After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality

Melo-Thriller: Hitchcock, Genre, and Nationalism in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Melo-Thriller Hitchcock, Genre, and Nationalism in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz Hitchcock’s work is visually the richest in the history of the cinema. — pedro almodóvar Introduction: Almodóvar, Spanish Cinema, and Intertextuality P edro Almodóvar has been probably the most internationally prominent Spanish filmmaker since his breakthrough films of the 1980s, The Law of Desire (1987), and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). The critical and commercial success of some of his films in the United States (Women on the Verge, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! [1989], High Heels [1991], Kika [1994], and the Oscar-winning All About My Mother [1999]) has made his name synonymous with Spanish cinema in many circles. Almodóvar’s films have been celebrated as irreverent, self-reflexive, and self-conscious explorations of Spanish national identity, sexuality, repression, and desire. His films are recognizably excessive, full of colorful characters, vertiginous plotlines , rich intergeneric allusions, and complex media intersections that include television commercials, billboard advertisements, popular songs, kitsch art, and the cinema. Critics and historians of Spanish national cinema in general and Almodóvar in particular have pointed out how national identity in the cinema after 1980 has been reflexive of the crisis in which the country found itself after the end of General Francisco Franco’s regime in 1975 and the beginning of redemocratization in the early 1980s. In the transitional period after forty years of the repression of many cultural practices that were not sanctioned by the state, Spanish popular art was reborn with a vengeance, appropriating and revising 174 found in translation the past cultural markers of fascism (the reduction of Spanish cultural identity to the kitsch aesthetics of bullfighting, flamenco dancing, Catholic imagery), and reinvented itself as signifying change, tolerance, political and sexual liberation , and artistic freedom. Almodóvar emerged as an artist in the cusp of this transitional period, becoming representative in the cinema of this “new Spanish mentality” (Kinder 432; Yarza 117–22). Almodóvar’s films (along with some other directors’) celebrate “cultural anxiety” (Yarza 174), generic instability (Acevedo-Muñoz 25), “marginality” (Kinder 429–33), the revision of social and political institutions (D’Lugo 50), and eventually the return to a pastoral, country setting as a symbol of stability (Del Pino 170). These themes suggest the problematic transition into democracy and the reintegration into the European community as symptomatic of the nation’s new identity, troubled but open, paradoxically stabilizing and unstable. Among the signs and symptoms of Spain’s and Spanish cinema’s “new mentality ” and reinvention as a site of the convergence of diverse cultural practices was the appropriation and adaptation to Spanish contexts of discursive and stylistic models from high, low, and popular culture from abroad, including Hollywood and European cinema. Almodóvar and some other directors (Vicente Aranda, Agustín Villaronga, Eloy de la Iglesia) managed to break through into “specialized” international film audiences, writes Marsha Kinder, and “Almodóvar was celebrated as a cross between Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, and David Lynch” (437). Almodóvar’s films are full of cinematic allusions to and quotations from formative figures of international, Hollywood, and independent cinema including Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wilder, Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, John Cassavettes, and Alfred Hitchcock. But said appropriations, allusions, intertextual references and citations serve to cement Almodóvar’s own style as something in a constant state of transition and maturation, arguably analogous to Spain’s own cultural heterogeneity after the end of Franco’s regime. In reference to Almodóvar’s most popular film of the 1990s, All About My Mother, I have argued elsewhere that the film finally settles into a definably melodramatic format , neutralizing the generic schizophrenia of earlier films (like the thriller/ melodrama/musical High Heels) in what results in “an understanding of identity as something ambiguous (sexually, culturally) and problematic, yet ultimately functional” (Acevedo-Muñoz 27). Even earlier on, however, in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar’s use of Hitchcock’s films as intertextual discourse was showing signs of a generically hybrid quality (in Women on the Verge between the thriller, screwball comedy, and melodrama). In Women on the Verge, his most popular film of the 1980s and the definitive melo-thriller 175 breakthrough into American...