Talk to Her

A. W. Eaton, A. W. Eaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135977498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most renowned film directors of recent years. Talk to Her is one of the most discussed and controversial of all his films. Dealing principally with the issue of rape, it also offers profound insights into the nature of love and friendship whilst raising important philosophical and moral questions in unsettling and often paradoxical ways.

This is the first book to explore and address the philosophical aspects of Almodóvar's film. Opening with a helpful introduction by Noël Carroll that places the film in context, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics:

• The relationship between art and morality and the problem of 'immoralism'
• Moral injury and its role in the way we form moral judgments, including the ethics of love and friendship
• The nature of dialogue, sexual objectification and what 'listening to' means in the context of gender
• Almodóvar's use of allusion and the unmasking of appearances to explore hidden themes in human nature.

Including a biography of Almodóvar, Talk to Her is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film as well as ethics and gender. It is also provides an accessible and informative insight into philosophy for those in related disciplines such as film studies, literature and religion.

Contributors: Noël Carroll, A. W. Eaton, Cynthia Freeland, Robert B. Pippin, C.D.C. Reeve, and George M. Wilson

Chapter 1
Noël Carroll

TALK TO THEM: AN INTRODUCTION

EVER SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed in 1972, the volume of dialogue about motion pictures in the world of English-speaking philosophy has been increasing at a geometrical rate. There are now quite a number of undergraduate textbooks that use movies to introduce students to the classical problems of philosophy. Anthologies abound entitled Philosophy and——, where the blank is filled in with the name of some popular culture franchise, and often that of a motion picture or a motion picture maker. Indeed, at last count, three publishers were trolling in this market.

There is an academic journal devoted to the subject, called Film and Philosophy, which is connected to a society—the Society for the Philosophical Study of Contemporary Visual Art—whose sessions are predominantly concerned with film. Books and articles on cinema by philosophers are appearing at a steady pace and courses in philosophy and film are spreading like wildfire. And now Routledge has launched this splendid new series devoted to the philosophical examination of individual films of note.

One reason for the explosion of interest in cinema on the part of philosophers has to do with the fact that baby-boomers and subsequent generations have grown up in a culture saturated with moving pictures, not only in theaters, but, perhaps even more importantly, on television. Motion pictures are everywhere, from hospital waiting rooms and airport lounges to your computer and your cell phone. It would be astounding if such an enormous part of culture escaped the notice of philosophy. Moreover, motion pictures form such a “natural” or, at least, presumed part of the lives of the students in philosophy classes that it is predictable that their teachers would attempt to take advantage of this fact.

The interest that philosophers are taking in motion pictures is various. There is what we may call the philosophy of motion pictures. This involves the philosophical examination of the concepts that organize the practices of motion picture-making and movie-going. Many of the questions that it addresses were once in the domain of what was called “film theory.” They include: “What is cinema?,” “What is the relation of film to reality?,” “What is the relation of movies to the other arts?,” “Is cinematic representation distinctive?,” and so forth. The philosophy of the motion picture also examines the special problems of the various movie genres, such as suspense, horror, melodrama, and comedy. And, as well, the philosophy of motion pictures grapples with the moral philosophy of cinema.

However, another aspect of philosophy’s interest in the movies is what I shall refer to as a concern with philosophy “in” film. As the preposition in suggests, this involves the interpretation of various motion pictures in terms of the standing philosophical themes that they can be shown to illustrate, adumbrate, or articulate, as one might find egoism exemplified by the television series The Sopranos.

Closely related to the enterprise of excavating philosophical themes from motion pictures is what we might label philosophy through motion pictures. Proponents of this view, which many find highly controversial, believe that some motion pictures do philosophy—that is, some motion pictures may offer significant contributions or insights to the conversation of philosophy. In this volume on Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, the essayists provide examples of all three of the preceding types of philosophical engagement with cinema, often in the same article, along with extremely nuanced readings of the narrative and profoundly probing examinations of the characters.

In her piece “Almodóvar’s Immoralism,” A.W. Eaton addresses a current issue in the moral philosophy of the arts: the question of whether an artwork, in this case a motion picture, can advance a morally compromised viewpoint in such a way that it enhances the overall artistic value of the work. This question has emerged in the wake of recent discussions on the inadequacy of autonomism—the view that ethics and aesthetics are separate and non-intersecting realms of value such that an ethical defect in a work never lowers the aesthetic value of the work nor does the ethical merit of a work increase its aesthetic worth. Recently this view has been challenged, and several arguments have been advanced to the effect that sometimes an ethical flaw can contribute to the aesthetic demerit of a work. But these arguments, in turn, have led to speculation about whether or not an ethical flaw could in some other cases augment the aesthetic excellence of the work. This view has come to be called “immoralism” and Eaton maintains that Talk to Her confirms the possibility of immoralism.

