Labyrinth of Passion

On February 23, 1981 — 23-F — Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, backed by his loyal Civil Guard officers, stormed the Spanish Congress determined to dismantle democracy. Wearing a tricorn hat, a thick mustache, and brandishing a weapon, he shouted: “¡Que no se mueva nadie!!” (Nobody move!!)

In Pedro Almodóvar’s world, everything moves. After a brutal civil war, decades of Francoist dictatorship, and subsequent executions, Spain was beginning to shake off oppression. It was La Movida! Before becoming a branding image for the new Spain and a promotional tool for Madrid, La Movida (1978–1983) was an underground culture, deeply connected to Pop Art, Punk, and the New Wave movement. “La Movida began when Franco died and we all went crazy. We didn’t know if there would be democracy or dictatorship. What’s more, we didn’t give a damn. We just wanted to be left alone to live our lives: to fuck in peace and live in freedom,” said MacNamara.

From the very beginning, Pedro Almodóvar was highly active in Madrid’s avant-garde music scene (with groups like Kaka de Luxe and Alaska y Los Pegamoides), in alternative clubs (such as Vía Láctea or Pentagrama), in experimental theater groups (like Los Goliardos, where he met Carmen Maura and Félix Rotaeta), and, of course, in cinema. That diversity — as well as Almodóvar himself — is fully present in Labyrinth of Passion (Laberinto de pasiones), alongside the music of Alaska, MacNamara, Tino Casal, and the works of photographers Alberto García-Alix and Ouka Lele, or fashion designer Sybilla.

Almodóvar is “Patty Diphusa” — 12 columns he wrote between 1983 and 1985 for La Luna de Madrid, a magazine referenced at the very beginning of the film — the porn star who tells photo-novella-style stories featuring rapists, homosexual couples, a drag queen, her rival’s amnesiac fiancé, a taxi driver and his son, among others. This fictional alter ego of Almodóvar appears throughout his films, portraying exaggerated, hyperbolic, and explosive characters, sentimentality, insatiable desires, and very strange lives — all narrated as if they were trivial matters. The language is raw, grotesque, and infused with a vulgar erotic lexicon, free of metaphorical euphemisms. Patty embodies radical freedom in customs and morality, the comic and the melodramatic, provocation, excess, the exotic, and above all, sex — and lots of it: “¿Mi profesión? Sex-symbol internacional, o estrella internacional del porno. Mis fotonovelas y algunas películas de Super 8 se han vendido muy bien en África, Portugal, Tokio, en el Soho y en el Rastro” (“My profession? International sex symbol, or international porn star. My photo-novellas and some Super 8 films have sold very well in Africa, Portugal, Tokyo, in Soho and at El Rastro.”)

Susan Sontag (1964) called this cultural pattern Camp: a pure aesthetic experience of the world, the triumph of style over content, aesthetics over morality, irony over tragedy; the anti-serious, the simulacrum, the extravagant, the depoliticized. Andy Warhol directed Camp in 1965, and Queer culture has expanded this transgression ever since.

The abundance of identities — sometimes exaggerated, other times diffuse or unstable — was already evident in Almodóvar’s early short films and his first feature (1978). The presence of drag performers becomes an effective device for expanding social visibility, theatricality, and the performance of overcoming the male/female binary, embracing uninhibited expression and bodily liberation.

From the very beginning of Labyrinth of Passion, immersed in the crowds of Madrid’s most iconic market, El Rastro, Almodóvar directs his desiring gaze towards the sensual looks of Sexilia (a nymphomaniac Patty Diphusa) and Riza Niro, the prince, as they survey the bulges in men’s trousers and the sway of their buttocks — in a cinematic exercise in which body language crudely encodes signs of sex, desire, and passion. At other times, these signs appear through elaborate, flamboyant compositions of makeup, clothing, color, and adornment. From haute couture to kitsch, from parodying the attire of the conservative bourgeoisie to the most outrageous and fantastical accessories, Almodóvar constructs fetishes — direct or subliminal visual narratives of everything that inhabits desire and the vibrant ways it manifests.

Labyrinth of Passion is... a labyrinth where one can easily get lost in the torrential flow of stories, events, themes, and characters — a world with no heroes, no villains — or else escape through the film’s final scene: the romance and sex between Riza Niro and Sexilia — she finally cured of her nymphomania, and he liberated from his mother’s seductive manipulations — literally flying off to a tropical paradise on a Caribbean island.

The narrative unfolds in a disorienting, scattered mode, where everything has a place: hedonism, music, a gay sadomasochistic photo-novella, a princess, artificial insemination, incest, bisexuality, group sex, homosexuality, aphrodisiacs for men and parakeets, terrorists, drugs, alcohol, lots of slang, domestic interiors, mirrors and crystal, Madrid nightlife cruising scenes… Everything contributes to a creative and systematic dismantling of bourgeois and reactionary Francoist morality — of the family, of the political, and of aesthetic correctness. A daughter, lying in bed with her father (who once found sex repulsive), tells a friend over the phone: “No more sex problems in this family!”

It was called postmodern to distinguish this culture from the political and social militancy of post-war modernity, which had been suppressed by the dictatorship. The moral and sexual liberation of the 1960s appears here stripped of leftist ideologies and social causes. Juan Luis Cebrián, founder of El País (1976) — a modernist, Marxist, and existentialist — described in his book La España que bosteza (1980) an atmosphere of disillusionment with the unfulfilled promises of the young democracy and a left entangled in pacts, alliances, and crises: “un verdadero suicidio político de la oposición” (“a true political suicide of the opposition”).

Upon that melancholy, Almodóvar constructs his picaresque, jocular, anti-epic, anti-heroic narratives — full of delirious micro-episodes and gags, abrupt shifts between the banal and the grotesque (and vice versa), disconcerting situations, contradictions and dissensions, exaggeration, extreme uninhibitedness, parody, melodrama, feísmo (an aesthetic of intentional ugliness or visual crudeness), kitsch and, above all, overflowing desire, sex, and eroticism. Patty Diphusa used to say it was always the same: pleasure, pain, truth, freedom, love, death. There is no alternative moral code beyond transgression itself, only a mutable game that constantly invents and dissolves its own rules — a liquid morality, as Zygmunt Bauman would later put it — always guided by the pleasure it may yield.

It is worth recalling António Variações (1983): “Vou viver / até quando eu não sei / que me importa o que serei / quero é viver / Amanhã, espero sempre um amanhã / e acredito que será / mais um prazer (…)” (“I’m going to live / until when, I don’t know / what do I care what I’ll be / I just want to live / Tomorrow, I always wait for a tomorrow / and I believe it will be / one more pleasure (...)”).