The Skin I Live In

La piel que habito opens with a contrast between a view of Toledo and that of an isolated mansion, El Cigarral, a kind of fortress closed in on itself at the end of an uncertain path. Through the railings and closed windows, one can guess at a body moving.  It is an undefined figure, a body bent backwards on a sofa, a character that appears like a mannequin, a puppet, or a robot, expressing enormous tension at first, and then, in a yoga position, great stillness. The tight-fitting skin-coloured suit that covers the body hides features and identities as if it were the shell of a chrysalis concealing an enigma. The face expresses no emotion, the eyes are closed.

In the next scene, a pair of hands prepares a tray with medicines and drinks. Then, the camera focuses on the cover of a book about Louise Bourgeois and continues filming heads and busts made with fragments of fabric and glue, and again, a pair of hands cutting fabric and gluing it. Through an internal lift, the tray with the medicines, water and food is sent, along with fabrics and a book, to the room/prison where the creature is confined. In the kitchen, there are two screens that record and monitor everything that happens in that closed room.

The prisoner's face is extremely beautiful and her voice is almost sweet and very young. Her name is Vera, although we will never know how many verities exist within that body and how so many contradictory identities intersect. The cutting of fabrics and collage on the heads and busts refers to the work of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), for whom used clothing holds problematic memories — fragments of fabric are sewn onto contorted, transformed, dismembered heads and bodies. Everything in the artist's work is disturbing, and Louise viewed the production of these pieces, using her own clothes, as her second skin and, in her own words, as metaphors: cutting, tearing, sewing, joining, gluing... express, at the same time, tension or suffering, but also acts of repair, desire, sexuality, tension, conflict or identity fragmentation. The use of soft materials often gives these works a sensual quality and an almost tactile sense of vulnerability and intimacy. Mutilated, amalgamated, almost inhuman bodies abound — bodies as sites of violence.

In the film's credits, Pedro Almodóvar thanks Louise Bourgeois: «Gracias a Louise Bourgeois, cuya obra no sólo me ha emocionado, sino que sirve de salvación al personaje de Vera.» (“Thanks to Louise Bourgeois, whose work has not only moved me, but also serves as salvation for the character of Vera.”) Nevertheless, there seems to be no salvation in this film. There is hatred, denial, trauma, resistance, and the revolt of a desecrated body. Opium helps one forget.

Over the course of her long life, Louise Bourgeois spent almost 20 years working on a series of pieces she called Cells. These pieces depict a microcosm enclosed in cages that separate it from the outside world. Louise speaks insistently about pain — physical, emotional, psychological, mental and intellectual pain, questioning the relationship between the physical/material and the emotional — and the need to externalise her life, her own memories — «Art is a guarantee of sanity», she writes in one of her works; and in another, «You have to tell your story and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you». In the 1995 work In and Out, the interior space of the cell is dominated by a contorted body without a face or arms that arches its back and is multiplied by mirrors and mirrored spheres. Cell can mean both the vital power of a cell and the encapsulation, the isolation of a prison: «Each cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain... each cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at». Fear and pain are always present, and the Cells offer themselves to the voyeur, defying them, exposing the turbulence and a certain darkness of the artist's inner world and provoking the gaze and memories of the observer. Just like in cinema.

Everything is tragic and violent in this Almodóvar film. Vera inhabits a skin that was imposed on her — first, subjugated, out of revenge, so that she would forget who she was and become a laboratory guinea pig, then so that she would construct an identity that she never really wanted. Everything else explodes in the voids, in resentments, in the amorality and contradictions of the characters. The surgeon Ledgard and the thief Zeca are brothers and do not know it; the mother who gave birth to them admits that they are crazy; from the tragic story of the former, there remains the suicide of his wife and daughter; Ledgard kills Zeca after he rapes Vera, thinking she was Ledgard's wife and his former lover. All this is revealed by their mother, Marília, in a sequence dominated by a ritual of fire on a huge pyre where the evidence of Zeca's murder is burned. It almost seems like a family: the mother, the son and Vera, the body of vengeance turned into a body of desire, as in the myth in which Pygmalion falls in love with the ivory statue he patiently carved, transformed into a woman of flesh and soul by the arts of the goddess of love. That is not Vera; Vera is a patchwork quilt, a human wreck produced by a mad and vengeful creator.

El Cigarral is the haunted mansion, the house of torture, the territory of manipulation, of control and violence aided by cutting-edge (bio)technology, electronic surveillance and characters whose stories the film entangles in past and present times. A personality can never be constructed in a linear fashion.

When Vera is ‘ready’, with perfect skin resistant to pain, there is a clash between the aesthetic perfection of the body/object (like Titian's bodies/paintings that occupy the immense walls of the house) and the permanent restlessness and pain that shine through in her gaze, even when she tries to face the emptiness and rebellion that inhabit her. Vera runs away, searching for her origins six years after the transgenesis. She will find a labyrinth, the same one that, like a survival diary, was drawn on the walls of the place where she was imprisoned: I breathe, I survive.

Pedro Almodóvar confronts a veritable regime of exception regarding the limits of power and the manipulation of (bio)technology in the subjugation of bodies, a nightmare close to what Giorgio Agamben denounces in his work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. El Cigarral is the biopolitical metaphor for extermination, the banality of mutilation, the production of survivors, dehumanisation.