The film tells the story of Benigno, a male nurse who attends a comatose patient named Alicia, a ballet dancer to whom Benigno was obsessively attracted even before she was involved in the automobile accident that reduced her to an almost vegetative state. Benigno, whose name means “benign” in Spanish, appears to be an immensely gentle and dedicated caregiver. He doesn’t—as others might be prone to do—forget Alicia’s personhood. He talks to her as if she could respond and acts as if she does. He also urges his friend Marco to treat likewise his ex-lover Lydia (who is also in a coma in the same hospital as Alicia as a result of a bullfighting mishap).

Although Benigno strikes us as not exactly mentally sound, he is otherwise presented as an extremely humane person, even perhaps somewhat saintly—a holy fool of sorts—at times. But, in the course of the story, we learn that Benigno rapes Alicia off-screen and impregnates her. Nevertheless, Eaton notes that the moral heinousness of Benigno’s deed never strikes the viewer with the force that it deserves. Its impact has been aesthetically muted by Almodóvar. Reviewers, for example, treat the film as if the relation between Benigno and Alicia was a romance, albeit of the l’amour fou variety.

However, this is nothing short of ethical obfuscation, indeed, an instance of the enduring moral category error that assimilates rape as a form of love. In short, we are being led by the film to be more sympathetic and forgiving of Benigno than we should be. Our attitude towards him is morally defective, since it depends, as Eaton remarks, “upon our interpreting the rape as something other than a rape.”

Furthermore, it is no accident that we have this attitude toward Benigno. It has been engineered by the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar who, among other things, has kept the rape scene offscreen and displaced its violence and brutality onto an ostensibly unintentionally comic silent film, called The Shrinking Lover, and a bubbling lava lamp. Out of sight, out of mind. What we are left with is the appearance of Benigno’s consistently kindly demeanor, which inclines us, like the movie critics, to overlook the gravity of his transgression. Thus, the film is morally defective because it both mandates that we adopt an ethically wrong attitude toward Benigno and seduces us, in large measure, into doing so.

But, Eaton adds, this moral defect redounds to the artistic merit of Talk to Her, thereby supporting the contention that immoralism is possible. According to Eaton, although the film encourages a morally pernicious viewpoint, it does not let us forget entirely that Benigno has done something terrible. Thus, on her account, the sensitive viewer is “torn between feelings of sympathy and antipathy, attraction and disgust, praise and blame,” and the experience of this dilemma is salutary. Consequently, it is precisely by making us feel what we ought not to feel that the film succeeds artistically in provoking our acknowledgment of this human possibility through our own experience.

Of course, whether or not this counts in favor of immoralism hinges to a great extent upon whether or not you feel that the discovery that Almodóvar’s film affords is an ethical one; an enlargement, say, of our comprehension of human possibilities that are relevant to the moral life. That is, what if it is convincing to hypothesize that Almodóvar’s purpose is to thrust us into an ethically uncomfortable position for the moral purpose of revealing to us something about the natural dispositions of the human heart?

Like Eaton, Robert B. Pippin, in his paper “Devils and angels in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” is struck by the viewer’s response to Benigno—specifically by our hesitation over simply condemning him and leaving it at that. Although the audience does not lose sight of the fact in the fiction that Benigno has done something grievously wrong, our judgment of Benigno does not end there. That Benigno is a rapist (period, full stop) is not our ultimate view of him. For, in addition, on Pippin’s accounting, we also admire something about Benigno—namely his single-minded authenticity; his integrity; his wholehearted, uncompromising embrace of his existential commitments. As Pippin observes, “Benigno, for all of his delusions, retains some sort of aesthetically admirable genuineness [an integratedness?] throughout the film, an aesthetic genuineness, I would say, that we want to count as morally relevant.”

Thus, in Pippin’s view, Talk to Her affords an opportunity for philosophical insight. It leads the viewer to the recognition that questions of moral injury are not the only considerations that may come into play when engaging in moral judgment, nor should they be taken as automatically trumping all other sorts of evaluations of acts or persons. So whereas Eaton maintains that Talk to Her inveigles the audience to embrace an improper moral attitude, Pippin implicitly rejoins that the attitude is rather, from the moral point of view, justifiably a more commodious one—one that takes into account the admirable ways in which Benigno is true to himself.

