Gay Directors, Gay Films?

Pedro Almodóvar, Terence Davies, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters

Emanuel Levy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231526531
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Through intimate encounters with the life and work of five contemporary gay male directors, this book develops a framework for interpreting what it means to make a gay film or adopt a gay point of view. For most of the twentieth century, gay characters and gay themes were both underrepresented and misrepresented in mainstream cinema. Since the 1970s, however, a new generation of openly gay directors has turned the closet inside out, bringing a poignant immediacy to modern cinema and popular culture.

Combining his experienced critique with in-depth interviews, Emanuel Levy draws a clear timeline of gay filmmaking over the past four decades and its particular influences and innovations. While recognizing the "queering" of American culture that resulted from these films, Levy also takes stock of the ensuing conservative backlash and its impact on cinematic art, a trend that continues alongside a growing acceptance of homosexuality. He compares the similarities and differences between the "North American" attitudes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters and the "European" perspectives of Pedro Almodóvar and Terence Davies, developing a truly expansive approach to gay filmmaking and auteur cinema.

1

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

Spain’s Enfant Terrible

OVER THE past three decades, Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as one of the most artistically ambitious and commercially successful filmmakers, not just in Spain or in Europe but also all over the world. Highly prolific, he has made nineteen features in thirty-four years. There is a pattern to his method. He spends a whole year writing and shooting a film and then, upon release, another year traveling and promoting it at film festivals and in various countries, with the United States a major destination on his tour.

Almodóvar has been described, at various points in his career, as a Mediterranean Rainer Werner Fassbinder (or Fassbinder with a sense of humor), a more naïve and less morbid David Lynch, an urban Woody Allen without the neurotic Jewish angst, and a stylish Martin Scorsese without the Catholic guilt.¹ But none of these labels does justice to his rich oeuvre or idiosyncratic vision. For starters, in almost every interview I have conducted with him, he goes out of his way to stress that his work is dark but not sick, that there is angst in it but no guilt, that it is serious but also humorous. He claims that he is very Spanish because his value system is defined by intuition, spontaneity, and chaos, but that his work has universal meaning.

Almodóvar has evolved from an entertaining “bad boy” in the 1980s to a respected world-class filmmaker in the late 1990s, a status he has been able to maintain. He began his career as a provocateur and sensationalist, making erotically charged films about sexually transgressive themes. But he gradually developed into one of the world’s finest filmmakers, whose works are multi-nuanced, meticulously made, and elegantly shot. Blessed with inspired verve and bold audacity, he has challenged social stereotypes in Spanish culture as well as sexual taboos in world cinema. In his best work, the seductive visual style and acute social conscience converge into features that are dramatically compelling and commercially appealing.

Early on, Almodóvar’s work was dismissed as too zany, too kitschy, or too campy by critics who failed to notice that the jokes and the triviality are just the surface of explorations of more serious concerns. Indeed, the comedic and farcical touches make his darker dramas about sexual politics and various abuses more tolerable to watch. Nonetheless, some critics have continued to apply the labels of “cinema of surfaces” and “cinema of excess” to his work.

Almodóvar’s films have evoked diverse, even contradictory, reactions because they display divergent tonality and ambiguous morality, offering spectators different kinds of pleasures, from the visceral and voyeuristic to the more emotionally grave and radically transformative. In most of his films, the director has relied on a wide range of characters and on a large ensemble of actors, a strategy that enriches his films and reflects his belief that ensembles are more democratic than single-star texts. Having a large group of characters as his basic narrative unit and carrier of meanings also functions as a safety valve, because it allows the viewers—male and female, straight and gay—to empathize and/or to sympathize with at least some of them. In contrast, in most of Gus Van Sant’s and Todd Haynes’s films the narrative centers on one or a few individuals.

Despite the dark tone and noirish sensibility of many of his films, Almodóvar is at heart an optimistic director. He is, in fact, the most upbeat and the least cynical of this book’s five filmmakers. This derives from the particular circumstances in which he grew up: “The characters in my films utterly break with the past, which is to say, most of them are apolitical. We are constructing a new past for ourselves, because we don’t like the one we had.”² Despite his increasing age and growing experience, his future-oriented credo has not wavered: “Individuals must always improve or strive to improve on their reality, no matter what that reality is.”³ (Terence Davies has expressed the same philosophy; see chapter 2.)

