Abstract

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar’s films are often categorized by critics within the shifts of gendered violence, which speaks on the condition of Spain plagued with the ills of its past. This paper would like to discuss Almodovar’s film Pain and Glory (2019), taking into usage the Socratic idea of pharmakon, and would attempt to analyze the role of drugs which acts as both remedy and pain to the ailing protagonist Salvador Mallo, and how their interplay constitutes the role of memory, which serves as a textual phenomenon to the protagonist. The present idea would then take into consideration the notion of the writer’s sacrifice and like to discuss the idea of authorship and its authority involved in the fictional domain of Almodovar’s film and argue in detail how filmmaking strategies employed by the filmmaker himself meditate on the theory of fiction within the so-called fictional space itself. This paper would also like to delve into an analysis of the many intertextual cues apparent in his later works, to experience and understand how the role of cinema in Pain and Glory entails with it the idea to combat death and paralysis in the light of the auteur’s palpable suffering, creating a contradictory situation of authorial absence/presence.