Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Sexism or Emancipation from Machismo?
[In the following essay, Redding Jessup asserts that "If the ending convincingly sums up Pedro Almodóvar's gender messages in this film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a story about emancipation from machismo."]
Introduction: May We Laugh?
Is Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown a sexist comedy about hysterical women or a story of liberation from machismo? Should our nerves jangle with Almodóvar's stereotypical treatment of women? Or, may we celebrate the happy ending and laugh with this comic film from Spain?
Even before we see Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the title conjures up images of edgy, emotional, out-of-control women. Then, from the beginning until the final scenes we watch the female characters in a frenzy over men. Pepa (played by Carmen Maura) frantically searches for her lover Iván (Fernando Guillén), who has left her for another woman, to tell him she is pregnant and to get him back. Crazed Lucía (Julieta Serrano) hijacks a motorcycle in pursuit of the same Iván, to shoot him. Pepa's friend Candela (María Barranco) is in a panic fearing she will go to jail as an accomplice to her lover's plot to hijack the plane which Iván plans to take to Stockholm with his new paramour, Paulina (Kiti Manver). Before the end of the film, Candela and Iván's son Carlos (Antonio Banderas) flirt and kiss, while Carlos' fiancee, Marisa (Rossy de Palma), sleeps nearby. As Elvira Siruana notes, the women in this comedy behave as "neurotics" who chase after men, "competing" with each other as if they had "no other objective in their lives."
The conclusion of the film, however, is not in the interest of the patriarchal power which such stereotypical images of women seem to justify. After all, irrational women need rational men to tell them what to do. But in the final scenes, Pepa is an independent career woman who says "adiós" to Iván. She also decides, as Murphy Brown will do four years later, to become a single parent. Clearly Pepa and her baby will be better off without Iván, a macho cad. As the comedy closes, phallocentric dualisms are upset. Pepa regains control of her life, and Iván remains irrationally subjugated to the macho role he plays. If the ending convincingly sums up Pedro Almodóvar's gender messages in this film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a story about emancipation from machismo.
In Caryn James' opinion, however, the endings of Almodóvar's films simply do not work. In "Almodóvar Adrift in Sexism," a New York Times article about Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and High Heels, she sees the endings as "contrived, declared by authorial fiat." She finds "a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women" because the conclusions are ineffective. "The undercurrent of sexism is directly tied to the bludgeoning control that wrecks the endings of Mr. Almodóvar's films," she explains. Women in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, for example, "are suddenly made self-sufficient at the end; this is a neat feminist twist but not a convincing one." Hence viewers are left with the impression that women are "frenetic and silly."
In contrast, Marvin D'Lugo believes that Almodóvar's female protagonists such as Pepa are "agents of radical cultural change" in films that reflect and further a "newly emerging social order." In his article "Heterogeneity and Spanish Cinema of the Eighties," he sums up the plot of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in this way: "We trace the inner emancipation of the female who, having already achieved the outward marks of freedom and independence that have come with the social transformation of Spain, now struggles to achieve the inner liberation from a phallocentric past by means of her disengagement from the womanizing Iván." By the final scenes, in D'Lugo's opinion, Pepa represents a "cultural and social system in which the female has finally shed the ideological chains of her imprisonment in traditional Spanish patriarchy."
Rather than a deus ex machina at the end of Almodóvar's films, D'Lugo writes that viewers participate in "the emancipating function of the specular ritual," which he defines as "the audience's bearing witness and tacitly legitimizing the cultural reordering that each filmic narrative chronicles." In an analysis of the final scenes of Law of Desire, the predecessor of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, D'Lugo notes the crowd of police and passersby who "look up to the window" where "the homosexual love scene is taking place." The audience joins spectators in the film in a "secular adoration scene." As viewers affirm liberation from past intolerances, according to D'Lugo, they "rewrite the phallocentric and repressive scenarios of Franquismo."
Pedro Almodóvar says that "his films are meant to deny even the memory of Franco," reports Vito Russo. Marvin D'Lugo identifies ironic images that negate the power over gender roles of institutions—the Church, the patriarchal family, and the police—used by Generalissimo Franco during his long dictatorship (1939–1975) to enforce conformity to gender hierarchy. Again in Law of Desire, D'Lugo notes the likeness to Michelangelo's Pietà of the final embrace of the homosexual lovers, Pablo and Antonio, in front of an "altar of pop-cultural artifacts." Tina, Pablo's transsexual brother who turned woman to become the lover of her father—although the patriarch abandons her—stands by the police in the "adoration" scene. Undermining the patriarchal order of course reaches beyond dramatic changes in Spain. Almodóvar's humorous untying of old gender strictures has international appeal.
