The Emotional Imperative: Almodovars's Hable con ella and Television Espanola's Cuentame como paso

In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha C. Nussbaum offers a broad, deep, and complex account of the relationship between knowledge and feeling. Nussbaum begins with two epigraphs. The first is from Proust. It cites the "geological upheavals" that love caused to take place in the mind of M. de Charlus, which, we are told, "only several days before resembled a plain so flat that . . . one could not have discerned an idea sticking up above the ground." Now "a mountain range has abruptly thrust itself into view . . . Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hate, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love" (unpaginated). The second epigraph is from Freud's "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego." Freud writes: "By being born we have made the step from an absolutely self-sufficient narcissism to the perception of a changing external world and the beginnings of the discovery of objects." This shift is perilous, however: "we cannot endure the new state of affairs for long . . . [and] we periodically revert from it, in our sleep, to our former condition of absence of stimulation and avoidance of objects" (unpaginated).

Crucial here are Proust's baptism of the emotions as "ideas" and Freud's proposal that perception and stimulation (the discovery of the world and the pleasure produced by it) are inseparable. Nussbaum's argument, then, is that emotions are "intelligent responses to the perception of value." She continues:

Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.

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As Nussbaum acknowledges herself, such a project is highly perilous. Emotions are not to be considered as "immune from rational criticism"; and they should even be regarded with some suspicion "given their specific content and the nature of their history" (2). But it is precisely this history that Nussbaum seeks to elaborate in the multiple, but parallel, spheres of society, psyche, and culture. Broadly speaking she argues for social construction and variation in emotion (at one point arguing for a distinctively "American death" in the notorious weepy Terms of Endearment [165-69]), traces the emergence of emotions in infancy (relating them, as in Freud, to the subject-object relation [174, 238]), and argues for the privileged role of artistic expression (especially music and literature) in suggesting a "ladder of love" that has democratic uses as "an education for compassionate citizenship" (432). Working through anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism, Nussbaum thus arrives at a final question: "How can love reform itself, so as not to be excessively needy, vengeful, or partial, and so as to be supportive of general social compassion, reciprocity, and respect for individuality?" (481) It is a question also posed urgently by and in recent Spanish audiovisual narrative.

Nussbaum barely considers film or television, although she does cite Proust's magic lantern as a simile for emotion: "colouring the room one is actually in with the intense images of other objects, other stories" (178). Many readers will find her discussion of mourning and melancholia (especially her brave account of the circumstances of her own mother's death) particularly moving and illuminating here. In this article I explore two recent works that, I argue, suggest with unusual colour and intensity that emotion is a form of cognition and love a kind of intelligence. The first is Almodóvar's recent feature film Hable con ella (2002), which proposes that knowledge (of self and others) comes only through caretaking of individuals. The second is TVE's most successful current series Cuéntame cómo pasó (2001-3), a family drama set in the late 1960s. A "quality" product festooned with prizes (like Almodóvar's recent films), Cuéntame...