"Pedro is lucky. As a filmmaker, he can do whatever he wants. He has more freedom than, for instance, Martin Scorsese. Scorsese lives in a system in America that involves more than just making films. He's forced to become a politician, to fight with the studios over content and money. That limits his freedom. Pedro doesn't have those limits." -- Actor Gael Garcia Bernal, star of Pedro Almodovar's Oscar-nominated Best Picture, Bad Education

"What do you mean, why doesn't Pedro address more important political issues directly in these apocalyptic times?" -- Javier Giner, translator for Pedro Almodovar, responding to a recent query from the author

We're sitting in the cinema...with the unreal darkness of so-called democratic rights.

Film critic Angel Fernandez-Santos of El Pais, Spain's largest circulation newspaper, has said that he believes Pedro Almodovar is entering a period of maturity. With his newly Oscar-nominated Bad Education, Iberia's leading postmodern auteur is undoubtedly coming around to being something very special...way beyond anything that was hinted at in his '99 Oscar-winning All About My Mother. But contrary to what Stuart Klawans suggests in The Nation (1), the La Mancha to Madrid Miracle Man is not blossoming as a political commentator.

Pedro's very first (Super-8) film was titled Film Politico, and, as Gary Indiana points out, in Almodovar's recent output "we see an unfolding and a neutralization of class distinctions, of the bourgeois realm revealing a submerged history of subproletarian existence...." (2) But all of Spain's current international tensions --including the March 11th bombings-- will not move the filmmaker to address political issues head-on.

It's not in his nature (3), in spite of the fact that the moral of all his films is to get to a greater stage of freedom. (4) More specifically, his focus is on rights, not needs, and as such he moves his viewers to consider the injustice of this and that indirectly...not by spotlighting what must be transformed for our mutual survival. Underscoring the latter would be being "political" in my filmscript.

Pedro grew up in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, eventually luxuriating in la movida...a time in Spain when the residue of Franco's regime flittered away, and artists could explore their potential. His playful, campy treatment of prostitutes and transvestites, blended with his insistence upon suffering, is the result.

Foreign faux fun with films...with some agons.

Simone Weil, however, after a mystical experience in '38 --in the very midst of the wretched disaster-- sided with the government against the rebels; she also put her body on the line when she helped the Free French later fighting the Germans and their collaborators.

One can divide her creative output into two categories: the sociopolitical and the religious. But it's the blend that bends my knees.

With all that she was involved in, she was able to cut communist ideology to the quick, declaring that the quasi-mystical cult of productive labor was merely creating an "opium for the masses" every bit as much as traditional religion had...as per Marx. But that didn't keep her from denouncing the ills of capitalism, the dehumanizing effects of consumerism, etc.

The increasing power of the state and other bureaucratic structures, along with the uses of technology in vogue, she claimed destroyed fundamentally important human values. This is a stance very different than that posited by Pedro when he pontificates today...about how political trouble begins when one man's desire is pulverized underfoot by another's power, freedoms foiled.

Kinky undercurrents, "alternative motivations" offered up for seemingly anti-social behavior, and the right to be all that one can be mix wonderfully well so much of the time in Almodovar's cinematic soup (as in Oscar-winning Best Original Screenplay for 2003, Talk To Her), but the fact that modern civilization is ill-suited to satisfy basic human needs is not broached in the auteur's ouevre. And that's what's needed to be political today.

It's not nearly enough to hint at the upside of what happened in Spain on March 14th, 2004...with the movement further away than ever before from Franco's Spain. The distancing of the democratic souls from the descendants of the religious dictatorship --with the ballot box--does not count for nearly enough.

Elections are founded on the fallacy that democracy is something it isn't. (5) We should exit Iraq immediately...if we care about the people's needs, as opposed to their theoretical rights.

No, we need Simone. Her soul. Not Pedro's flair and feeling. We need her spirit to distinguish for us...the difference between needs and rights. We need to soar with her...so as to not serve to legitimize and entrench conflict. Which is what concern with rights does.

Bless Pedro. Enjoy him. But follow Weil. She will turn us in a direction we need to go...in real time, not with reel blindness. Make-believe mindlessness in the face of fatidic forewarning.

Machine Freedom is not what any of us need now.


Richard Oxman is getting ready to tear apart the Oscar ceremonies in Los Gatos, CA; he can be reached at dueleft@yahoo.com between commercials. He is a former prof of Cinema History. Born a year before Simone Weil died, he considers himself born...too late.

NOTES:

(1) See pp. 34-35 in the November 29, 2004 issue.
(2) On p. 22 of the "Internal Affairs" article in the Nov/Dec, 2004 issue of filmcomment
(3) From a 1999 interview in French film journal Positif
(4) From Marsha Kinder's interview in Film Quarterly, vol. 41, no. I (Fall, 1987).
(5) See Eric Hobsbawm's "Delusions about Democracy" (http://www.counterpunch.org/hobsbawm01252005.html)