Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Skin I Live In
2011 · Pedro Almodóvar · The Skin I Live In on Sightlines
A woman sits on the floor of a bare room in a bodysuit the colour of skin that is not hers. In another part of the house a man watches her on a screen the size of a wall. Almodóvar sets that arrangement up early and then lets it run. The suit is a bad second skin: it doesn't conceal the body, it announces that the body underneath is under construction, seams and all. The screen turns watching into work. Antonio Banderas, back with Almodóvar after twenty-one years, plays the watcher as a man of immaculate composure, a plastic surgeon whose face holds one quality and never breaks it. What he keeps in the villa is a patient, a prisoner and a project, and the order of those keeps shifting.
Almodóvar called the film "a horror story without screams or frights." Take him at his word. Almost nothing in it raises its voice. Alberto Iglesias's strings do the screaming instead, circling like something trapped under glass. Pressure, no discharge. That is where Deleuze earns his place here rather than being bolted on: he has exact names for images that refuse to spend themselves in action, and this film is built out of them.
Start with the screen. Deleuze called an image a dicisign when the camera perceives someone who is perceiving — you don't simply look, you watch looking being done, and you feel the machine doing it. Robert's monitor makes that structural. The same feed is a medical chart and an appetite. Michael Powell had already welded apparatus to desire in Peeping Tom (1960), where the camera is the weapon; Almodóvar keeps the weld and hands it to medicine, which supplies a better alibi than art ever did. It's the cleanest answer I know to the old argument about the gaze. Give the watcher a professional reason and the violation acquires a filing system.
Then the house. Gated, outside Toledo, interiors saturated to the edge of sweetness, Louise Bourgeois sculptures on the walls of a man who has views about the female body. Deleuze has a term for a world like this: crystal-decomposition, an ordered aristocratic world rotting from inside, which he found in Visconti's great dying houses. Almodóvar's version rots quietly and on schedule. Nothing is dusty. The colour does the work the dialogue won't, an affective colour that absorbs a scene whole, so a room can be lovely and clinical in the same breath and you lose the ability to say which is the top note.
And the woman in the suit. Vertigo (1958) runs on a man remaking a living woman into a lost one, correcting her hair and her clothes until the dead image fits. Almodóvar literalises that with a scalpel: makeover as control becomes surgery as control. What it produces is a crystal-image in Deleuze's strict sense, an actual thing and its virtual double jammed so close you can't prise them apart. Vera is a present body carrying the image of someone gone, and the layers can't be separated because they have been sewn.
The skin itself is a fetish in the Deleuzian register rather than the Freudian one: a part-object charged with compulsive force. A synthetic covering that withstands any damage, made by a man who can't stop touching it. Almodóvar took the story from Thierry Jonquet's pulp novel Tarantula, and the pulp shows through as impulse-image, a world of drives erupting under the social surface, where the elegant villa is only the derived milieu and something older and hungrier is the real country.
Then the film does the thing it is famous for. Information is metered out so a late identity disclosure detonates and rewrites everything you've already watched. Les Diaboliques (1955) engineered that mechanism; Almodóvar borrows the whole machine for the Vera/Vicente reveal. Two Deleuzian concepts arrive together. The descent into the past is not a flashback in the ordinary sense, a dated clip inserted to explain, but sheets-of-past: the past as layers you move through, where the layer you reach reorganises the present instead of illustrating it. Afterwards every earlier image becomes a lectosign, an image that has lost its obviousness and has to be deciphered. You don't remember the first hour. You re-read it. Thrillers work on the contract that the image doesn't lie. This one keeps the contract exactly, and demonstrates that an image can be perfectly truthful and still decline to tell you what it is of.
Which makes Robert a forger, Deleuze's faussaire: the figure who doesn't lie about a truth but manufactures one, and pulls identity into a series. Vicente becomes Vera. Frankenstein (1931) supplied the grammar, a maker who assembles a person out of someone else's flesh and then flinches from what he sculpted, while the sculpted thing turns his desire for mastery back on him. The difference in 2011 is that the creature isn't made of corpses. It's made of a living person who didn't agree. That's why the film is argued over as hard as it's admired, and why queer horror keeps it close: it puts the question of who owns a body inside the mechanism of a twist, so you can't enjoy the reveal without taking a position on it.
What it did to film: it moved the twist off the plot and into the person. Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) gave Almodóvar his exact situation, the guilt-driven surgeon, the captive in the country estate, the serene lyrical calm laid over an operating theatre. Almodóvar keeps the calm and relocates the horror from a face to an entire surface, from a daughter to a possession. The line also runs back through his own work. Banderas had already played the captor who expects captivity to ripen into love, in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990). Watching him do it again two decades later, with a scalpel and no jokes, cools that earlier film retroactively. A strange kind of influence: a director descending on himself.
Watch it twice. The second time the monitor stops being a plot device and becomes the film's argument about attention, and the bodysuit stops being a picture of a victim and becomes a picture of authorship. Then the question it won't answer gets sharper. If the skin is new, whose is the pain in it?
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Vera under observation in the villa: Almodóvar literalises Vertigo's man remaking a woman into a lost love, so the captive is at once a present body and the virtual image of someone gone, the two layers surgically inseparable.
- crystal-decomposition — The gated Toledo villa with its saturated interiors and Louise Bourgeois sculptures — an ordered, moneyed, immaculately kept world going rotten from within.
- le faussaire (the forger) — Robert doesn't deceive about an identity, he manufactures one: the synthetic skin and the Vicente-to-Vera transformation make a person into a serial forgery.
- sheets of past (order of time) — The nonlinear timeline: rather than a dated explanatory flashback, the film descends into a layer of the past whose disclosure reorganises the present it interrupts.
- lectosign (the readable image) — The Diaboliques-style withheld reveal, metered so the late identity twist retroactively rewrites every prior scene — afterwards the earlier images have to be read rather than simply watched.
- dicisign — The surveillance monitor on which Robert watches his captive as patient and object at once, the Peeping Tom coupling of clinical apparatus with desiring gaze made into the film's viewing structure.
- fetish (part-object) — The synthetic skin that withstands any damage, and the flesh-toned bodysuit that became the film's emblem: a covering charged with compulsive force and handled as an object of appetite.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Adapted from Thierry Jonquet's pulp novel Tarantula: beneath the composed surgeon and the elegant estate runs a world of pure drive — obsession, captivity, appetite — with the villa as the derived milieu of something more savage.
- affective colour — Almodóvar's saturated interiors, melodrama frozen into clinical steel, where colour absorbs the feeling of a scene instead of the characters expressing it.