Voyeurism in Talk To Her

VOYEURISM AND ANNUNCIATION IN ALMODVAR'S "TALK TO HER"
Author(s): Kevin Ohi

Source: Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 521-557
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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AND
VOYEURISM
IN ALMODOVAR'S
ANNUNCIATION
TALK TO HER
Kevin Ohi
A world
me
without
complete
which
is present
the world of my immortality.

Cavell,
Stanley
to me
is
The World Viewed
with my perspective in or
der to be independe7it of me, is for me in order to be
The world is in accordance
without
to be
and
me,
Maurice
the
world.
"Eye and Mind"
Merleau-Ponty,
To begin with an axiom whose interest for cinematic

become
hope,
in
oneself
However
Or,
one
that
and
sexuality
though
rapists
is
proof
no
crimes,
as
absent
from
so
deeply
low
as
does
sexual
often
to
is low
not
murderers
world
or
to the
as
an
enough.
Thus,
shown
that
the
world.
must
term
in psy
like homo
infraction
at
the
moreover,
threateningwhere,
manifest
without
appeal
voyeurism,
appears
a certain
in
voyeurism's
make
mean
has
the
from
references
will, I
spectatorship
to see
of what
deviations,
and
standard
a correlation
and
oneself
deduced
be
sexual
ridiculous
ot
see
a description
could
other
faintly
standard
sexual
to
effort
culture, or film criticism. There,
chiatry, popular
once
voyeurism
perhaps:
straightforward
it is not
be,
apparent:
it.
is the
that
when
Joseph
Davis
to
"al
writes,
research
causation,
a majority
it comes
of the
on
serial
perpetrators
studied had histories of voyeuristic-type behavior"where

acknowledg
him
the
cum
hoc
allows
to
as
ing
potential
fallacy
proceed
though causal
were
settled.3
the
fact
that
violent
sexual
criminals
ity
thereby
Repeatedly,
confess
lent
to having
been
sexual
criminals,
Voyeurs,
however,
voyeurs
or that
have
"proves"
that
voyeurism
"leads"
intellectually
more
voyeurs
mies perhaps less invested in sexual repression

against
voyeurs
is not
made
only
by latter-day
are,
or
become,
vio
to violence.
rigorous
enemies,
and
ene
for its own sake. The case

moralists
seeking
to prod
Criticism, Fall 2009, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 521-557. ISSN: 0011-1589.
2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.
521
522
KEVIN
OHI
vigilance (and punitive legal apparatus) insufficiently attentive to

in territory familiar from the
putatively harmless sexual peccadilloes;4
dozing
debates,
pornography
mous
with
sexual
is, for some feminists, all but synony
voyeurism
violence.5
Pathetic,
yet
deeply
made
dangerous:
mani
fest is an opacity in the relays linking sight to embodiment, for voyeurism,

like vision, operates at a distance. On the one hand, voyeurism is sex at a
distance
tutes
to some,
or,
a
hallucinated
connection
other, that distance

form
of sadism:
eurism
for
cinematic
sex
for
is understood
is mastery,
sight
therefore
shorthand
not
therefore,
often
gendered
the
with
contact
of
of
the
power;
another.
On
and consequently
cinema
the
as a
Voy
as
spectatorship
between
homology
of women
subjugation
it substi
is disempowerment.6
exposure
accounts
dynamics
and
apparatus
actual
in
because
allpathetic
as objectifying
and
appears
at
relies
on
the
understand
ing the act of unseen gazing as a form of sexual domination/

These two conceptions of distancepathetic
substitution and sadistic
of
both
and
not,
course, opposed,
masteryare
help keep sex in the do
main of a subjectby
providing, as different modes of miscarriage (or

improper objectification), instances of the pathology that proves the norm.
What if, however, voyeurism is the effort to see the world without oneself
in
it?
thus
Voyeurism,
effort
to see
without
the
world
is not
understood,
without
about
in it is also
oneself
subjects
and
an
to see
effort
the
objects:
the
world
perhaps
the subject. (Whether total impersonality is actually possible is

another question: to comprise one's own disappearance
may, in
the
be
end,
hard
to separate
from
but
mastery,
whatever
effects
appear there are not reducible to one subject's appropriation

another.)
their
accounts
Psychiatric
accounts
of voyeurism
and
from
film
the
theory
of power over
reverse
implicitly
of being
experience
of mastery
engineer
to be
seen;
seen
by a voyeur may be an experience (exciting or terrifying) that, riveting one

to the particularities of one's body or identity, perhaps makes one feel the
object
of
experience
deduction
sadistic
drive.8
But
from the experience

secures
why
deduce
the
motivations
voyeur's
of being seen by him? Above
complementarity,
and
secures
(a
certain
or
all, such a
kind
of)
rela
tion.
Set against this background,
Tal\ to Her (,Hable con ella, dir. Pedro Al

unsettles
such assumptions
and therefore
modovar, 2002) refreshingly
asks for a different understanding of film spectatorship. Almodovar's
film
seems to present a straightforward allegory of gendered viewing. To sum
marize (the story, if not its more complicated exposition): Benigno (actor
Javier Camara) watches the unsuspecting Alicia (actress Leonor Watling)
first, from his apartment
street,
and
then,
after
a car
window,
accident
while she dances

leaves
her
in a studio across the
in a coma,
as her
nurse.
The
VOYEURISM
comatose
sented
view
of gendered
tacle
whose
Alicia,
to our
in many
gazing
is made
too
the
accounts
literalizes
of cinema:
In
gaze.
523
body is repeatedly
straightforwardly),
of a male
object
ANNUNCIATION
(often naked)
exquisite
(almost
AND
an
most
the
oblivious
accounts,
pre
ontology
female
spec
moreover,
Be
nigno then rapes Alicia, who becomes pregnant. The effect of her pregnancy
(and the miscarriage that terminates it) is startling: she awakes. Read as an
of gendered
allegory
tories
that
of sexual
demand
immediately
and
violence,
the
spectatorship,
from
film
therefore
from
explanation:
a sexual
violation
two
presents
a desiring
to an
trajec
act
to an
gaze
An
awakening.
osten
sibly objectifying gaze becomes a form of sexual violation (hence, "almost

too straightforwardly" figures gendered spectatorship), but (and?) the lit
of that
eralization
violation
breaches
magically
the
distance
that
subtends
to conscious
life the erstwhile passive object of a gaze.

Many things complicate this summary. For one thing, there are in fact
it, awakens
two
comatose
and
women,
the
narrative
of the
secondwhich
focuses
on
Lydia (actress Rosario Flores), a bullfighter, and her lover Marco (actor
Dario Grandinetti)doubles,
but then diverges from, the first. An addi
tional complexity is Benigno's relationship with Marco, a friendship that
forms as Marco spends time in the hospital with Lydia and becomes more
or less explicitly a love relation
film
does
even
little
more
to reconcile
elementary
BenignoAlicia
one
compos
assume
that
and
sex
love
passionate
what
viewers
do
why
men's
concerns
take
therefore
has
taken
for
One
I do
rape?9
deduces
not
the
merely
in the world of the
even
the
An
in
happens
a comatose
of consent;
incapable
place?
that
granted
for women.
literally
assume
Alicia has not consentedalthough

cannot
perhaps
mentis
(on both sides) thatappealinglythe

both
problem
story:
mean why assume

film,
with
is non
person
more
sex
or
simply,
rape
why
from
the
pregnancy, but nothing of the sort is shown (and there is no taboo on the
of intercourse
representation
What
terms,
ter's
we
are
is an
shown
or
is his
annunciationthe
talking
in Almodovar).
to her.
moment
of Botticelli's
description
rape
version
What
when
of the
we
Mary
scene,
are
shown,
in Walter
hears,
the
in other
"words
of her
Pa
exal
tation" and thereby becomes pregnant with the body of Christ.in One code
in the film, remarks Almodovar in his commentary to the DVD release, is
this: "Whoever speaks, loves."11 Talking thereby derives an extraordinary
power
that
argue
for an
we
ought
annunciation:
not
to underestimate.
for instance,
Moreover,
Alicia's
"morning
certain
tonal
dressing
which Almodovar
effects
ritual,"
compares to the dressing of a saint and which he pairs

with the ritual dressing of Lydia before her martyrdom in the bullfighting
ring. ("Javier," Almodovar
reports telling Camara as they were filming
Benigno's "trial" |his grilling by hospital administrators], "you're my }oan
KEVIN
524
OHI
of Arc"a
Dreyer
Robert
too, no doubt,
reference,
quasi-diffident
and
to Carl
Theodor
Bresson.)
link be
establisha
paintings make visiblepossibly
tween looking and talking, suture the imaginary and the symbolic (or de
Annunciation
that
pict
suturing).
Christopher
draws
Pye
structural characteristic of Renaissance
our
attention
to
striking
Annunciation
paintings: the bar or

column that typically separates Mary from the Angel Gabriel.12 If, as Pye
"all Christian knowledge
were lost, a person
quotes Michael Baxandall,
could well suppose that both figures...
were directing some sort of de
vout attention to the column
that separates them" (81). Pye reads this bar

with another typical aspect of such paintings, the perspectival recessions
that, with the column, create a trompe l'oeil effect in which the viewer,
drawn deep "into" the painting, is made to bump up against "the opaque
surface of the image" (85).
Such effects might be read thematically: as a figure for Mary's breached
yet intact condition, for example. Yet, for Pye, the thematics of the paint
ings instead come to figure their effects of fascination:
[T]he experience of going in deep only to find oneself at the
opaque surface of the imageof
ending, in a sense, at a
the truth ol the
point before one began"embodies"
breached
and
inviolate
But
conception.
to
the
extent
that
the truth is now conveyed as a performative effect, precisely

as
a missed
more
encounter
accurate
figure
for the
with
to see
image's
the
the
sacred
scene's
content
as a function
force.
captivating
it would
content,
be
of and
(85)
Pye's reading of these Annunciation

paintings with two scenes from King
Lear suggests the uncannily anticipatory relation of that premodern mo
ment
to a "later"
interest
is the
flat
bar,
forms
subject
circuit
against
of medieval
the
of fantasy.
of attention
of
plane
painting
For
in the
the
and
my
purposes,
structural
canvas,
thereby
looks
Pye
backward
looks
of particular
though,
effect
forward
describes.
to
to an
the
The
hieratic
exorbitance
structuring the subject of fantasy. The trompe l'oeil devicein which the
eye ends up "at a point before one began"makes
explicit a tension be
tween Annunciation
read as narrative (these paintings are traditionally
said to demand
a narrative reading) and the fascinatory effects of its depic
tion.
This, we note, is exactly the tension in Laura
dered
spectatorship:
cinema,"
the
tension
between
or what she calls "fetishism"
"visual
and
Mulvey's
pleasure"
"voyeurism."
account of gen
and
"narrative
It is perhaps
AND
VOYEURISM
rather
late
in the
day
Mulvey's
or
argument
525
even
some
of the
raised to it (most notably, perhaps, by queer theoretical readings
objections
of cinema).13
Although
ogy linking (male)

more
to rehearse
ANNUNCIATION
Mulvey's
viewing
conflictedand
has
essay
become
and sexual violence,
more
shorthand
for a homol
the essay turns out to be
its conclusion.
interestingthan
Before
it re
solves them by dividing identification and desire (and the tendentious

gendering of looking emerges here: the man looks at women, but identi
fies
with
the
men),
stalls
essay
on
how
two different kinds of absorption:

generated
by
narrative
to understand
specular
If
"movement."
the
fascination
one
resists
relation
between
and an absorption
these
understanding
according to a division of labor "in" the subject (assigning the former to

desire and the latter to identification), if one resists assimilating them, in
other
words,
to
a primal
scene
made
legible
by
castration,
start
they
to
seem like incompatible, or mutually interfering, forms of attention.

