize her and seems only interested in the concrete and external aspects of her daughter such
as height and age.
Father and son are linked by their respective death –the former at the start of the film, the
latter at the end. The son runs to his death after Manuela promised him to tell the truth about
Esteban’s father. The absence of the truth kills. Rosa’s diagnosis forces Manuela to face death
one more time.
Reference AIDS: Manuela says to Lola “You are not a human being you are an
epidemic.” At the end, life triumphs over death. Rosa’s baby will live and Manuela will be safe.
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The Choreography of Truth and Lies
The director deep attraction to the fetishistic props and histrionic characters may stem from
those condoned bacchanalias where everyone on the village became, once a year an actor,
performer, or dramatizing queen. From an interview given by Almodovar I learned that the
filmmaker’s mother used to read letters for illiterate people. Often she will embellish the letters
adding material that was not in the text. As an aside, this is a common theme in Latin-American
literature and films – Central Station, Painting Lips (Puig), Nobody writes to the Colonel (Garcia
Marquez).
The men Almodovar grew up with - father, relatives, or others in the small village are rarely
referred to in his interviews. It would seem that men were mostly absent from daily routine since the
men were spending long days on the fields with animals unable to join the women in their frequent
and often impromptu gatherings.
Almodovar seems to confront in his film this contrast between men and women, and
often seeks to resolve it by blurring differences accepting sexual ambiguities without prejudice.
Gender differences become a stage where the dialectic between reality and fiction, truth and lies,
are enacted. The director’s childhood recollections of those creative women is expressed in his
films’ narrative through the characters need to lie and to avoid the truth in their life –just like
those men and women in his native village. The embellishment of letters, and the carnivals with
its elaborate costumes are the antecedents of the film histrionic, theatrical, and/or melodramatic
references. In All About my Mother A Streetcar Named Desire condenses the truth/ lie dialectic:
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Blanche lying to herself (Huma), the ultimate confrontation of the truth of illness (Rosa),
Stella and the maternal longing (Manuela, Rosa, Huma), the evanescent nature of desire, that
streetcar (Nina).
Lying to one and to others are the beacons that guide Almodovar’s characters to the truth.
Manuela lied to her son, and she is also an actor first play-acting as part of the organ-donor
process, then as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. Rosa lies to her mother, her mother joins the
lying line with her fake Chagalls and the need to hide her grand-child’s illness (“don’t tell them
he has the antibodies”), Huma is the ultimate liar – an actor in love with Nina who can’t face
reality and escapes to the fictional of drugs.
Having it ALL
Almodovar’s characters are “useless passions”, fully aware of their unrequited desire to
achieve a plenitude of being by denying limitations or differences, attempting to have it all.
Cross-dressing and androgyny offer the illusion of self-sufficiency by denying the need of the other
sex in order to attain a sense of completion.
The All of the title is also about a wish to have it and be all- a denial of the limitations
imposed by the differences between the sexes. Agrado is proud to have it all: penis, breast, and
firm butt. Mario is the macho man, fearful of castration that needs Agrado to deny fetishistically
the anxiety-provoking differences between the sexes. Esteban is also Lola. Manuela is both
father and mother denying the need for the other attempting to restore the symbiotic illusion of
being one with son.
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REFERENCES
Andrews, S. (1992). She's bare. He's covered. Is there a problem? The New York Times. Arts and
Leisure. 11/1/92.pp 13-14.
Barry, D. (2009) NYT, Arts and Leisure Section, p. 18, 28).
Bell-Metereau R. (1993). Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haskell, M. (1987). From reverence to rape. The treatment of women in the movies. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Herzog, J. M. (2001), Father Hunger. Exploration in Adults and Children. N.J. The Analytic
Press.
Kaplan, L. (1993). Fits and Misfits: The body of a Woman. Panel Fetishism. Images of women in
films. Division 39. Spring conference.
Mc Dougall, J. (1985). Plea for a measure of abnormality. New York: International University
Press.
Pollack, W. (1993). In a time of fallen heroes: the re-creation of masculinity. Harvard University
Press.
Salgado, S. C. (2001), Pedro Almodovar. Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Barcelona: Paidos
Shoemer, K. (1993). Harvey Keitel tries a litle tenderness. The New York Times. Arts and Leisure.
11/2/93. Pp.1, 24-25.
Shaffer, R. (1993). The evolution of my point of view on the difference in sexual practice. Paper
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