Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A wind-up frogman paddles across a bathtub, swimming between Marina's knees while she dozes in the warm water. She is a prisoner. The man who tied her to the bed is in the next room. And here she is, playing with a toy. Eroticism, slapstick, and a child's loneliness fold into one small green object, and for a moment the film forgets it is supposed to be a thriller about a kidnapping. Almodóvar builds whole movies out of moments like this, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is his most uncomfortable wager on how far a gorgeous surface can carry an ugly premise.

Stay with that frogman, because it tells you what kind of object Almodóvar deals in. Deleuze, borrowing from the naturalist novel, had a name for objects like it: the fetish, a part-object snapped loose from any whole and loaded with a drive that has nowhere respectable to go. The fetish belongs to what he called the impulse-image, the cinema of appetite and compulsion erupting up through the social surface. Ricky runs on exactly that kind of drive. Just out of a psychiatric hospital, he has one fixed idea, make her love me, and he pursues it the way a hungry animal pursues food. His tenderness and his violence are the same impulse wearing two faces. In Deleuze's scheme the impulse-image always slopes downward, toward exhaustion and death; the addict, the predator, the world rotting under its own hunger. Almodóvar's provocation is to bend that slope the wrong way. The compulsion is supposed to end in degradation. Instead it is asked to flower into a marriage. That is the whole scandal of the film, and it is a formal scandal before it is a moral one.

The surface does the bending. José Luis Alcaine shoots Marina's apartment in deep reds, blues, and yellows, arranged with the calm of graphic design, and the camera frames the captivity with the poise you would give a love story. This is what Deleuze meant by affective colour, a colour that soaks up a scene and holds its feeling rather than just describing the room. The palette here is doing an argument's worth of work. It keeps insisting on romance while the plot keeps committing a crime, and the dissonance between the two is the point. Place this in the melodrama line that runs through Sirk, where colour maps emotional temperature onto wallpaper and furniture. Almodóvar inherits that language and turns it cruel, photographing a hostage situation with the composure of a courtship so that we feel the pull of the romance even as we flinch from it.

Then there is the matter of who Marina is. She is an actress, formerly in pornography, currently shooting a cheap horror picture under an aging director named, with a wink, Máximo Espejo, Maximum Mirror. Almodóvar keeps cutting between the horror shoot, where Marina is bound and menaced on camera, and the apartment, where she is bound and menaced off it. This is the territory Deleuze called the crystal-image: present and performance, life and its double, becoming hard to tell apart, the way an image and its mirror reflection trade places. Marina playing a captive and Marina being a captive start to rhyme until you lose the seam. And yet I would not overstate it, because Almodóvar and his editor José Salcedo keep that seam faintly visible; the cutting lets you always know which captivity is the movie's and which is the movie-within. So the crystal forms as a seed without ever sealing into an airless hall of mirrors. The film reaches for indiscernibility and then, tactfully, lets you breathe. This is the gaze-lineage of Peeping Tom and Vertigo, the film built around the predatory camera and the man remaking a woman to his desire, reworked so that the watched woman is herself a professional of being watched.

Which raises the question the film refuses to settle. Does Marina come to love Ricky, or does she perform love because performance is how a captive survives, and she is a performer by trade? Deleuze called this the powers of the false: not a lie to be exposed but undecidability made into the engine of the thing. The conversion narrative gives you every romantic-comedy cue for real feeling and never lets you confirm it. Buñuel taught this deadpan refusal to signpost a woman's desire, in Belle de Jour and in Tristana, where a man's possessive taming and a woman's ambivalent attachment are left deliberately unresolved. Almodóvar claims that Spanish lineage directly and pushes it into pop melodrama.

Watch, finally, the bodies. The Collector gave him the plot machine, La Belle et la Bête the fairytale promise that proximity converts dread to love. What Almodóvar adds is choreography. The ropes, the bed, the kitchen, the bathroom become a stage where two bodies negotiate distance, and captivity slowly turns domestic through posture rather than plot. Deleuze would call these arrangements gests, attitudes that expose a social relation by holding it in the body. The drama is in how they stand near each other.

The film's afterlife is blunter than its meaning. Rated X in America, foreclosed from normal release, it became one of the cases that forced the MPAA to invent NC-17, a category for adult art that is not pornography. Fitting, for a movie that spends ninety minutes refusing to be sorted into the box you brought to it. Watch it again for the frogman, and notice how hard the colour is working to make you forgive what you are seeing.