In George M. Wilson’s “Rapport, rupture, and rape: reflections on Talk to Her,” further details are added to the portrait of what is admirable about Benigno. For Wilson, Benigno is an exemplar of a kind of fundamental human virtue. That virtue can be marked by the slogan “talk to her;” “understood in the appropriate expanded sense, [it] is a prime instance of and a metonomy for the activity of taking care of another person with unquestioning love, without any conditions and without expectations of reward or immediate response.” Indeed, it is when Marco is able to talk to the dead Benigno, standing at the foot of his grave, that we come to suppose that Marco may finally be capable of love.

Of course, Wilson, like Pippin, does not think that Benigno’s virtues in this regard exculpate the terrible wrong that he has committed. Rather, Wilson argues that the philosophical lesson the film advances is that our judgment of the moral injury he has inflicted upon Alicia should not obliterate other aspects of our sympathetic response to Benigno.

Our responses to Benigno, as with many of our moral experiences outside of the cinema, are conflicted. However, we should not repress that conflict, but struggle to keep straight in our minds the considerations in which those conflicts are rooted. That too is an integral part of leading a moral life and, insofar as Talk to Her, invites—indeed encourages—viewers to cultivate this moral insight, it may not present a clear-cut victory for the immoralists.

If Wilson finds that Benigno exemplifies the virtue of “talking to her,” Cynthia Freeland, in her article “Nothing is simple,” reminds us that talking to her is not enough. From the perspective of feminist philosophy, Freeland notes that men must also listen to women and, if that is impossible, they must at least strive to interpret them. For, had Benigno interpreted Alicia’s wishes—had he taken them seriously—he would never have violated her.

For Freeland, Talk to Her points the way toward an advance in philosophical understanding. Feminist philosophy has emphasized objectification—viewing another human being as an object rather than as a subject—as a primary lever of sexism. And, by talking to her, Benigno signals that he regards Alicia as a person rather than as a mere body, a mere thing. Yet the film “suggests that there is more to our duties than just this, since Benigno clearly does see his patient as a person.” That “more,” Freeland hypothesizes, using the film as a philosophical springboard, is that we must also listen to the other, interpret the other—that is, take their needs and desires to heart. Inasmuch as Benigno has no conception of Alicia’s wants, he fails to live up to his moral responsibilities to her, and, by extension, so too do those of us who only talk at the other with no effort to hear and to interpret them—just as Marco fails to listen to Lydia in the car after Angela’s wedding.

Freeland uses Talk to Her as a means for advancing a feminist, philosophical insight. Her interpretation of the film is what Gadamer called an “application.” She derives the significance of the film from her own present dialogical context, which is feminist philosophy. She engages the film as a philosophical companion, as an opportunity to stimulate a philosophical discovery. The film presents us with a problem: insofar as Benigno appears to acknowledge Alicia’s personhood, what has gone wrong here? This prompts Freeland, in turn, to conjecture that there is a need to listen and to interpret the other; talking to or at another is not sufficient.

Although Benigno gives every appearance of acknowledging Alicia as a person, Freeland goes beneath the surface to find something amiss and to specify it. In his “A celemín of shit: comedy and deception in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” C.D.C. Reeve, similarly, makes the unmasking of appearances, perhaps the most ancient subject of philosophy (dear to Plato and Hindu philosophy alike), the central theme of his explication of the film. Through various devices and on many levels, Reeve sensitively points out Almodóvar’s recurring allusions—visual, verbal, narratological, and symbolic—to comely outsides that cover up black, smelly things inside, things whose emblem Reeve associates with feces. Benigno’s outward appearance of innocence and naiveté, for instance, is a façade, disguising ultimately sordid desires.

For Reeve, whose approach to the film evinces the influence of psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Talk to Her is, among other things, Freudian in its affirmation of the dark underside of human nature. Reeve carefully examines the characters, revealing the psychological damage that festers within them. Reeve shows, for example, that Benigno’s upbringing, dominated by his mother’s nearly unprecedented dependency upon his caretaking—she’s merely lazy (and depressed), rather than ill—inexorably undercuts the possibility of anything like a normal relation between Benigno and a woman. Interestingly, moreover, Reeve’s views of the characters in Talk to Her echo Eaton’s view of the film itself as something artistically shining on the outside that succeeds precisely by camouflaging the evil within.

