The classic Hollywood melodrama, primarily the “women’s films” we studied throughout this semester demonstrated how a clear framework of morality is being transmitted through these movies. Mary Ann Doane writes in the chapter “The Love Story” from her book The Desire to Desire that the love story itself, seen in these so-called women’s pictures, were meant to speak to the female spectator (Doane 96). These films taught us about women’s standing in modern society as well as the limitations placed on them.
One of Doane’s primary points is that the women of these films are ultimately punished for expressing desire in any way that isn’t deemed wholesome or socially acceptable. In reference to a character in the film Humoresque Doane writes “She must die because her excess is not recuperable” (Doane 104). The women who experience the oftentimes unhappy endings of these love stories, do so because there is no way for them to recover from their sins. Later Doane says, in some of these films, “the women quite literally love themselves to death” (118).
Both Doane and Williams would likely agree that it seems women exist to be victim heroes, both in real life and in fiction. Women were created to suffer. We only have to pick up The Bible to know that one of the first major events in written religious history is a woman sinning and subsequently being punished for it. From the beginning of recorded history, women in stories have struggled to earn the right to be full and flawed human beings without having to pay a price for it. The Bible says “Sin began with a woman, and we must all die for her” (Ecclesiasticus 25:24, King James Bible). If we are to take films and modern melodramas in particular as moral tales for our time, we can clearly see that women persist as the ultimate victim heroes and lesson providers. The actions they take in the stories serve as both cautionary tales and blueprints for acceptable behavior. The subtext of many of the classic Hollywood melodramas seems to be “act accordingly…. or else.”
These films created and reinforced societal expectations of women. Women needed to be reminded that their place was in the home, wifed up, mothering children, being dutiful and that to want otherwise could mean suffering dire consequences. These “women’s films” of their time may have been disregarded by film critics as frivolous, silly, and meant to entertain the droll fantasies of housewives and old maids alike, but their messaging and impact was more sinister and insidious than we give them credit for.
When we viewed All About My Mother, a 1999 film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, I did a lot of reflection on not only how it employed the melodramatic mode, but how it managed to do it in such a way that the female characters, while still suffering in a variety of ways, were not necessarily being punished for their moral crimes. As I went on to view two more Almodóvar films centering around female characters, it became clear to me that in his films Almodóvar utilizes many melodramatic storytelling elements. However, he does it in a way that completely subverts the mode so that his female characters are allowed to be fluid, excessive, morally complex, and full of many complicated and conflicting desires. Instead of these female characters either meeting a certain terrible fate (e.g., death) or ultimately sacrificing an integral part of themselves in order to keep the peace, or “do the right thing” (consider Bette Davis’ character in Now, Voyager, another classic melodrama we viewed in class, giving up the love of her life in order to maintain moral balance).
Women have often been portrayed as being in a position of powerlessness, forced into roles they did not necessarily choose simply because there were no other options. Almodóvar embraces modernity in his stories by portraying women as having an array of options, including complete independence from men. While his stories may be concerned with emotions, desires, relationships, all the elements of the classic melodrama, they also display a level of freedom and optimism not often seen on screen. The classic Hollywood melodramas reinforced the moral and societal expectations placed upon females in modern Western society. Almodóvar takes this idea and flips it, creating a new way of looking at women’s lives and allowing for a subtle yet important shift toward a new moral framework.
Volver is a 2006 film written and directed by Almodóvar. In the film, there is a scene about one hour into the film. In the scene Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, sings to an audience after she has successfully catered a large event to a film crew. At this point in the film, we understand that Raimunda is our victim hero as she has suffered some losses as well as had to commit a crime in order to protect her teenage daughter, Paula. We also understand that she believes her mother to be dead, whom she was estranged from for reasons that have not been revealed at this point in the film. Her mother, Irene, is not dead and in fact is hiding out with Raimunda’s sister, Sole. During the party, Irene is in Sole’s car and can hear the singing.