In 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown topped box office records and received five Goya prizes in Spain and won awards in Toronto, in Venice, in Berlin and in New York. The next year it was a nominee for an Oscar. Its images of women chasing machos have entered many brains. Elvira Siurana's and Caryn James' important concerns about the female characters' stereotypical behavior prompt a closer look at the film. As Alice Sheppard notes, "typical humor against women relies on stereotypes." But in this analysis of gender in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I will try to show that Pedro Almodóvar uses stereotypes subversively, that he directs his humor against machismo, and that the ending confirms this humorous critique.
Because this essay views Almodóvar's gender messages from the vantage point of the end of the film, I will first focus on the final scene. Inspired by Marvin D'Lugo's baptism of the ending as the "annunciation," a beginning, I will share evidence that this finale is also a nativity scene that opens the ending with hope for better gender arrangements in the future. An epilogue to the plot, the final scene follows the closure of two parodic themes, Don Juan and stereotypical women in Hollywood comedies of the 1950s and 1960s. After analyzing these parodies, which involve the central characters and the main plot of the film, I will note contributions to gender themes by other scenes and characters. My conclusion will be that Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is about liberation from machismo.
Almodóvar's humor in this funny film renders machismo absurd. Yet our laughter has undertones of frustration as well as optimism. Pepa overcomes her subordination to the macho; the macho continues with someone else. Machismo roves around society throughout this film; the final scenes indicate that mañana it will go away.
Ending: "Annunciation" and Nativity Scene
The final scene of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown follows the conclusion to the plot. In the penultimate scene, after two days and one sleepless night of frenetic searching, Pepa catches up with Iván at Madrid's Barajas Airport. By then she has nothing to say to him except "adiós." This leave-taking is a statement of emancipation from the macho, but there is one more scene. The last set is the terrace of Pepa's penthouse. Back from the airport, Pepa walks through her living room, past the police and others sleeping off drugged gazpacho, to reach the terrace just when Marisa wakes up. Then we watch the happy epilogue, called the "annunciation" by D'Lugo. Pepa announces her pregnancy to Marisa.
Marisa is one of seven people melodramatically entangled in Pepa's story who join Pepa in her penthouse during the second day in the fictional reality of the film. "Sea precisamente al que tiene menos relación con ella al que le comunique su secreto" ["it is exactly to the one with whom she has the least relationship that she communicates her secret"], points out Pedro Almodóvar. But Marisa is part of the mesh. Carlos, Iván's son and Marisa's sweetheart when they enter the apartment, leaves Marisa for Candela, as his father discards Pepa for Paulina. Marisa is abandoned while she sleeps, dreaming sweet orgasmic dreams after consuming the gazpacho that Pepa concocted for Iván. Pepa has laced this nourishing cold soup with sleeping pills to keep Iván, even if asleep, with her. Iván does not come by, and almost everyone, including Marisa, relishes this delicious culinary symbol of Spanish summers. Thus Pepa announces her pregnancy to Marisa, who is there by a series of coincidences.
The names of the characters in this final scene are not accidental; they suggest the Holy Family. Pepa is a nickname for Josefina, the feminine form of José or Joseph; Marisa is derived from María. Pepa (Joseph) will be both father and mother to her child. Marisa (Mary), blessed with immaculate intercourse while sleeping on the terrace, is no longer a virgin. Pepa is pleased and calls virgins antipáticas [unpleasant]. This brief discourse, reversing the veneration of sweet innocent female virgins, does not appear in the original script. By adding it, Almodóvar debunks with a few phrases the age-old cult of women's purity and undoes an obsolete myth that helps sustain macho power. If female chastity is not fiercely defended, Don Juan's valiant conquests, the macho's "scores," are mere deceptions. If a female person is not an otherworldly virgin mother, does she need a worldly patriarch to rule her and the family? Happily the Mary at the ending of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is not a virgin, and the family announced will not be patriarchal.