"Annunciation"
in Almodovar's
him might describe one way of mov
ing
between
narrative
and
and
fascination,
specular
to
assume
that
the
film depicts a rape obscures
the complication of that traversal (implicitly)

by making looking simply synonymous with an action, with rape. In lieu
of a rape, the film shows Benigno's retelling (to Alicia) of a film, his ren
dering, in narrative, of his experience of visual absorption. The narration

seems in turn to bring into being Alicia's pregnancy and the images we
see: Almodovar's
virtuosic (and loving) creation of a silent film, Shrinking
Lover}'' In this film, it seems clear that we are to identify the man with
Benigno
myself,"
body
paired
and the woman
Benigno
parallel
with
those
the
with Alicia.
and
remarks,
of Alicia,
sleeping
the
whose
woman's
The man is "a bit overweight,
overhead
comatose
at the
end
shots
face,
of the
of the
woman's
moreover,
sequence
like
naked
is explicitly
(figures
1 and
2). The question, however, is how to read these pairings. One option
would be psychological and thematic: the silent film corresponds so pre
cisely
to Benigno's
history
that
it tempts
one
to read
it as
a representation
of his psychology, and his narration as symptom or as self-exposure. It

would not be difficult to imagine a reading that would find in that lover's
vaginal spelunking a fantasized merger with "the mother" that, paired
with what we learn of Benigno's pastliving
alone with his mother, he
bathed her, dressed her, and did her hair (she wasn't mad, he says, just a
little lazy)would
serve to diagnose Benigno's putatively pathological
It
be
that the film here represents what is at stake in Be
sexuality.
may
nigno's relation to Alicia. The question, however, is whether psychological
diagnosis is the best mode in which to address it. "Where does van Gogh's
madness come from," asks Gilles Deleuze in one of his seminars, "his rela
tion to his father, or his relation to color?" Without answering the etio
KEVIN
Figure
OHI
1. From Shrinking
Lover.
logic question, the philosopher

more
concludes
that the relation to color is much
interesting.15
van Gogh, Benigno presents us with ample psychological bait.

lurid exactness of the fantasy-of crawling back into the womb
ought, perhaps, to give us pause, and the film's psychological clues seem
Like
The
like bait for reductive reading. Indeed, diagnosis is anticipated by Benig

no's analysis with Alicia's psychologist father, who seems even more guile
less than the guileless Benigno. And the available psychological diagnoses
are too predictable to require elaboration:
a failed separation from a
mother, a failed ability to develop object relations, a (not terribly) repressed
homosexuality,
a search
identification that would
Figure 2. Alicia,
for
another
woman
to care
for,
even
give his helpless body over to Marco's
a maternal
care, and
comatose.
AND
VOYEURISM
so
on.
I do
not
think
that
with
a viewer
any
ANNUNCIATION
could
acuity
long
entertain
such diagnostic readings; they are baited precisely to be dismissed, and so

that with them will be dismissed a psychological or identificatory under
standing of viewing in the filmwhich is much more than a paper tiger.
The doctor's diagnosis is crudely reductive, among other reasons, because
he understands Benigno's longing gaze in the psychological terms of gen
dered objects, an assumption made explicit when he asks to know Benig
"He asked me if I was a faggot," the scandalized
no's "sexual orientation."

caretaker
tells
pression,
both Alicia
sexual
Rosa
or
Mariola
(actress
it's more
and Marco;
It seems
used
clear
his desire is not oriented

nor
heterosexual,
"he
Fuentes);
. . . orientation."
subtle:
even
American
ex
loves
Benigno
by gender. Not homo
it might
bisexual,
the
that
better
be
called
"any
thing through glass":16 his "orientation" is a structure of viewing.

Shrinking Lover ought to be read, therefore, less for its themes or for
what it reveals psychologically
than as one of many scenes depicting acts of

the film shows two kinds of looking: a more
spectatorship. Schematically,
or less explicitly sexualized gaze at exposed bodies and an absorbed gaze
at aesthetic spectacles. The first might properly be called voyeurism: Be
nigno's (and later Marco's) watching of Alicia from his apartment win
dow; Marco's repeated gaze (initially, through a cracked door) at Alicia's
naked, comatose body (Benigno says, "[A]dmit it, you were looking at her
breasts"); even Lydia's looking at Marco in the rearview mirror of her car,
or, later, as he listens to Caetano
presents
that
spectacles
at the beginning
the
television
we
Veloso
the
forces
Veloso
characters
(figures 37). The

the
viewing:
Pina
and end (Cafe Mtiller and Mazurka
interview
Caetano
see
with
the
Lydia,
series
dances
Fogo, respectively),
the
bullfight,
second
Bausch
performance
by
(figure 8), the wedding of Marco's former girlfriend, and

Lover.
Punctuated, even structured, by the aesthetic spectacles,
Shrin\ing
film
one
to
question
the
relation
viewing. One possibility is to understand

the
more-or-less
ing
can
thus
clandestine
become
"means,"
absorption
rape
sexualization
(in
one
or is motivated
between
these
two
modes
of
these parallel series as intimating

of aesthetic
version),
by, desire.
or,
at
An
the
experience.
Look
least,
aesthetic
very
insistence
on
the
sexual
of ostensibly neutral aesthetic spectaclesand

on the proximity
of film viewing to "compromised"
forms of sexualized voyeurismwould
be one (highly schematic) way to render the central move of much film
resonance
criticism attuned to sexuality and gender. Another possibility, however, is

to understand sexualized looking in the film as another form of aesthetic
absorption. Giving priority to these aesthetic spectacles generates provoca
tive possibilities for understanding
cinematic spectatorshippossibilities
that
may
not
be
without
their
consequences
for sexuality
and
gender,
too.
528
Figure
KEVIN
OHI
3. Marco
looking
at Alicia
in the hospital.
The film's spectacles repeatedly offer the alternative of reading them in

and thematic terms, or of pursuing other forms of absorp
psychological
tion. As in the silent film, each spectacle repeats, in various ways, the film's
thematic concerns:
more
representing
both Pina Bausch

or
less
inert
dances,
women
for example,
cared
for
by
could be read as
men.
The
various
that lies both in such the

spectacles lend the film a structural elegance
matic reduplications
and in the way that they can be mapped in relation to
a parallel series of visual replications.
I want to return to the topography
that
these
various
note that, beyond

consists,
Figure
most
4. Marco
the thematic
obviously,
gazing
create.
repetitions
in
at the dance
the
For
content
fact
that
the
moment,
however,
of the spectacles,
they
are
studio from the window
spectacles.
of Benigno's
I would
the repetition
apartment.
VOYEURISM
Figure
5. Benigno
watching
AND
ANNUNCIATION
the dance studio.
It will be hardly illuminating to note that the effect is self-reflexive: at

such moments, one cannot avoid the intimation that what is depicted is
one's own viewing of the film. As striking as the shared thematic concerns
of Cafe Miiller and Shrinking Lover is a visual effect that marks both. The
opening of the film draws a curtain over a screen on which Pina Bausch's
dance
appears projected, creating a startling trompe l'oeil effect that

the curtain seem real (three-dimensional)
and the screen seem
flatwhich is to say, appear as such (figure 9). Made visible at the begin
makes
ning, then, are our own viewing of the film and the film as viewed object;
the dance figures "within" the film the film as viewed. (Compounding
the
effect is the metacinematic
quality of the moment, its quotation of Chil

dren of Paradise [Les enfants du paradis, dir. Marcel Carne, 1945] and, more
immediately, of All about My Mother [Todo sobre mi madre, 1999], through
Figure
6. The camera
watching
Benigno
thus washing.
530
KEVIN
OHI
Figure
7. Rain on glass.
both of which the scene accesses a tradition pondering cinema's relation to

[displacement of, inhabitation of, indebtedness to, divergence from] the
ater. All of these various relations are coded by, in effect, putting cinema
"on stage.")
minutes
into
showing
the
That
the
parallel
dance)
viewers
is further established
to Marco
of
each
and
scene,
Benigno,
also
occurs
by the reverse shot (two