By this point in the film, we can see that Raimunda is a complicated woman who seems to be carrying around a significant amount of pain under the surface. She is hot headed, quick to anger, yet fiercely loyal to her immediate family and close friends. When faced with adversity, she seems to be able to quickly problem solve her way into a solution. She needed money after her husband’s death so she took over her friend’s empty restaurant and started a catering business. Using her resources and charms, she pulls it all off. In this scene, she is singing a song because her daughter has never heard her sing before. In a medium close up shot, Raimunda sings as the band plays and the camera remains focused on her. The colors of her clothes as well as the surroundings are vivid, mostly reds, purples, and some blues and greens. There are a few cutaways to Sole and Paula as well as to Irene during the short scene, but the main focus and shots are of Raimunda’s face, as she sings passionately, letting loose a few tears. Raimunda is singing the titular song, “Volver” (“Coming back”) and the lyrics are essentially about losing one’s illusions about life but still having hope. Translated to English “I still retain a humble hope/hidden away/and that is all of my heart’s fortune/coming back.” She sings the entire song before the scene cuts to the next.
Raimunda is a character whose virtue is signaled to us by the suffering she has endured and the sacrifices she has made. Almodóvar, rather than punishing her for her various sins, which include covering up a murder, gives her happiness and hope. She reunites with her mother, reveals a terrible secret at the root of her pain and estrangement, and gets her own happy ending, one that is more focused on family, love, and independence. Raimunda is one of many characters in Almodóvar’s universe who does not require a man or a romantic relationship to be fulfilled, another way in which he flips the fundamental purpose of the classic melodrama. While those films repeatedly impressed the concept that a woman’s place is married with children, keeping sexual and other desires tamed, Almodóvar allows for women to want for something else.
We see this pro-feminist ideology again in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, an Almodóvar dramedy from 1988. Pepa, played by Carmen Maura (who also plays Irene in Volver), has been dumped by her longtime lover, Ivan, and for the majority of the film she is trying to find a way to talk to him as he continually eludes her. Along the way she interacts with various female characters all embroiled in their own interpersonal dramas. In the final scene of the film, around one hour and twenty-five minutes in, Pepa, after a day of complete chaos and having saved her ex-lover’s life, surveys her apartment before she goes outside to her balcony. Her apartment is filled with several people sleeping after having been drugged by a spiked gazpacho. Pepa appears to have survived her mental breakdown, after nearly being driven mad by Ivan, as well as the circumstances of her life. She sits with another female character, who is waking up after sleeping through the majority of the film, and discloses that she is going to have a baby. In a medium shot, with both women dressed in red, a prevalent color in the film, the two speak intimately with each other. This scene can be described as a happy ending, albeit a touch open-ended, another example of Almodóvar not necessarily conforming to the classic melodramatic mode. Pepa seemingly has resolved her feelings about both her ex-lover and the fact that she is going to have a baby. She seems hopeful and content in her independence. She is a successful professional who owns her own apartment which she tells the other woman she intends to keep as she loves the view. We can gather from this scene that Pepa does not need to rely on a man or conform to any traditional gender roles. The camera cuts to being behind the women and pulls back as the conversation between the women becomes unintelligible and the skyline is displayed beautifully in front of them. The credits begin to roll and music begins to play.
The use of color in these two films, as well as in All About My Mother, and in his films in general is a key component. Almodóvar notoriously imbues his frames and dresses his characters with bright, vivid colors. His mises en scène are often sumptuous to look at. David Batchelor goes to great length in his book Chromophobia to critique how Western philosophical traditions have often marginalized color as superficial, chaotic, or lacking in substance compared to form or structure. He writes “colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological” (Batchelor 22-23). This relates directly to Almodóvar’s films as it is another way in which he is being subversive in his art. Almodóvar is taking this notion of color as excess and vulgarity and empowering it. These characters may be dramatic, queer, even vulgar, but it is celebrated and it works to emphasize his underlying message that his characters can be as brash, loud, and colorful as they want. The notion of sterility, whiteness or absence of color, or starkness, as somehow being better or more refined is completely disregarded.