In the final scene on the terrace, a calm conversation between two women, Pepa is free from her submission to Iván, and the baby she plans to have will not grow up under the macho's influence. She has no worries about becoming a single mother, no concerns about social or political stigma, and no financial problems. (No Spanish politician, to my knowledge, nervously pointed to Pepa as a threat to "family values," that is, to "the importance of the father.") Well-to-do Pepa can afford a penthouse on Montalbán Street, in the beautiful Los Jerónimos neighborhood in Madrid, a few steps from the Prado museum and from the Retiro Park. Her economic advantage glows, if we contrast her with Gloria (also Carmen Maura) from Almodóvar's 1984 film What Have I Done to Deserve This? After Gloria frees herself from her macho husband by whacking him over the head with a ham and baking the fatal weapon, she is still financially stuck in an awful apartment overlooking traffic on Madrid's M30 beltway. For Gloria the "outward marks of freedom and independence," noted by D'Lugo in Pepa's case, are not so brilliant. Besides, Gloria's homosexual son who returns home to be the man of the house is already tainted by his father's machismo. But the carefree ending of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown predicts that machismo will not spoil Pepa's baby.
Venturing beyond the hopeful finale into the future—an epilogue invites us to do so—Pepa will continue her career, as Spanish women who work outside the home now commonly do when they have children. When she gives birth she will enjoy the Spanish sixteen-week parental leave with seventy-five percent of her salary. All Spaniards have both a paternal and a maternal surname, and Pepa's baby will carry on Pepa's maternal as well as her paternal family names. Spain's low birthrate, 1.3 children per woman in 1992, indicates that Pepa probably will choose to have one child. Perhaps, like Murphy Brown, she will hire a man to care for her baby until she or he goes to nursery school. The maid Pepa mentioned as she stepped over the spilled gazpacho in the last scene will help her clean the apartment, freeing her from the la doble jornada [double day's work] of many career women with children, not only in Spain. Also, the maps and planes in her apartment symbolize her freedom and imply she will travel. The film's ending encourages optimistic thoughts.
The hopeful finale suggests a nativity scene. The conversation between Pepa (Joseph) and Marisa (Mary) on the terrace with a view of Madrid's nighttime skies takes place close to a manger, or hints of one, and a light, like a star, winks above the Telephone Company building before the scene ends. Ducks and chickens are in the closing and opening sets. D'Lugo mentioned "the biblical intertext" of the "annunciation" and of the prologue. In the voice-over in the opening scene, Pepa said she, as a Noah, would have liked to have a pair of every animal but could not save the couple that mattered most to her. Happily, saving this couple, Iván and Pepa, is no longer a goal at the end of the film. Nor is this nativity scene, with Mary and Joseph and talk of a future baby, a "celebration of fertility," an element of comedy in traditional (androcentric) theory, noted by Regina Barreca. The glad tidings here are that Pepa is free from her submission to a Don Juan and that the baby will be a member of what D'Lugo calls the "presumably 'liberated' generation."
"On the Verge of Parody": Don Juan
"En mis películas todo está al borde de la parodia" ["In my films everything is on the verge of parody"], Almodóvar tells us. Throughout Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown he parodies the legendary Don Juan. Although he does not mimic its style, Almodóvar implies actions, characters, and even the author of José Zorrilla's nineteenth-century Don Juan Tenorio, the drama that revitalizes the Don Juan myth with performances each year on All Saint's Day in Spain and in other Spanish-speaking countries.
The final scenes of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown suggest the ending of Don Juan Tenorio. At the end of the romantic drama, Doña Inés, willing to sacrifice her eternal life, saves Don Juan from hell. After Don Juan's last-minute repentance, the souls of Doña Inés and of Don Juan ascend into heaven in a whirl of flowers, angels, perfume and music. When Pepa saves Iván's life at the end of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Iván says "estoy avergonzado" ["I am ashamed"] and "lo siento" ["I am sorry"] and offers to talk with Pepa in the cafeteria. "Ya es tarde" ["It is too late"], Pepa responds. So, they go up into the sky on their separate ways. Iván prepares to board the plane to Stockholm to fly with his new lover Paulina to Beirut if the Shiite terrorists slip by the police. Pepa returns to her penthouse, to the terrace with a view of Madrid's heavenly skies.
The uplifting ending of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown brings the parody of the Don Juan legend to its ironic close. Pepa rejects Iván, but no woman leaves Don Juan Tenorio. He makes the decisions. Women, numbers to win a bet, matter only as helpmates to his ego. In contrast, Almodóvar's film is the story of a woman discarded by Iván who overcomes her subordination to him. In the end, Pepa completes the task stated in an early scene when the receptionist Cristina (Loles León) advises her, "olvídale" ["forget him"], and Pepa responds, "dame más tiempo" ["give me more time"]. Two days and one sleepless night later, she says good-bye to Iván.
