About the three identities of women

Eduardo 2021-11-28 08:01:19

Watching Almodovar's movies will be a stressful thing. Not only the amount of information is large, but the elements are also quite horrifying. Homosexuality, transgender people, pedophiles, rape, incest, homicide...everything sounds more than inappropriate for children. To conservatives, this is simply anti-social. Well. Even the relatively innocent "Speaking to Her", the stage where a vegetative pregnancy is made is inevitably suspected of necrophilia.

However, what is amazing is that every time after watching such heavy-tasting movies produced by Ah Shi, what is left at the end is not a satisfied curiosity or a warning, but a kind of weird compassion. The combination of desire and violence can never produce good results, but when you know where everything comes from, you can't help but feel compassion for where you go. The sigh is too light, the sorrow is too heavy, and only compassion is left. It's not necessarily a forgiveness, but it's full of consideration.

Ah Shi is a well-known friend of women. Nine out of ten films are about women. Even if the remaining one is about men, he will sometimes pretend to be female, or even transgender. Become a woman. This film belongs to the last situation.

There are a total of five people who are born with a female sex in this film, two mothers, a daughter, and a lesbian clerk in a women's clothing store, and a woman who appears few faces but plays a role as a wedge in the structure of the story. , The doctor’s wife. Excluding the female shop assistants who have little influence on the plot, the remaining mothers, wives and daughters just constitute all the gender roles played by women in their lives.

1.
The female identity of mother is portrayed by Ah Shi with the utmost gentleness in his passion for erotic and violence expressions. Whether it's "All About My Mother" or "Return", facing the suffering of life and the torture of fate, the flexibility, perseverance, tolerance, and ethics displayed by my mother are all moving. But in this film, in addition to the tenacity of the maternal instinct, the mother also has an added layer of complexity.

The movie focuses on two mothers, one is Vincent's mother and the other is a doctor's mother. Vincent's mother is the owner of a women's clothing store, who cares about his son's work as well as his son's emotional objects. Such a powerful mother was able to give up hope after her son disappeared bizarrely. She also firmly believed that her son was still alive and continued to search without giving up. It can also be said that it is precisely because of her persistence that laid the groundwork for Vincent to finally go home.

As for the doctor's mother, as the doctor's servant and the master gave birth to the doctor fortunately. From the beginning, the relationship between master and servant is stronger than the relationship between mother and child. She also has another son born to an unknown servant. The servant has long been missing. She also doesn't want to see that son. She has been stocking on the streets since she was a child. He was drugged at the age of 7, and he is even more lawless in adulthood. Compared with the previous mother, this mother's maternity is no longer blindly protecting her children, but has the option of linking with status. In her eyes, childbirth only has a physiological meaning, it is a simple process of reproduction, and it does not bear the obligation of nurturing, nor does it require the responsibility of care. When she watched the doctor pointing the gun at the servant son, she shouted angrily to kill him. The mother's ethical attributes were completely stripped away, and there was only a pure biological relationship between the two.

In the Western context, whether it is because of the highly developed individualism or the result of the liberation of feminism for hundreds of years, the ethical meaning of the role of mother has indeed been eliminated to a large extent. Irresponsible mothers can be disqualified, and social institutions will take their children away. The original heavy sense of obligation of motherhood has been reduced due to the strengthening of children's rights, and has returned to the mother's basic function as a childbearer.

This article does not intend to discuss the impact of this return on gender ethics and family morality or to argue whether this return is reasonable, but attempts to emphasize the multiple meanings of motherhood. She can be a tough and gentle umbrella for her children, or it can be simplified as a performer of reproductive functions. The so-called maternal instinct does not actually have substantial content, but a moral obligation preset in the structure of discourse. So once the moral obligation of motherhood is cancelled, the mother is just a woman who has given birth to a child.