In their essay “Almodóvar’s Girls” Bersani and Dutoit write about many of the complex female and female identifying characters in his films. They highlight how Almodóvar employs many melodramatic tactics, including the use of repetition (Pepa comically hails the same taxi driver several times in the film) as well as coincidence and fate in his films (Bersani Dutoit 251). More importantly though, Bersani and Dutoit talk about how Almodóvar’s use of women talking, in multiple films, is partly based on his childhood memory of the women surrounding him as a child, who sat around simply talking. This “availability” of the women wandering and talking amongst each other seemed to have provided an origin for any kind of story, even evoked a promise (252). All About My Mother, Volver, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown all have scenes that implement this promise, this intimate connection, this “prospective sociability” (252). It seems that this intimate sphere that women share is another subversion of the patriarchal narrative because in this space women are allowed to share, be real, connect, conspire, and inspire each other, away from the ears and eyes of men who would normally be telling them what to do.
Not only are the women in Volver and Women allowed to be flawed, complex, and non-traditional, but they are celebrated and even rewarded for it. Rather than have their oftentimes excessive emotions and desires, as well as their misdeeds, quash their chances at happiness they instead, in many ways, get to “have it all.” Raimunda literally commits a crime by covering up the murder of her husband and gets away with it as well as getting to reunite with her mother. Pepa, who had an extramarital affair for many years and plans to keep her baby out of wedlock, is portrayed as a strong, fiercely independent, and capable woman, living with little regret and unafraid to face her future. These female characters and their fates, while having been the protagonists of very melodramatic, nearly soap opera like stories, get to be free, joyful, and make many choices in their lives without suffering dire consequences or bending to the expectations of men or society at large.
So what? What does this subversion of the melodramatic mode mean? Why are Almodóvar’s depictions of women important? It is because if we are to look to these stories to “make sense of experience” or to extrapolate “a moral legibility” that shapes and informs our attitudes, if we are to apply the limitations set for women by these stories to reality, then it is clear that by shifting the narrative and its moral implications, Almodóvar is effectively moving the needle. He is taking the melodramatic mode and refusing to perpetuate the idea that women’s desires and the reality of a woman’s place in society cannot be reconciled. He is suggesting clearly and vividly that women can actually live their lives and maybe even have all the things they want. Through these depictions and these female characters, we understand the lack of shame and judgment placed on them for living their complicated emotional and sexual lives, thus moral restrictions on them shift and loosen. These films normalize and enable women to be the changeable, flawed, horny, dramatic, multifaceted, sometimes unhinged beings that they are. Like any media consumed by the masses, these representations inform our social attitudes. Women of the 1940s were provided melodramas as a form of entertainment and also to have women on screen they could identify with. Upon further analysis, specifically when asking “why do these women suffer?” we must acknowledge that these films perpetuated social standards for women and what was okay for them to want in their personal, professional, and sexual lives. If they wanted too much or not the right things, consequences were inevitable.
While Almodóvar creates melodramas using many tropes of those classics, he does so with a fundamentally different moral agenda. In the Almodóvar universe women are there to be revered, appreciated, and unrestricted. Their lives can be open ended stories with all sorts of possibilities. If we can see ourselves in these women, we can see our own possibilities and we in turn are also set free. The politics of the melodrama and their impact on us then become truly apparent.
Works Cited
Almodóvar, Pedro. All About My Mother. Sony Picture Classics, 1999.
Almodóvar, Pedro. Volver. Sony Picture Classics, 2006.
Almodóvar, Pedro. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Lauren Films, 1988.
Batchelor, David. “Chromophobia.” Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books, 2000, pp. 20-49.
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, “Almodóvar’s Girls.” All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema. Edited by Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 241-266.
Brooks, Peter. “Preface” and “The Melodramatic Imagination.” The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1976, 1995, pp. xxii-23
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Love Story.” The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film in the 1940s. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 96-122
The Holy Bible: King James Version.
Williams, Linda. “The American Melodramatic Mode.” Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. pp 10-44.
Film thoughts and scattered musings 
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