(a
watching
in
all
the
reversal
other
that,
aesthetic
spectacles, perhaps most notably at the bullfight, the wedding, and the fi
nal dance). In Shrinking Lover, in lieu of that reversal, we see Benigno
speaking to Alicia; the "content" of the annunciation is thus a structure of
spectatorship.
It is therefore striking that we find the same visual effect in the silent
film. As the shrunken lover gazes at his full-sized beloved, one becomes
Figure
8. Marco
listening to "Cucurrucucu
Paloma."
AND
VOYEURISM
Figure
aware
nothing
is that
9. The beginning
of Cafe
Miiller,
and of Talk
to Her.
of how, filmically, the juxtaposition

so
much
of a man
a film
as
screen
in
standing
viewed
front
ANNUNCIATION
was achieved.
from
of a cinema
close
She looks
upthe
screenand
relative
she
also
like
size
looks
like a flat projection (figure 10). The fantasized merger, then, as he crawls
into her vagina, seems a discomfiting literalization of a fantasy, not of ma
ternal merger, but of a merger with filmas if one could, like Buster Ke
aton in Sherlock^ Jr. (dir. Keaton, 1924), cross the plane of the screen and
enter the film.
It seems to me that the importance of the film's self-reflexive effects, its
depicting of its own viewing, is to be found here. Viewing has been turned
inside out, which, likewise,
relation
of aesthetic
spectacle
is the topographical
to plot
Figure
10. From
Shrinking
in the
film.
structure intimated
Such
spectacles
double
j/0'
Lover.
by the
the
532
KEVIN
but
plot
OHI
also
are
of
part
it,
themes
symbolize
but
constitute
relations;
viewed by the film audience, they stall the plot, even as, in another sense
for characters in the film, certainly, but also for the film audiencethey
himself) have
simply are the plot. As several critics (and even Almodovar
noted, the red curtain that opens Talf{ to Her quotes the closing shot of All
about My Mother. Such intertextuality is common in Almodovar's
films;
one thinks of a novel written in Flower of My Secret (.Laflor de mi secreto,
1995) that becomes the plot of Volver (2006) or, in Tal\ to Her, of the curi
ously moving shot, in the Caetano Veloso performance, of Cecilia Roth
and Marisa Paredesmoving,
perhaps, because he gives us two of his
actresses,
greatest
not
ostensibly
(or
acting
not
acting
and
acting),
thereby
seems to intimate a time after the film, or after film. Among other things,
the shot identifies acting with watching, while also pointing to a meta
actual house) where his entire body of
space (in this instance, Almodovar's
work
communicates.
The
return
of the
similar effect. The

than
the
scene
red
curtain
backdrop
of one's
the
as
of scene
backdrop
after
scene
has
of the film is, in this sense, nothing other

and
viewing,
the
setting,
Almodovar's
films
them
as a place, or tangible, as a fabric. Among many

selves, as if localizable,
other places, red curtains hang in Benigno's apartment. His (and, later,
Marco's) gaze beyond them to the dance studio where Alicia dances is thus
identified not only with the dance at the beginning, but with this meta
critical gaze at Almodovar's
filmic corpusand
beyond that, at film as a
And
genre.
the
characters'
desire
to pass
less explicitly, a fantasy of touching

self-reflexive
visual
effects
could
in the
composition
be
film's
extended.
depicted
the
through
a "beyond"
For
curtain
is, more
or
of film. A listing of such
example,
conversations
the
has
most
common
various
couples
sitting side by side, facing the camera (figures 1114). Many crucial mo
mentsMarco
with Lydia (twice), and Marco with Benigno, in particu
lartherefore
occur
in cars,
and
they
evoke
nothing
so
much
as
the
shot
of Benigno and Marco, side by side at the theater, watching Cafe Miiller.
Or Lydia and Alicia, side by side on the hospital balcony. Or, of course, the
audience of Tal\ to Her. Shrining Lover is self-reflexive in the sense that it
marks the reversal that is already implicit in these (of course, self-reflex
ive) moments.
In the automotive
we see people
also
see
them
shots, the windshield is also often visible; not only do

sitting side by side like a film or theater audience, but we
through
glassa
recurrent
visual
effect
that
extends
beyond
the car scenes. Such shots through glass sometimes render Benigno's view
(as, for instance, those into the windows of the dance studio or, later, of
Alicia
in the shower
through glass brick); over and over, however,
they
AND
VOYEURISM
11. Lydia
Figure
give
us
the
camera
ostensibly
its own
seems
to double
recur
and
thus
to figure
whose
are
camera.
Such
shots
but
of a voyeur,
and
element,
the
more
even
walls
shot
the
striking
made
533
death of a sna\e.
position
within
scenes;
hospital
found
the
a thematized
"vision"as
in the
Almodovar
it in
placing
of the
view
objective
voyeuristic,
visible
shots
in the car after the premature
and Marco
ANNUNCIATION
of
glass.
make
also
insofar
camera
the
making
as the
glass
lens.17
Such
is the
Segovian
Marco
and
prison
Benigno's
when they touch their hands to the glass in the prison's

room
visiting
(figure 15). It is a startlingly moving moment, in part, of
course, because their physical separation is made visible (I wish I could
relation culminates
hug
you,
Benigno
queasy
Benigno
Figure
about
and
12. Marco
the
Marco
But
says).
by the larger-than-life
moment
seem
and Lydia
it also
vagina
at
evokes
the
of his beloved.
the
to touch
jail,
the
it is
lens
on their way to a wedding
shrinking
lover's
absorption
If there is something
that,
of the
touching
camera
the
and
almost
glass
thus
and a bullfight.
wall,
to com
KEVIN
OHI
13. Benigno
Figure
their
prise
status
that
fantasy
and Marco.
as
filmic
aesthetic
and
objects,
could
absorption
their
cross
makes
separation
that
that
plane,
visible
one
could
a
en
ter a film.
"Anything
through
"orientation"
in
its own
the film, I have suggested,
glass":
visual
structure,
reminding
see is filmed and therefore seen through

Renaissance
perspective
when
of glass
a pane
world
viewed.
(The
comes
or
mirror
where
lines of sight running

monocular
plane.)19
of externalizing
Figure
point
It is less,
14. Benigno
therefore,
perception.
and Marco
for
being,
between
The
at Cafe
of
an
what
rendering
and
eye
on
the
the
canvas,
in the field of vision
intersect
eye
that
Brunelleschi,
human
to trace,
points
identification
Miiller:
we
everything
and
the
terms,
visible
with
a matter
Alberti
between
is, in crude
identified
that
glass.18 It is worth recalling
intervenes
mechanism
and
into
repeats Benigno's
us
of human
an
the
intervening
eye
sees
than
eye and canvas
"Let me weep."
VOYEURISM
15. Marco
Figure
runs
in
and Benigno
the
perhaps
human
tifying
much
a denaturalizing
locating
from
direction
opposite
with
it on
out,
ANNUNCIATION
535
at the prison.
perception
inside
AND
something
a flat
of
what
screen
as
might
iden
expect,
inhuman,
turning
perception
itself.
Perspective
is thus
outside
perception
one
it is a naturalizing
of
as
representa
tion.
Such
an
effect
repeatedly
tained
within,
of the
acts
Deleuze:
is at
stake
"Man
in
line
the
absent
it seems
This,
landscape."20
to
from
but
from,
is
me,
Cezanne
con
entirely
what
the
voyeur
figured by a series of shots in Tal\ to Her. I am think

beautiful
mysteriously
the
rating
what
partly
by
the
sees, and it is, again,

ing
be
may
mentioned
of the
film.
In
shots
one
of trees
that
most
striking
of the
act
like
a curtain
of these,
the
sepa
camera
pulls back and over the railing of a balcony (partly made of glass), reveal
ing Alicia and Lydia, side by side, with Marco and Benigno behind them
(figure 16). The shot of the glass presents, again, an externalized
image of
the
as
camera
one
might
dows,
shot
the
lens.
one
(leading
are
the
usand
ample,
two
that
to
It
a balconybut
think
characters
is ambiguous.
foursome
is as
that
and
it is the
that
the
though,
Benigno
trees
window
that
are
is the
Given
view).
but
one
were
they
in fact they might look as though they were

in a silent film. Marco, when
the
day
of their
topic
ago
two
today
months
conversation,
that
ago
she
suggests
was
implicitly
gored."
gives
us
cut,
the
spectacle
seen,
whose
object
talking
about
if, for ex
wonders
Benigno
then,
even
to be
talking,
would
Lydia
The
win
and
important
a spectacle,
remarks,
outward
hospital
by this framing
they appeared
months
not
the
toward
was determined
to view
aligned
is facing
inward
first, that the blocking
of perception,
locus
the
importantly,
on
expect
suggesting,
again,
about
More
say
to
that
the
they
"it
was
scene
of
are
all
536
KEVIN
Figure
16. The balcony.
turned
OHI
inward
on
the
Marco's
glassand
of Shrinking Lover. (The

just
to
balcony
narration
here
awakening
be
in
ates
the
film
other
The
whether
(or
remembers
once
"inward"to
ward"to
in
again
to turn
Thus
the
trees
sualizing
speechas
(to
film
other
from
of
out,
in the
turning
if, in
the
it is as
other
seem
that
words,
two
that
repeatedly
insists
we
view
the
as
One
the
sure
Marco
is pulled
film
the
as
film
seems
the
exterior
once
same.
the
illustrates
topography
at
"out
were
visible
inside-out
woman's
in
isn't
comatoseand
"destinations"
when
a snake
whether
coma.
of the
to make
occurs
of the
a dream
one
even
cre
or has it with her then,
to her
itselfand,
that
as
Further,
placeor
sleep
film
inward
us.
that
of killing
memory
dreams
if these
shot
balcony
his
with
is framed
with Lydia
and
effect
overlaps
shows
takes
thoughts
viewing
the
Lydia)
likewise
performance
words,
characters
made visible in an objective shot.

It is striking in this regard that, in his commentary
Almodovar
Alicia's
filmic scene is repeated
self-reflexive
performance
this conversation
inside
of the
Veloso
the
the
the
of the
gaze
narrates
the
having
to her,
co's
he
that
when)
talks
the
it is yet another
Caetano
which
a memory
Africa,
and
that
impression
Marco'sin
doubles
one.)
moments,
audience.
Benigno's,
the film within a film,

a sense
This pairing of narrated memory with depicted

at several
the
beyond
with
paired
doubles
a coma
entering
or
through,
therefore
bullfight sequence
asnarrativelyLydia's
from
witnesson,
can
vi
Mar
could
be
on Shrinking Lover,
body
as
a landscape:
I think all lovers have
dreamt sometime [sic] of walking

about the body of the person. . . . hiking on the body of the
VOYEURISM
love
person
they
all
elements,
the
nature.
as
if it was
even
These
the
some
flowers
woman's
[the
AND
ANNUNCIATION
natural
landscape.
and
sheets
the
are
breasts]
real
eryone laughs as well, and I feel moved..