There is actually a mother in the movie, the doctor’s wife, who also poses a huge challenge to the mother’s moral obligations. She was tempted by lust, abandoned her husband and daughter, and eloped with her servant son. As a result, he was in a car accident and suffered severe burns and was rescued by her husband and returned home. In the long process of recuperating from injuries, one day he accidentally discovered his ruined face and couldn't help but commit suicide by jumping off the building. In this series of events, she lived according to her personal wishes from beginning to end, never considered her husband and daughter, and completely abandoned the dual moral obligations of wife and mother. The tragic death in front of her daughter became the fuse of all subsequent tragedies.

Borrowing the images of these three mothers, Ah's affirmation on the one hand affirmed the tenacity and love displayed by women as mothers, on the other hand, he also nakedly displayed the evil consequences caused by these unscrupulous mothers. This kind of subtle opposition made him both. The experience of sympathizing with women continues to plunge these women into the tribulation of fate. Based on this, Ah Shi asked a more acute question: Are women's misfortunes created by women themselves? In the narratives that mothers ignore their own moral obligations and lead to misfortunes between themselves and others, Ah Shi vaguely concludes that the mother is the "original sin". However, at the end, the sentence "I knew it would be like this" before the doctor's mother was killed again hinted at the mother's self-reflection. This kind of ambivalence runs through almost all of A's films describing women.

2.
If the wife says that motherhood means the dual relationship between mother and child, then the wife is the relative relationship between a woman and her husband. Compared with the morally strong motherhood, the wife represents passion in this film.

There are only two plots belonging to the wife: elopement and suicide. The film does not directly describe the process of elopement, but describes the whole process through the mouth of the doctor's mother and the third party. But when the servant's son raped Vera who transplanted his wife's face, the thriving lust revealed the reason for the elopement. As for suicide, according to certain psychological studies, women generally choose milder methods of suicide, such as cutting their wrists or taking poison, while men choose more drastic methods such as jumping off buildings and shooting to end their lives. The doctor's wife adopted the male method. Of course, this may be because the environmental conditions at the time were the most convenient way, but it did not conceal the excitement of the jumping behavior itself. These two short but full of confrontational tensions constitute the original motivation of the whole story, just like the passion symbolized by the wife, which is strong and full of driving force.

Compared with this clearly-identified wife, there is also a metaphorical wife, Vera. Vincent was named by the doctor Vera after transgender, a "female" who shared the same face as the doctor's wife. As the protagonist of Zhenger Bajing, most of the story revolves around Iraq. However, whether Yi is Vincent who has a male body or becomes Vera after being transgendered, Yi's entire image is cowardly and weak. Having a good impression of the lesbian shop assistants can only show favorably, trying to rape the doctor's daughter halfway and fleeing timidly, and after being imprisoned by the doctor, he humblely begged and obeyed to the point of humiliation.

When the doctor rescued the raped Vera under the servant's son, we almost believed that this was a story similar to "Tie Me, Tie Me" to a successful ending due to the Stockholm complex. But we were wrong. Vera successfully deceived the doctor's trust, and in the middle of the night, she killed the doctor and the doctor's mother who rushed to the rescue. Her way of revenge is a pistol. Psychoanalysis believes that a typical male-like object was held in the hands of a castrated male, completing her own revenge.

And does this herald the final victory for men? Not necessarily, unless the premise is that Vera still agrees that she is a male. But when she shot the doctor, tears were clearly in her eyes. In the long and delicate relationship, among all the sweet words that deceived the doctor, there must have been a moment of hope that all of this would be fine, but this thought could not erase the deep hatred. So between love and hatred, the way to end can only be you die and I live.

Love and hate are the ultimate passion. Vera's weakness has been occupied by the passion of love and hate since she was promoted from the experimental product to the partner of the Doctor Eachother. The end of the passion must be the extinction.

3. Daughter
The first identity acquired by a woman in this world is her daughter. The daughter is clean and soft, like morning dew and delicate flowers. That's why the sisters and sisters in the Grand View Garden are so precious, that's why the Grand View Garden is needed.

