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The Skin I Live In (2011): Sometimes, the correct description for a film is given out by its filmmaker, more than someone who has nothing to do with the film’s making and is a watcher. The Skin I Live In is an excellent example. Upon its release, its writer-director, Spanish melodrama auteur Pedro Almodóvar described the film as a horror story without the scares or frights. Frankly, there are a few other relevant things that you can say to briefly comment on what the film is. And as such a horror story, it holds up well even today, when most great contemporary horror films are being made without such elements which define the genre.
But of course, The Skin I Live In is a horror story only on the surface. At its heart, this is a melodrama that aims to present a human drama that is hollowed out to a degree. It is a film that has a lot of things to say, all relevant things, but never gives them out in the form of straightforward dialogue, monologue, or exposition. Instead, they come in the packaging of a psychosexual thriller with an unending circle of revenge. Of course, the signature bright colors and aesthetic choices greatly help enhance this hybrid.
The film’s Spanish title is La piel que habito, an adaptation of the 1984 French novel Mygale written by novelist Thierry Jonquet, later translated into English under the title Tarantula. Premiered at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, the film has considerable deviations from the plot of its source material, necessarily transplanting the film to its contemporary ideology and social milieu. This can make the movie difficult to comprehend and some of its narrative choices ambiguous. Here is an attempt to explain the film’s plot and various themes.
The Skin I Live In (2011) Movie Synopsis & Plot Summary:
The film introduces us to Dr. Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who successfully produces artificial synthetic skin that is not prone to burns, rashes, or insect bites. He has named it Gal and, in what appears to be a seminar, he says that he has been testing it on laboratory mice. However, he privately reveals to someone who seems to be a person of great authority that he has conducted these transgenic experiments illegally on humans as well, for which he is instantly rebuked and forbidden to continue his research work.
In his secluded estate in the city of Toledo, Ledgard keeps captive a beautiful woman called Vera. The surgeon is assisted by his attendant and prime servant, Marilia, an older woman. Since the experiments are no longer official and Marilia is the only one he trusts, he asks Marilia to suspend the jobs of the other servants and send them home. On the other hand, Vera seems to ask for sexual advances from Ledgard, telling him that she knows how he ogles at her body by the cameras installed throughout her room. However, Ledgard shoves her away and locks the door from outside, asking Marilia to keep a watch over her as he walks off.
When Ledgard is away, Marilia’s estranged son Zeca comes up at the door wearing a tiger costume since it’s the day of a grand carnival at Toledo. Although Marilia initially hesitates to let Zeca in, the man asks for only a minute just to see and reunite with his mother. Entering the estate, he watches the news on TV about him being hunted by the police officers because of being caught on CCTV committing a robbery at a store. He shows his mother a cut on his skin and says he would ask Dr. Ledgard to treat him. His mother scorns him, saying he should leave and that Ledgard would give him a lethal injection instead.
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She also refuses Zeca’s request to let him hide there for a few days. On the room’s security camera, Zeca sees Vera doing some physical activity. Mistaking her for the deceased wife of Ledgard, who desired him, he demands to see her in person. Marilia coldly refuses and asks him to leave, to which Zeca responds with utter contempt, binding and gagging her. Further, he takes the keys from the envelope at Marilia’s instructions, closes her mouth again, and unlocks Vera’s room. He grabs Vera, an advance she does not exactly reject but most certainly opposed, and then sexually assaults her. However, Ledgard arrives, asks Marilia about it, and then storms into the room. He shoots Zeca in the back and kills him.
When Ledgard gets out with Zeca’s body to bury it, Marilia sits with Vera by the fire outside and reveals to her that she is the mother of both Zeca and Ledgard but that their fathers are different, something which none of them know. While Zeca’s father was a servant like her, Ledgard was adopted by one of her employers, the infertile wife who always claimed him to be her biological son. However, his foster parents died early anyway, so ultimately, Marilia took care of him. On the other hand, Zeca had taken to a life of drugs and crimes and was involved in drug smuggling at large.Ledgard went to a medical school, got successful, and married a beautiful woman named Gal. When Zeca returned years later, he eloped with Gal because both desired each other, but they were involved in a terrible car accident where their vehicle crashed, and Zeca, assuming Gal to be dead, ran away.
