Therefore, as by one man sin entered into
the world, and death by sin, so death passed onto all men, for all have sinned.
(Romans 5.12)
As far as I can put it in to words I think I am trying to
answer the question: “Is being man a
state of original sin?” Even formulating the question is difficult but I have
been trying for weeks even to get to that stage.
Over those weeks I have been looking at the films of Pedro
Almodovar and wondering how it would be possible for me to live in the world of
his films. It would be difficult. His men have a habit of meeting nasty ends. These are usually self-precipitated
nasty ends: Begnigno’s incarceration for rape and subsequent suicide in Talk to Her; Lola’s death from AIDS in All about my mother; the murder by his
step daughter of Paco in Volver after
he’d tried to rape her. Even in a film like Tie
me Up, Tie me Down where Antonio Banderas’s character meets with an
unlikely happy end the character he portrays is a violent, deranged kidnapper.
Almodovar unsettles any easily given category of masculinity
and forces me to really question what it means to be a man. I like this. Any
film that prompts a member of the audience to reflect on his life has to be
doing something right.
However, I get the feeling that Almodovar’s
interrogation of masculinity, particularly, heterosexuality is playful on the
surface level only. I suspect that at a deeper level he distrusts and resents
heterosexual men.
So, while I like the way I am forced to look at what I don’t
normally have to look at (the things that make me the kind man that I am most
of the time) I think he takes his critique of masculinity too far.
As I said, I think that it would be difficult for me to live
in the world of one of his films: I would end up committing some dreadful act
of violence or abuse and have to face the consequences. I really get the sense
that for Almodovar, to be a man is to be guilty of original sin.
I don’t want to intellectualise this issue because it is
fundamental to how I try to live every day on this planet. What is it to be
man? I think this is one of the most important questions that can be asked.
Most of the time that question is, for me, indistinguishable from the
question of what it is to be a woman.
One obvious thing: there are no differences between the levels of men’s
and women’s intelligence. I am not talking about gendered 'types' of intelligence any quasi empirical sense here. What I mean is it's a given for me that, intellectually speaking, anything women can do men can do just as well and vice versa.
Another obvious thing: while I don’t think that that there is a difference in aggression between
men and women men are much stronger.
This difference in strength means that that
aggression is expressed in radically, horribly unequal ways.
Men are more physically violent than women. Most acts of
violence between men and women are committed by men on women. I have always
been acutely aware of this: it was a feature of my own family life when I was a
child and I tend to think that this makes me hypersensitive to any hint of
violence committed by men on women.
So violence against women makes me feel guilty. Not, you
understand, because of my acts. Because
of my father’s. And by extension those
of the violent abusive men who have gone before me.
So haven't I answered my own question? Being a man is a state of
original sin. Being a man, having the physical potential to hurt and abuse,
brings with it a responsibility that cannot be ignored.
I know, then, that I
have to carry the weight of this original sin. Yet I think there is a world of
difference between responsibility and culpability.
Responsibility reminds us
that while there is nothing inherently, inescapably sadistic about how men
relate to women it also challenges men to question themselves to engage with
themselves and with others in a careful, caring way.
Culpability is a static
position, a problem without a solution, to paraphrase Joyce, it is a nightmare
from which we will never wake up.
Original sin as culpability is a nightmare for men and for
women – there are no winners.
A world where men are
condemned to abuse women is inhabitable.
So this brings me back to my beginning – the (un)inhabitable world
of Pedro Almodovar.
Watching his films of reminds me of this default position of
original sin. A world where men are already – irrespective of an individual
man’s actual acts – more violent,
sinful, treacherous than women.
His films are hilarious, thought provoking and absurd but
his men – even Antonio Banderas - are
wretched.
For example, the father in the film, Volver is an incestuous, violent slob who’s beaten to death by his
step daughter after he’d attempted to rape her. He’s justifiably disposed of as
if he were a dead dog by his wife (Penelope Cruz).
This is a film that celebrates the love between mothers and
daughters. The murder of the father, Paco, is a defining moment that brings the
different generations of women in the family together – in spite and because of
what we learn later: that Penelope Cruz’s character had been raped by her own
father.
This film celebrates women. In particular, it creates a
space for mothers and daughters to build and rebuild their relationships, to
love and support one another. Who can object to this? My problem is with the particular
configuration of this celebration. The
women only really start to live when the men in their lives are exposed as violent
and abusive and then punished.