Almodóvar’s work goes beyond well-constructed narratives, showing multilayered meaning and skillful mise-en-scène, even when the texts rely on excessive design and lurid costumes. His oeuvre defies the theory that old narratives and classic genres—screwball comedy, noir crime, woman’s melodrama—are no longer functional (that is, useful) in our postmodern world. In fact, his films are very much revisionist genre pictures to which he applies a novel, postmodern strategy. He likes to destabilize codes of traditional genres by combining their elements: “I mix all the genres. You can say my films are melodramas, comedies, tragicomedies, because I put everything together, and even change genres within the same sequence, and very quickly.”⁴

For Almodóvar, every element of life, including biological and human anatomy, is subject to change. Bodies, minds, hearts, and souls are not as fixed or stable as they might appear on the surface. His narratives permit boundary confusions of sex, gender, and identity. In his deliriously complicated plots, the characters are able to—and often do—change their bodies and identities with incredible speed, fluidity, and elasticity.

The key concepts in Almodóvar’s work are passion, desire, sexuality (or rather sexualities), pleasure, and happiness. When his film Bad Education came out in 2004—the same year that Mel Gibson’s controversial religious epic The Passion of the Christ was released—he explained: “I am the anti–Mel Gibson director. My movie is about the power of faith, and so is his film, but I am in the opposite place from him. My goal as a writer is to have empathy for all characters. In all my films, I have a tendency to redeem my characters. It is very Catholic—redemption is one of the most appealing parts of the religion. Sadly, I am not a believer in Catholicism, but the priest is probably my favorite character in Bad Education.”⁵

Almodóvar’s output is richly dense with references to other films, TV soap operas and ads, pop culture, music, and literature. Intertextual connections and allusions are crucial to his work, as Marsha Kinder pointed out, because “they counteract the potentially dehumanizing effects of his grotesque humor.”⁶ He uses self-consciousness and artifice effectively to undermine Hollywood’s seemingly “naturalistic” or “realistic” cinema, as do Haynes and John Waters (albeit in different ways). Almodóvar’s work is self-reflexive: “I use cinema in a very active way, never as a pastiche or homage, because for me, a film is something that once I have seen it, it has become part of my experience. I put these movies in the middle of my films, and they become part of the story, but never in the sense of being a cinephile like Tarantino or Spielberg or De Palma.”⁷ He elaborated: “All the influences on me and all the references in my films are spontaneous and visual. I don’t make any tributes. I’m a very naïve spectator. I can’t learn from the movies that I love—they become part of my life and my movies without quotation marks.”⁸

Steeped in pop culture lore of the past, particularly Hollywood of the studio system, Almodóvar, like Fassbinder, could not have evolved into the major and particular artist he has become without his knowledge of American filmmakers, from A-grade directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and Vincente Minnelli to B-level directors like Frank Tashlin, Hamer, and even Waters. His seemingly absurd narratives blend kitsch, fantasy, and humor, resulting in explorations of human feelings of the deepest kind. As he told me: “I find the clichés of popular culture both very funny and very alive. I like to play with them, to create a narrative angle that makes them part of my movies as they are part of my life.”⁹

Although Almodóvar’s films show consistent concern with social issues (domination, oppression, rape, homophobia, transgendering, physical disability, and mental illness), there is a remarkable lack of political agendas. The outrageous, the perverse, the deviant, and the incongruous are displayed in his oeuvre as normal and existing states of being. Refusing to take a moral stance against any issue, he is a nonjudgmental director. His mise-en-scène is stylized and theatrical, but it is firmly grounded in his visual energy and impressive ability to change tone from scene to scene—and often within the same scene. Significantly, unlike Waters, Almodóvar has never celebrated bad taste or gross tackiness for its own sake. Nor has he made camp movies just for the sake of being camp. With the exception of one or two films, there is no deliberate violation of taste or crass vulgarity in his features.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER BEGINNING

When compared to the other filmmakers in this book, Almodóvar is, like Davies, a product of the working class—and a rural one at that—whereas Van Sant and Haynes are the products of upper-middle-class parents. Lacking formal education, Almodóvar is an autodidact, whereas Van Sant and Haynes are graduates of film and art schools.

Almodóvar was born on September 25, 1949, in the sleepy little village of Calzada de Calatraya in La Mancha. He has used his regional background in only a few films—most notably, The Flower of My Secret (1995) and especially Volver (2006). Most of his films are set in Madrid and, to a lesser extent, in Barcelona. The young Almodóvar was not suited to provincial life, as he later recalled: “I felt at home as an astronaut in King Arthur’s court.”¹⁰ His grandfather was a winemaker, and his father worked as a bookkeeper at a gas station. He said: “My family, like that of Sole and Raimunda in Volver, is a migrant family which came from the village to La Mancha in search of prosperity. My sisters have continued to cultivate the culture of our mother. I moved away from home very young and became an inveterate urbanite. When I returned to the habits and customs of La Mancha in Volver, I had to ask my sisters to be my guides.”¹¹

