14. The Flower of His Secret

Carne trémula and the Mise en Scène of Desire

Summary

This chapter talks about one of Almodóvar's films, Carne trémula. Characters in Carne trémula love those that they desire sexually and fall in or out of love according to their sexual attraction. Many contemporary discourses of sexuality are predicated on a more or less strict separation between love and desire and on their contradictory nature. These discourses go back to the separation in the middle ages between two morally polarized affects - uplifting spiritual love and destructive physical passion. These two later became integrated into the beneficial modern concept of romantic love as a combination of Christian devotion and sexual passion only to drift apart around the differentiated concepts of love and sex in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to gradually become fused again through the process that Steven Seidman has called “the sexualization of love.”