Two Hundred Years of Solitude

Volver was not only meaningful but it was also comical and that’s something that I find very hard to do, so I always am able to appreciate it when an author or director can make these two things come together as though they were never apart. While The House of the Spirits is comical in some parts, it’s nowhere near the extent of Volver. I believe that Diesen said it best when he said, “On the other hand, it is relieving to watch a film so filled with funny observations about things we normally consider too horrible to laugh at.” Ultimately, that’s whats so charming about this movie. However, this isn’t the only thing. It’s pretty hard to ignore the very strong female cast. Penelope Cruz is not only beautiful in every scene – even when she’s cleaning up her husbands blood – she manages to clean up the mess of a corpse, cook for 30 people multiple times, and burry a fridge with the help of only other women. Joe Lozito from Big Picture Big Sound agrees when he says, “Ms. Cruz is able to let loose like we’ve never seen before. She’s positively radiant as Raimunda and she takes control of the screen and the role,” and I think that is why she was chosen for the role. This identity of the strong woman is also seen – many times – in our novel, The House of the Spirits. Whether you talk about Clara, Blanca, Transito, Amanda, Rosa, Nivea, or even the newest character Alba, there are strong characteristics about all of them. Even in death Clara took charge of her fate and died with dignity. Little Alba, just a child, confronts her grandfather about the idea of the tenants getting part of the land that they worked. I think that the theme of the strong women is present in Latin American culture because they typically are very strong women that have had to overcome many injustices. While injustice is present in every race, culture, country for every type of person, I still believe there’s a certain type that affects hispanic women that makes them as strong and (excuse me) bad ASS as they are today.

WORKS CITED

Diesen, Trude. “Volver.” Volver. N.p., 02 Aug. 2006. Web. 09 Sept. 2016.

Lozito Javascript:decode_stars(‘****’);, Joe. “Volver Movie Review.” BigPictureBigSound. N.p., 26 Oct. 2006. Web. 09 Sept. 2016.

The female characters in both The House of the Spirits and Volver consist of strong and extraordinary women. They are independent and don’t heavily rely on a male’s opinion. These characters combat the idea that women are supposed to be submissive because they are the opposite. Clara and Raimunda fight for the well-being of their children under any circumstance. The women in these works are not dependent on men and have the ability to make their own decisions. The female characters are the center of both of these two works they are the focus of the stories. The men are secondary characters and “are often predators” (Bina007).

In The House of the Spirits Clara heavily relies on her supernatural powers to prepare herself for the problems that are to come. She doesn’t let her premonitions frighten her as she grows older she learns how to accept it and use it as a coping mechanism. The contrast and similarities between Clara an Raimunda are uncanny. Raimunda is this beautiful young mother who spends her time working many part-time jobs in order to provide for her family. She has a 14-year-old daughter and her husband spends his time lounging around drinking. When her husband attempts to rape her daughter (Paula) and her daughter kills him she takes matter into her own hands. She settles the issue and tells her daughter not to worry about it. This is similar to when Esteban beats both Clara and Blanca so Clara leaves Trés Marias with her daughter. She does everything in her power to alienate him and exclude him from the family because once he crossed that line he lost her forever. In a sense this was worse than death for Esteban because he spent the rest of his life craving human affection. These two women like their mothers Nívea and Irene do what they believe is right for their families.

The husbands in both of these works are viewed as antagonistic characters. Pedro and Esteban are both womanizing close minded men. Pedro attempts to rape his stepdaughter whom he has raised since she was a baby. He is lazy and spends his time laying around on the couch drinking beer not worrying about finding a job and providing for his family. Esteban on the other hand is an ill-tempered man whose mood is unbearable all together. During his life time he rapes many women and uses them for sex. He then throws them away as if they were a simple object and not human beings. Neither of their demises (both literal and metaphorical) are mourned. After committing the acts that ultimately leave them without relation with their families they lose their sense of home. For Pedro he literally loses his life while Esteban is forced to live a life isolated from his children. The women can do without these men in their lives and are seen to succeed in life well, after ridding themselves of them.

