What Have I Done to Deserve This?

After today’s class discussion I wanted to make sure that in my comments about ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto/What Have I Done to Deserve This? I touched on the issue of possible influences for the film. I also think that it’s important to bring into such a critique the elements of analysis that appear in the reading by Kathleen Vernon (available on PDF at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1212901.pdf?acceptTC=true), some of which might illuminate and other that might obscure our own analysis of the work.

 

From the films we have watched we could say that Almodóvar’s work cannot be defined by a specific movie style or genre, but rather represents a pastiche, a mix-and-match of genres and influences that form a collage that defines his very personal style. Vernon’s essay echoes some of the points that we had made prior to seeing today´s film. Mostly, the influence of neorealism, the film genre developed in Italy after WWII and discussed in the readings of Death of a Cyclist. Neorealism shifted the tradition of Italian cinema from an epic style that had developed in the early history of Italian film (mostly under fascism), and which glorified the deeds of heroic individuals in a way similar to the basic tradition of the Western in US cinema –although in a much more grandiose style, sometimes tied to deeds of Italian history, much like Spanish film had done under Franco's earlier years-- and towards a style that centered on the struggles of the working class and the enormous gaps that separated, culturally and economically, the “two Italies”, the rural south and the industrial north. Italian neorealist films were also infused with very strong doses of melodrama, the genre Vernon most closely identifies as the root of this specific work by Almodóvar. Some prominent examples of Italian neorealism include Bicycle Thieves, by Vittorio de Sica (1948), the story of a struggling working man whose world falls apart when his bicycle, his sole mode of transportation, is stolen and he can find no other work to feed his beautiful young wife and cute little boy in the big city, and Riso Amaro (Bitter rice, 1949) by Giusseppe de Santis, which focused, on the other hand, on the struggle of the peasant families. Italian neorealism’s huge doses of melodrama highlighted dramatic situations in order to stretch the emotion of an audience that, in the eyes of the filmmakers, would be driven to political action.

This type of what we could call political neorealism was rescued in the early years of the post-Franco regime by a series of Spanish filmmakers interested in portraying the struggles of a new working class population that arrived from the provinces to the urban areas to participate in the economic boom of the time, and which the city had a difficulty absorbing. I referred to these films as kinki (meaning young delinquent) or urchin films; last week we watched a clip from Colegas, (de la Iglesia, 1982) and from Carlos Saura’s Deprisa, deprisa (Fast, Fast!, 1981). These films tended to focus on the lives of children of rural immigrants to the city who, due to lack of parental supervision, and influenced by their environment (most plots take place in the projects) fell into lives of crime, with very dramatic consequences for themselves and for society. The filmmakers’ intent was also geared towards generating empathy towards these characters by invoking the roughness of their upbringing, and highlighting the enormous socioeconomic and cultural divide that would need to be overcome to modernize Spain. I have no doubt that these stories are the source for the characters of the children in What Have I done… Here, I have to disagree with Vernon’s political reading of the film depicting the “urban non-planning of the Franco years, growing out of a policy that actively sought by neglect of urban social services to discourage immigration to the ‘corrupt’ cities” (33) --I encourage you to read the discussion alluded to in note 15 of Vernon’s article to see the counterpoint to her position, which argues that, instead, the projects where these characters, including Gloria and her family, lived, were supposed to serve as launching platforms for a new urban working class, and their failure being one of lack of awareness, on the part of Franco’s planners, of the enormous socioeconomic and cultural gap that separated their idealized vision of what Spain from its reality, a gap created precisely by their own inability to see beyond their own social condition.

The film also shows influence from the French New wave. The French New Wave develops in the late 50s and early 60s as a response, on the one hand to the exhaustion of neorealism as a genre (too rural, politically too manipulative, to self-aggrandizing), and an attempt on the part of French filmmakers to offer newer perspectives on "reality” and a realistic portrayal of modern life and the alienation it produced in the working class. Issues of consumerism, of the tensions and limits that modern life forced on the imagination and free will are at the heart of many of the plots of films of the new wave (we mentioned Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), but other new wave stiles, such as those exemplified by both Jan Luc Godard’s A bout the soufflé(Breathless, 1960), and Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), also are important for two reasons: one is the infusion of humor into what is mostly a tragic plot, the other the homage both films pay to a golden age of Hollywood. Almodóvar’s love of the New Wave and especially of classical Hollywood films are apparent in What Have I done... The representation of the children as cogent beings (like in 400 Blows), the “comic” new wave, exemplified by the man who makes car noises in the bar, as well as to the golden age of Hollywood referenced openly in the incorporation of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) to the plot, and of Alfred Hitchcock (in the shower scene, and in the appropriation of the murder method from the TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents") are only a few examples.

 

In this analysis, I believe understanding Almodovar’s own position is fundamental. In a1984 interview where he speaks specifically of What Have I done… he talks of the film as something he can relate to precisely because of his own experience moving from the Spanish countryside to the city. This ties it to what is Vernon’s most interesting family tree when talking about the film. That is its relation to a series of dark comedies from the 1950s and 1960s about the struggles of the emerging urban middle class in Spain, all of them produced under Franco, but that could also be given a subversive twist thanks to the use of dark humor. These films come out of the neorealist tradition (one of its most important representatives is Marco Ferreri, who was Italian but worked in Spain as a filmmaker), a genre that in Spain had been actually appropriated by fascism to offer a positive spin on the rural condition of post-war Spain. The humor in the majority of these comedies, which are intended as appealing to a mainstream Spanish audience, was used to downplay the type of hardship and alienation that this transition to modern life could bring, and was therefore allowed by the very harsh censors of the time precisely because it downplayed the financial struggles implied in moving into the middle class, which also meant becoming part of consumer society. However, filmmakers like Ferreri and especially Luis García Berlanga in El verdugo used humor to subvert the principles on which the genre stood, and used it, like Almodovar, to critique the dehumanizing nature of a system that emphasized consumerism in order to fuel economic growth. Thus, Vernon mentions García Berlangas’ The Executioner, the story of a young man who is forced to accept becoming the successor of his father in law’s practice as a state executioner in order to be able to afford the lifestyle he wants to give his new bride. Like in What Have I Done…?, humor is used in that piece to mask the grotesque tragedy of the situation, a grotesqueness made even worse by the fact that state executioner was a real job in Franco’s Spain.

Finally, it is important to reiterate that What Have I Done’s main twist on the Spanish neorealist tradition of the 1970s is that it focuses on the plight of several women. Vernon quotes Almodovar and explores the claim that the film is about motherhood, but it is also important to point out that it is about a mother whose role is challenged by the expectations and the demands (and the tensions and conflicts) generated by the conflict between tradition and modernity. Consumerism, or the material comforts modernity promises society, have a much higher cost for the working class, for whom the access to money implies sacrifices that are both psychological –Gloria is “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”— and physical –Gloria sells her child to the dentist in order to buy the hair curler, and sometimes require confronting certain taboos imposed by social tradition –women are not supposed to work —or by the legal imposition of the state (Gloria’s oldest son makes his money selling drugs, an endeavor that although very capitalistic, is sanctioned by the law, while Cristal shows perhaps the most clear example of these two contradictions, prostitution as being something that is sanctioned by the law because of its social stigmatization). Like in the previous Almodóvar films we have seen, Gloria’s liberation comes from her ability to break out of the traditionally imposed restrictions on her self reliance; here though, independence is also presented as an acceptance of the hardships that come with it, perhaps as represented by the enormous, ugly, dirty, balconies that she stares at from her window, and also as a choice, since Gloria chooses these hardships over the easy life that returning to the village might represent.