Law of Desire

first part

i saw law of desire for the first time when it aired on portuguese television during my teenage years. it disturbed me so deeply that i never watched it again until i had to write this text. the unease i felt was similar to what i experienced when i saw the wounded man (patrice chéreau, 1983) or happy together (wong kar-wai, 1997): films that share a vision of desire as a destructive force, where love—if one can even use that word—is not a fulfilling experience; it is an impulse that pulls the protagonists into relationships marked by obsession, pain, and the impossibility of reciprocity. love—if one can even use that word—is unsustainable, and loneliness, inevitable. desire is an abyss between lovers, it makes communication between them impossible, condemns them to a voracity that is never satisfied, to a relentless search for a wholeness they never reach. and none of this is accidental: all three films address queer identity in societies that resist its existence, brutally marginalizing it.

i wonder if we can even use that word—love—because we are speaking of desire, and because, if we were never taught how to love, can we really know what it means? are we capable of putting it into practice? are we, in fact, able to overcome what was denied to us and embody an idea that society sells, but does not actually live by?

at the time the film was made, homosexual relationships were subject to greater social and political repression, and the representation of queer relationships was almost always tied to secrecy, to loss, to tragedy. in spain, post-franco democracy was still full of remnants of conservative moralism. yet almodóvar wanted to celebrate the first moments of freedom, the first moments of democracy after forty years of dictatorship. law of desire became a milestone in lgbtq representation in spanish cinema—because it focused, for the first time, on trans and homosexual protagonists in an open and unapologetic way, while still showing the social repression that remains a daily part of their lives.

the film is groundbreaking in several ways within almodóvar’s career: it is his first melodrama—it opened up aesthetic and thematic paths that would later be revisited and developed over the following decades. as he himself has stated, law of desire is a key film in his body of work, because it explores an absolute need to be desired and, at the same time, the realization that it is very rare for two desires to fully coincide and correspond—a perspective that is clearly seen in later films like tie me up! tie me down!, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and bad education. the film was also the first to be produced by el deseo, the production company founded by almodóvar and his brother agustín. and it was his first film in which the main character is openly inspired by the director himself.

second part
the typewriter in law of desire is a physical and emotional extension of pablo—it is the intermediary tool that transforms reality into narrative, that serves to master frustration through writing. i can't help but associate this idea with william s. burroughs (especially in naked lunch—both the book and david cronenberg's film adaptation), for whom the typewriter becomes a kind of vital organ that converts impulses into text. in cronenberg's film, the relationship between human and machine is visceral—the typewriter metamorphoses into an organic creature that vomits words in an uncontrollable compulsion.

like pablo—almodóvar’s alter ego—the protagonist of naked lunch, bill lee—burroughs’s alter ego—finds himself in a state of identity and creative fusion, where desire, violence, and writing deeply influence one another. both experience the complexity of a creative process that is at once liberating and oppressive—a compulsion that reveals both their vulnerabilities and their desire to recreate the world in the image of their own obsessions. the typewriter becomes a kind of queer interface, a portal through which so-called marginal identities find expression.

the act of writing is not merely about conveying linear stories, but about materializing internal conflicts—repressed desires, personal traumas, unrealizable fantasies. the typewriter becomes a symbol of transgression—a tool that gives form to fragmented, non-normative identities, that transforms intimate confessions into public gestures (the personal is political).

i find myself wondering: today, artificial intelligence is often seen as a threat to human artistic creation; but could it come to occupy a subversive role, like typewriters did back then, and become an intermediary tool for a visceral act of absolute resistance?