Reworking the gaze in Pedro Almodovar's "Volver"

I wrote this for my film studies class last quarter:

Reworking Mulvey's "gaze" in Pedro Almodovar's Volver by J.D. Santo

Laura Mulvey’s concern with the depiction of women in unchallenged, mainstream film is becoming more and more pertinent as misogynistic films in the “torture-porn” genre such as Hostel: Part II (US, Eli Roth, 2007, 94’) and seemingly innocent “buddy comedies” like Superbad (US, Greg Mottola, 2007, 114’) continue to treat women as sexual objects to be ogled and manipulated. These exploitative films are cementing Mulvey’s belief that women fulfill the viewer’s desire for scopophilic gazing and voyeuristic fetishes. Volver (Spain, Pedro Almodóvar, 2006, 121’), however, is able to deftly and beautifully portray an emotional and feminine community of women intent on supporting, loving, and helping one another while simultaneously celebrating their very womanhood, their unabashed sexuality. By using precise shots and juxtaposition within the frame, structuring the viewer’s gaze so that he/she feels uncomfortable in alignment with the male gaze (and therefore comfortable with main female protagonist Raimunda’s gaze), creating misogynistic male characters, and refusing to allow Raimunda to abandon her sexuality, Almodóvar creates in Volver a film that celebrates the fierce sexuality and femininity of Raimunda. Volver challenges the dominant patriarchal order and allows women to transcend the female-dominated role of spectacle in cinema, and could thusly be considered to be a member of what Mulvey describes as the “alternative cinema,” a group of films which challenge the basic assumptions of the mainstream film.

Almodóvar’s precise attention to his visual representation of female sexuality is key in Volver. Most notable is a series of disjointed scenes concerning the murder of Raimunda’s husband Paco by their daughter Paula (who is also Raimunda’s sister, due to her father raping her). Firstly, a high-angle shot from directly above displays Raimunda’s cleavage on the right side of the frame and her outstretched arms cleaning various dishes on the left side of the frame; lastly, she cleans a large kitchen knife. In a later shot, Paula has murdered Paco because he attempted to rape her. In order to protect Paula from prosecution, Raimunda uses a mop and paper towels (tools typically associated with domestic housewives) to clean up the blood. The payoff shot occurs in the subsequent scene which utilizes the same high-angle shot from earlier; this time the knife is soiled with blood of Raimunda’s husband instead of food.

This series of shots inextricably links the female as being not just a symbol of power but also a very real threat of castration – an “anxiety” (p. 718), as Mulvey describes, that men try to escape either through fetishistic scopophilia or voyeurism/sadism. The scene most importantly structures the viewer’s gaze to look directly down Raimunda’s shirt to her breasts. This would be considered “one part of a fragmented body” which gives “the quality of a cut-out or icon” (p. 716), yet the shot cements Raimunda’s status as an empowered female (and domestic housewife) by juxtaposing a symbol of sexuality in Raimunda’s breasts with the image of the bloody knife.

Two of three males given crucial roles (not to be mistaken with leading roles) in the film – Paco and Raimunda’s husband – are sexual perverts. Although the gaze throughout the film is structured almost entirely according to Raimunda (a gaze where the viewer feels comfortable because of her loving, compassionate nature and devotion to family), Volver’s gaze is structured with Paco’s voyeuristic point-of-view twice in the film, both times providing discomfort in “gazing” with a chauvinist. The viewer is first aligned with Paco’s gaze as Paula sits next to him with her legs spread while Paco (and therefore the viewer) stares at the outline of her vagina clearly visible through her tights. The subsequent alignment of the gaze shows Paula topless in her room with her door slightly cracked while Paco stands in the hallway peeking in. Both times, even though the gaze is aligned with a male character, the viewer is made sexually uncomfortable because they understand that this voyeuristic gazing is morally wrong.

Almodóvar seems to play with Mulvey’s notion that individualistic women in film typically become the “property” of the men by the end of the film and therefore lose their “outward glamorous characteristics, generalized sexuality, [and] show-girl connotations” (p. 718). The appearance of the boyish, attractive, charming male filmmaker who pays Raimunda to cook dinner for his crew causes the viewer to infer that a romantic relationship will be pursued, which would diminish the threat of castration in Raimunda and allow a man to possess her (and therefore allow the viewer to “indirectly possess her too”) (p. 718). Ironically, however, Raimunda seems almost inconvenienced by the filmmaker. (In one scene in particular, Raimunda is on the phone with her sister Sole discussing their recently-deceased aunt’s funeral and is approached by the filmmaker. During their conversation, she smiles and flirts to appease him but rolls her eyes and sighs after he leaves. Raimunda is clearly not concerned with romantic pursuits and instead puts her family issues first and foremost).

Mulvey encourages an alternative cinema to develop as a counterpoint to dominant Hollywood cinema where woman stands “in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other…still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Volver is not politically or aesthetically avant-garde in the traditional sense (i.e., it does not demand or even suggest a revolution in the depiction of women in the cinema), but it certainly constructs Raimunda as a woman who is at once strong-willed and beautiful without fear of expressing her femininity or fierce sexuality. Therefore the film should most certainly be considered one which reacts against the “obsessions and assumptions” (p. 713) of mainstream film by depicting Raimunda as strong and sexualized while depicting men as unimportant at best, sexual deviants at worst.