As one of the true icons of 20th- and 21st-century queer cinema, Pedro Almodovar has always interrogated the nuances of relationships and the messy collateral damage they inspire in a homophobic society. His keen gaze is just as sharp when it comes to the poor straight people; often, it’s even more scathing in its analysis. 1989’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! might be the purest example of Almodovar’s romantic and sexual dissections, positioning the expected and endorsed dynamics of boy vs. girl and placing it midway between a Grimm fairytale and Hammer horror movie. Through Pedro’s eyes, the question, “Are the straight people okay?” is answered with a resounding “Nope.”
Almodovar reunited with his most enduring muse, Antonio Banderas, for the fifth time with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (known as ¡Átame! in Almodovar’s native Spain.) and it remains their most potent collaboration. Banderas (perhaps never hotter than he is here) plays Ricky, an unhinged former psychiatric patient whose first task after being released from a mental hospital is to kidnap Marina, an actress and former porn star with whom he had a one-night stand, in the hopes of making her fall in love with him. He snatches her from the set of her latest project, stows her away in her own home, and keeps her in literal knots until she sees that his feelings for her must be sated. And, spoiler alert, it works! Call it Stockholm Syndrome or just a demented storybook tale, but the kidnapper wins his happy-ever-after.
Almodovar said that the film was inspired by his love of B-movies, particularly the Roger Corman women-in-prison flicks that made up for minuscule budgets by amping up the style, humor, and deviance. A noted fan of classic Hollywood noir and stories of glamorous women in peril, Almodovar also took cues from William Wyler’s The Collector, wherein an obsessed man abducts a woman to be part of his collection. Yet that film is painfully real in its portrayal of a kidnapping and the trauma it causes, where Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! rejects grit in favor of lascivious fantasy.
The horror remains, however. When Ricky kidnaps Marina, the abduction isn’t softened or played for laughs. She does suffer and there is violence. Marina is bound in ropes, a captive in bondage that moves slickly from terror to arousal. The fear is real but so is the love.
This is less about love in real life than it is about love in the movies. The speed with which Marina becomes enraptured by Ricky, asking him to tie her to the bed so she won’t be tempted to flee his adoration, is deliberately improbable. The all-consuming power of pure infatuation, sexually overloaded and immune to reason, is ideal for the cinematic form. If art intends to expand the mundanities of reality into something gargantuan yet relatable, Almodovar turns the power of desire into the most beautiful threat.
Fantasies of kidnapping and forced consent (as it is so euphemistically referred to in the romance novel world) are very popular among many women. We are already taught to fear our impulses, and to mistrust the intentions of every man we meet. We fear that which we hunger for the most. It’s a theme that many romantic dramas have explored, from Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place to Jane Campion’s In the Cut: What do you do when you are attracted to the very thing you’re afraid of? Can such things ever be compatible, or are they doomed to forever be mutually exclusive? Here, Marina’s sister Lola, who is the assistant director of the film they’re both working on, says that the schlocky horror flicks are “more a love story than a horror story.” The director then says, “Sometimes, they’re indistinguishable.” Almodovar doesn’t go so far as to suggest that you can have both, mostly because such execution, in reality, would probably end disastrously. But in the dreamland of cinema, the rules do not apply.
Many feminist groups took umbrage with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! They worried it had romanticized abuse (particularly with its full-on depiction of sex, which initially received an X rating in America) and reinforced an age-old lie that love can “fix” a cruel man. Yet the film doesn’t seek to fix Ricky or Marina. Their love is not one of mutual salvation, yet neither is it fully the throes of shared madness. It’s sadomasochism in the face of oblivion.
Almodovar himself said that Tie Me Up is “a story of how someone attempts to construct a love story in the same way as he might study for a degree: by means of effort, willpower, and persistence.” It’s like explaining the steps of a human relationship to aliens, showing them fairy tales as key examples, and then asking them to recreate it. How could the end result not be frenzied, horny, nuance-free, and yet still strangely sweet? Ricky, Marina, and Lola drive off together with smiles on their faces and big plans for a normal family life, a climax that makes similar endings to other morally unhinged rom-coms feel all the more deranged as a result. If you’re told that boy loves girl and boy must have girl, why wouldn’t the result end up closer to King Kong than An Affair to Remember?
“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” is streaming on Max and the Criterion Channel.
