Film and Philosophy

Volume 25, 2021

Pedro Almodóvar’s Communities of Circumstance

This article engages in a close analysis of community across the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. What emerges from this is that while Almodóvar has a strong subversive streak, his films are deeply concerned with questions about how we might live together in the best way possible. Drawing on the feminist ethics of care—with its emphasis on the maternal as an ethical model—and the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, I argue that Almodóvar’s preferred communities are “communities of circumstance,” best conceptualized as dynamic networks of relations that respond directly to the varied needs of their members. Rather than fitting any fixed social boundaries, they emerge organically from lived experience. Ultimately, I conclude that Almodóvar’s films not only offer screen representations of communities of circumstance, but might contribute to our understanding of what it means to live in community in the “real world.”