Almodóvar signals Pepa's progress toward this "adiós" throughout the film. When she burns the bed, with Manuel de Falla's "Ritual Fire Dance" from "Love the Magician" playing in the background, she begins to purge the power memories of their lovemaking have over her. Then she packs up his clothes and gifts. After lugging the suitcase up and down the steps of her apartment, she finally heaves it into the trash, ridding herself of her subordination to him. She will no longer wait for him to come by for it. After flinging the telephone through the window in two moments of frustration and frantically running to answer it with each ring, she walks calmly to answer the call from Lucía. Almodóvar's stage instructions for this scene, the fifty-ninth of the eighty-four scenes in this eighty-eight minute film, are: "Por primera vez Pepa se dirige al auricular como una persona normal, sin necesidad de batir un record de velocidad" ["For the first time Pepa goes to the phone as a normal person, without the need to beat a speed record"]. When she slings the record "Soy infeliz" ["I am unhappy"] through the window, with its slapstick landing on the neck of Paulina, she is freeing herself from the unhappiness Iván caused her. When she tosses the answering machine loaded with his lies through the window onto the hood of the car, just as Iván and Paulina are leaving, she throws his falsehoods back to him. This is a "ligera" [light] comedy, in Almodóvar's words. We have little access to Pepa's deliberations, but scenes of visual and situational humor indicate her steps toward her liberation from Iván.
Names in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown bring to mind Don Juan Tenorio. As I have suggested, Iván is a Don Juan. Ana, Pepa's neighbor—the one who asks the panic-stricken driver of the mambo taxi if he sells guns—is an ironic namesake of Doña Ana who was seduced by Don Juan Tenorio in a case of mistaken identity. Ana in the film erroneously worries that Lucía is after her sweetheart Ambite instead of Iván. Pepa's paternal surname, Marcos, is the first name of Don Juan Tenorio's servant. We hear it only in her call to Lucía, early in the film when she is servile to her feelings for Iván. Pepa's first name implies the author of Don Juan Tenorio, José Zorrilla, as well as the biblical Joseph. D'Lugo notes how Almodóvar in the introductory voice-over "gives the voice of the creative author to Pepa." Through Pepa, he creates a Don Juan from the perspective of a woman abandoned by the macho.
Point of view works ironies on the Don Juan myth. We see Iván through the problems he causes Pepa and Lucía. Invulnerable Don Juan Tenorio does not notice the suffering he brings about. With the exception of Doña Inés, with whom he falls in love and whose father he then kills, women are objects for seduction. Self-absorbed, after a conquest, he goes on to his next adventure. Similarly, Iván is not upset by Lucía's insanity. At the airport, even though she tries to shoot him, he pays little attention to her—only a glance and a mention of her name, as if reprimanding a little girl. If surprised by Pepa's "adios," in the next moment he turns to his new lover and prepares to board the flight to Stockholm. But we see Iván through Pepa's feelings, not through his pride. He is a culprit.
Iván's machismo is to blame for Pepa's irrational actions; yet she is of sounder mind than he. He first appears in Pepa's nightmare as he passes from one woman to the next, pleased with the uninvited seductive phrases—piropos, he playfully tells them. This introduction to Iván resembles Don Juan bragging about his list of conquests, from one woman to the next, in the opening scenes of Don Juan Tenorio. A one-dimensional macho from this beginning of the film, Iván does not change or think. But Pepa, even when "on the verge of a nervous breakdown," figures out, for example, where Lucía lives and where Iván is going and with whom. Later, with pistols pointed at her face, she is able to try to persuade Lucía not to kill Iván. In the end, Pepa's rejection of Iván is a reasonable decision; Iván's machismo is unreasonable.
The mythic Don Juan, a fearless young hero, is reduced in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to a ridiculous liar in the figure of the cowardly and middle-aged Iván. The most revealing scene of Iván's prevarications occurs when he leaves this message on Pepa's answering machine: "No me voy de viaje, ni me voy con ninguna mujer" ["I am not going on a trip, nor am I going away with another woman"]. While he makes the call from a phone booth because he is afraid to face Pepa, Paulina waits in the car ready to go with him to Stockholm. Pepa walks by the phone booth to put his suitcase in the trash, and Lucía passes by on her way to Pepa's apartment. Pepa and Lucía move with determination, as does Paulina when she yanks the suitcase from the dumpster and takes it to the car. Meanwhile, Iván hides cowering behind the advertisement in the phone booth, afraid to use his voice to tell the truth.
