Destruction, Reconstruction and Resistance

The instinct to tame and preserve and the longing for eternal beauty makes skin a crucial element in the genre of the Body Horror. By applying a gendered reading to the art of destruction and reconstruction of an ephemeral body, this paper explores the significant role of skin that clothes a protean body in Almodóvar’s unconventional Body Horror, “The Skin I Live In” (2011). Helpless vulnerable female bodies stretched on beds and close shots of naked perfect skin of those bodies are a frequent feature in Almodóvar films. Skin stained and blotched in “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1989), nurtured and replenished in “Talk to Her” (2002), patched up and stitched in “The Skin I Live In”, becomes a key ingredient in Almodóvar’s films that celebrate the fluidity of human anatomy and sexuality. The article situates “The Skin I Live In” in the filmic continuum of Body Horrors that focus primarily on skin, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960), and touching on films like Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006) and attempts to understand how the exploited bodies that have been culturally and socially subjugated have shaped the course of the history of Body Horrors in cinema. In “The Skin I Live In” the destruction of Vicente’s body and its recreation into Vera follow a mad scientist’s urge to dominate an unattainable body, but this ghastly assault on the body has the onscreen appearance of a routine surgical operation by an expert cosmetologist in a well-lit, sanitized mise-en-scène, suggesting that the uncanny does not need a dungeon to lurk in. The exploited body on the other hand may be seen not as a passive victim, but as a site of alterity and rebellion. Anatomically a complete opposite of Frankenstein’s Creature, Vicente/Vera’s body, perfect, beautiful but beset with a problematized identity, is etched with the history of conversion, suppression, and the eternal quest for an ephemeral object. Yet it also acts as an active site of resistance

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Body politic · Human body · Human sexuality · Instinct · Literature · Movie theater · Politics · Silence · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Medicine · Spanish Culture and Identity · Anatomy

• Gender Trouble

  Judith Butler•Gender Trouble•2011

  Añadir item

• Skin Shows

  Maureen F Curtin, Judith Halberstam•Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature•1998

  Añadir item

• The Body and Society

  Steven Seidman, B Turner•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1986

  Añadir item

• Flesh Journeys

  Kevin Atkinson, Kevin Young Michael Atkinson•Deviant Behavior•2001

  Añadir item

• Metaphors of Inscription

  Open Access•Pippa Brush•Feminist Review•1998

  Añadir item