written as part of a timed midterm exam for Dr. Veronica Fizpatrick’s seminar Love Hurts: Romance, Media, and Masochism at Brown Unversity, Spring 2024
Returning to Jennifer Doyle’s introduction of “difficulty” in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, I was struck by the important distinction made between the obscene and the difficult in our experience of an artwork (15). This, in combination with her emphasis on the role of criticism throughout, has urged me to return to a brief moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! ) (1989) which has haunted me, revealing complicity in my perceived inability to confront or engage with why and how this specifically-racialized situation produced, with seeming intention, a feeling of discomfort.
In the scene beginning 1:10:55, two black men (only one of whom is listed in the film’s credits – Alito Rodgers as “Negro”) stand in a public plaza at nighttime discussing their concerns surrounding an upcoming political election. Their conversation is interrupted when Ricky (Antonio Banderas), completely unannounced, approaches the men and asks, “Got any smack?” With a look of obvious annoyance, one of the men responds, “No, but how much you want?” before walking off-screen to retrieve the drugs for an ailing Marina (Victoria Abril), tied-up at home. Left alone with the other man, Ricky stands in uncomfortable silence, avoiding eye contact with the man smoking a cigarette, before awkwardly explaining “I’m gonna sit down over there.” Without extrapolating any accusations of directorial mal-intent in considering this brief encounter’s standing as the only appearance of black characters on screen throughout the entire film, of primary concern in my returning to this moment is the ease with which I was able to acknowledge a feeling of uncomfortability and opt out of affording it any critical consideration or involvement in our class’s conversation. The scene left me “tied-up,” and ultimately, it felt easier to ignore this moment of discomfort and instead focus on the more obvious points of controversy throughout, as framed by a class syllabus centering concerns of love, genre theory, and masochism through a lineup of films – with one exception, to-date – led predominantly by white actors (here, something seems to be revealed of the “unstated limits that the academy has drawn around its archive of possible referents” (Doyle 16), given Soraya Roberts’s elucidation of the ample existence of non-white – and specifically-black – films exploring similar genre-conventions and general themes).
Race proves itself far from the forefront of Almodóvar’s “queer” investigation of masochistic power-relations in the heterosexual coupling of ¡Átame! The film as a whole, then, might fail to satisfy Doyle’s criteria of difficulty in that we are only asked to sit with this discomfort for the 15 seconds of silence before Ricky retreats to the monument steps flanked by (non-black) sex workers and drug dealers, when we might again breathe easily as the film returns to its constructed facade of white-heteronormative Spanish society. In discussing a separate work, Doyle, on page 23, notes, “It is also difficult because the artist completely withholds the personal, the emotional component of the process from the work… forc[ing viewers] to provide the work’s emotional content.” Considering readings of ¡Átame! as being filtered through the director’s outwardly-queer lens, the portrayal of cishet “normalcy” and concurrent suppression of the director’s own experienced queerness are central to the anticipated subversive effect of the film. The scene I wish to discuss here is presented with a similar detachment, or apparent objectivity, asking that I as a white audience member confront the racialized preconceptions that diegetically enabled Ricky to profile the two black men as drug dealers and extradiegetically allowed me to recognize a paralleled experience of discomfort in witnessing the ensuing exchange. Through my own queer lens I felt absolved from Almodóvar’s critiques of heteronormativity throughout, but it is in this moment that I could recognize the director’s camera acting as a mirror held up to a broader society I am undoubtedly implicated in.
Wrestling with Doyle’s axiomatic assertion that, “attention to a work’s controversy actually suppresses attention to a work’s difficulty” (20), I am compelled to underscore a final time the retroactive feeling of complicity in my initial critical disregard for this described scene. In no way divorced from the academic context in which I have encountered ¡Átame! and other above-mentioned materials, there is a position of extreme privilege in having been able to “look away” (14) from a scene like this – experiencing a difficulty in finding the “right” language to express why this single confrontation with race could so efficiently generate such tension – and instead focus my critical attention – and subsequent class discussions – towards displays of pleasure, power, and possession. This critical impulse towards avoidance locates its genesis not only in a concession of race as existing outside of the film’s primary “interests” and subversive ambitions, but also in recognizing an assumed academic task and institutionalized framework within which we are asked to engage with these works.