The lay sister of the village, whom Almodóvar met through his older sister, thought that he would make a “good priest” and so helped place him in the Salesian Fathers Catholic School. A victim of sexual abuse in various Catholic schools, Almodóvar avoided discussing the issue, first confronting it in his movies Dark Habits and Bad Education. Years later he elaborated: “It was a shame because sex should be discovered naturally, and not brutally, suddenly. For two or three years, I could not be alone, out of pure fear.”¹²

Almodóvar has explained the main value of living in La Mancha: “It allowed me to discover what I did not want to be. Everything I do is the opposite of the upbringing I received, and yet I am from there and belong there, and in The Flower of My Secret, I became conscious of that for the first time.”¹³ In his boyhood, he read much more than his classmates, which, to use his own words, “was odd and inspired the same rejection that I now inspire in some critics. I wasn’t a normal child, because during recess I’d rather talk about Ava Gardner than play ball.”¹⁴ (A photo of Gardner in Matador serves as a cultural reference as well as an indication of the hero’s superiority over his ignorant student, who doesn’t know who she is.) He also painted and watched movies, such as Peyton Place and melodramas starring Elizabeth Taylor (Giant) and Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass). He loved movies based on the plays of Tennessee Williams, particularly Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer (both, incidentally, starring Taylor).

The sexual segregation that prevailed in his own family had long-lasting effects on Almodóvar’s value system. For one thing, he always felt closer to his mother, Francisca, than his father, Antonio, a typical Spanish patriarch who could barely read or write and worked hard in various manual jobs to support his children—Pedro, his two sisters, and Agustín, his younger brother. Almodóvar recalls an image of unalloyed power: his father, home after a long day’s work, sitting in an armchair, “like a god,” expecting his wife and daughters to wait on him “like slaves.”¹⁵ He was not a bad man, just uneducated and set in his ways. (He died of lung cancer in September 1980, the very week that Almodóvar premiered his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom.)

The river was always a place for familial and communal celebrations, as he later observed nostalgically:

Undoubtedly, the river is what I miss most from my childhood. My mother used to take me with her when she went to wash clothes there, because I was very little and she had no one with whom to leave me. I would sit near my mother and put my hand in the water, trying to stroke the fish that answered the call of the fortuitously ecological soap the women used back then, which they made themselves. The women would sing while they were washing, which is why I’ve always liked female choirs. My mother used to sing a song about gleaners who would greet the dawn working in the fields and singing like joyful little birds.¹⁶

Years later Almodóvar would sing fragments of these songs to the composer of Volver, Alberto Iglesias, only to be told that it was actually a song from the operetta La rosa del azafrán. It was also by the river where, a few years later, he discovered his own sexuality and lost his virginity, though he has never disclosed details about those circumstances.

At the age of sixteen, upon completing his bachillerao, Almodóvar moved to Madrid, defying his father’s wish that he get an office job in the region. “I came to a small apartment that my parents had bought, so at least I was assured of having a roof over my head, but I couldn’t afford formal schooling.”¹⁷ Instead, he worked as a clerk at the National Telephone Company between 1970 and 1980. He didn’t hate his day job as much as Davies did his before becoming a full-time director. This job enabled Almodóvar to save some of his salary to buy a Super 8 camera.

Almodóvar took an active part in the city’s emerging artistic underground—manifest in La Comedia Madrileña and La Movida Madrileña (Madrid Upsurge)—and specifically in the localized comedy and rock ’n’ roll scenes, performing with his own band. He became a central figure of La Movida, whose elements would serve as subjects of his earlier films. The changes were first reflected not in theater, cinema, or literature but on the streets: “All the color, all the liberation, all the humor, you first found in how people were living.”¹⁸ He elaborated: “Madrid was the most modern center in the world. If you wanted to, you could find the Shah’s son, Dali, and the Pope.”¹⁹

As he later recalled: “My first films coincided with a moment of absolute vital explosion in the city. Madrid in the late 1970s was probably the most joyful, the most fun, the most permissive city in the world. It was really the rebirth of the city after such horrible period of the Franco regime. If there was something characteristic about the culture of Madrid that I belonged to, it was the night life. That was my university, and also the university of many of my generation.”²⁰

In those years, Almodóvar acted with an avant-garde theater group, Los Goliardos, and also wrote comic strips and stories in some underground papers. In 1981, he published a short novel, Fuego en las entrañas (Fire in the Bowels). He also published his parodist observations under the pseudonym of Patty Diphusa (a fictitious international porn star). A pun name in Spanish, patidifusa derives from patidifusion, which translates into “bewildered” or “astounded.” It is the feminine form of an adjective that suggests being both aghast and nonplussed. These texts were collected as Patty Diphusa y otros textos, translated as The Patty Di...