Masters, Slaves and, finally, impossibly? Love. Hegel and Talk to Her by Pedro Almodovar

After a gap of nearly 20 years I have been reading Hegel again. Specifically I have been reading about his master slave dialectic. How it is that the identity of the slave is initially lost in being enslaved by the master. And how, too, the identity of the master is, in this act of enslaving another lost in the sense of being closed to the being in itself of the slave. Later, the identity of the slave is transformed because in becoming an instrument of the master’s will he takes on the point of view of the master. In being brought to live in the position of another – the master’s – the slave therefore transcends his own identity by accessing a more universal perspective than he’d previously had.

The slave overcomes his particular identity and becomes a more realised consciousness. Where does this leave the master?

On this account it’s almost better to be a slave.

Sometimes I think that philosophy is God’s version of stand-up comedy.

Hegel’s dialectic was in the back/front of my mind as I watched Pedro Almodovar’s 2002 film, Talk to Her.

I think it helped me understand Hegel.

Talk to Her is a film about interrelated love affairs. It is also a film about how identities can shift and exchange in the spaces between and inside people.  In other words, the question of who these characters are exists as dialectical exchange between the film and its audience on the one hand and in the interrelationships between the characters themselves. These ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dialectical axes produce versions of people that are never fixed or simple.

The film ends without leaving its audience with easily packaged accounts of what it is like to be in love, of what counts as normal love or, indeed, what it means to be a person in the first place.

One love affair is between Marco, a  journalist and Lydia, a bullfighter. Alicia is injured in a bullfight, falls into a coma and is hospitalised:

Another love affair is between Benigno, a male nurse, and Alicia, a beautiful dancer who is in a coma in the very same hospital where Lydia is brought.

Almodovar presents these characters to us gradually – none of them is as he seems to be at first sight.
 

Most memorably, Benigno, who initially seems to be kind and responsible turns out to be a voyeur and, possibly, a psychopath. 

Through flashbacks we see how he had initially fallen in love with Alicia. He watches her dancing in her studio from the window of his apartment. He meets her only twice:  first, when he ran after her in the street to return the wallet he’d seen her drop, second, when he went to her father’s psychiatric clinic for the sole purpose of meeting her.

Following her car accident she is left in a coma, and, lo and behold, Benigno is her nurse. He is devoted to her, washing her, massaging her, cleaning her up when she has her period. Although he tells others that he is gay, it gradually becomes clear that he is in love with Alicia. 

For four years he tends to her every need. She is, of course, in a vegetative state. She is beautiful but brain dead.  He tells Marco: 

“The last four years have been the richest of my life”.

The episodic way that Almodovar sketches Benigno implicates the audience. He is a nice guy. He is kind and calm. He is seemingly, very loyal and very professional.  He is a very likable character…..but…

He is fired and sent to prison for raping and impregnating Alicia. Benigno sees nothing wrong in what he has done.

In one hilarious, absurd exchange, Benigno tells Marco that he wants to marry Alicia, that…

“We get along better than most married couples. Why shouldn’t a man marry the woman he loves?"

Marco replies:

"Your relationship with Alicia is a monologue and it’s insane. I’m not saying that talking is no use but people talk to plants but they don’t marry them!"

Benigno just doesn't get it, the extent of his detachment from the real world is obvious:

"I can’t believe you are saying that! I thought you were different!”

Benigno is sent to prison and eventually, realising that he’ll never get out, he kills himself. However, Almodovar’s ‘horizontal’ dialectic between the two men – Benigno and Marco – means that, in a way, what was impossible, forbidden, is transformed and made possible.

The porousness of identity is a key theme of the film. Benigno and Marco become very unlikely friends. Benigno reads the travel books that Marco has written –

“I read all your travel guides. It was like travelling for months with you at my side. Telling me things no-one tells you on journeys”

It is as if that, realising his days are numbered, Benigno is transferring his identity to Marco. This interchange between the two is neatly conveyed by showing the two actors face to face in a prison meeting booth – the reflection on the window of Benigno’s face and mouth are superimposed on Marco’s:

This horizontal exchange is completed at the end of the film when Marco and the miraculously recovered Alicia meet and are attracted to one another in the theatre:

Originally I thought that performance and observation were the two poles of the dynamic moments at which identity is lost/found in this film. Benigno and Marco, Alicia and Marco both meet at the theatre. Benigno observes Alicia dancing. Marco observes Lydia on the TV. However, observation of performances is not quite what takes place.

The key exchanges in the scenes where there are explicit performances are not the obvious ones of the observers and the performances!

Benigno is attracted to Marco when he sees him crying in the theatre – he is less affected by the actual performance than he is by the sadness of the stranger sitting next to him.  

Lydia is attracted to Marco for the same reason; they’re at a musical performance and she observes him, once more, in tears, moved by the performance.

At the end, Marco is at the theatre and Alicia is attracted by what appears to be his vulnerability, his distress.

In each of these situations what is observed is the opposite of a performance.

Other key exchanges – Marco watching Lydia walk off the set of a tabloid talkshow after refusing to answer personal questions, Benigno’s voyeurism of Alicia – are also moments of observation of what is not intended for public performance.  

I suppose what is being observed in each of these cases is a moment where outward performance ceases and the internal performance of the person is revealed.

Moreover, these points of observation are the points at which love comes alive. So, what’s going on here?

The moments of observation of that which must not be observed described above are moments where identities began to shift, when love took place. They initiate versions of the Hegelian dialectic:

The moment when the observed comes to exist only for the observer is the first stage of the dialectic.

However, in observing the vulnerability  of the observed the observer overcomes his position by a transfer of what it is like to be observed – surely, for any non-psychopathic individual the observation of suffering is at the same moment the experience of that suffering?

So the second stage of the Hegelian dialectic - in observing, one becomes observed – is undergone.  

The reconciliation of the dialectic has to involve a reciprocal movement. The lag of the master behind the slave that has always puzzled me has to be resolved. That is why of all the relationships in this film it is only that of the two men – Benigno’s and Marco’s – that comes to the point where there is an even transcendence of identity. This relationship proves to be the most crucial, the most life-defining, the most loving.

Through one another they negate themselves, they each acquire the view point of the other, and eventually they both rediscover themselves as belonging to a reality greater than those negated prior and assumed other selves.

Theirs is the only relationship where there was a reciprocal dialectic of identities, where there was a reciprocal exchange of love (after all, Alicia was in a coma and Lydia, as we learn later, was actually still in love with her previous lover).

In each of those other cases – Alicia and Benigno and Marco and Lydia – there was enslavement to circumstance or external mastery of the characters that meant their relationships were stillborn. They never got past the impasse of the master-slave dialectic.