even
scape,
mirror
the
in the
hills.
looks
to
Here
.. |T]his
background
Here
belong
ev
is a land
like
a star.21
body is thus implicitly identified with the materiality of film

as it is made visible in the shots of trees, which, furthermore, also call to
The woman's
mind
the
green
(and
vegetation
that
water)
running
forms
the
backdrop
of Mazurka Fogo, the Pina Bausch dance that ends the film. Identifying
the film with the dancing on stage, it also ties a landscape empty of human
habitation (like the beautiful still lifes of the deserted prison that precede
return to discover
Marco's
Benigno's suicide) with the merger with film

in Shrinking Lover. If the entry into the woman's vagina is less
fantasized
an
eroticor
tion, the topography

as the
gether,
a fantasy
of the absorption
characters
face
inward
of total
aesthetic
or as
the
of trees
merger
on
and
absorp
is here specified as the coming

the
of the
balcony,
trees
that
glass
identifies
the
to
(inhuman,
behind them and the narrated scene (figuratively)
implacable)
them,
than
maternalmerger
in front of
camera's
gaze
with a gaze whose locus seems to be the image of the trees. The inside-out
structure
that
intimates
the
out,
emptying
These
viewer's
or otherwise
not of psychologizing
of the
human
thus
the
impersonal
evoke
from
film
the
takes
the camera's
motivating
a subtracting
mergers
"into"
entry
the
act
the
form
but an
gaze
of gazing.
that
community
Leo
Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit see figured in the "implicated witnessing" of The Thin
Red Line (dir. Terrence Malick, 1998) (a witnessing identical to total ab
or
sorption)
world
it.22 When
screen
what
not
an analogous
but
outside,
in
the
have
a frame
topography.
also
frames
calls
an
requires
(in
but
The
rather
form
the
different
context)
of our
absence
with
moving
"the
from
of The World Viewed that the
is a frame,
its context
image,
still frames become
segments
very
his
pun
suggests
frame that forms the painting's
its communication
that
acknowledgment
notes at the beginning
Cavell
does
Cavell
Stanley
which
viewed,"
internal
as
to me
edgeits
viewedbecomes,
to
that
image.
The
invisible
in the projection but

enter it as a kind of blindness,
separating
thereby enter into the filmic imageand
our blindness, perhaps, paradoxically
visible as the world viewed.23 In a
similar way, the refiexivity of vision in "Eye and Mind" points, for Merleau
Ponty, to an embodied vision (and Cavell's notion of silence is often cast as
an experience of embodiment) that marks less a particular viewer situated
in a specified context (although it does suggest that, too) than a dispersal of
seeing
into
the
world,
into
things.24
To
acknowledge
silencean
acknowl
KEVIN
538
OHI
asynchronicity in film (which drives apart
for
would seem to make possibleseems,
that a fundamental
edgment
intelligibility and conviction)

Cavell, to open the possibility for an embodied
a
of
recognition
human
in
embeddedness
vision insofar as it involves
world
that
human
exceeds
meaning.
in a him filled with
The most beautiful scene of aesthetic spectatorship

such
set pieces
beautiful
oma"
Veloso.
Caetano
by
Marco's
is perhaps
The
or dream
memory
ing
the
seems
sequence
where
or
he
seems
Veloso
might
sings,
or might
some
the
to figure
effect
the
separate
as
unverifiable
not
be.
of the
He
swimmer
of
Caetano
be
might
order
other
first
twice:
as
swim
mysterious
(in
time
and
space)
of Marco's
a part
cinematic
Veloso
Yet
again,
dream,
He
transition.
thus
in
as a whole
performance
unlocatable
occurrence.
diegetic
but
might be at the house (Almodovar's)
its stalling of the narrativecuriously

ingly
a sense,
Pal
is not identified in the film,25and the light
to
indicate
in
by a happy
second,
The swimmer
from the performance.
performance
is framed,
scene
and,
mer (figure 17). The swimmer

of
the
of "Cucurrucucu
in time as it is seem
the
film
us
asks
to
choose between narrative logics governed by psychological causalityand

the trajectory of the scene (like its initial framing as dream or memory)
leads us there, as well, to the story of the snake Marco killed in Africa
Almodovar
to me
says,
that
at
pieces
transfix
in
our
he
stake
non sequiturfor
set
here by the swimmer.
kind of logic, embodied
and another
the
wanted
are
both
the
to convey
feeling
and
feeling
the
it renders, in miniature,
film.
attentionand
These
set
pieces
render,
moment's
stall
therefore,
17. The non sequitur
the
status
narrative
a kind
The
With him,
And
the galvanizing
tion that we might identify with voyeurism.
Figure
of summer.
as
it seems
narrative
effect of such
and
movement
of cinematic
swimmer
absorp
is there as a
swimmer.
VOYEURISM
AND
ANNUNCIATION
body to be looked atlike a dancer, like a bullfighter, like the film itself
and hence as a figure for the captivation he also inspires, and the conveyed
feeling links the materiality of film not only to a gaze at a desirable body
to an
but
of embodiment.26
experience
The
other important form of continuity in this seeming non sequitur is

the medium in which the swimmer appears: water. The moment offers a
figure for aesthetic
in
to
water;
every
Marco
see
absorption
it suffices
why,
insofar as the swimmer's

to
body is submerged
reaction
characters'
to
nearly
in the film: tears
aesthetic
spectacle
in the first Pina Bausch
notices
(figure 18). Benigno
because of his tears; Lydia, like
sequence
he cries after killing the snake; his reaction
wise, is drawn to him because

to Caetano Veloso's song is, again,
cry
the
recall
at Mazurka
"Here,"
Fogo.27
to weep;
Almodovar
and Alicia,
at the end, sees him
in the
remarks
to
commentary
suicide note, "if the audience

release, as Marco reads Benigno's
has a heart, they should cry. Without reserve." "And here," he continues,
"if they wiped away their tears they should cry again when Marco real
the DVD
the prison
izes"
Marco
the
stands
officials took
at Benigno's
if they
audience,
aren't
grave
Alicia's
hair clip from Benigno.
in the
heartless,
following
should
scene,
continue
he
Then,
remarks,
as
"And
crying.28
Yet again, one is confronted with two possible logics to explain the tears
that ought to fill the eyes of those who aren't heartless. The first is identifi
one identifies with Marco's grief and with Be
catory and psychological:
loss
and
desire.
And
this is one way to understand
the effect, more
nigno's
generally,
of Almodovar's
tification is perhaps
only
Figure
should
a complete
18. Marco
depictions of so-called deviant sexualities; iden

too strong a term for it, but a marked sympathy (if
absence
of condemnation
at the prison after Benigno's

reserve."
and
death.
"Here,
of any
sense
if the audience
that
their
odd
has a heart, they
cry. Without
KEVIN
OHI
a genuinely
ity precludes
to condemn
impulse
human
interest in them) leaves one to feel little

of Almodovar's
or any
Benigno,
pervertsthe
phile dentist in What Have 1 Done to Deserve This? (^Que

mercer
esto!!
1995)
the
(or
mother
who
sells
her
son
pedo
he hecho yo para
the
to him),
mur
two
derers in Matador
(1986), the priest in Bad Education (La mala educacion,

2004), the serial rapist in Ki/^a (1993), the kidnapper in Tie Me Up, Tie Me
Down! (jAtame! 1990), and so on. Yet it seems to me that it is rather the
effect
anti-identificatory effects in these films that forestall moralismthe
Bersani and Dutoit note when they remark on Almodovar's
ability to fos
ter in his actresses "a remarkable talent for playing extravagance if it were
natural
wholly
without,
however,
pear psychically plausible."29

cries
tears,
and
again,
then
in
any
way
continues
crying,
to make
attempting
For when the audience
it ap
cries, wipes away its
it responds
as
characters
in
the film do to beauty. The film (again) appears to offer a psychological

Marco cried, he explains, when he saw beautiful things he
explanation:
could not share with the woman who left him. As a psychological account,
the
seems
point
sence. The
less
memorialized
relation
than
tears link aesthetic pleasurethe
Bausch
or
Caetano
Veloso
or
loved's
absenceinaccessible
Tal\
of watching
a confrontation
vanished
of
experience
pleasure
to Herto
because
an
with
or in a coma
ab
Pina
a be
or dead
or
behind the glass wall of a prison or on a movie screen. Thus, when, dur
scene where they touch the glass
ing Marco's last visit to Benignothe
wall of the visiting roomBenigno
cries, what might be read as the cul
of his becoming human (for the audience, for example, who can
at last identify with him because he can finally make genuine contact
mination
with
another
human,
person),
his merger
marks
instead
with the gaze
the
culmination
of the camera,
of his
in
becoming
his finally becoming
voyeur.
To
spell
out
both
why
Benigno's
tears
at the
prison
are
like
tears
shed
at
a play and why they pull the film's aesthetic spectacles away from the psy
chological explanations that might ground them, one might begin by re
calling that the aria in Cafe Mtiller that opens the film is "Let Me Weep,"
from Purcell's
The Fairy Queen, and by recalling the words of "Cucurru

cucu Paloma": "They say that in the nights / All he did was cry; / They say
he didn't eat, / All he did was drink./ They swear that even the sky / Shiv
ered when it heard him cry. / How he suffered for her, / and even in his
death he called her ... "30 Dissolving
in tears, we, if we aren't heartless,
Marco
and
and
like
mergelike
Lydia,
Benigno at the prisonless with
a character
than with an aesthetic object, merge with the beauty we see,

and, like the shrinking lover, enter the film, submerge ourselves in a me
carries the happy, non
diumwater,
music, pleasure, or celluloidthat
VOYEURISM
AND
ANNUNCIATION
sequitur swimmer. (Seen through tears, he would make that water and
our eyes indistinguishable.)
Striking, then, are the recurrent shots of rain on glass, which come to
function something like what Bersani and Dutoit, in their reading of The
Thin Red Line, call "inaccurate
replications":31 most importantly, from Be
nigno's
the
apartment
week
of Alicia's
and
accident,
at the
prison
the
day
Benigno kills himself (figures 19 and 20). "I like rainy days since I've been
here," Benigno remarks at his last meeting with Marco, partly, one sus
pects, because they remind him of the week he met Alicia, but also be
cause, as the shot makes
after
sequence
darkened
clear, the rain makes

death
Benigno's
body
writes
as Marco
is later),
its
the glass visible. The
a shot
of the
rain
against
prison
a night
reads (and we hear) Benigno's note. Evoking,

letter in Shrinking Lover (which, when the
perhaps, the tear-splotched
lover sees it again in the woman's purse, is projected much like the wom
an's
window
features
the
it;
words
are
rain-spattered
and present, and takes Marco

On
the
one
hand,
the
then,
accompanied
window
by
provides
marks
an
between
into Benigno's
emotional
as
Benigno
transition
(and us) posthumously

moment
of
images
climax
he
past
world.
and
the
culmination
of an identificatory, psychological
trajectory. On the other,
here Benigno seems, at last, to have joined the shrinking lover, to have ar
rived "inside" the film, and we recall again the swimmer and the water
that surrounds
important
the
water
summer,
for
ing
him. The
because
on
water in thatlikewise
it subtracts
the
example,
window
or
the
ostensible
away
from
of the
filma
"framing"shot
emotional
tears
and
medium,
parent and visible as such.

