After overcoming the initial shock provoked by some outrageous scenes in Pepi, Luci, and Bom, I was more than curious as to why Pedro Almodovar was interested in creating such a film. With my initiation reactions of cringe-worthy discomfort and even mild disgust at the blatantly vulgar humor, looking into the historical context of it all helped me to understand Almodovar’s motives. Following the death of their patriarch Franco, his film could be seen as a revolutionary melodrama – a representation of Spanish society at the end of their “ancien regime” and maybe even as an anticipation for a more libertarian agenda. The treatment of gender in the film centers on the reversal of what is seen in classic melodrama by transplanting female passivity and destabilizing fixed categories of sexual identity.
But classifying the film merely as a product of the time period is perhaps too simplistic. The fact that I cannot pinpoint what purpose the film served is telling in itself. Even stylistically, with the murky shots and episodic scene sequences, the film seems to reflect the ambiguity and multiplicity of gender. As we touched on in class, the film seems to reaffirm that factors such as race, class, and sexual orientation are unattached from the multifaceted nature of ideas. It is the very notion that there is a limit to knowledge that allows us to make speculations draw from other ideas and theorize, and as we sat together as a group to share common reactions, it was as if our internal superegos were constantly policing and consulting with one another to reaffirm those theories.
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