The Hebrew Bible describes the creation of women as follows: "Eve was created because Adam was very alone. She was created to accompany him, to associate with him, to give him pleasure. This view has long existed in the West. Culturally, it's a basic myth about women. Female sexuality was created for male pleasure."
This thriller, directed by Almodovar, tells the story of a woman who is forged. The film sees loneliness and social isolation as metaphors and cornerstones of becoming a person. Whereas Freud saw phallic envy as the cornerstone of femininity, Almodóvar took a very different view, reinterpreting the process of inception and formation of women and, by extension, the formation of man.
What created women? The Hebrew Bible tells the following reason for the creation of women: Eve was created because Adam was very alone. She was created to accompany him, to associate with him, to give him joy. This view has long existed in Western culture as a fundamental myth about women. Female sexuality was created for male pleasure. Their roles are unequal, their purposes are different. Modern women have always insisted that our sexuality, our selves, are as important as men's. But it's a tough fight. Below I will discuss a film that once again opened up the question of female sexuality to me, which seemed to me to show the dilemma of women's development in a new social context.
Pedro Almodóvar's thriller "The Skin I Live" tells us the story of the creation of a woman. The film sees loneliness and social isolation as metaphors and cornerstones of growing up as a human being. Almodovar called the heroine "Vera", which means truth. Whereas Freud saw phallic envy as the cornerstone of femininity, Almodóvar offered a completely different perspective, reinterpreting the process of inception and formation of women, and by extension, the process of human formation as well. Both Freud and Almodóvar believed that women are castrated men. Freud explored the inside and the "black continent", while Almodovar explored the outside, using the outside as a window to the inside. Almodóvar tells a story of sadness and mourning. A scientist lost his beloved wife in a car accident that burned her skin. This scientist has developed an artificial skin that, if used on his dying wife, might save her. This skin is flawless and indestructible: it doesn't burn, it doesn't feel.
How does the scientist use this invention? We see him driving an expensive sedan to his grand villa. In this villa there is a laboratory (where he performed the surgery) and a rehabilitation clinic inhabited by a beautiful and mysterious female patient. Her skin was flawless, and a second layer of skin kept her intact, a flesh-colored bodysuit. But she is almost completely cut off from the world. She only associates with one motherly woman, who provides her food and books by lift. She exercises and reads every day, but never leaves the room.
As the film's plot unfolds, we learn that she was actually a man before, but later changed her gender. However, she is not an ordinary transgender. The gender transition she underwent was different from normal sex reassignment surgery, not a combination of hormone therapy and step-by-step reversible surgery to achieve a permanent sex change. The young man first had his penis removed and his pussy transformed into an artificial vagina. At this point, Almodóvar is imitating the process of creating women, not being transgender. The woman is formed on the basis of female genitalia, not by altering her secondary sexual characteristics so that she can appear female to the outside world. At first, she became a genital female, then was fitted with a hairless face, soft skin, breasts, buttocks, and female flexibility, which are actually secondary sexual characteristics developed by female puberty.
But how did she become a psychological woman? How did she come to see herself in terms of female imagery? At the beginning of the film, we see her reading a book by Alice Munro, a Canadian feminist writer. The house she lives in is decorated with artwork by Louise Bourgeois, a French feminist sculptor. These female artists are teaching her what it means to be a woman. She was cut off from other women, other than talking on the walkie-talkie with the woman who fed her from afar and provided her art. In isolation, she was carefully fed with the concept of femininity. It's like adults give little girls dolls to play with, so they start seeing themselves as nurturers and caregivers; let them play with dolls, so they start to wish they were hipsters too. Her skin is the interface between her ego and her environment, protecting her from the outside world, while maintaining her integrity, protecting her from being involved in the outside world. In order to develop this impermeable skin, she was confined to a solitary house. That protection came at a high price: the skin kept her isolated.
In the film, we learn that the surgeon's wife, recovering from horrific burns, jumped out of a window to commit suicide when she saw her horrific, scarred skin in the reflection. Now we can understand how important, and why, the indestructible skin he created was so important to the surgeon. However, the story is more complicated. This lonely woman is in solitary confinement. She lives in the most punishing prison. She was alone almost all the time. Who does she identify with? Who is the witness of her life? Only the surgeon watched her, and only he had the power to imprison or release her. Only he represents her outer world. His will determines her fate. His choice of how to live her life determines the only possibility for her life. Isolated and alone, she could only long for his presence. Her life was an exaggerated version of Betty Freidan's 1950s housewife life: living alone in a glamorous suburban villa, doing nothing but babysitting and waiting for her husband to come home. The environment the surgeon created for her infinitely expanded her loneliness and minimized her possibilities. But such an environment also looks quite extravagant, similar to the life that middle- and upper-class housewives choose for themselves in the 21st century. Many women get diva-like smooth skin through toxin injections and plastic surgery. Practicing yoga is her only comfort. She trusted the yoga instructor on TV, who assured her that practicing yoga would help her get to the bottom of her heart. Yoga gave her something akin to choice. She can choose to do or not to do yoga, which is not something the surgeon can impose. What she was really missing was someone who wanted to know how she was feeling and listen to what she had to say. It made her lonely and dehumanized.
In a psychological sense, the skin is the boundary of the self. This is the first layer of boundaries. Being touched, hugged, fondled, slapped, cut, burned, beaten is all experienced through the skin. It is the organ of the senses. It is the boundary between me and not me. The skin also harbors the possibility of perversion, because through the skin, pleasure can leapfrog into pain, and pain can become pleasure. When a surgeon gives a patient an indestructible skin, he robs her of both her vulnerability and her ability to damage her humanity.