My own opinion is that Talk to Her is an example of the category of philosophy through the motion picture. It is a challenge to our almost automatic tendencies when it comes to issuing ethical judgments and it functions as an occasion for deepening our appreciation of the complexity of moral judgment.

There are a number of variables that may come into play when judging an action from a moral point of view. Typically, we think that first, the action is wrong; second, the agent is blameworthy; and third, it would be better had the action not occurred. These three judgments usually cohere as a neat package, or, at least, it is our default assumption that they are of a piece. When we hear that a child has been molested our natural disposition is to presume that the action was evil, that the perpetrator is at fault, and that it would be better had the event never happened.

Talk to Her, on the other hand, complicates this line of response. The action is presented as unequivocally wrong. Yet I think we are very uncertain about whether or not Benigno is fully blameworthy, since he appears to be so mentally confused. As C.D.C. Reeve demonstrates so adeptly, Benigno’s sequestered youth with his demanding and depressive mother hardly prepared him for adult relationships with the opposite sex.

Furthermore, Benigno seems, quite frankly, out of touch with reality. His belief that he has a better relationship with Alicia than most married couples have with each other is an utter fantasy, since in fact he has no interpersonal relationship with Alicia whatsoever. So although the act is evil, the degree to which we are prone to attribute blame to Benigno is tempered. Indeed, some viewers may even feel that Benigno is not guilty by virtue of insanity, and think that rather than being imprisoned he should be institutionalized. But in any event, most, I hazard, feel sadness toward Benigno rather than moral indignation.

As a result of his rape of Alicia, Alicia gives birth to a child. The child dies in the process, but the shock of the event seems to draw Alicia out of her coma. It revives her, and she is able to take up her life again. Thus, although the rape is evil, good almost miraculously results from it. We usually think of an evil event that no good can come of it—that it would be better had it never occurred. However, in Talk to Her, the rape—though clearly marked as immoral—is given in the fiction as the cause of Alicia’s “rebirth.” Consequently, I think that we hesitate in declaring that it would be better had it never happened at all. Would even Alicia want things to be otherwise if she could have been informed of the eventual outcome of the rape ahead of time?

Talk to Her is an unsettling film because of the way in which it splits apart the tidy, coordinated, negative set of verdicts that we typically issue when morally condemning an act, its agent, and its consequences. Talk to Her puts us in the unfamiliar position of feeling the pressure to vote for a mixed decision. Moreover, in so doing, the film invites the viewer to scrutinize the habits of thought and feeling that govern her moral judgments, thereby enabling her to understand them more precisely.

The film has the capacity, in a manner of speaking, to lead the audience from reflex to reflection, which, from my perspective, indicates that it stands with the angels rather than the devils. That it encourages philosophical self-reflection upon the workings of our moral machinery in a way that is apt to refine and improve our powers of ethical judgment, furthermore, is part of what makes the film the excellent work of art that it is.

Talk to Her philosophizes through cinema in the sense that it prompts the viewer who is ready to engage with the film to a recognition about the internal structure of moral judgment about which, if he was aware of it at all, he was only dimly aware. The film becomes a passage to moral clarity. As many authors in this volume point out, the last words of the film, uttered by Katerina, the ballet instructress, are “nothing is simple.” Nothing could serve as a better observation concerning the film’s point of view with respect to moral judgment.

Undoubtedly, it may sound strange to many to suggest that philosophy can be engendered through film. On the one hand, some will argue that a motion picture can’t prove its case, and, without proof, there is no philosophy. On the other hand, it may be maintained that the philosophical insight that I claim for Talk to Her is too obvious to count as a contribution to philosophy. Hasn’t everyone always realized that we may be driven toward mixed verdicts when morally assessing an act, its agent, and its consequences?

The short answer to the last question is “no”—not everyone is aware of this, or, at least, it is easy for us to forget it when caught up, especially, in the heat of moral judgment. Moreover, the kinds of philosophy in which artworks traffic are not the specialized topics of the graduate seminar (as appropriate as those are in their place). Art, especially ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributor biographies
• Note on the director
• 1 Noël Carroll
• 2 A.W. Eaton
• 3 Robert B. Pippin
• 4 George M. Wilson
• 5 Cynthia Freeland
• 6 C.D.C. Reeve