At the end of the film, the water running
down
associations,
toward
like
a mediumof
at once
glass,
'V..V.
19. Rain
trans
the back of the Mazurka
I*
Figure
seems
draw
on prison glass.
542
Figure
KEVIN
20. Benigno
OHI
writing;
water on glass.
set is mimicked
by the film's credits, which seem to wash across

and vertically) a plane placed in front of the stage
(blurred, horizontally
That
(figure 21).
pairing suggests what I think the water in the swimming
Fogo
scene does: that we link the water to the "surface"
of the film. (The film is

the
credits
as
the
windows
are
by
by rain.)32 The tears that
mark the response of characters in the film to beauty thus suggest a kind
of expropriation
of sight; tears transform the eye from an invisible me
made
visible
dium
of sight into a visible surface, turn the eye into a lens, into a pane of
glass. In the closing credits, the back of the stage seems to merge with a
plane in front of it. That impossible
topography, like the earlier scene on
the balcony, figures, in turn, this expropriation
cal identification with aesthetic spectacle.
Figure
21. Closing
of vision, a nonpsychologi
credits.
AND
VOYEURISM
The
Veloso
were
"you
the
asleep,"
to
seems
performance
fast
nurse
that
possible
the
in the presentwhen
well
letter
conversation
we
present,
him
tells
wake you." Yet the weirdly unplaceable

seem
ANNUNCIATION
returns
between
to us
dream;
"so
we
didn't
quality of the scene also makes it

and
Lydia
Marco
he at last talks to her. Benigno's
to Marco,
Marco's
recall,
afterward,
just
from
the
place
voice, in his fare
Marco's
dead;
takes
and
tears,
then
his graveside address to Benigno, likewise cross that divide. The nonpsy
chological identification adumbrated by tears in the film can also be read
in the
of aesthetic
proximity
to a becoming
absorption
as it were
and I think that (again, nonpsychological)
identification
account
startling
for
the
effect
of annunciation:
the
fact
comatose,
might be read to
that
Alicia
wakes
up. Vanishing into the worldthe landscape, the filmhas an animating

effect. Marco's tears bring back Benigno's voice from the dead, much as
Benigno's narration of a silent film reanimates Alicia. The animating,
vivifying effect seems tied to a paradoxical
identification
with one's own
disappearance.
In slightly different terms, the world of the comatose is the world of
cinema. I noted earlier that the film repeatedly presents pairs of people
next to each other, that communication,
and love, is visualized as figures
side by side, as an audience in a theater. The striking exception is the final
pairing of Alicia and Marco (figure 22). They are not side by side; rather,
Marco
angle
sits
two
rows
perpendicular
in front
to the
of Alicia,
stage,
with
and
the
an
empty
camera
views
seat
between
them
from
them.33
an
That
shot presents the film as though at right angles to itself and suggests that
to identify with film, to enter it, is to identify with the comatose. To put
this another way, not only is the angle of vision different, but, for the first
time, we have a visible place held for the absent figure that is implicit in all
the
scenes
of
That
spectatorship.
empty
seat,
is no
therefore,
doubt
Be
nigno's, but it is also ours. "This is not my voice" is Almodovar's

startling
opening remark on the DVD commentary; although his immediate refer
ence
is to his
laryngitis,
the
comment
is an
apt
one
for
the
film's
explora
tion of the curiously expropriating consequences

of absorption. Despite
the often-remarked tonal shift in Almodovar's
films (from the 1980s and
with these
early 1990s to his latest four or five films), the preoccupation
effects is there all along. One thinks, among many other examples, of an
amazing pair of shots in Matador that mark a becoming inhuman of a
gazer: one that merges a gazing woman with the latticework on an eleva
tor, and one that, by showing her through glass, turns a gazing mother as
if to wallpaper (figures 23 and 24).
An identification
with the comatose:
what I am calling a nonpsychological
that paradoxical
identification
identificationsuggests
that voyeur
KEVIN
OHI
' (f
\'J
'
4r * :'
>'
i fs /
.//
f,
\ k
t.
# I
'
.#
Figure
22. Marco
and Alicia
for Almodovar's
ism,
Gilles
the
percept
no
longer
Deleuze
the
and
owe
Felix
affect
only
. . . the
Cinema
sents,
potentially,
Figure
23. From
to
Guattari
of perception
call
those
who
not
circumscribed
like, perhaps,
perception,
the
as to autonomous
continue,
They
sees.
man."34
to a form
a sort of inhuman
"We
"percept":
and
sufficient
or
experience
in
percept
is the
approaches
the
a seeing
world,
and
terms
evocative
before
landscape
state
of
a world
for
have
the
seen
no
to
that
experienced
as cathedral
to Her,
in
man,
comatose
by
Talt{
attain
beings
like it never was, is, or will be lived; Combray
monument."
landscape
of
Fogo.
points
and
anything
them: Combray
or
film,
or the human,
by psychology
what
at Mazurka
the
because
one.
Matador.
"The
absence
it pre
AND
VOYEURISM
ANNUNCIATION
II
1'
p
p*
545
f
1
* . #
V f\^j
Figure
24. From
/ J
Matador.
viewing reappears in very different accounts of vision.

for
Jay,
example, outlines three "Scopic Regimes of Modernity":
that of the perspectival subject of Italian Renaissance
art, the "art of de
Such a viewerless
Martin
scribing" in northern painting, and the "madness of vision" in the baroque.35

effect we
Although it is not Jay's emphasis, the potentially expropriating
have
noted
ible in his account.

he
borrows
play
the
turn
in perspective's
from
unsettling
mechanisms
exteriorizing
he links the art of describing
Likewise,
Svetlana
to various
to Baconian
Alpers)
of
potential
its
emphasis
"the
(a classification
but
empiricism
on
prior
is leg
may
under
existence
of
world of objects,...
a world indifferent to the beholder's position in front
of it."36 "The projection" writes Alpers,
.. is viewed from nowhere."37
For Ann Banfield, the instruments of vision in empiricismthe
micro
for
into
a
realized
in
narrative
scope,
examplebring
being
possibility
fiction:
these
allow
instruments
the
viewing
is not, indeed,
rectly
observes
subject
where
an
to see,
no subject
unsensed
to witness,
the
sense-data,
where
places
is present.
He
he
thereby di
of
appearance
things in his absence, and that absence itselfhis own

which scientific inference had already allowed him
ceive of and predict.38
Certain
instances
in
narrative
verbs with present-time
deictic
fiction
of
references
the
coordination
provide
of
past-tense
her with linguistic
ex
546
KEVIN
OHI
amples for Bertrand Russell's sensibila, sense perceptions that are subordi
nated neither to a subject who feels them nor to an object which occasions
them. Formulating thereby a kind of "impersonal subjectivity,"39 she finds
in narrative fictionand
ers
of such
less
sense
particularly free indirect stylelinguistic

related
perceptions,
sentences."40
These
to what
sentences
she
spoken
by
no
elsewhere
one
calls
mark
"speaker
as
(considered
the
production of a voice, sentences in free indirect style present, linguistically,

certain grammatical impossibilities and therefore ask to be conceptualized
as sentences spoken by no one) thus evoke something like the vision of the
voyeur,
the
of
"sight"
the
comatose
as
the
model
of cinematic
spectator
ship.
It may not be a coincidence,
borrows from Pier
then, that Deleuze
Paolo Pasolini the idea of finding in free indirect style a model for the
"oscillation" of "subjective" and "objective" view that potentially contam
inates
any
effort
to assign
a particular
Bakhtin, Deleuze
Paraphrasing
view
in cinema
to either
category.41
writes that, in free indirect style,
there is not a simple combination of two fully-constituted

subjects of enunciation, one of which would be reporter, the
other
reported.
It is rather
a case
of an
of enun
assemblage
ciation, carrying out two inseparable acts of subjectivation

simultaneously, one of which constitutes a character in the
first person, but the other of which
and
brings
him
on
to the
scene.
is present at his birth
There
is no
mixture
or aver
age of two subjects, each belonging to a system, but the dif

ferentiation of two correlative subjects in a system which is
itself
While
heterogeneous.42
cinema
does present shots that can be identified as subjective or

its
as it is in a sense neitherwould
seem to
objective,
apparatusinsofar
tend toward this middle state, especially when the camera is not subordi
nated to psychological
causalities. "The perception-image,"

Deleuze writes,
"finds its status, as free indirect subjective, from the moment that it re
flects
its content
in a camera-consciousness
('cinema of poetry')."43
Deleuze's
discussion of Pasolini's
"nominal"
which
has
become
autonomous
free indirect style comes in his initial,

(and could be correlated to
definition of the perception-image

"solid perception"). More generally, Deleuze's
variously exfoliated
omies
between
of cinema
in Cinema
I chart
a movement
an
acentered
taxon
state
of things ("the plane of immanence")

and so-called natural perception,
which might be conceptualized
in terms of subjects and objects. (For him,
VOYEURISM
the
contrast
between
Edmund
AND
Husserl
and
ANNUNCIATION
Henri
Bergsonas
opposed
reactions to a certain impasse between materialism and idealismlies

in
the fact that Husserl begins with "natural perception" where Bergson be
The perception-image,
gins with the plane of immanence.)
action-image,
and affection-imageas
intervals, "centres of indetermination"44 that ap
pear on the plane of immanence, interrupting light to introduce a locus of
reaction or delayare
in a sense the coalescing of ("natural") perception
on this undifferentiated plane. The various ways that cinema escapes or
exceeds
human
manence.
sons
enable
perception
(All these images
and
to
erase
it to move
back
therefore could
thema
movement
toward
the
of im
plane
be said both to produce

most
perhaps
visible
per
in
the
personifying and depersonifying effects of the affection-image or close

up.) Such is one way to understand the movement from solid to liquid to
gaseous perception. In "gaseous perception," he finds in montage not a
psychologizing or humanizing of perception but a loosening
tions of the eye and its "relative immobility":45
of the limita
And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage

a construction,
undoubtedly
from
the
of view
point
is
of an
other eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non

human eye, of an eye which would be in things. Universal
variation, universal interaction (modulation) is what Ce
zanne had already called the world before man, "dawn of
"iridescent chaos," "virginity of the world."
ourselves,"
. .. What montage does, according to [Dzigaj Vertov, is to
carry
so
that
points
into
perception
any
on
which
to put
things,
whatsoever
point
it acts,
or which
act
into
perception
in space
itself
on
matter,
all
perceives
it, however
the
far these
actions and reactions extend. This is the definition of objec

tivity,
Montagein
"to
see
without
Vertov's
use
boundaries
or distances."46
of itenables
one
to move
back
toward
a state
where "the eye is in things, in luminous images themselves."47 To identify

with such a vision (and to do so could obviously not be psychological)
is,
Bersani
and
Dutoit
perhaps, to experience the "implicated
witnessing"
suggest
is an
unprecedented
form
of connectedness
(which
is one
way
understand
to
what links, for them, Terrence Malick and Almodovar).48

