Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bad Education
2004 · Pedro Almodóvar · Bad Education on Sightlines
The strings that come up under the swimming-pool scene aren't Alberto Iglesias's. They're Bernard Herrmann's, or near enough: the swoon from Vertigo, pastiched in the open, poured over two men and a rectangle of chlorinated blue. Almodóvar could have commissioned that feeling fresh. He borrowed it. And it works. You feel the ache the music tells you to feel, even while some part of you registers the quotation marks. Hold onto that split. It's the film.
Bad Education starts with a delivery. A young actor walks into the Madrid office of the filmmaker Enrique Goded carrying a typed script about the Catholic boarding school where the two of them were boys, and carrying an old name in his mouth, a name Enrique used to use on somebody else. The script tells the story of a trans performer coming back to settle accounts with her childhood. Enrique reads it. We watch what he reads. From there the film never returns to solid ground, and that refusal is not a trick.
Deleuze has a name for what the script does. In Cinema 2 he tracks films where the actual present and its double — memory, dream, performance, the version someone is telling — stop being separable and begin exchanging places, like an object and its reflection in a mirror when you've lost track of which side you were standing on. He calls that a crystal. The small thing that starts the process, dropped into a situation already saturated and waiting, he calls a seed. The script is the seed. It arrives in a room belonging to a man who makes fictions for a living, about a past he has kept sealed, hand-delivered by someone who wants a part in it. Everything in Enrique's life crystallizes around those pages.
What the pages do next is worth naming precisely. Deleuze distinguishes ordinary description, which points at an object existing outside it, from crystalline description, which composes its object and then wipes it, leaving another in its place. Once we have watched "The Visit," we no longer have the boarding school. We have the school as typed by a man who may not have been in it, and that typed school is the only one the film will ever give us. Almodóvar makes the substitution literal by shooting the screenplay as a movie, in noir chiaroscuro instead of his usual saturated heat, so that the swap is also a change of genre. The past doesn't arrive as a flashback belonging to somebody's head. It arrives as someone's draft.
Which makes the film's central figure, in Deleuze's vocabulary, a forger. Not a liar. A liar concedes the truth and hides it; a forger manufactures one, the way a counterfeiter produces a note, and then lives on it. Gael García Bernal plays several men, or one man at several stages of authorship, and the performance keeps a seam visible in each. The powers of the false is Deleuze's name for the principle underneath: once narration is handed to a forger, versions stop competing for a single verdict and start coexisting as falsifying narration — incompatible accounts, all load-bearing, none cancelled.
You might object that this is a twisty thriller with a French lens screwed onto it. The difference is testable. A puzzle film withholds one truth and pays it out at the end, and the payout retroactively makes every earlier scene honest. Bad Education pays nothing out. Each time a version gets corrected, the correction arrives from somebody with an interest: a script, a confession, an audition. No narrator is left over who doesn't want something.
This is an argument with film theory's oldest contract, too. Bazin built cinema's authority on the photographic trace: something stood in front of that lens, and the image carries its imprint. Deleuze's reply, in the chapters on the false, is that modern cinema keeps the imprint and detaches it from the truth. Almodóvar runs that argument through genre rather than essay. Noir already came equipped with a confessing narrator, the doomed man of Double Indemnity dictating his own entrapment. Almodóvar keeps the voice and removes the guarantee that it belongs to whoever it claims.
So the image asks to be read rather than simply watched. Deleuze calls this the lectosign, an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and turned into something you decipher. Here it's literal (pages, a title, a document passed hand to hand) and structural, since every scene comes stamped with the question of who wrote it. Enrique's position is the reader's. He's a seer in Deleuze's sense: a man who can no longer answer what he perceives with an action, only look, listen, and keep turning pages. When he finally does act, his act is to cast the film and rewrite it. That isn't resolution. It's participation.
Underneath the noir lies an older, hotter layer. The film treats clerical abuse not as topical exposé but as the poisoned spring from which desire, artifice and revenge all flow. Deleuze's term for a milieu that turns out to be a crust over a world of raw appetite is the originary world: a school with its rules and its music revealed as a place of pure drive, everything downstream of it sliding toward drugs, blackmail, a body. The severity of this film is that it won't let filmmaking stand outside that slope. Enrique auditions a beautiful young man, decides what his story will be, and takes what he needs from a boy's account of being taken from. The camera doesn't exempt itself.
The debts are exact, and Almodóvar names them without embarrassment. Vertigo supplies the engine of a man remaking a person into a lost object, down to the borrowed strings. Sunset Boulevard supplies nested authorship, a screenwriter's script becoming the film you're sitting in. Plein Soleil supplies the sunlit, amoral impostor wearing a dead man's life. Strangers on a Train supplies the transactional pact between two men with a murder and some leverage between them. 8½ supplies the blocked director whose casting sessions dissolve into his own memory. What Almodóvar adds is the thing none of them had: a queer interior, where the impersonation and the desire are the same act, and a performer's self-invention is both crime and survival. That's the invention. Not the nesting, which was Wilder's, but the discovery that noir's machinery of doubles, confessions and femmes fatales had been describing the closet all along and could be turned around to speak from inside it.
In 2004 it opened Cannes, the first Spanish film ever to do so, which put clerical abuse and a forged queer self at the front of the most watched week in cinema. It settled something about narrative as well: a film can hand the telling to someone with a motive and never take it back, and the audience will still grieve. That's the hard part, and the reason this is Almodóvar's darkest picture. He gets you feeling the melodrama at full strength while holding up the counterfeit plate.
Watch the pool scene again. The strings are stolen, the shot is quoting a film from 1958, the scene may be the fabrication of a man with a blackmail plan. The longing in it is not fake. Ask whose it is.
Concepts in play
- powers of the false (puissances du faux) — The dossier's 'unreliable narrator' architecture: nested fictions and shifting identities in which no account of the boarding-school past is ever restored as the true one — every correction arrives from someone with an interest.
- the forger (le faussaire) — Bernal's 'astonishing, multi-layered performance' as an impostor assuming a dead man's identity and life — the Plein Soleil/Ripley blueprint named in the lineage, a man who manufactures a self rather than hides a truth.
- crystal seed (the formation of the crystal) — The young actor arriving at Enrique Goded's Madrid office with the typed script of 'The Visit' — a small object dropped into a saturated situation, around which the filmmaker's sealed past, desire and profession immediately crystallize.
- crystalline description — The screenplay is shot as a film-within-the-film in noir chiaroscuro rather than Almodóvar's saturated melodrama, so the typed version of the boarding school composes a past and then replaces the one it describes — the only school the film will give us.
- falsifying narration — 'The Visit' as Ignacio's/Juan's typed screenplay, rebuilt from Double Indemnity's retrospective confession: mutually exclusive versions of the same boyhood and the same crime are presented as co-true, with no narrator left outside the scheme.
- the lectosign (the readable image) — A script read on screen and passed hand to hand, with Sunset Boulevard's device of the screenwriter's pages literally becoming the film we watch — every scene stamped with the question of who authored it.
- the seer (voyant) — Enrique's reflexive 8½-derived position: he reads, auditions, and rewrites his own past rather than acting on what he perceives; his only available act is to make the film.
- originary world — The Catholic boarding school, drawn from Almodóvar's own religious schooling, revealed as 'the poisoned spring of desire, artifice and revenge' beneath its clerical order — with drugs, blackmail and murder as the slope running out of it.
- sheets of past (order of time) — 'Weaving through past and present' via the script rather than by dated flashback: the boyhood at the school is a region entered through a document, coexisting with the present in more than one version at once.