Pedro Almodóvar tells us that the inspiration for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. When Almodóvar wrote the script, the only things remaining from Cocteau's monologue were "una mujer sola, el teléfono y una maleta" ["a woman alone, the telephone, and a suitcase"]. Then he added the voice of the lover and "sus mentiras" ["his lies"]. Almodóvar also notes that Iván talks to machines—telephones and an answering machine—that allow him to send lies without looking at Pepa. John Hopewell's comment about Antonio in Carlos Saura's Carmen sums up Almodóvar's condemnation of machismo in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: "Machismo impedes communication. It is also quite simply a lie."
In addition to telling lies, Iván uses his voice to dub words into films, which evokes ideas about illusions of reality in the film within the film, in cinema, and in life. This early dubbing scene also hints at role-playing in machismo. Iván speaks, while the actors move their mouths, to delude future audiences who will think his voice pertains to someone else, which it does. It belongs to a beguiler. Iván is an impostor to himself.
The sad song "Soy infeliz" ["I am unhappy"] tells Iván, "vive feliz en tu mundo de ilusiones" ["live happily in your world of illusions"]. This song about hurtful delusion begins the film and later, on a record, flies through the window of Pepa's apartment. A sad bolero echoes the same message at the end of the film. Almodóvar's final commentary on machismo as represented by Iván is the song "Teatro" with its lyrics, "lo tuyo es puro teatro" ["yours is nothing but acting"].
"On the Verge of Parody": Hollywood Comedies
Another parodic theme, visible throughout Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and brought to its ironic closure in the final scenes, is women's behavior in Hollywood comedies of the 1950s and 1960s. Generalissimo Franco's censors welcomed these films about happy subjugation, and Almodóvar saw many of them in Spain. Speaking of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, he tells us:
He querido hacer una especic de alta comedia al estilo de las americanas de finales de los años 50, donde un grupo de mujeres están a punto de tirarse por el balcón o de ahorcarse con el cable del teléfono porque su novio no las llama. La película está basada en esos primeros momentos del abandono, en que pierden un poco el control de los nervios. [I wanted to make a kind of high comedy in the style of the American ones at the end of the 1950s where a group of women are ready to throw themselves from the balcony or hang themselves with the telephone cord because their sweethearts do not call them. The film is based on those first moments of abandonment, when they lose some control of their nerves.]
Pedro Almodóvar also makes clear, "no quiero que sea una mirada complacienta sobre los sesenta, sino todo lo contrario." ["I do not want this to be a complaisant look at the sixties, but rather the opposite"].
In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Pedro Almodóvar mimics and mocks women's stereotypical behavior in Hollywood comedies of decades past. But his message is not that women can act like funny little girls because in the end they will submit to their man who will take care of them. To the contrary, Pepa passes comically through the trauma of ending her relationship with Iván, who has discarded her. In the happy conclusion she is free to invent her own life. Significantly, the character in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown who remains completely dependent on her macho man is insane. Lucía, in her zany outfits from the 1960s, refuses to leave behind gender roles often prescribed by comedies of that decade and returns to the hospital. Pepa's denial of subordination, her declaration of independence, does not sanction stereotypical behavior of women as did many Hollywood happy endings of the fifties and sixties.
Almodóvar calls Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown "una comedia realista al estilo americano, o sea, muy falseada" ["a realistic comedy in the American style, or, that is, very falsified"]. Pauline Kael mentions the tone of the fifties of the plastic-like "cosmetic layouts" of the introduction. The main set, Pepa's apartment, resembles unreal Hollywood decor of decades past. The apartment building in the prologue is a bad painting, and its interior is impeccable. The kitchen, as María Asunción Balonga notes, is like one from "Homes and Gardens." The tomatoes for gazpacho are lustrous red; the colors inside and on the terrace are brilliant. Almodóvar explains that "Lo que pretendo es que lo único auténtico y lo único verosímil sean los sentimientos de ella" ["What I intend is that the only authentic thing and the only credible thing will be her feelings"]. Against a backdrop of artificiality, Pepa's emotions are genuine from the beginning to the end.