Returning to Jennifer Doyle’s introduction of “difficulty” in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, I was struck by the important distinction made between the obscene and the difficult in our experience of an artwork (15). This, in combination with her emphasis on the role of criticism throughout, has urged me to return to a brief moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! ) (1989) which has haunted me, revealing complicity in my perceived inability to confront or engage with why and how this specifically-racialized situation produced, with seeming intention, a feeling of discomfort.
In the scene beginning 1:10:55, two black men (only one of whom is listed in the film’s credits – Alito Rodgers as “Negro”) stand in a public plaza at nighttime discussing their concerns surrounding an upcoming political election. Their conversation is interrupted when Ricky (Antonio Banderas), completely unannounced, approaches the men and asks, “Got any smack?” With a look of obvious annoyance, one of the men responds, “No, but how much you want?” before walking off-screen to retrieve the drugs for an ailing Marina (Victoria Abril), tied-up at home. Left alone with the other man, Ricky stands in uncomfortable silence, avoiding eye contact with the man smoking a cigarette, before awkwardly explaining “I’m gonna sit down over there.” Without extrapolating any accusations of directorial mal-intent in considering this brief encounter’s standing as the only appearance of black characters on screen throughout the entire film, of primary concern in my returning to this moment is the ease with which I was able to acknowledge a feeling of uncomfortability and opt out of affording it any critical consideration or involvement in our class’s conversation. The scene left me “tied-up,” and ultimately, it felt easier to ignore this moment of discomfort and instead focus on the more obvious points of controversy throughout, as framed by a class syllabus centering concerns of love, genre theory, and masochism through a lineup of films – with one exception, to-date – led predominantly by white actors (here, something seems to be revealed of the “unstated limits that the academy has drawn around its archive of possible referents” (Doyle 16), given Soraya Roberts’s elucidation of the ample existence of non-white – and specifically-black – films exploring similar genre-conventions and general themes).
Race proves itself far from the forefront of Almodóvar’s “queer” investigation of masochistic power-relations in the heterosexual coupling of ¡Átame! The film as a whole, then, might fail to satisfy Doyle’s criteria of difficulty in that we are only asked to sit with this discomfort for the 15 seconds of silence before Ricky retreats to the monument steps flanked by (non-black) sex workers and drug dealers, when we might again breathe easily as the film returns to its constructed facade of white-heteronormative Spanish society. In discussing a separate work, Doyle, on page 23, notes, “It is also difficult because the artist completely withholds the personal, the emotional component of the process from the work… forc[ing viewers] to provide the work’s emotional content.” Considering readings of ¡Átame! as being filtered through the director’s outwardly-queer lens, the portrayal of cishet “normalcy” and concurrent suppression of the director’s own experienced queerness are central to the anticipated subversive effect of the film. The scene I wish to discuss here is presented with a similar detachment, or apparent objectivity, asking that I as a white audience member confront the racialized preconceptions that diegetically enabled Ricky to profile the two black men as drug dealers and extradiegetically allowed me to recognize a paralleled experience of discomfort in witnessing the ensuing exchange. Through my own queer lens I felt absolved from Almodóvar’s critiques of heteronormativity throughout, but it is in this moment that I could recognize the director’s camera acting as a mirror held up to a broader society I am undoubtedly implicated in.
Wrestling with Doyle’s axiomatic assertion that, “attention to a work’s controversy actually suppresses attention to a work’s difficulty” (20), I am compelled to underscore a final time the retroactive feeling of complicity in my initial critical disregard for this described scene. In no way divorced from the academic context in which I have encountered ¡Átame! and other above-mentioned materials, there is a position of extreme privilege in having been able to “look away” (14) from a scene like this – experiencing a difficulty in finding the “right” language to express why this single confrontation with race could so efficiently generate such tension – and instead focus my critical attention – and subsequent class discussions – towards displays of pleasure, power, and possession. This critical impulse towards avoidance locates its genesis not only in a concession of race as existing outside of the film’s primary “interests” and subversive ambitions, but also in recognizing an assumed academic task and institutionalized framework within which we are asked to engage with these works.