Talk to Her

Almodovar’s film has a lot of interesting themes/symbolism in it. While the most notable is the Sleeping Beauty overtone, the first I noticed was with Lydia, the bullfighter who’s deathly afraid of snakes. A few Film Study courses and a year of Psychology were more than enough to cement the Freudian correlation into the forefront of my mind. Snakes are one of many phallic symbols in literature and film. Phallic, of course, refers to men and therefore Lydia’s deathly fear of snakes is meant to reflect her fear of men and the violence they can perpetrate. On the talk show we sense that something especially negative happened between her and the other bullfighter which is why she reacts so violently when the topic is brought up; when she, Marco and others talk about the priests and missionaries who have raped the villagers and the nuns, she is sickened. An interesting thing to note though is that snakes are not the only time she comes face to face with her fear of what is masculine. One could easily argue that a bull is very much associated with men. In that case, when she goes into the ring, she is confronting her fear head-on. She is haughty when she bullfights. People often commented that it was lucky the bull never tore her apart; in fact, the man sitting beside her ex comments during one fight: ‘if you weren’t here, she wouldn’t be taking as many risks.’ Therefore, it is obvious that the bullfighting is meant to make a statement towards men.