In this film, the daughter's brother Bao is the father's doctor. After the death of his wife, the weakened daughter became the only support for the doctor. Unfortunately, I always like to patronize the already unfortunate family. At the friend's wedding party, the doctor was not watched for a while, and the daughter followed other stray young people into the garden. Unfortunately, she was raped. In fact, it was an attempt, but the daughter's fragile nerves finally came to the brink of collapse, and finally chose the same suicide method as her mother.

Pink is the color of my daughter, but it ends with scarlet. It directly prompted the doctor to implement a huge and terrifying revenge plan that lasted several years. The doctor kidnapped the perpetrator Vincent and forcibly performed sex reassignment surgery on him, creating a new female Vera.

To some extent, Vera is another daughter in the doctor's heart, or a substitute for her daughter. At a similar age, with the same delicate skin and thin body, after transgender, she is like another young girl in the season. But the face the doctor gave Vera was the face of the late wife. The face of the beloved wife is on a person who is a daughter. There is no doubt that this is an Oedipus empathy.

The original motive of the doctor was to avenge his daughter, so the method used was castration. But in the process, unknowingly, his motivation has become ambiguous. He transplanted the face of his beloved wife to Vera, creating a "monster that he didn't know what to do or even how he should face it." ". And this "monster" actually reflects his heart. The love and hatred for the wife who betrayed her, the pity and the secret desire for the beloved daughter, the frustration of having to face all kinds of out-of-control when she wants to control everything, and many emotional entanglements, so "monsters" are produced. .

Facing Vera's temptation, the doctor resisted at first, but couldn't make up his mind to kill her personally. When he finally killed the servant son and rescued Vera, he chose to surrender completely to his monster. The doctor's mother repeatedly advised him not to tolerate the rape, but he turned a deaf ear to it and let the monster in his heart take control of him. This is the weakness of doctors and the weakness of everyone. Longing for good, even if it is a mirage, even if it is a moth to the fire, as long as there is a glimmer of light, it will be lucky. So the doctor said innocently before he died, "but you promised."



From daughter to wife to mother, a woman's life revolves around three identities. If drawn on the timeline, it would look like a plant, from the initial weak shoots to the blooming in the middle and to the end when it returns to the weak but tenacious. Ah Shi used such a bizarre story to tell the stories of women under the three identities, but it strung the growth trajectory of women.

Some people commented on this film and thought that Ah Shi's movie always repeats himself, and when he arrives here, he has already revealed his talents. I don't think it is necessary. Compared with the old work, the narrative structure of this film is more complete and full, the plot is intertwined, the contrast between the characters is obvious, and the sense of fatalism is strong. Aiming at old topics such as women and identity, Ah Shi is also quite accurate. Compared with the individual description of women's situation in the previous film, this film is like a condensed image of all beings. You see everyone, you also see yourself.

But Ah's lens is still cold. He photographed women's coldness, enthusiasm, purity, and volatility, women's conspiracies and calculations, women's flexibility and tolerance, and women's various attitudes, but he just stood on the sidelines and never offered a helping hand. . So in his lens, women are insulted, hurt, and even destroyed. However, he was patient. He did not close the camera when the women were defeated. Instead, he waited slowly, waiting for the power of women to grow in the face of adversity, until they found their way.

To be patient for this, I always believe that he respects and truly understands women in his heart.





PS: Originally, I just waited to pass the time during the bath and wrote it by the way, but later it became a thesis-like thing. It took two full nights, so Almodovar is the most annoying == Give me back the time I spent watching my fellows! !

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Extended Reading
  • Alivia 2021-11-28 08:01:19

    In fact, this film is talking about "colonialism." The child is oppressed, abused, reformed and imprisoned, and finally returned to the mother's arms. The mother can no longer recognize her child, just like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, etc.

  • Deon 2021-11-28 08:01:19

    The narrative is still smooth, and the soundtrack is still in place. It’s just that I don’t feel so new to this kind of story after watching a lot of director’s films.

The Skin I Live In quotes

  • [last lines]

    Madre de Vicente: Why are you crying?

    Vera Cruz: I'm Vicente.

  • Marilia: The things the love of a mad man can do.