We see Pepa's sincerity in an opening scene, the dialogue from Nicholas Ray's 1954 film Johnny Guitar. Iván first dubs Sterling Hayden's part into Spanish; later Pepa dubs Joan Crawford's words into Spanish. Iván, through Johnny Guitar's lines, asks for lies: "Dime que siempre me has esperado." ["Tell me that you have always waited for me."] "Dime que hubieras muerto si yo no hubiera vuelto." ["Tell me that you would have died if I had not returned."] "Dime que todaavía me quieres, como yo a ti." ["Tell me that you still love me as I love you."] Pepa says the lines with deep emotion, too heartfelt for the role Joan Crawford plays. Then she faints, which blends into the melodramatic pitch of the film. This clip shows that Iván, as a Don Juan, wants self-delusion; Pepa, authenticity.
As in Johnny Guitar and other Hollywood films of those decades, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown takes place with sudden shifts from the stage set to the streets. One of these switches from the set is to Almagro street in Madrid, and Almodóvar's choice is significant. This is the street where Pepa looks through an apartment window and watches a woman dance, an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, as noted by Patricia Hart. The name of this street lined with elegant buildings suggests the wonderful seventeenth-century theater, Corral de Comedias, in the town Almagro, where classical drama is still performed. It brings to mind Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla, the seventeenth-century model for Don Juan Tenorio. But Pedro Almodóvar chose this street for an additional purpose, one that states the underlying gender theme of the comedy.
The central office of the Instituto de la Mujer [The Women's Institute] is located at Almagro 36, and its telephone number is 410-51-12. Pepa reads its address when matching Lucía's phone number, 410-41-30, with street numbers in the Madrid directory arranged by addresses. She rushes through the numbers, "Almagro 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36," before arriving at Almagro 38, Lucia's address. The Center for Information on the Rights of Women, where women can receive advice on legal matters, is located at Almagro 30. Very close by on Almagro Street is the Casa de la Mujer, which houses various associations where women and men work for the cause of gender fairness. Lucía, ensnared in the past, lives on a street that symbolizes Spain's advances toward the goal of equality of opportunities. Her apartment is next door to the Women's Institute, a government agency dedicated to turning Spain's progressive constitutional rights for women into realities.
The Spanish government in 1983 created The Women's Institute "for the purpose of promoting the conditions necessary for equality between the sexes and for the participation of women in political, cultural, economic and social life." The Institute's work is inspired by the Spanish Constitution of 1978, which prohibits discrimination based on sex (article 14), specifically forbids discrimination based on sex at work (article 35), and declares marriage an institution based on equality (article 32). Moreover, the Constitution, in an aboutface from Generalissimo Franco's regime, promises that "the public powers" will remove obstacles in the path toward equality (art. 9.2). In the decade following its ratification, ending the year Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown appeared, legislative and social reforms were dynamic. But, the Women's Institute notes "the difficulties in changing attitudes at the same speed as legislation" and says that "a profound change in social customs and individual behavior" is necessary.
Almodóvar turns this need into comedy in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The ludicrous juxtaposition of Lucía's apartment next to the Women's Institute on Almagro Street is a serious social commentary. Moreover Iván has walked along this same street. There too is Iván's son Carlos, who according to Lucía "ha salido como su padre" ["has turned out like his father"]. During the first night of the film, Pepa stalks Almagro Street looking for Iván. She sits down across the street from Lucía's apartment and from the Women's Institute, waiting for her Don Juan. Women in 1988 engaged in behavior reminiscent of Hollywood comedies of decades past and Don Juans on a street that represents progress are absurd incongruities. But the optimistic ending justifies our smiles.
The protagonist Pepa conveys Almodóvar's messages of hope for women's progress. At the end of the film, Lucía, a foil to Pepa, trapped in the past, is put away. The macho Iván, also a crazy anachronism, roams free. Naive Candela, whose name implies cándida, ingenuous, still has much to learn. Her sexual desires blind her again—the scene with rabbits who like turnips and with a can of Seat car oil in the background has innuendoes. She cuddles up to Carlos on the sofa, while his fiancée Marisa sleeps nearby. Where is female solidarity against machismo? By the final scenes, it is Pepa who advances from reactions reminiscent of Hollywood comedies of the fifties and sixties to actions suitable to the end of the eighties.
