Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

In my reading of E&H’s fifth chapter, I was particularly interested in the various permutations of cinema’s interface at the level of the skin. The hermeneutics of this lens are further elaborated through the essays of Reyes, Marcantiano, And Silhol. Reyes observes trends in surgical horror to examine how The Skin I Live In (Almodovar, 2011) addresses the concepts of “beauty terror” and the skin’s paradoxical existence as a hybridization of the internal and external, as well as an empty casing for deeper, insular subjectivity. Marcantiano, in contrast, approaches the film through its dialogue with Spain’s historical trauma and the role of the digital paradigm in the confusion and partial erasure of memory and temporality. Silhol’s essay is situated firmly within the film’s narrativity, exploring the semiotics of the Oedipal codes in its character arcs and the psychoanalysis of Almodovar’s cultural production.

The different readings of the film in these essays are similarly rooted in its central and striking manipulation of the flesh. Whether we view it through Sobchak’s phenomenological cinesthesia or Williams’ Jerk theory, Almodovar’s rich text relies, in part, on his awareness of the skin as a site of conflict, healing, and ultimate confrontation. The skin, in my view, is open to interpretation through its inherent qualities of plasticity and fragility. Our interpretations of the skin can modulate and fit around any concept we desire (identity, temporality, psychoanalysis); yet its fragility lies in our touching of it—our Ledgard-ian manipulation of it. To be so malleable that it can represent anything raises the question of whether it was anything before our meddling; and whether its ontological existence depends on our conceptual and theoretical inscriptions upon it. Its utility in film theory is not a negative; it allows us to address issues we struggle to confront otherwise. Perhaps one way to see it is that our nerve endings lie at this surface, serving the tactility that unlocks our vulnerability, and this cinesthetic and psychosocial vulnerability activates our necessary, and often repressed from ocular-centrism, confrontations with our external world. The skin is, thus, a pertinently sensitized means to an end.