[Pride 2020] A Lance in the Throat: Scary Heteros in Almodóvar’s “Matador”

Movies like Matador are very much, as the kids say, my shit. High-end trash. And I mean that fondly. Because Matador has it all: a vigorous color scheme, lethal 1980s fashion accessories, murder, and Antonio Banderas! It’s also a covert reversal of the hetero gaze.

Since old Hollywood, queer coding has been a tool directors use to make their villains ominous and more threatening. The Hays Code dictated that motion pictures could not directly address certain taboo concepts that quaint audiences might find disturbing, one of the big ones being homosexuality. But films tacitly explored such topics anyway, with scripted subtext and actor-performed idiosyncrasies. Alfred Hitchcock did this often: Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, Brandon Shaw in Rope, and Bruno Antony in Strangers on a Train to name a few. Decades later, even after the Hay Code had been lifted, this technique continued and led to more controversial and sometimes questionable LGBT representations, particularly in thrillers such as Dressed to Kill and Basic Instinct—films, directed by straight men, designed to unnerve the priggish.

Picture it: Spain, 1986. Gay director Pedro Almodóvar sashays in to flip the script! Like the best of us, gay or not, Almodóvar’s characters are drawn to violence and sex. As viewers and as practitioners. The blending of eroticism and brutality is a recurring theme throughout Almodóvar’s body of work. But in Matador, savagery is married exclusively to hetero-ness—it’s the straight characters we ought to be frightened of.

Finally.

Assumpta Serna plays a vicious lawyer named Maria who develops an obsession for a matador named Diego, played by Nacho Martínez, after witnessing him gored in his groin in the arena. Diego, now retired, spends his days teaching students how to slay beasts. Still longing for his bygone career of killing horned animals for the glory, Diego masturbates to grotesque giallo-like videos featuring gloved men slashing screaming women. And when he and his girlfriend fuck, he demands that she play dead.

Establishing morbidity as a necessary aperitif to Diego’s ability to climax is one way Almodóvar asserts in Matador that, in the world of this story, debauchery and toxic heterosexuality are intrinsically tied. Take the arc of Ángel, a clairvoyant student of Diego’s played by Antonio Banderas, who wants more than anything to be “a man.” For the record, he is a man, but he doesn’t feel like one, because, well…society. So, he’s training to be a matador (a word which roughly means killer in Spanish). One day Diego asks Ángel if he’s gay, and so Ángel (who’s likely on the queer spectrum) decides later on to “prove” that he’s not by trying to rape Diego’s girlfriend, Eva. The horrendous act is motivated by a psychosexual panic and a need to assimilate to heteronormativity.

His need to be straight—or, rather, to be seen as straight, whether he is or not—compels him to act out monstrously. Repulsed by his own barbaric behavior, he goes to the police. But when the police don’t buy his confession, he decides instead to confess to an ongoing serial murder case involving men being stabbed in a manner similar to how stadium bulls are—with a blade through the neck. He is of course not the killer, but one’s machismo is ostensibly defined by one’s perceived heinousness, so…

Re-enter Maria, Ángel’s legal counsel—and the real serial murderer. She takes the case to get closer to Diego, her beloved. (She also has firsthand knowledge Ángel didn’t do it, since, you know, she’s the killer.) And it doesn’t take long for Maria to get Diego in her clutches. She seduces him and is about to plunge her deadly hairpin into the top of his spine when he thwarts her, and they, thoroughly turned on by each other’s appetite for bloodshed, fall madly in love.

They also share an MO, so that’s cute.

The least dangerous character by far is the one who outright rejects (hetero)sexual conduct: the police Comisario, played by Eusebio Poncela, to whom Ángel confesses. While he’s not inclined toward committing evil deeds, he’s drawn to them as an investigator nevertheless. It’s also implied that he’s a discrete homosexual. Because although the Comisario’s orientation is never explicitly stated, he outright turns down the advances of a female psychologist, and he eyes several men’s bulges, so let’s say it stands to reason. So, for all intents and purposes, the Comisario is a queer everyman standing in for integrity.

In this way, Almodóvar’s Matador reverses the era’s genre trends and demonizes instead the straight characters as venomous monsters out to adulterate, or destroy, the innocent—with Ángel embodying the corrupted, since his appalling attempted rape of Eva emanates from a tainting by the poisonous heteronormative culture his mentor signifies. More or less, we’re all drawn to sex and violence—it’s just a matter of how and to what degree. For decades, provocateur filmmakers out to create discomfort could simply hint at a character’s queerness, and that was often enough to do the trick. This practice had of course become much worse by the 1980s. So leave it to gay director Pedro Almodóvar to turn the tables and remind us that the straight are scary, too, if not scarier.

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