Almodovar’s many films consist of strong eccentric women and their connections with one another. This aspect is also present in Allende’s novel because all of the women are interconnected even their names are different variations of the same word. The relationships that these women have with one another add to their independence because together they can succeed and are able to better their lives. They inspire each other to continue on through the hardships. They are there for one another when tough times arise and build one another up instead of tearing each other down. The men in either of these works tend to do the opposite and tear their companions apart rather than building them up. Both Allende and Almodovar develop strong interconnected and self-aware women who are able to fight their own battles to counter the idea that women are submissive beings. They create these multi-faceted female characters who fight for their lives and making the best of their situations.

Work Cited:

Bina007. “VOLVER – the Genius of Almodovar.” Bina007 Movie Reviews:. Bina007, 09 Sept. 2016. Web. 08 Sept. 2016. <http://www.bina007.com/2006/08/volver-genius-of-almodovar.html&gt;.

Johans, Jen. “Film Intuition: Review Database.” : Volver. Film Intuition, 05 Apr. 2007. Web. 08 Sept. 2016. <http://reviews.filmintuition.com/2007/04/volver.html&gt;.

On the surface, Almodovar’s Volver has many similarities to Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Both stories depict multiple generations of strong, vivacious women and their struggles to survive both common life and the actions of men.

The main premise of Volver is two grownup sisters discovering their mother’s ghost following their aunt’s funeral. This use of an other-worldly element (the mother’s ghost) would seem likely to take center stage of the film. However, the existence of the ghost does not distract from the main characters’ real-world problems. Similarly, in The House of the Spirits, Clara’s paranormal powers do not do her much good; in the end she is still married to an abusive man. The lives of these women in both stories are less than desired. But the strong nature of the characters, with their inability to resort to self-pity despite their gloomy circumstances is quite admirable. This, rather than the mystical elements both stories possess, is the main focus.

In the beginning of Volver, one sister, Raimunda returns home to her husband’s dead body because earlier he tried to sexually harass his step-daughter, Paula. In true mother-like fashion, Raimunda decides to clean up the mess and cover up the accident for her daughter’s sake. When a neighbor notices blood on Raimunda’s neck, her response is “’women’s troubles’…which is both a startling risqué joke and the startling truth” (NY Times). Paco, the deceased husband, literally is “women’s troubles” (Almodóvar). He is trouble for Raimunda’s daughter Paula, whom he attempted to rape, and he is trouble for Raimunda herself, as she is now tasked with covertly disposing of his body.

But this is beside the point. The fact that the New York Times reporter Anthony Scott found the joke that the character made “risqué” is important. Allende’s portrayal of Blanca’s transition into adulthood as shameless and good in The House of the Spirits was revolutionary when released in the 20th c. And it is still revolutionary today. As Scott writes, “men, for Raimunda and her circle, tend to be malevolent, irrelevant or simply absent: straying husbands, predators, dead bodies. They cause a fair amount of trouble, but the point of “Volver” is that it’s not about them.” Men are not the focus- in Volver, The House of the Spirits, and real life. The fact that that Scott found Raimunda’s joke “risqué” is because men, who primarily dictate society norms, have pre-decided that female menstrual cycles are “risqué.” As Cynthia Fuchs writes: “The most… provocative aspect of Almodóvar’s movie is its celebration of women’s self-understanding… In the end, men are unimportant in the women’s patient, purposeful, and proud survival.” This, in essence, is what Volver and The House of the Spirits have in common. Both are portrayals of women surviving in a world dominated by men.

Fuchs, Cynthia. “Volver.” Common Sense Media, http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/volver#. Accessed September 8 2016.

A.O. Scott. “The Darkest of Troubles in the Brightest of Colors.” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/movies/03volv.html?_r=1. Accessed September 8 2016.

So, another blog post. The House of the Spirits and the Spanish film Volver express similar themes, characters, and magical realism. A good example of this is innocence, Paula and Clara can be described s innocent in terms of their upbringings. Paula was innocent up until she murdered her “father” because he was trying to rape her. Clara blames herself for the death of Rosa because of her magic abilities/powers so she limits her use of what is her full potential. In both the film and the book, women are suppressed in the sense that, they have less rights than men and are constantly barraged by pre conceived notions and high expectations. Another common theme throughout the book and film is wealth v. poor, in Volver, the family is on the brink of poverty and earlier in the book, Esteban used to be poor with good intentions, to provide for his soon to be wife, after he became wealthy he became a completely different person with a completely flipped set of values. This relates to the film in the sense that this poor family was so desperately trying to survive on what little they had, but in the film what they wanted the most was each other aka their mother. The suffrage of women is a very apparent thing in the book and film and it is depicted in various ways throughout both of them. One depicts women’s suffrage more descriptively than the other but they are both still trying to get the same point across. Solver was an excellent film and what made it so unique was that it depicted real world problems in such a real manner. The film gave us insight of the third world struggle of poverty and life among a society with strict rules against women saying they can only do this and that. I am excited to finish the book and I hope to be able to draw more connections to both films and literature that we work on throughout the semester.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits or watching Pedro Almodovar’s Volver, it’s that women are better than men.

