There is a natural wedding between film making and the primal scene. The primal scene, as first described by Freud (1918) in his “Wolfman” case, is a witnessing of parental intercourse. In such a scenario, the child is a helpless witness to the exciting lovemaking. Arlow (1980) has stressed the evocation of envy and a desire for revenge from the primal scene experience. His patients attempted to exact revenge by reversing the scenario, so that a parental figure was forced in some way to witness the patient’s love making, real or metaphorical. They also exacted revenge by interrupting the primal scene.
Film is a natural vehicle for evoking reactions to the primal scene. The moviegoer sits passively (cell phone off) in a dark room, watching a larger than life bright exciting image. The filmmaker is also caught in the act of watching, although she has the advantage of being able to manipulate the images. I have found that it is relatively common for filmmakers to use the evoked envy and frustration of the primal scene to capture the emotions of the viewer. This is presented more intensely in some films, including Blowup, which Arlow wrote about in the same paper on envy in the primal scene, The Conformist, L.A. Confidential, The Crying Game, The Lives of Others and Rashomon. A more recent example is Pedro Almodovar’s 2009 film, Broken Embraces.
At the heart of this story is the love affair of a filmmaker, Matteo Blanco, and his actress /lover Lena, played by Penelope Cruz. They are the primary loving couple of the primal scene and they are watched closely by three pairs of envious eyes. Their love affair evolves during the filming of another film, a film within a film, Girls and Suitcases, Blanco’s first attempt at comedy (reportedly loosely taken from Almodovar’s early film, of a Women on the Verge Nervous Breakdown).
In the making of Girls and Suitcases, Matteo Blanco is the witness as he sees Lena interacting with a series of women in front of the camera. At the same time, an amateur film is being made of the filming of Girls and Suitcases, effectively documenting the secret romance between Lena and Matteo. We have layers of eyes and cameras, and this is just the surface.
In analysis, the primal scene is a mystery from the distant time before memory, the infantile past. It must be reconstructed from memory fragments, often represented in dreams and acting out on the part of the adult patient (Arlow, 1980). Broken Embraces comes to us in a similar form. It is presented in the form of a film noir in which the present action provides mysterious clues to a darker, more exciting past. The main protagonists are a blind screen writer, who calls himself Harry Caine, his agent and part time caretaker, Judit, and her adolescent son, Diego. From the outset, we know there is a mystery from the past when Harry explains that he used to be Matteo Blanco, but had left that identity to fully adopt his pen name. He is trying to wipe out the past. Similarly, Judit has been trying to hide the past from Diego, who complains that she will never tell him what happened.
This repression of the past has apparently been stable for some time, but we enter as it is disturbed, first by a piece of news and then by the intrusion of a fourth character, a strange young man who calls himself “Ray-X”. The news item comes as a passing comment in the opening scene, which itself attracts our attention to the primal scene. A middle aged blind man, Harry Caine, interacts with a beautiful young woman. We learn later that she has helped him home. As we enter, she is reading the newspaper to him. He soon tells her that he is interested not in the news, but in her. He asks her to describe herself and when she says that she is wearing tight jeans, we see a closeup of her pubic area covered by the tight jeans. As he begins to touch her seductively, seemingly to fortify the image, the camera focuses on her breasts as he uncovers them.
I realize that my own perspective may be idiosyncratic, but I think it likely that some other viewers wondered how a blind man had happened onto such a beautiful woman. I even wondered if what we saw of her was perhaps his imagined view. Perhaps it was all a sham and she was a call girl, although nothing in the film supports that. As she describes herself and we see him trying to put together the picture, the line between what we actually see and what we think we see becomes perhaps blurry. He seduces her into love making, demonstrating that although blind, he is clearly not castrated. We do not actually see the love making. We hear them grunting, see the tip of his back moving up and down into and out of view, and see her foot above the back of the couch that blocks our view of the lovers. In effect, we the viewers are the passive observers of a primal scene, with whatever envy and vicarious pleasure that entails.
After the love making, his doorbell rings and another woman enters, Judit, his manager and caretaker. She appears to be used to this kind of thing and warns him about the dangers of picking up strangers. In an understated way, we have our first triangle.
At this point, the film focuses on a series of parent/child relationships. It begins with an aside to the plot. Harry tells Judit about his idea for a new screenplay based upon something he had read about the playwright Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller fathered a son with Down’s syndrome whom he avoids for many years until the son attends a talk Miller gives in support of the case of a retarded man accused of murder. The son comes up to him after the talk and hugs Miller, finally telling him who he is and how proud he is of his father. We can’t help noticing that Judit has a strong reaction to this story, but don’t yet know why.
We next are focused on a very different set of parent/child interactions. The very first newspaper item that the young woman had read to Harry concerned the death of a man named Ernesto Martel. Harry had claimed to know nothing about him, but in fact he talks with Judit about the death and later checks the web for information, leading to the first of the film’s flashbacks in which we see Ernesto Martel, a powerful and wealthy businessman, ensnaring his beautiful secretary, Lena (for Magdalena), into becoming his mistress.
The name, Magdalena, is of course not an accident. Lena is a frustrated actress who has been forced to work in the past as a high priced call girl. In order to get proper medical care for her dying father, she has to turn to her boss. Her devotion to her parents leads her to prostitution. She sacrifices herself to allow her parents some comfort in their last days together while finding herself a lover who is of her father’s generation.
Coming back to the present, we have still another version of the parent/child relationship, in this case father and son again. Harry is approached by a strange man who calls himself Ray-X. He wants to write a screenplay with Harry about “a son’s revenge on his father’s memory.” It is to be a story about a repressive homophobic father. Harry turns him away, telling him the story is too personal. He has recognized Ray-X as Ernesto Martel Jr. and verifies it by having Judit’s son, Diego, identify him from an old picture from a 1994 film shoot.