We began with Tal\ to Her as an allegory of gendered spectatorship but
asserted that, where we expect to find sexual violation, we instead find an
annunciation. "Whoever speaks, loves": talking in Almodovar's
film pro
duces
imagesimages
where
"narrative"
is curiously
indistinguishable
KEVIN
from
the
OHI
arrest
of visual
story of Lydia's
final
on
"seen"
evening
where
absorption,
last day "viewed"

or
narrative
elaboration
on the hospital windows,

the
through
(Marco's
or Benigno's
windows
rain-spattered
of
the
from aesthetic spectacle, from Cafe Miiller,

prison) is indistinguishable
Mazurka Fogo, "Cucurrucucu
Paloma," Shrinking Lover, Tal\ to Her. The
film's title derives from Benigno's injunction to Marco, who cannot bring
himself to speak to Lydia because he cannot be made to believe she can
hear himin a coma, she is to him as remote and oblivious as any charac
ter projected
on
a screen
in a darkened
movie
theater.
The
shrunken
lover
literalizes the fantasy of merging with film; the happy, non sequitur swim
mer seems to smile at us. In the film's "telling," it becomes impossible to
whether
say
the
viewer
crosses
over
to the
or
viewed,
whether
the
viewed
"speaks" to or "looks" at the viewer. Speaking over Benigno's grave, Marco

seems at last to come around to what his friend asked him to see as possi
ble. Annunciation
in Almodovar's
seeing world.
That understanding
that
to gaze
on
an
in a comais
thus
asks
It
oblivious
is,
not
not
person
on
but
a curious
mastery
the
only
a viewer dispersed
sexual
a screen
limit,
of equality.
and
turn
to
It
spec
our understanding
thatto
conceptualization
or, at the
sort
of gazing
valences
their political implicationsbut

perhaps,
into a
leads us to the startling conclusion
spectaclea
to reconsider
tatorshipand
lation.
of absorption
to experience
us
film produces
of re
the
most
lead one to say that pe

inflammatory of contemporary exampleswould
about
which
dophilia (the panic
suggests, among other things, an effort to
stave off the unsettling force of sexuality and thereby to secure a subject
present to itself), whatever
heterosexuality
might,
sexuality)
at least
potentially,
protect
those
stance,
as,
who
only
insofar
as one
that
structure
name
for
shares
the
Seen
consent
once
women)
structure
terms
world.
of
of a given
it (like adult
form
of human
because
from
this
and
(children
a social
this
any
is unsettling
occasion,
it was
contexts,
or abuse
moreover,
like,
of equality.
cannot
ostensibly
some
and
enacted,
a relation
innocuous
seemingly
sent
in
when
of inequality
systems
forms of exploitation
or homosexuality,
are
it presents,
inequality;
world.49
to
maintain
be
might
one
to
for in
animals,
efforts
Consent
efforts
angle,
can
So-called
one
con
sex
ual relations, like aesthetic pleasure, and likeat

its bestpedagogy,
offer the not unequivocal
enter
to
an
unknown
world (this is
opportunity
the epistemology of jealousy in Deleuze's
of
Proust).50
reading
Yet again, the film supplies a visual figure: the final dance might be read
to represent
such
an
unknown
world.
line
of dancers
emerges
from
the
wings of the stage (whose trees and water we noted); Almodovar, more
over, leaves half the screen black (figure 25). The dance that emerges from
AND
VOYEURISM
Figure
25. Mazurka
Fogo
ANNUNCIATION
549
emerges from the dark.
de
Chaplin's
Benigno's
response to actress Geraldine
of
out
of
the
male
of
"Trenches."
"Out
death
life;
emerges
scription
"Trees," Benigno of
emerges the female. Out of the earth emerges ..."
of
or
dialectical
refusal
fers; "flowers?"
sublimating
logic, his
Benigno's
darkness
evokes
his choice of a medium over any conveyed content, are en

materialism,
this
final shot: from the darkness emerges . .. trees, and a dance.
dorsed by
The darkness
no doubt also evokes Alicia's
coma, and the dance, her
emergence
comatose
from it. Almodovar

body
isn't
simply
remarks
asleep,
that
in his commentary
he
wanted
to
that Alicia's
intimate
world
within her body and eyes that is nevertheless not legible thereor, if leg
Her eyes, he remarks, were to convey that
ible, legible only as inaccessible.
she had been (and was, partly, still) in a place "very far away" (figure 26).
Figure
26. Alicia,
awakf.
KEVIN
OHI
"I don't know anything about their universe," Almodovar

says of Lydia
The nonhuman gaze of cinema, the voyeur's effort to see the
world without himself in it, is, in a sense, the paradoxical
effort to visu
and Alicia.
alize
this unvisualizable,
universe
in a way
remote place, to identify with an unknowable
that
does
not
render
it knowable.51
The
effort
to per
ceive one's own disappearance

may not, finally, be able to evade the sub
that
would
seem
to
ject
preside over its own vanishingif
only, that is,
to register itand however different it may be from any desire to exert
over
mastery
a form
another
of mastery.
such
person,
Almodovar's
an
film
effort
suggests,
therefore
shelters
however,
imity of that dynamic to the scenario of domination

taught to see in voyeurism cannot be taken for granted.
that proximity
or distance
within
that
the
we have
it
prox
been
The question of
for
to
the
sexual
is,
Her,
Tall{
politics of voy
eurism.
Boston
College
NOTES
Earlier
versions
of this essay were presented at the Psychoanalytic

Practices seminar at
Center and at the Society for Cinema and Media
University Humanities
Conference
in Philadelphia
in 2008. Thanks to Frances Restuccia for inviting me
the Harvard
Studies
to the Humanities
Center, to Hollis Griffin for asking me to present at the SCMS

and to the audience
members (especially Nick Davis, William Rothman,
in both places. Special thanks, as well, to Henry Russell
Seshadri)
Conference,
and Kalpana
Jonathan
Bergstein,
Heller-Roazen,
Criticism.
1.
Stanley
Flatley, Zach
Megan
Holmberg,
Jim Giguere, Ellis Hanson, Daniel

Forsberg-Lary,
David Kurnick, Amy Villarejo, and two readers for
Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged

MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 160.
edition
(Cambridge,
2.
Maurice
Thomas
3.
Writings, ed.
A Criminal Precursor and Diagnostic

Indicator to a Much
Joseph Davis, "Voyeurism:
in Sexual Deviance: A Reader, ed.
Larger Sexual Predatory Problem in Our Community,"
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003),
Christopher
Hensley and Richard Tewksbury
131-48,
4.
Basic
Merleau-Ponty,
"Eye and Mind," in Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Baldwin (London:
Routledge, 2004), 290324, quotation on 318.
quotation
Joseph Davis
on 140.
is perhaps
representative:
[I]nstead of treating the voyeur as a nuisance,

public order, or mis
demeanant
sex offender, the voyeur should be assessed for probable
and future predatory threat, as well as the potential to
dangerousness
commit
a physical
See also Antoinetta

Federal
Legislation
act of violence
upon another
person, (ibid.,
141)
Vitale, "Video Voyeurism and the Right to Privacy: The Time for
Is Now," Seton Hall Legislative Journal 27, no. 2 (20023): 381-410.
VOYEURISM
AND
ANNUNCIATION
5.
I do not mean
to imply that there is a feminist position on voyeurism, or to deny that

recent feminist accounts of cinematic viewing have added nuance to the understanding
of relations between looking and sexual violence.
6.
Joseph Davis again: "[VJoyeurism places real people into [V] the offender's mind, and
from that point, they are his; he owns them. If he wants to rape, he will, and if he wants
to murder,
then he will" ("Voyeurism,"

140). He cites Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T.
Oaks, CA:
Profiling Violent Crimes: An Investigative Tool, 2nd ed. (Thousand
in the Diagnostic and
Sage, 1996). One of the peculiarities of the category of "paraphilia"
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-1V),
is the range of "deviant"
Holmes,
sexual
behavior
that is lumped together: voyeurism, pedophilia,

sadism, masochism,
The grouping follows fromperhaps
frotteurism, and exhibitionism.
these categories as pathologies
of disturbed intersubjectivity:
justifiesunderstanding
transvestism,
The essential features of a Paraphilia

are recurrent, intense sexually
1)
arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors generally involving
nonhuman
of oneself or one's
objects, 2) the suffering or humiliation
partner, or 3) children or other nonconsenting
persons that occur over
a period of at least six months. (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of
Mental Disorders, 4th ed., text revision: DSM-IV-TR
DC:
[Washington,
American Psychiatric Association,
2000], 566)
sex as a refusal to engage
Hence, objectification links sexual violation (nonconsensual
another subject) to various forms of improper distance (looking at images instead of
people, looking instead of touching, treating skin or clothes as a surface to rub instead
a depth to know) and to exchanges between persons as objects (using objects as [or
"instead"
consent
of
of] persons or persons as objects). Whatever else it does, the moralizing
serves to stabilize the relation between persons and objects that threatens to be
disrupted by the various modes of invested exchangelooking,

fact any sensory relationbetween
them and between persons.
7.
of
touching,
hearing,
in
A vast array of film scholarship could be described as sharing these assumptions.