However, Gal was not dead. Instead, she was severely burnt, and her skin was vitally destroyed. She survived thanks to her husband’s medication, but she did not see a mirror for a long time. One day, she hears a song in the voice of Norma, her daughter, and rushes to the window, where she sees a reflection of herself and is horrified to the point that she commits suicide by jumping out of the window. In the present time, Ledgard returns after getting rid of the body and puts the mattresses to fire, asking Vera to come with him. They sleep together, and Vera says that since Zeca has been too much, she is messed up and unwilling to have sex.
Late at night, Ledgard dreams of his past from six years ago, when he had attended an upscale wedding with his daughter Norma. He found Norma unconscious under a tree later that night, traumatized. Having recently returned to some normalcy after post-psychosis meditation, she again returns to the mental health facility, refusing interaction with any man, including her father, because she sees her rapist in each of them. After years of spending in the facility with fear, she finally throws herself out of the window and commits suicide like her mother.
Vera dreams of the same event, except that her dream differs from Ledgard’s. Vicente, a young man, works in his mother’s boutique and casually flirts with Cristina, a young girl employed there. He crashes into the same wedding that Ledgard attends with his daughter and, like all young men there, takes drugs. He meets Norma there and starts talking with her, asking her what drugs she has taken. Norma lists her medications, and without paying heed to the implications, he goes to a secluded space with her and starts undressing her. Suddenly, she starts stressing out as a reaction to the music and starts screaming when Vicente tries to have sex with her. She is scared and bites his hand, which leads to her getting slapped by Vicente as a reflex and as a result of his low consciousness.
Norma is rendered unconscious due to this, and a terrified Vicente first rearranges her clothes into place and then runs away. He is actually unaware that Ledgard, who got away from the party to look for Norma, had seen the youngsters in their drugged sexual orgy in the garden and also him fleeing on the motorbike. He tracks down Vicente wearing faux skin and knocks him off his motorbike one night, kidnapping him and holding him in chains in what looks like a dungeon. Once he regains consciousness and realizes the trouble he got into, Vicente starts losing his mind and is petrified of the condition he finds himself in.
On the other hand, Vicente’s mother reports him missing to the police, but the police officers don’t take the case seriously and tell her that her son is most likely dead or taken by the sea. This is much to the old lady’s disbelief, who does not believe her son to be dead. Meanwhile, Ledgard takes good care of Vicente and doesn’t torture him. But then it is revealed that he is going to perform a vaginoplasty on Vicente and convert him into a woman.He also gives him a set of dilators and instructions on stretching his vagina. Gradually, he transforms Vicente into a woman who is the replica of his wife, with breasts and buttocks tightened by skin clothing. Watching Nat Geo and Yoga channels and writing on the wall each date over the course of six years, Vera tries to keep herself rooted to her core identity.
After an absence of four years, Marilia returns to the estate upon Dr. Ledgard’s request to look after Vera. Presently, Ledgard has formed a new relationship with Vera, which causes concern for Marilia, the loyal housekeeper. Marilia distrusts Vera and is uneasy about the dynamics between them. Meanwhile, one of Ledgard’s colleagues, Fulgencio, reads a news story about a missing person named Vicente and realizes that Vicente was one of their sex change patients. He accuses Ledgard of falsifying Vicente’s consent and conducting unethical experiments on him.
Vera overhears the conversation between Fulgencio and Ledgard and decides to intervene. She confesses that she is willingly staying with Ledgard and denies being Vicente. Vera claims that she has always identified as a woman. However, Vera later stumbles upon a photograph of her previous self, Vicente, attached to the same news story about the missing persons. Later that night, Ledgard and Vera engage in a sexual encounter, but Vera reveals that she still experiences pain from the trauma of being raped by Zeca. She goes downstairs to find lubricant but retrieves Ledgard’s gun instead. In a moment of intense emotion, Vera shoots and kills Ledgard.