Gender and Other Funny Scenes and Characters
Other scenes and characters corroborate Almodóvar's messages about gender in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. They also add to the ludicrous situations and juxtapositions, the wild coincidences, the exaggerations, the caricatures, and the comic tone that make this film seem frivolous. But as Pedro Almodóvar asks, "¿Qué es frívolo y quées trascendente?" ["What is frivolous and what is transcendental?"]. Funny minor characters and scenes underline Almodóvar's portrayal of machismo as a lie.
Two television commercials are woven into this comedy. In the first spot, a priest puts a condom in the bride's bouquet during the wedding ceremony and warns her never to trust any man. María Barranco, the bride, later appears as Candela, deceived by a Shiite terrorist. Carmen Maura, Pepa, abandoned by Iván, dubs the words of the bride. We view the second commercial with Pepa who watches herself in the main role. "The mother of the murderer" combines detergent, murder, words of Pontius Pilate, a hint of Christ on the cross, police, and a housewife pleased with her clean wash. The advertisement for Ecce Homo laundry soap mocks housewives' delight in a clean shirt, as if it were a life or death issue, which in this case it is. Omo, by the way, was a "popular" detergent in Spain during the sixties. The police, no longer in a police state, are helpless before the stain-removing power of Ecce Homo. All blood and guts have vanished from the shirt. The mother has saved her son, the murderer. Television gives the word in the world of consumerism; detergent works miracles. The final sentence about the incredible detergent, "Ecce Homo parece mentira" ["Ecce Homo, it (or he) seems a lie"], suggests commercials deceive. These words can also mean, "behold, this man seems to be a lie."
Almodóvar plays with lies in this film. Chus, the Jehovah's Witness and concierge who cannot tell a falsehood, is a comic contrast to Iván and his prevarications. Lucía lies to herself about time not passing. Significantly, her mother wants to sell the outdated outfits to cure her daughter's self deception, but Lucía's affectionate father tells her she looks wonderful, "estupenda," in an ugly wig. Lucía replies, "Qué bien mientes, papá. Por eso te quiero." ["How well you lie, father. That is why I love you."] Pepa lies to protect Candela. The police do not believe her when she tells the truth.
We do not hear the kind and funny mambo taxi driver lie, but he repeats sexist clichés. This sensitive taxi driver with his clown-like hair cries because Pepa cries and because he does not have eye drops for her. On the next trip he has the drops. Each time Pepa needs a cab, along comes the mambo taxi that offers magazines, newspapers, drinks, snacks, cigarettes, a sign "Gracias por fumar" ["Thank You for Smoking"], leopard seat covers, and mambo music. The taxi driver's sweetheart's sugary name, Azucena, reminds us of Don Quixote's illusory love for his sweet Dulcinea and hints at Pepa's love for Iván. Later, this Don Quixote in his Rocinante mambo cab says to Pepa that Azucena "va a pensar que … ja, ja" ["will think we are … ha ha"] because they meet so often. He also claims categorically that there are no dangerous women, "si las sabe tratar" ["if you know how to treat them"]. In the next moment he finds himself in the line of fire as perilous Lucia shoots at his mambo taxi.
In a reversal of a long-standing gender situation, women force men to partake in a wild taxi and motorcycle chase. They do not sit as companions to their crazed men who pursue each other until one car crashes—or the wheels fall off the stage coach. The mambo taxi driver, not a macho, wisely panics and gives up. He takes Pepa and Ana to the airport by a safer route. There Iván and Paulina are checking in for their flight.
Paulina, the supposedly feminist lawyer, is an ironic reversal of a feminist. She does not help women, is jealous of Pepa, and runs off with a Don Juan. Paulina Morales—her surname is also ironic—had represented Lucía in a suit against this Don Juan, Iván. Moreover, she is very "unlaughing," a term described by Regina Barreca in her introduction to Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Barreca explains that this adjective can be "a weapon against both the 'pretty little girls' and the 'furious females' in order to negate whatever powers of humor they seem to possess." But, Almodóvar, a feminist, does not label feminists humorless here. Rather, an implication is that feminists, not only in Spain, need humor as they further equality in masculine societies where machos still lurk.
Sexism or Emancipation from Machismo?
Almodóvar would like to be thought of as "authentically feminist" and as "one of the least macho men in the world."