Whatever their (often notable) achievements,
and however those achievements
might
these terms might describe (for example, and among
depend on these assumptions,
in The Sexual
many others) Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"
1992), 2234; Jonathan M.
Subject: A "Screen" Reader in Sexuality (London:
Routledge,
Metzl's "From Scopophilia
to Survivor: A Brief History of Voyeurism,"
Textual Practice
"When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision:
18, no. 3 (2004): 41534; Linda Williams's
and Linda
Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
MD: University
Williams, American Film Institute Monograph
Series, vol. 3 (Frederick,
Publications
of America, 1984), 8399; Carol Clover's "The Eye of Horror," in Men,
Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 166-229; and, to a certain extent, Elena del Rio's "The Body of
of the Senses
Voyeurism: Mapping a Discourse
Camera Obscura 45 (2000): 115-49.
in Michael
Powell's
Peeping
Tom,"
8.
Antoinetta
Vitale writes, "Imagine

having your most private and intimate moments
caught on tape without your knowledge.
Imagine those images being held in the hands
of some stranger who has invaded your privacy for their own sadistic purposes. Now,
381-82).
imagine that all of this may be entirely legal" ("Video Voyeurism,"
9.
Nearly every account of the film does, and that rape troubled many viewersand
of Catholic Bishops (USCCB),
for whom the "off-screen
just the U.S. Conference
not
rape"
offensive" (review of Tal\ to Her [Washington,

partly justified its rating of "Omorally
DC: USCCB
Office for Film and Broadcasting,
2002], www.usccb.org/movies/t/
talktoher.shtml
[accessed 16 January 2007]). Joanne Laurier, on the World Socialist
KEVIN
website,
modovar,
Benigno
OHI
"The movie's silent movie insertstyled,

animadverts,
according to Al
a la Bufiuelis
a trendy but vacuous device to camouflage
the moment when
Alicia in the hospital." Laurier, irritated by the film's
rapes the unconscious
leads one to wonder
"tangents,"
whether
Almodovar's
sin is sexual
she charges the director with a self-indulgence

aestheticism;
cal context and (like the voyeur) thwarts human interaction
surface:
movie
perversion or
that obscures sociohistori
by treating reality as a
from a
deeply deviant and psychotic behavior
unnecessarily
empathetic
vantage point. But most
importantly, Almodovar
glibly, superficially and without opposition
presents contemporary
Spain as a series of beautiful images, largely
devoid of a social context. ("Talking
about Not Too Much, Unfortu
[T]he
disturbingly
views
and
nately," World Socialist Web Site, 27 March 2003, www.wsws.org/ar

ticles/2003/mar2003/talk-m27.shtml
[accessed 24 March 2008])
critics were no more pleased than the socialists; Thomas
Hibbs finds
less rigorous a moral philosopher
than Quentin Tarran
(as "incoherent")
tino: "In what can only be described as a cowardly attempt to have it both ways, the film
calls it rape and depicts it as a benign and fruitful act of love" ("The
simultaneously
Reactionary
Almodovar
Critics'
Choice:
Global Oddity," National Review, 21 January 2003, www.nationalreview.

[accessed 24 March 2008]). Peter Bradshaw,
com/comment/comment-hibbs012103.asp
the rape in more redemptive
writing in the Guardian UK, on the other hand, understood
terms:
The action of Tal\ to Her could
ing. Yet such is the imaginative
be horrific, or at the very least nauseat

warmth that Almodovar
[sic] conveys
combined
with his stylisation and modifica
for his two male
leads,
tion of the real world in which
tralised through a combination
Her," Guardian UK, 23 August
aug/23/1 [accessed
Thanks
10.
11.
the rape happens, revulsion is neu

of sympathy and alienation"
("Talk to
2002, www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/
17 June 2010]).
to Jim Giguere
for his help finding film reviews.
Walter
Pater, "Sandro Botticelli," in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and PoetryThe

L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 39-48,
Text, ed. Donald
quotation on 45.
Pedro
Almodovar,
dir., Tal\ to Her, DVD
(2002; Culver
City, CA:
Sony Pictures
1893
Classics,
2003).
12.
Point," in The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early

Pye, "Vanishing
Christopher
Modern Culture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 65-104; hereafter cited in
the text.
13.
"Rear Window's Glasshole,"

in Outtakes: Essays on Queer
See, for example, Lee Edelman,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 72-96;
(Durham,
Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson
and D. A. Miller, "Visual
14.
Pleasure
in 1959," in Outtakes, 97-125.
film that Pedro Almodovar

made so that he
Shrinking Lover, the silent black-and-white
could excerpt it in Tal\ to Her, presents a man who takes the diet potion that his scientist
lover has concocted
Later
reunited
crawls
15.
Gilles
but not tested. Shrinking uncontrollably,

he returns to his mother.
with his lover, he eventually walks across her naked, sleeping body and
into her vagina.

"La peinture et la question des concepts" [Painting
Deleuze,
a seminar held at Universite de Vincennes a Saint Denis
concepts],
and the question of

VIII) and now
(Paris
VOYEURISM
posted on La voix de Gilles Deleuze
translation),
AND
en ligne [The
ANNUNCIATION
voice of Gilles
Deleuze
on line] (my
www.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/rubrique.php3Pid_rubrique=7.
16.
I owe this phrase to Ellis Hanson, with whom I first saw Tal\ to Her, and whose
then led me to many aspects of my argument here.
17.
There
remarks
are many other ways that the film makes viewing visible. One thinks, for
of the paired shots of the address of Alicia's apartment buildingfirst
as a
subjective shot from Benigno's view, and then as an objective shot. The subtraction of
example,
the internal
point of view makes

the fact that we are seeing.
18.
On another
Time
visible the camera's
presence
and draws
our attention
instance
Around:
of the "vitrinization"
of gazing in film, see D. A. Miller, "Second
Rocco and His Brothers," Film Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2008): 12-18, esp. 1415.
19.
in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh

Osborne, "Perspective,"
Brigstocke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), available at Oxford Reference
18.
Online, www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html
?subview=Main&entry=tl
e2024 (accessed 31 October 2007).
20.
Gilles
Harold
Deleuze
Graham
21.
to
and Felix
Burchell
(New
Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson

York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 169.
and
It is worth registering that hereagainAlmodovar

invokes a well-worn (and
potentially misogynist) topos. In her classic study of the gendering of narrative structure,
Teresa de Lauretis addresses the (far from benign) "territorialization
of women," the
transformation of female bodies into landscapes
in Alice Doesn't:
("Desire in Narrative,"
Indiana University Press, 1984], 10357,
Semiotics, Cinema [Bloomington:
on 155). The "movement"
of narrative that transports male and female
toward Oedipality
"is the movement of narrative discourse, which specifies and
Feminism,
quotation
subjects
even produces
the masculine
position as that of mythical subject, and the feminine
position as mythical obstacle or, simply, the space in which that movement occurs" (143).
As with his portrayal of inert, naked women, Almodovar,
I would like to think, depicts
rather than simply participates in the coding of sexual difference that opposes "[m]ale
hero-human
... subject" to "female-obstacle-boundary-space"

(121), although the
possibly tenuous distance between depiction and participation
may have something to do
with why some viewers of the film were more resistant to it than I was. As the rest of my
in Almodovar's
film
essay suggests, however, I think that the woman-as-landscape
moves
short, by identifying the gaze with the

away from this gendered structurein
and (thus) by dispersing the subject into the space it would ostensibly traverse.
landscape
The moment when the shrinking lover crawls into his lover's vagina is legible, of course,
as a literalization
of fantasiesparanoid,
pastoral, misogynist, or all of theseof
merger that no doubt derive from a universal human origin in female bodies.
And it would be more than possible, therefore, to read this moment in Oedipal
terms.
Yet it is also legible as a disappearance
of the subject, and that disappearance
need not be
maternal
understood
in agonistic or gendered terms, need not excite the defensiveand
to shore up a threatened subject. Although it isn't the focus of the
genderedeffort
current essay, the question that de Lauretis poses of the possibility for women of forms
of identification with narrative that are not complicit with its Oedipal
structures could
find one possible answer in the form of spectatorship
that I attempt to outline in this
reader for Criticism for reminding me of de
essay. I am grateful to an anonymous
Lauretis's important argument.
22.
Leo
Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit,
Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London:

Institute, 2004), 161; and Cavell, The World Viewed. For Bersani's articula
tion of the ethics of this implicated witnessing (which he often puts in terms of a
British Film
KEVIN
OHI
reformulation
of the possibilities
of Chicago
University
of narcissism), see also (with Adam

Press, 2008) and Homos (Cambridge,
Press, 1995), esp. 11381.
23.
See Cavell,
The World Viewed, 24-25.
24.
Merleau-Ponty,
"Eye and Mind."
25.
He is identified
by the Internet Movie
26.
A narrative
(Chicago:
University
Database
(imdb.com)
Philips), Intimacies
MA: Harvard
as Fernando
non sequitur, this moment with the swimmer is thematically

should perhaps not neglect to mention, because, in a film where our gaze
directed at women's bodies, the swimmer is a man. It seems unavoidable,
Iglesias.
excessive, too, I
is primarily
then, to read
him with the other bodiesAlicia's,
Lydia's, the woman's in Shrinking Lover, even those
of the dancers in Pina Bausch's dance theaterthat
are given to our view. The other
male body we see is the shrunken lover's; that parallel suggests the swimmer's immer
sion in the water be read with the lover's immersion in the woman's body, but that
not be read as a gendering of vision. Moreover,
parallelI'm
trying to suggestneed
whereas
in the case of the shrunken
of his body has the "alibi"

lover, our contemplation
action of the silent film, the swimmer is there explicitly, exclusively, to be
at. Given that this scene seems to take placeif it takes place anywhereat
of the narrative
looked
Almodovar's
house as Almodovar's
actresses gather to listen to music, it would not be
to identify the gratuitousness
(and the gratuitous pleasure) with the
improbable
director's own desiring gaze, and therefore to sense that the pleasurable
looking at
women's bodies in this film is somehow gay. The swimmer's smile as he emerges from
the water seems to address the audience (even, knowingly, to flirt)which
distinguishes
him narratively, if not (however) ontologically,
from Alicia when her eyes unexpectedly
open while she is in her coma. Not the least important effect of the moment is to make
film, toothat male bodies are there on
explicit what ought to be obvious in Hollywood
the screen to be seen (not just seen seeing). But more importantly, the swimmer's body
appears as we hear the opening chords of Caetano Veloso's song; the image, one can't
of the moment points in
help but sense, is of swimming "in" music. The gratuitousness
two directions:
toward
or embodiment.
The
a gay look and toward an immersion in aesthetic spectacle, sense,

wavering intimation of a gay look, I would therefore argue, is
important less because it makes us aware (if we weren't already) that male bodies are
objects of desire in cinema and less because of its function as bait for a thematico
psychological
reading than because of the way what one might call a gay look in
Almodovar
becomes indistinguishable
from the structure of viewing I explore here.
way to put this: here, and throughout the film, when one's viewing is most
[I desire that man there] it is also most "formal" [the eye as lens].) That,
"psychological"
more than any thematico-identificatory
that might occur to onea
explanation
gay
(Another
male tradition
of identification
or artistic) transcending
as arguing foraccounts
with female glamour, camp, or even a (putatively mature

of gay particularity, which I definitely do not want to be heard
for the interest, throughout Almodovar's
oeuvre, in beautiful
female bodies. I was led to think further about this moment by David Kurnickand
owe to him not only many of my thoughts about it but also, no doubt, many of the
sentences here that express them. Some of my terms here are also indebted to Kurnick's
"Carnal
Ironies,"
forthcoming
in the journal
Raritan.
27.
It isn't just Marco who cries: Lydia cries at the wedding;

