Gender Metamorphosis in Almodovar's Talk to Her: The Fine Line between Violation and Interpenetration

The news has familiarized us with the story of young people in irreversible comas who end up being kept in a state of non-life/non-death by modern medicine. The great emotional impact of these events, in addition to the manipulative and perverse use that the media often makes of them, is ascribable to their exemplary nature. But it is also because similar stories take root in the primordial collective imagination, even in the enchanted world of fairy tales that we have all loved since childhood: we all remember that in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, young girls in a state of apparent death are awakened by the love of a young prince.

I will not concern myself here with the metaphorical significance of those fairy tales; rather it interests me to emphasize the persistence and re-emergence of the stereotype of masculinity and femininity, that in the film Talk to Her takes to the extremes to explore its complexity and de-construct it.

Specific analytic themes and questions involving the collective imagination are woven together, as many psychoanalytic studies of the film have emphasized, demonstrating the enormous capacity of the cinema to explore human emotions and affectiveness. Almodovar has achieved in this film the maturity of expression that permits us as viewers to undergo a journey that engenders hope and a sense of friendship and love, passing through psychic areas and characters' dimension in which unfinished gender identifications and personalities become thinkable, and even a personality that is so distant and alien from our usual shared meanings — that is, Benigno's — is no longer simply condemned with a label, because something during our vision of the film will have profoundly changed (Sabbadini, 2002).

Reflecting on the theme of gender differences in the analytic relationship leads to the consideration of two extreme conditions: that of violating the bounderies in the male analyst/female patient couple, and that of a regressive push toward fused dynamics