‘Nothing is simple’ ‘Talk to her’

1. ‘Nothing is simple’‘Talk to her’ Cynthia Freeland: Chapter 5

2. Treatment of women: • Problem of objectification: held by feminists that men tend to “objectify” women, treats her as an object and not a subject. Feminists complain that men regard women as mere bodies to be observed or used for sexual pleasure, rather than a person in their own right. • Benigno sees the two comatose patients as actual people (not mere bodies) and that they are still the women they were and have larger potential as human beings.

3. Treatment of women: continued • Rape: complicates our moral reaction, pregnancy doesn’t appear a miracle. Clearly wrong, Benigno emerges as a monster (different understanding of what is really wrong with objectification). • Develop a relationship as viewers and audience members to these women: both to the characters depicted and the actresses who portray them, through a visual and kinaesthetic awareness of their bodies (audience response).

4. The dance sequences: • Important to the narrative and symbolically • It starts and ends with a dance sequence: process of watching and understanding the artistic portrayal, doesn't have any real closure. • The mood is very sombre. • The opening scene: symbolically, it foreshadows the film’s suffering and sadness, mainly for women but also the desperate attempts of men to save them. Film’s male leads will struggle to love and to care for these women. • Different reactions to dance: Marco shows intense emotion (weeping), and Benigno is observant and empathetic.

5. The dance sequences: continued • The mood at the end: narratively and metaphorically far more optimistic and positive than at the film’s beginning, despite the tragedies that have occurred in the course of the story. • Katerina (dance teacher): she says that ballerinas will represent the souls of the men. • Almodovar shows the women actresses who ‘inhabit’ their bodies so fully during their scenes of living animation before becoming comatose, in order to dramatise the terrible difference in their states before and after. Heightens fear and pity for them.

6. Tragedy: • Befall of the two women but also the end of helping to unfold the tragedy of the two men. • The women become blank and unconscious, unanimated bodies in order that the story of the men’s friendship and tragic loss can itself unfold. • Male friendship and men trying to know and understand women (authenticity in human relationships). • Katerina: “world of art, nothing is simple” referring Alicia and Marco’s relationship beginning. It won’t be easy for them when Alicia finds out that Marco was friends with Benigno who spied on her and raped her.

7. The animated body: • Communication through their bodies: Alicia and Lydia. Lydia puts herself in danger with bullfighting (risk-taker), whereas Alicia is the opposite so she could be seen as gentle through the use of ballet. • Alicia’s raping is monstrous: helps explain why Marco confesses that he now finds Lydia’s body ‘disgusting’. Her body is like a shell, its not “her” anymore. • The two men treat the two women differently: have different ideas about the females vegetative state.

8. The challenge of interpretation: • After the film that Benigno goes to see we see the lava lamp in an extreme close-up as the blobs move around in the liquid. Audience members could see this as a hint that Alicia is now pregnant because the scene before with the film is also a metaphor for what Benigno has done. • Possibly be the saddest moment when Benigno tells Marco “I haven’t had many hugs in my life”. Marco hasn’t had any more direct emotional contact with someone than Benigno has. But the positive outcome of long tragedy: Marco may have learned that in life, as in art, nothing is simple.