Benigno cries at the prison at
the end; and Alicia's eyes, in the amazing
when Marco sees her, again awake,
sequence
in the dance studio, seem to be filled with tears.
28.
Almodovar's
are more than an homage to Oscar Wilde on Little Nell or Gore

of Reading Gaol" (see Vidal's question "Must one have a heart of
stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing?"
["A Good Man and a
Vidal
on "The
remarks
Ballad
VOYEURISM
AND
ANNUNCIATION
Perfect Play," review of Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann, Times Literary Supplement,
2-8 October 1987, 1063, quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
comments link tears
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 146). Almodovar's
and aesthetic transport. "I remember the first time I heard Caetano sing 'Cucurrucucu
he remarks in an Advocate interview, "I was moved to tears. It was surprising
Paloma,'"
to me, and that's why it works in the movie. While I'm sometimes embarrassed
to be a
man who cries, I find it dramatically
interesting because a man who cries in a public
"Pedro Talks," Advocate, 24 December
place is a man of mystery" (Alonso Duralde,
2002, 57).
29.
Bersani and Dutoit, "Almodovar's

Girls (All about My Mother)," in Forms of Being (see
note 22), 84. Thus, Daniel Mendelsohn's
hair-raising review of Volverhe claims that
Almodovar
has grown up, leaving extravagance
and camp behind for a more mature
thematics and style (deeper, more genuine, more felt, more
(and universally appealing)
not on the frivolous
real, and focused not on erotic obsession but on dutiful motherhood,
but on the hard-working)misreads
Almodovar
not only because it depends upon a
willful mischaracterization
of the films, early and late (describing Tal\ to Her as though
falling in love with a comatose woman were the everyday fare of mainstream cinema
and as though the film did not feature a man crawling into an enormous vagina, and
that in the early
suppressing the "elaborate narrative frames" of the later filmsframes
films were, for Mendelsohn,
for one's own
"idle, postmodern
games or advertisements
and not only because it refuses identification (to refer to "the addicts, the sex
cleverness")
as "hyperbolic elements" of the earlier films is to inhabit,
changes, the trannies, AIDS"
or to claim to inhabit, a world in which drag queens or people living with AIDS
or
transsexuals or addicts never occupy center stage, are not people at all but are rather
extravagant accessories to be discarded when one grows up and settles down, and gives
The misreading (and the moralism)
elements").
up "the ostentatious appeal to 'marginal'
instead seem to derive from an understanding
of film entirely governed by identifica
tion. Weimplicitly
mainstream,
seronegative,
mature,
hardworking,
as universally appealing
moviegoersrecognize
"The Women of Pedro
recognizably
depict us (Daniel Mendelsohn,
Yor\ Review of Booths 54, no. 3 [2007], www.nybooks.com/articles/1911
hopes, childbearing
February
30.
Translation
2010).
and, one piously

films that
Almodovar,"
[accessed
New
12
2007]).
at Rasakata,
text:
http://superseli.multiply.eom/reviews/item/5
(accessed
18 June
Original
Dicen que por las noches

no mas se le iba en puro llorar;
dicen que no comia,
no mas se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo
se estremecfa
al oir su llanto,
sufrio por ella,
y hasta en su muerte la fue llamando.
como
31.
Bersani
and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 169. For a gloss of what they mean by "inaccurate
which condenses a much larger argument about a mode of being in the
replications,"
world (very much relevant to my argument, but perhaps not clear from the immediate
context here), see also Leo Bersani, "Psychoanalysis
Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 161-74, esp. 168.
32.
and the Aesthetic
Subject,"
Critical
One thinks of the rainand

the various
This, too, is a recurrent effect in Almodovar.
the scene
stunning effects it creates as the camera looks through a taxi's windshieldin
of Esteban's death in All about My Mother, or of the sequence
in Law of Desire (La ley del
KEVIN
OHI
deseo, 1987) where Pablo Quintero (actor Eusebio Poncela) drives back toward Madrid
after he has discovered his boyfriend's murder. A shot of the road reflected in his
(as tears slide under the lenses and down his cheeks) is followed by a
pairing his eyes with his car's hubcaps, which gives way, in turn, to a
his tears on the outside of the windshield.
sunglasses
superimposition
shot that places
33.
The
from the
figures are lit by a light whose source is perhaps ambiguouscoming
stage, perhaps, or from an added special effect that creates the impression that they are
illuminated
a filmthey have
by a glowing within the film itself. Or as ifwatching
turned to face the projector, thus to be projected by it.
34.
Deleuze
and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 16869. On Combray as it was never

see also Gilles Deleuze,
Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard
(Minne
Press, 2004).
University of Minnesota
experienced,
apolis:
35.
Martin
36.
Ibid.,
37.
Ibid., 15; Jay quotes from Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Painting
Seventeenth Century (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 138.
38.
Ann Banfield, "Describing

the Unobserved:
Events Grouped
around an Empty Center,"
in The Linguistics of Writing; Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb,
Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe
UK: Manchester
(Manchester,
Jay, "Scopic Regimes

in Contemporary
Discussions
of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster,

Culture series (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 227.
12.
University
Press, 1987), 265-85,
quotation
in the
on 265.
276.
39.
Ibid,
40.
Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration

Fiction (London:
1982).
Routledge,
41.
See Gilles
and Representation
"The Perception Image," in Cinema

Deleuze,
Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjan
(Minneapolis:
in the Language
I: The Movement-Image,
University of Minnesota
of
trans.
Press,
on Free Indirect Discourse"
and "The
2003), 7186; and Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Comments
'Cinema of Poetry,"' in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton
and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), 79101, 16786.
Hugh
42.
Deleuze,
43.
Ibid., 74.
44.
Ibid,
64, 68.
45.
Ibid,
68, 83.
46.
Ibid,
81.
Ibid,
60. Banfield
47.
Cinema
1, 73.
likewise
eyeless, and so terribleto
turnswith
Virginia Woolfs flowers in "Time Passes,"

the "very look of the world" ("Describing,"
280):
It is as if the novelist, like the astronomer gazing at the image in the

of things that no one has ever seen
object glass, at the photograph
meets there the look of things themselves, in the double sense of loo\,
whereby the star, the lighthouse, Lacan's sardine can in the sea, flash
back, like so many mirrors, the now disembodied
look of the observer.
(279)
48.
Bersani
Miller's
and Dutoit, Forms of Being,

reading of an extraordinary
158-61.
sequence
For an (I think, related) effect, see D. A.

in Sansho the Bailiff (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi,
VOYEURISM
1954), where "character
Time Around:
("Second
ANNUNCIATION
gaze at one another in mutually aghast fascination"

Sansho the Bailiff," Film Quarterly 61, no. 1 [2007]: 65-67,
and camera
on 67).
quotation
49.
AND
that all pedophilic

relations are abusive because children can never
not only levels differences that would enable one to distinguish among degrees
of coercion; it also asserts that adult sexuality, by contrast, is structured by consent.
Whatever its other effects (shoring up adult self-presence and self-knowledge,
among
The
insistence
consent
other things), condemning

pedophilia
through these arguments about consent estab
lishes a class of persons who cannot speak for themselves. In that sense, consentand
a machine for generating inequality, like, for that matter, most "methods"
protectionis
of pedagogy. See Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Emancipation,
50.
Deleuze,
51.
The
Proust and Signs.
impersonal erotics I have traced in Almodovar's

toward a condition of the reader that David Kurnick
film resonates
with the aspiration

and in the
sees in Middlemarch
novel more generallyan

aspiration that, he suggests, brings
nineteenth-century
and a kind of detachment
("An Erotics of
together an experience of embodiment
Detachment:
Middlemarch and Novel-Reading
as Critical Practice," ELH 74 [2007]:
"novelistic
583608). These novels, he argues, raise the possibility of understanding
of individualization
but as a route to understanding
the
desire not as the mechanism
to escaping itthat is, as a kind of knowledge"
(594). The reader's serial
impediments
investment
in different novelsthe
privileging of closure, he suggests, obscures the fact
that, for a reader if not for the heroine of a marriage plot, "there is always life after
closure" (598), always more messy middles to become embroiled inopens
up, precisely
in one's ostensibly personal investment in the novel, in the novel as an erotic experience,
an ethical practice of detachment, a striving for a perspective beyond one's circumscribed
"The ecstasy that novels both thematize and provoke deserves
predicament:
ation as a technology of potentially critical self-estrangement"
(600).
consider

Voyeurism in Talk To Her

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VOYEURISM AND ANNUNCIATION IN ALMODVAR'S "TALK TO HER"

Author(s): Kevin Ohi

the world of my immortality.

The World Viewed

"Eye and Mind"

To begin with an axiom whose interest for cinematic

culture, or film criticism. There,

studied had histories of voyeuristic-type behavior"where

mies perhaps less invested in sexual repression

for its own sake. The case

vigilance (and punitive legal apparatus) insufficiently attentive to

is, for some feminists, all but synony

fest is an opacity in the relays linking sight to embodiment, for voyeurism,

other, that distance

ing the act of unseen gazing as a form of sexual domination/

providing, as different modes of miscarriage (or

the subject. (Whether total impersonality is actually possible is

appear there are not reducible to one subject's appropriation

by a voyeur may be an experience (exciting or terrifying) that, riveting one

from the experience

of being seen by him? Above

Tal\ to Her (,Hable con ella, dir. Pedro Al

while she dances

in a studio across the

sibly objectifying gaze becomes a form of sexual violation (hence, "almost

life the erstwhile passive object of a gaze.

in the world of the

Alicia has not consentedalthough

(on both sides) thatappealinglythe

mean why assume

compares to the dressing of a saint and which he pairs

structural characteristic of Renaissance

paintings: the bar or

that separates them" (81). Pye reads this bar

the truth is now conveyed as a performative effect, precisely

Pye's reading of these Annunciation

a narrative reading) and the fascinatory effects of its depic

or what she calls "fetishism"

raised to it (most notably, perhaps, by queer theoretical readings

ogy linking (male)

and sexual violence,

the essay turns out to be

solves them by dividing identification and desire (and the tendentious

two different kinds of absorption:

according to a division of labor "in" the subject (assigning the former to

seem like incompatible, or mutually interfering, forms of attention.

film depicts a rape obscures

the complication of that traversal (implicitly)

dering, in narrative, of his experience of visual absorption. The narration

and the woman

The man is "a bit overweight,

of his psychology, and his narration as symptom or as self-exposure. It

logic question, the philosopher

that the relation to color is much

van Gogh, Benigno presents us with ample psychological bait.

like bait for reductive reading. Indeed, diagnosis is anticipated by Benig

identification that would

give his helpless body over to Marco's

such diagnostic readings; they are baited precisely to be dismissed, and so

no's "sexual orientation."

his desire is not oriented

by gender. Not homo

thing through glass":16 his "orientation" is a structure of viewing.