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The Skin I Live In Essay

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A Response to an Analysis on the film,
“The Skin I Live In” by Pedro Almodóvar.
Like shedding layers of skin, Almodóvar’s latest narrative painfully unravels to reveal the rawness of losses that cannot be mourned. The skin – that ‘scrim’ on which we project our fantasies and fears (Mifflin, 1997) – is used here to good effect to examine deeply psychoanalytic themes. The title of the film takes its central character’s profession – Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a tormented plastic surgeon – and turns it into a metaphor for exploring two central themes: the complex relationship between the given body and our identity and how trauma that cannot be reflected upon can be enacted through the modification of the body (Sabbadini (2012 p.1)
Domenico di Ceglie who is a prominent Italian Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist practising at the Tavistock Clinic in London finds in the film’s characters the personality dimensions of systemizing and empathizing, and a link between the inability to mourn the loss …show more content…

I will now turn to these three themes as they are explored in the film. The narrative of the film with all the painful developmental denouements for the central protagonists emerges slowly from a pieced-together series of flashbacks and scenes from the present day. As in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the past and present exist in a loop. This movement powerfully captures the mental to-and-fro from past to present and from present to past that is so characteristic of traumatized states of mind, at times collapsing the two into an imprisoning ‘present moment’ from which no escape seems possible except through violence (Sabbatini, 2012

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