Quizá eso de que a mí me gusta la intimidad de las mujeres no deje de ser un reflejo machista. Pero espero que no, porque a mí me interesa la mujer y su mundo en todos sus aspectos … Yo creo que soy uno de los hombres menos machistas del mundo, más autenticamente feminista. Lo que no quiere decir que no vea la realidad. Defiendo a las mujeres, pero no creo que sean unos arcangeles. Pero mi corazón suele estar siempre con ellas. Aunque te salgan cosas de la educación. [Perhaps the fact that I like the private lives of women is no more than a reflection of chauvinism. But I hope not, because I am interested in women and their world in all its aspects … I believe that I am one of the least macho men in the world, the most authentically feminist. That does not mean that I do not see reality. I defend women, but I do not think they are archangels. But my heart is almost always with them. Although some things come out from one's upbringing.]
Pedro Almodóvar's messages about gender in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown are feminist. Machismo is senseless and hurtful, they say. Iván mindlessly plays the Don Juan role. Lucía's dependency on Iván to give her life meaning is an anachronism and a complicity with the macho charade. In contrast to Lucía and to Iván, Pepa, the hero, frees herself from her subjugation to machismo. When Nancy Walker, in A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture, identifies "the impulse of all feminist humor" as "the fundamental absurdity of one gender oppressing the other," she expresses an underlying theme of this film.
Some of the aspects of women's humor described by Regina Barreca, Zita Dresner, and Nancy Walker also fit Pedro Almodóvar's comic strategies. In A Very Serious Thing, when discussing the subversion of stereotypes in literature written by women, Walker notes "the purpose of mocking those stereotypes and showing their absurdity." In the same work she speaks of the intent to "point to the origins of these stereotypes in a culture that defines women in terms of relationships with men" and mentions portrayals of "lovelorn women" as "victims of male indifference and the double standard." These comments describe Almodóvar's subversive use of stereotypical behavior in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Also, Almodóvar's meaningful scenes of Don Juans and dependent women on Almagro Street, symbol of women's progress, come to mind when Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner note women writers "exposing the discrepancies … between the inequities … and the egalitarian ideals." Finally, the nativity scene on the terrace does "not, ultimately, reproduce the expected hierarchies," a refusal which links it to "the ending of comic works by women writers" discussed by Regina Barreca.
Yet Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a film written and directed by a man. Pedro Almodóvar, as he creates his humor, does not have to deal with female social conditioning such as "standards of ladylike behavior," discussed by Walker. He, by the way, has mentioned, in speaking about his sexual orientation, "we [gay men] keep on being what they call masculine in behavior." Identification of masculine stylistic traits would be a different study. But Almodóvar is a feminist and this film reflects the hope and the need for more progress as well as dramatic changes for women in Spain. As María Antonia García de León says, Almodóvar "no tiene una visión androcéntrica" ["does not have androcentric vision"].
Nor do I see macho control in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Almodóvar's presence is felt in his unique humor; in the wild series of significant surprises and incongruities; and in his signatures—taxis, telephones, television, not to mention the appearance of his mother and brother in minor roles. Also, we see la Telefónica, the Telephone Company building with its red clock, where Almodóvar once worked, from Pepa's terrace on Montalbán Street. Rather than dominating the audience, however, as Marvin D'Lugo discusses, he invites viewers' participation. As I have noted in this essay, Pedro Almodóvar offers suggestions in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown—a nativity scene with a Holy Family, parodic themes of Don Juan and of Hollywood comedies, Almagro Street, Ecce Homo, Azucena—for us to ponder beyond the visual images on the screen. After a laugh of recognition of his intentions, we collaborate in the gender messages.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, not a realistic comedy, reflects aspects of gender in contemporary society. Although Pepa's material comfort is Hollywood-like, her situation at the end of the film—a self-sufficient career woman who decides to become a single parent—symbolizes real advances in the "outward marks of freedom and independence" for women, mentioned by D'Lugo. But the macho is still there. As Spanish women have said to me, "queda mucho camino para andar" ["there remains a long road to walk"], and not only in Spain. Machismo or its residues may be around in private lives and at work until women attain more "outward marks" of equality in societies, until they hold approximately half the decision-making positions, including those on the highest levels, for example. Meanwhile, machos are absurdly irrational, says Pedro Almodóvar, and rational women overcome their submission to them, as Pepa does.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a story of emancipation from the macho. Pepa's independence and the epilogue, a nativity scene that undoes the patriarchal order, end the film with the hope that future generations will be able to laugh away machismo.
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