Almodovar plays out
this dynamic as comedy but for all that I believe that there is a very unfunny
point to his joking. Is it necessary to demonise men in order to celebrate
women? I don’t think it is.
This binary opposition is a deliberate and - this is crucial – punitive choice.
Another film – All
about my Mother - is also highly
playful but just as punitive in its treatment of masculinity. The playfulness
is a ruse. In reality beneath the ‘surface’ queering taking place – cross
dressing, drag queens, transsexuality – there is a deeper ‘queering’ at
work. It seems to me that Almodovar is
purging homosexuality of what he sees as the contaminant of heterosexuality.
The ostensibly gay father in this film, ‘Lola’, is a cross
dressing, irresponsible cheat, who turns out to be a closet heterosexual.
In the back story of the film he fathered a child with the
main protagonist of the film, Manuela, and absconded. Now, 18 years later he’s fathered another
child with Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz).
Who knows how many he has fathered in the nearly two decades in between
the two? As Manuela says to him when
they meet again after 18 years of estrangement “You aren’t a human being, Lola, you’re an epidemic.”
The point that I’m reading here is you can dress up as a
woman but in the end you’re still a heterosexual man and as such, you’re not to
be trusted, you’re a more damaging entity; basically, you are AIDS.
In the context of two decades of blame for AIDS on the gay
community this is an understandable reversal. However, historical reversals are often the most depressing historical narratives..
Lola eventually dies of AIDS but before she/he does so there
is a scene where he holds and kisses his infant child. Obviously this is
Almodovar’s comic re-painting of the pieta
beloved of renaissance artists but he is, I think, making a serious point.
In
an ideal world motherhood and fatherhood are multiple and openly possible. In
the real world, things like AIDS and the pressures to have a ‘normal’ family
acceptable to the outside world are much more powerful than the emancipatory
impulse of particular people to defy those norms.
I am just not so sure that Almodovar’s representations of
men are not part of the problem.
His dispatch of Lola reads to me like a director-imposed
punishment. Almodovar plays God and who does he smite?
The irresponsible, untrustworthy (closet-) heterosexual
male, Lola.
For the same crime Verdi
sang “La Donna e Mobile”. Almodovar
kills off his villain with HIV.
The film Atame
continues with the theme of the male as violent, acquisitive, dangerous. Of course, nothing is as simple as that with
this director. Atame is recognisably a romantic comedy but it is one where the
typical gender roles are distorted into insane parodies of the generic.
Ricky (Anotonio Banderas) falls in love with Marina, an
actress, follows her home, attacks and imprisons her. She is knocked
unconscious but after she wakes up he tells her:
“I’m 23 years old. I have 50,000 pesatas. I am all alone in
the world. I will be a good husband to you and a good father to your children”
So begins a classic tale of love at first headbutt. Soon, the deranged Banderas proves to be
absurdly kind and romantic. It helps the course of their love that Marina is a
junkie. After Ricky himself is violently attacked and left for dead by some
drug dealers from who he’d been attempting to score dope for Marina he finds
his way back to where he’d left her at home tied up. He is very badly injured,
she tends to his wounds and they make love passionately.
She falls in love with him. Her sister accidentally comes to
her rescue and asks:
“How can you fall in love with a kidnapper who’s tied you
up? Is that normal? You’re probably in shock, you can’t be that kinky”
After Marina escapes, Ricky makes his way to his childhood
village, now in ruins. For all his violent psychopathy he is portrayed
sympathetically. A romanticised
combination of Forrest Gump and Hannibal Lecter he is still, despite this
romance and sympathy, a violent psychopath. The joke is funny, but like a lot
of jokes it wears off sooner or later.
As a man trying to
find a place in the world of Almodovar’s films there are no easily habitable
subject positions: rapist, incest monger, kidnapper, psychopath, feckless cross
dresser, AIDS victim.
I mean, what about young men and boys in his audience? How
are they to be taught to live as men if they find themselves named a priori as violent, aggressive,
irresponsible, ‘epidemics’?
It has just occurred to me that Almodovar’s films have so
much explicit sex in them precisely because these are not films to be taken
literally. These are not films for children, these are for adults and as such
they demand reflection and self-interrogation.
Yes, I get the feeling that he is treading the line between
postmodern free play and medieval morality play but more often than not I think
he falls into the latter because the personified ‘Sins’ are usually men.