Marilia, alerted by the sound of the gunshot, rushes into the bedroom with her pistol. She discovers her son, Ledgard, dead on the bed. Unbeknownst to Marilia, Vera is hiding under the bed and shoots and kills Marilia in a desperate act of self-defense. As Marilia takes her last breath, she utters, “I knew it,” possibly referring to her suspicion about Vera’s true identity and intentions.
The Skin I Live In (2011) Movie Ethics & Scientific Crisis Explained:
Identity and Self
In the film, a shocking revelation of a mysterious young woman actually being a man whom Dr. Robert Ledgard has transformed against his will raises serious ethical questions about identity. It also ponders the impact of external manipulation that can alter one’s sense of self, perhaps forever. The issue of informed consent and individual autonomy lingers in the film. The film prompts us to question the boundaries of medical research and the responsibility of scientists to respect the autonomy and agency of their subjects. The lack of informed consent in the film serves as a cautionary tale, reminding us of the importance of respecting human rights in scientific endeavors.
Body Modification and Gender Identity
“The Skin I Live In” also delves into the ethical complexities surrounding body modification and gender identity. Dr. Ledgard’s decision to transform Vicente into Vera raises questions about the ethical boundaries of altering a person’s physical appearance to align with a desired gender identity. The film challenges us to consider the ethical implications of such procedures and whether they should be pursued solely for cosmetic or psychological reasons.
Also, it delves deeply into the social stigma of being a woman and subtly challenges the same. It shows how resilience helps Vicente to stay true to his core despite becoming a woman and how slipping into a female skin enables her with a degree of agency over the evil of Dr. Robert Ledgard, whether or not he later chooses to stick with this identity. This is also a playful nod to the director’s own queer touches, which brush the original story with a more contemporary European art-house flavor that is ultimately engaging to watch.
Coping Mechanisms
The film offers a powerful and inquisitive look into the various coping mechanisms employed by people to deal with their psychological traumas. Of course, the most significant and most unique of them all is the one employed by Vera, earning a physical tolerance to endless sexual exploitation through years to fight back actively in the end and fearlessly going for the kill in a playful femme-fatale fashion. However, Dr. Robert Ledgard’s pursuit of finding what David Cronenberg would term ‘new flesh’ is its own coping mechanism, a way to deal with his romantic grief due to the loss of his wife.
Another under-noticed coping mechanism is that of Norma, who tries to get her own place in the world through a romantic interaction with Vicente, who later reveals his drugged state, further pushing her into trauma. In the end, the saddest way to cope with dark things is not to cope at all, something both Norma and Gal did in the past, a dark but elemental plot point that the film deals with and with nuance.
The Circle of Revenge in The Skin I Live In
The film, at the end, is the story of how the cycle of vengeance is an endless loop until someone truly meets justice, or so we think. Zeca’s killing was Ledgard’s revenge for Vera’s rape, while the killing of Ledgard at the hands of Vera was her way of stabbing into the heart of what destroyed her original form of a man. In the fashion of classical Spanish melodrama, which was heavily influenced by the French melodramas of the nineteenth-century theatre arts, Marilia is a figure of sacrifice who gets butchered in the unhinged game of blood and flesh at the end.
The Skin I Live In (2011) Movie Ending Explained:
What does Vera do next?
Having finally escaped from the clutches of Dr. Ledgard and no longer burdened by the need to conform to his twisted desires, Vicente makes his way back to his mother’s dress shop, a place he hasn’t set foot in since the day he was abducted. Overcome with emotion, he confides in Cristina about the horrific ordeal he endured – the kidnapping, the forced sex change, and the chilling murders that took place. As Vicente’s mother enters the room, he reveals his true identity to them with a soft yet profound declaration, “I am Vicente.” With these poignant words, the film comes to a close, leaving the audience to grapple with the weight of Vicente’s journey and the lasting impact of the harrowing events he experienced.
