4. A Life, Imagined and Otherwise

The Limits and Uses of Autobiography in Almodóvarós Films

Summary

In this chapter, the author explores some aspects of Almodóvar's early life as a narrative that was always already inscribed in cultural myths as articulated in films. In tracing the cultural narratives that frame Almodóvar's autobiographical account, the author is attempting to read the materials provided by the director as nonnatural, or constructed, and non-transparent, in other words, as a site for the kind of ideological discourse Roland Barthes called “mythologies,” in which the critical operation consists in deciphering the excessive accumulation of reasons, alibis and appearances, that is, the “natural,” in order to make evident the rule-governed exchange that underlies the both semantic meaning and collective life. In this “deciphering” by taking into account reasons or alibis through cultural mythologies, the author is trying to clarify the meaning of autobiographical discourse for Almodóvar.