The Skin I Live In

(La piel que habito, Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2011)

The Scream We Live In

In The Skin I Live In, there is a small, embedded but highly significant story involving Norma (Blanca Suárez), the traumatised daughter of the central character, Doctor Lingard (Antonio Banderas).

Almodóvar is a master at the complex construction (in the Billy Wilder style) of a story – with its gradual revealing of ever-more labyrinthine and perverse information, via a series of diverse character-centred flashbacks and points-of-view. And, in particular, he is the master of what is seen and unseen, heard and unheard.

This is not simply a process of narrative hide-and-seek, because there are also complex, figural transferences between characters: characters who can come to swap experiences, lines of dialogue, roles – even to literally swap faces, bodies and voices.

As in the work of Marco Bellocchio (see, for example, Vincere [2009]), casting (of actors in multiple roles, across the various generations of the characters and their biographies) is a major part of this process.

The story of Norma is one such story of transference, embedded within the entire structure. We are told, by another character, the tale of how Norma’s mother, Gal (Elena Anaya), hideously disfigured in a car and fire accident, was one day lured from her catatonic state by the sound of her daughter in their backyard, singing a lovely song she had once taught the girl.

But then Gal saw her own ghastly image reflected, and instantly hurled herself out the window to her death, right at her daughter’s feet. We are told that, just before Gal plunged, “She gave a scream that echoed through the house”.

Yet Almodóvar pointedly does not let us hear this scream; he elides both its sight and sound, just as he omits the action of the fall itself. What we are allowed to hear, from Norma, after a few moments of panicked, disturbed breathing, is her scream, not her mother’s – a strange, short, sharp, contained cry, almost a musical note, to replace the song she sang just moments beforehand.

And the game with the cinematic figuration of the scream in The Skin I Live In is, at this point, far from over.

Later, as a young teenager, Norma will be raped and abandoned by Vicente (Jan Cornet), a party boy at who is (like all of the kids) high on pills. As Vicente roughly penetrates her, Norma shouts “No!” and begins screaming. Her hysteria rises; she bites Vicente’s hand, all the while moaning and wailing like some wounded animal.

Vicente gives a slap to silence Norma, and she instantly falls unconscious. This is how her father, the doctor, will find her; and when she awakes, in a swirl of avowal and disavowal, of repression and profound recognition, she will now identify her father as the sexual attacker. And she begins to scream again as he takes her, seemingly protectively, into his arms.

Later on, locked up in a psychotherapeutic institution, Norma has retreated to a wordless whimper – inching away from her father in order to shut herself up in a wardrobe. The end of her sad story re-ties the transference with the mother: we are told that, one day – and again, this is something we pointedly do not see – “Little Norma went in search of her mother along the same road her mother had taken. Through the window”.

The scream as something released from the body, and as something stifled within it. A scream passed, like a baton, from body to body, sealing the repetition of a tragic destiny. The scream we hear but do not see; or see but do not hear.

The scream as liberating catharsis, and the scream as unending Hell – like Edvard Munch’s famous painted scream, gathering the lines and shapes of the whole world into itself. The scream as a murmur, or trembling, always present, just underneath the surface of bodies and selves. Or the scream as music, as closure, as the punctual expression of a crisis resolved.

These are some of the tropes and motifs and themes of scream presence that are present in the films of Almodóvar.

This is an excerpt from larger research elaborated in Spain during 2012 under the title “Scream Presence”. One spin-off from this work appeared as a chapter in the book Poéticas del gesto en el cine europeo contemporáneo (Intermedio, 2013). For further material from the project in English and Spanish, see my written and audiovisual collaboration with Cristina Álvarez López and Covadonga G. Lahera here.

MORE Almodóvar: All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh, Parallel Mothers, Law of Desire

© Adrian Martin June 2012