Surgeons coaxed her into using dilators to expand her vagina, claiming it would allow her to have sex without pain. In the film, the surgeon's brother is the surgeon's rude "alter ego". His brother raped and hurt the heroine, but the shock also brought her "alive". She started complaining. The surgeon promised her happy sex. But this is not the case. She has feelings. In the film we see that she is brutally raped and then lovingly cared for and comforted. She was frightened and weak because of the pain during this first sexual intercourse, which was experienced as rape. She took on the role assigned to her by the environment.
In the end, however, the surgeon failed. Vera is a woman physically, but mentally he is still a man. In the end, she went back to her mother's second-hand women's clothing store and told them that she was her mother's mutilated son. In a psychological sense, the person is still a man. The irony of the heroine's situation is reinforced by the mother's occupation. She runs a shop that sells second-hand women's clothing. Today, the heroine is also a second-hand woman to her mother.
Almodóvar tells a modern version of the myth of Tiresias. Tiresias was originally a man, but after the goddess Hera punished him to be a woman for seven years, and then after receiving the gift of good deeds, he regained his manhood. Tiresias was asked how much sexual pleasure women had compared to men, and he replied that women had ten times as much sexual pleasure as men. The protagonists and victims of Almodóvar's films, despite being women, do not receive such satisfaction. For her, sex brings nothing but pain and ultimate disaster. In the end, like Tiresias, she returned as a man.
The loneliness of living in artificial skin is unbearable. Anzieu (1989) proposed a parallel relationship between the psychological function of the mental image of the skin and the somatic function of the physical skin: the psychological skin is the self-skin, which preserves everything needed for mental health and mental function, and at the same time It also excludes everything that may harm the self, just as the skin of the body keeps all the organs in it, and at the same time keeps out possible dangers. This means that the skin self is necessary for sexual function. In my opinion, sex becomes frightening when it is seen as an intrusion into the body; the same psychological intimacy can be seen as an intrusion into the self, and therefore extremely dangerous. To avoid this danger, the individual needs to stay away from those who might violate him. Those self-imposed social isolation that induces unbearable loneliness not only protects oneself from intrusion, but also from intrusion into others. In his research on body shaping, Lemma (2010) explored the topic of "invasion". She describes several cases where, in the opinion of the surgeon, their bodies did not substantially improve because of plastic surgery, but these patients insisted that the plastic surgery they wanted was important to them because it It's their own choice. The bodies they reject are offered by mothers who, in their view, are either too intrusive, too neglectful, or jump between the two bad extremes. Body shaping is for them a firm expression of a separate self (I am now) unrelated to my mother, and thus relieves the anxiety of intrusion and the depression of being abandoned.
Among the artists who have embraced remodeling their bodies as an art form, Lema mentions Orlan, who has recorded and broadcast many of her plastic surgeries, showing these extreme procedures, which has aroused fear in audiences and disgust. In addition, Lema also mentions a man named Stelarc, whose artistic creation involves tampering with his own body, adding some additional functional parts, such as a third arm. What Oran changes is the state of being, and what Stella changes is the function. Oran is passive because she provides only the face and the image of the face, while the surgeon and the viewer provide the behavior. For Stella, new behaviors can be created by modifying the body. Lemma quotes Stella: I have passed the barrier of skin...Skin no longer means lock-in...Empty body becomes master...It's time to recolonize this body.
In Lema's view, this is the use of the body as a womb in fantasy, thereby counteracting the experience of being locked in a mother's womb, so the artist counteracts the loss of a mother by becoming a mother. In conclusion, Lema believes that the transformation of the body has two purposes: either to deny separation, to try to separate, to cover up shame, to resist the fear of fragmentation, or to avenge the parents. As such, she offers many ways to explore with patients who have injured their own bodies or, like the surgeon in "The Skin of My Life," are driven to injure the bodies of others. In this film, the surgeon lost his wife years ago when his skin was burned beyond repair in a car accident. Recently, his daughter was brutally raped by a murderer, which made him lose her daughter again. After losing his entire family, he lives alone. After losing two women he loved (wife and daughter), he was double castrated. He fell into utter loneliness. He first castrated the young man who raped and killed his daughter, and then isolated him, he also placed this man in the helplessness and loneliness he was in. The story equate castration and social isolation with female sexuality. By forcing the young man to become helpless and lonely, he becomes a woman. After making the transition from male to female, the surgeon tried to teach the young woman he created how to become a sexually functional woman. His attempt failed because the young woman longed for her mother, to return to her life and continue to be her mother's son. However, her mother is a businessman who sells second-hand women's clothing. From this point of view, it has been doomed from the beginning that he will become a second-hand woman.
(Excerpted from "The Skin I Live In" from "Through Solitude" by Arlene Kramer Richards)
Loneliness is a universal human experience. What triggers loneliness? Who or what is the lonely person longing for? Who is more likely to suffer from painful loneliness? What is the inner experience of a lonely person? How to deal with loneliness? The authors of this book show readers how psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and works of art can alleviate individual feelings of loneliness and alienation by strengthening the connection between the self and others. Hopefully, these articles will help shed light on the many dimensions of loneliness so that we can better assist ourselves and others in finding our own personal ways of dealing with loneliness.
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