My Problematic Loves: Almodóvar, Matador and the “Rape Culture Bechdel Test”

Matador is a film few would characterize as Almodóvar’s best (he himself referred it as one of his lesser efforts), but it is brash, gorgeous and a striking exploration of eroticism, machismo and Catholic guilt. Its primary characters are not “normal.” They have extreme and unusual characteristics, desires and drives. Protagonist Diego Montes (Nacho Martinez) is a retired bullfighter (disabled by a gore wound—to the groin, natch) who now teaches the art of the torero in a private school at his home. The bullfighter’s job is, as Montes explains to his students, to seduce the bull into letting itself be killed. It’s clear that since his retirement he’s feeling underwhelmed by normal experience—to the point that he has to occasionally go matador on a female student or two and bury them on the grounds in secret. So, you’ve got a middle-aged white male bullfighting teacher who masturbates to montages of women being mutilated in slasher flicks, and needs his actress girlfriend to pretend to be dead in order to get it on with her. Then you have him up and suggest to a shy, awkward young student that perhaps said young dude is not into girls. The shy younger man responds by attempting to rape his teacher’s girlfriend. Meanwhile, the teacher is already attempting to cheat on the actress with another woman, an attorney by day and literal femme fatale by night, who declines him several times, despite which he follows her around town applying pressure. Of course this woman is just playing with him; she’s been interested in him from afar for years, and as it turns out, she doesn’t just want to play dead during sex: She is willing to actually kill both of them as an erotic gesture.

Cinematically speaking, Matador takes an arguably hokey premise and twists it into a saturated, sensual, lurid and sometimes really funny text on the entanglements of sex and death and transcendence and guilt and the desire for altered or heightened consciousness. The costuming and choreography of bullfighting appear in all kinds of places and to stunning effect. Personally, I’m one of those people who thinks bullfighting is disgusting, and I not-so-secretly hope the bull will go in for the kill before the man with the sword gets his chance. But in Almodóvar’s homeland, it is an ancient and much-mythologized tradition rife with metaphors. So we get to play with the trope of bullfighting as a way of trying to find the line between, for example, seduction and violation. It’s kind of an important line, isn’t it? Should film leave it unexamined? In Almodóvar’s gaze, death becomes sex becomes death ad infinitum, and the notion of people being the prisoners of their own compulsions is echoed in a million visual iterations of traps, cages, cells, walls of glass and hospital wards. A sword becomes interchangeable with a hairpin. The roles of pursuer and pursued, aggressor and victim, aggressor and counter-aggressor, bull and bullfighter—they shift over and over until it ends in a murder-suicide, and we close on the detective gazing at their naked bodies and remarking that he’s never seen anyone look happier.

Pedro Almodóvar has come under fire more than a few times for treatment of women in his films, and sexual violation and subjugation are arguably his master subjects. Rape is a very persistently recurring theme in his works. (I’m struggling to think of one of his films where it doesn’t come up.) This purveyor of sexual violence and violatory gaze is basically Spain’s most internationally acclaimed director. And if “rape culture” is the reason for that, it’s not for any reason as superficial and condescending as “it enables” or “perpetuates” or “suggests” rape as normative. If anything, it’s quite the reverse: Sexual violence is pervasive, all the time and all over the world. Women are the statistically likely victims, but they are by no means the only ones. Rape can be entirely premeditated or a sudden, radical failure of impulse control; it can be a weapon of war or a night out that goes horribly wrong. Pervasive does not equal normal. Almodóvar’s films often attempt to explore that reality and to inhabit the minds of people who are specifically not “normative” in their inclinations. It could be argued that far from being misogynistic or pro-rape-culture, Almodóvar is a director with a unique and abiding interest in female pain. Yes, he’s a man framing female experience from his imagination, but artists who work with storytelling simply cannot be barred from doing that. The whole point of fiction is to inhabit characters who are not you and do it in a way that makes them feel alive and real to readers or viewers. Almodóvar does it with camp, with melodrama, with exorbitant comedy and definitely with plenty of sexual violence. Good. A talented director is forging connections that illuminate or reflect something about the experience of being a living human being on this planet.

I won’t pretend that films cannot be used to reinforce the status quo, sometimes in ways that aren’t ideal. But films are works of fiction, even biopics (in some cases especially biopics, but that’s another rant). Lots of middling movies are two-hour palliatives we can depend on to satisfy our urge to get out of our heads for a bit. Some of the best ones delve into the really cobwebby, awkward corners of the human psyche and shine a light in there. They aren’t prescriptive; they’re reflective. But I start to develop an unsightly rash when we start talking about eliminating rape culture from movies in four easy steps. Both because where it needs to be mitigated is real life, and because as long as it exists (which will probably be more or less forever, though it might wax and wane), it should be explored by serious filmmakers.

Meanwhile, no Bechdel test that will ever replace discernment. Art is not especially amenable to standardization. And censorship is rarely, if ever, an effective agent of positive change. As the old psych-saw goes, what we resist persists.

Amy Glynn writes for Paste.