Expressions of machismo and violence in the masculine characters of Pedro Almodóvar's cinema: A chronological review

Abstract

This research focuses on the male characters of the film director Pedro Almodóvar. In the first place, the presence of nationalism is deepened in a recurrent way in its plots through the figure of the "Iberian male" that feeds on the Spanish cinema of the “tardofranquismo” and the Transition, as well as the connection with the sexual, the use of humor and the director's attempt to create dissident identities. In second place, the representations of violence in the cinema of Almodóvar are studied as a feature of the exercise of the power characteristic of the more traditional Spanish machismo, expressed sometimes through posture, gestures or control of space-time of the victims; and others, through verbalization and physical aggression