Speaking of the middle ages…..
Alongside Almodovar and in orbit around this question: “Is
being man a state of original sin?”
I have been reading the 14th
and 15th Century writer Christine De Pizan. Proto – Feminist Christian rhetoric from the
Late Middle Ages added to modern day Spanish Queer Cinema in an attempt to make
sense of my own life!
I’m a little bit ashamed to say that before a few weeks ago
I had never heard of de Pizan. I read her book The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). It is a late medieval
re-writing of the history of famous women from the classics, Christianity and
contemporary Europe.
She lived in France between the 14th and 15th
Centuries and is known today as being one of the first professional writers in
European history. De Pizan’s book
challenges representations of women by male writers, particularly those in
popular contemporaneous works such as Boccaccio’s Of Famous Women, Matheolous’
The Lamentations of Matheolus and the
Medieval ur-text The Romance of the Rose.
She dismisses much of what these men have written about
women as foolosophy: a tissue of lies
and scandal perpetrated by jealous, impotent and malicious men.
“Let Matheolus and all the other prattlers who have spoken
against women with such envy and falsehood go to sleep and stay quiet”
(II.19.1)
“Henceforth let all writers be silent who speak badly of
women…let them lower their eyes, ashamed at having dared to speak so badly” (I.
38. 4)
As a medieval it is no surprise that De Pizan was pedantic
and devout; however, she was in respect of her pedantry, erudite and engaged.
Over the course of three books she gives tens of examples of the bravery,
loyalty, intelligence, fidelity, and above all, chastity of women.
Her book is full of ancient and medieval, mythological and
historical heroines:
The Queen of Sheba, Dido of Carthage, the Amazonians, Hippolyta,
Mennilippe and Penthesilia are all paraded as paragons of female virtue.
Even those whose historical records are far from unblemished
are drawn up in the wake of her argument and celebrated: the violent,
incestuous Semiramus becomes the “first
stone in the wall of the city of Ladies”.
At the same time she is critical of the conduct of men in
relation to women.
She mentions horrific acts of violence and torture against
women – particularly the murders and abuses carried out by Pagan men against
their Christian wives and daughters that she recites in Book 3.
Men are portrayed as being less faithful to their wives,
less loyal to their parents, more cowardly in adversity and needlessly cruel.
Here too, it seems that to be a man is to be guilty of
original sin!
Above all, there is a sense that men are creatures of weak
flesh in comparison to women. The point at which men and women meet physically
is a critical one. It is imperative that women control themselves because men
cannot:
It is in her veneration of virginity that De Pizan equates contact
with men with sin. Chastity is the most important virtue for the women she
envisages in her City of Ladies. The most chaste of all – the Virgin Mary – is
enthroned as the ‘Queen’ of the city and her example is definitive for
inclusion:
“chastity is the supreme virtue in women” (II.37.1).
While she criticises men Christine is also very eager to
differentiate between women who are virtuous and those who are evil. The City
of Ladies will not let them in:
“…what citizens will
we place here? Will they be dissolute or dishonoured women? Certainly not.
Rather they shall all be women of integrity of great beauty and authority”
(II.12.2)
Later….
“I will not meddle
with evil women for such women are like creatures alienated from their won
nature” (II.13.2)
Christine de Pizan and Almodovar have led me by different
routes to question what it means to be a man – have led me to wonder what
exactly it means to be a man in my relationships with women; have led me to
question if it is not the case that masculinity is a state of original sin.
I think that De Pizan’s criticism of masculinity is
dangerously apologetic. In characterising their original sinfulness as a kind
of helplessness she lets men off the hook for the crimes of violence that they
all too often commit on women. Men are originally sinful. They are are violent,
greedy, and lustful, but De Pizan seems to let them off the hook because it seems
they are not able to help themselves.
Almodovar’s conclusions are different. Men are originally
sinful . They are violent, greedy and lustful but because they are wilfully and
essentially so there is no apology, there is punishment.
Neither Almodovar nor De Pizan reflect a version of
masculinity that I aspire to. However, perhaps in having been interrogated by
their work, having been drawn out of myself they have both done me the service
of forcing me to become my own reflection, to reanimate and re-engage with the
very question with which I started this post: “Is being a man a state of
original sin?”
I still haven't answered this question.