Okay, maybe that’s not the moral. Maybe that’s not even true. But how can you not hate men after these stories? Men are dull, earthly creatures, where women are beautiful, mystical, patient goddesses. Volver beautifully illustrates this in an incredibly subtle way by the juxtaposition of Irene’s “resurrection” and Paco’s staying dead – “… a bulky corpse whose disposal becomes one of the story’s main plot devices” (Baumgarten).

In spite of the fact that men bring very little to the table in either of these stories, their power and their lust are evidently the causes of mishap and tragedy across generations (Stein). You can see this in The House of the Spirits in Esteban Trueba’s rape and fervent, possessive love of Rosa and then Clara and in Nicolas’ careless impregnation and abandonment of Amanda. It’s also abundantly clear in Volver‘s prevalent incest motif, with Raimunda’s pregnancy by her father and Paula’s narrowly-avoided rape by her stepfather, and in the affair that killed Raimunda’s father, Agustina’s mother, and, in at least a very strictly legal sense, Irene. Well, this sounds awful. I wouldn’t have gone to college if I’d known this was the sort of thing I’d be enlightened to. I’d live and die as a blissfully unaware cashier or machinist.

So, what is the moral? Is there one? Should we resign to the hopelessly destructive, careless dynamic of men versus women? I don’t think so. If The House of the Spirits and Volver have taught me one common lesson, it’s that while there is a major issue, we’re still fixing it little by little every day. It’ll never go away – some people are just pieces of shit. But the human race has finally opened its collective eyes and is stumbling – most certainly stumbling – into the blinding light of a future where we are a singular, equal species.

Volver

By Marjorie Baumgarten, Fri., Jan. 12, 2007 – http://www.austinchronicle.com/calendar/film/2007-01-12/430977/ Accessed Sep. 8, 2016

SFGate

By Stein – http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Leave-it-to-Mama-to-clean-up-the-mess-2484510.php Accessed Sep. 8, 2016

A big theme in both Volver and The House of Spirits is magical realism, but the use of it is different in both of the texts. The magical realism in Volver furthers “the rich culture that surrounds death” because all of the female characters are faced with it (Almodovar, IndieWire). On the other hand in The House of Spirits the different female characters are faced with the culture of magic. Therefore, I’d like to provide certain examples of how magical realism was used to further these two different themes.

Death is everywhere in Volver, from the death of Paula’s “father” to the diagnosis of Agustina. The main example I want to focus on deals with Irene because the big realization of her not really being a ghost is what really added to the film as a whole. It is important to look at how the whole film was told because the way it was told is what made the audience think Irene was a ghost. Therefore, the magical realism that is present in the film could have possibly been avoided had the film been told differently. Either way this storytelling style allowed the film to maintain its magical element, while the element of death allowed for the film to mirror reality.

It is also important to note how the female characters regard the “culture of death” in comparison to the culture of magic because they seem to be accepting of it and their personalities remain unchanged. Meanwhile the female characters in The House of Spirits tend to seek magic, especially Clara in order to escape reality. So while the magical realism in Volver accepts death and it’s magical elements into their reality, the magical realism in Allende’s novel further separates the culture of magic from reality. Both texts dealt with strong male characters that inflicted pain on the female characters, but unlike the characters in Volver, women in The House of Spirits found an escape from their inequalities by submersing themselves in the culture of magic, either completely like Clara or simply by observing like Ferula. In the end I conclude the writers used magical realism to define their female characters a certain way by taking in account the cultures that surrounded them.

Work Cited:

“Making “Volver,” Pedro Almodovar’s Online Diary.” IndieWire. IndieWire, 29 Aug. 2005. Web. 08 Sept. 2016. http://www.indiewire.com/author/cfg/.

Scott, A. O. “The Darkest of Troubles in the Brightest of Colors.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Nov. 2006. Web. 08 Sept. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/movies/03volv.html?_r=0.