Now, Judit, Harry’s agent, insists that Ernesto Jr. stay away from Harry, even threatening to report him for harassment. This leads to one last parent/child conflict before we get to the heart of the primal scene. Judit has to go on a business trip and puts her adolescent son, Diego, in charge of watching out for Harry, particularly asking him to let her know if Ernesto Jr. tries to approach him again. Diego wants to know what this is all about. She tells him, “It’s a long story.” He asks for a summary and angrily protests at her secrecy about the her past and Harry’s, drawing us into the mystery and focusing us on the film’s conflicted tension over revealing the past.
Of course, it will be revealed for us. Diego accidentally overdoses on drugs at a club he works in as a DJ. Harry takes him home from the hospital and as they talk, learns that Judit is afraid of Ernesto Jr. He decides to tell Diego about the hidden past, leading us to the central love story and the multilayered primal scene.
The flashbacks move in steady chronological order. The story revolves around a triangle of Lena, Ernesto Martel and Matteo Blanco, the then young film director. But there are other interlocking triangles as well, and here the primal scene becomes prominent.
This film, which seems to revel in layers upon layers, centers around the making of two films. Matteo Blanco is filming Girls and Suitcases, starring Lena, while Ernesto’s effeminate adolescent son, Ernesto Jr., is filming the making of Girls and Suitcases, focusing on Lena and Matteo. What we have is a telescopic series of primal scenes. Matteo, the director, is watching Lena act in front of the camera. We see her interacting with a series of women. Ernesto Jr. is spying upon Matteo and Lena when Matteo’s cameras are not rolling, catching them in private, intimate moments. He is taking his film to his father, who has hired a lip reader to watch the film with him and tell him what Matteo and Lena are saying to one another.
Lena and Matteo are aware of Ernesto Jr.’s prying camera. They manage to lock him out for a moment of passionate love making, somewhat reminiscent of the Harry/Mateo’s sex with the woman at the beginning of the film. We, the viewers, of course, are witnesses to this scene, still another layer.
As Lena and Matteo fall in love, they are observed by two generations of Ernesto Martel. The teenage junior observes their love making from his vantage point as a younger person, sexually naïve like the child in the primal scene. Ernesto senior has to watch his young mistress and her lover as a younger couple expressing love to one another while making fun of Lena’s affair with him. What is more, they each have a different perspective to their jealousy. Ernesto Jr. is attracted to Matteo, Ernesto Sr. to Lena.
In Broken Embraces, Arlow’s cardinal primal scene elements of envy and rage are palpable. We see Ernesto Sr.’s pained face as he hears Lena’s words from the lip reader telling Matteo how painful it is to be “under that old bastard for 48 hours.” and see him staring at a blowup of Lena and Mateo kissing. Driven by his need to know, a mix of curiosity, a need to control and an erotic desire driven perhaps by primal scene dynamics, he looks on fascinated and tortured.
Like the classic primal scene observer, and like characters in all the other films I have noted, Ernesto Sr. feels compelled to act, to interrupt the primal scene. He insists that Lena take a weekend off from making the film to go with him to the shore for two days of love making, passionate for him, tortured for Lena. We see her emerge from under the sheets, disengaging herself from Ernesto, to go to the bathroom where she vomits into the toilet. When she returns, he feigns death, later accusing her of not being upset at finding him dead.
But the lovers in the primal scene fight back when Lena rebels against Ernesto Jr.’s camera, assaulting him when she finds him filming her outside Matteo’s home. Somehow realizing that Ernesto Sr. is watching the films, she speaks to him directly through Ernesto Jr.’s camera, and then walks in as he is viewing the scene with the lip reader, reciting her lines directly as they are spoken on the screen. In effect, the actress comes out from the screen, the lover in the primal scene scenario speaks directly to the observer.
Lena tells Ernesto that she is leaving him. As she is walking down the stairs, he pushes her, causing her to tumble down, breaking bones in her legs. At this point art follows reality (although since it is a film, art is following art). In order to complete the production of the film, Matteo stages a scene in which a woman, the crazed ex wife of Lena’s character’s lover pushes Lena down a flight of stairs, justifying the cast and crutches that she is forced to use.
Once the shooting of Matteo’s film has been completed, the lovers run from all the prying eyes, going to a seaside island resort, telling no one, not even Judit, of their whereabouts. There we see further elements of the primal scene. Matteo takes a photograph of a panoramic view, not realizing until after it is developed, that in the corner of his photograph, he has caught a pair of lovers in an embrace. He decides to write about them. Lena tells him that she and Matteo are the lovers in the photograph, creating an otherworldly image of Matteo and Lena looking out from the cliff at their own embrace.
I was reminded of Antonioni’s Blowup, which Arlow wrote about regarding the primal scene, and which revolved around a photograph that accidentally caught a distorted image of a pair of lovers and a possible image of a pistol pointed at them. In fact, Almodovar attributed the image to a real event in his life according to the IMDb website.
Just after that we see the telescoping of couples watching couples. Matteo and Lena sit on a sofa, arm in arm watching a film in which another couple looks at the remains of a man and woman locked in an embrace for eternity when the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius captured ancient Pompeii in its last moment. The film is Viaggia in Italia (Voyage in Italy) by Roberto Rosselini in which a jaded married couple seem destined to move on in separate directions when this experience convinces them to continue their marriage and re-avow their love for one another, inspired by the lovers caught forever in an embrace. As if to reproduce it, Matteo sets the timer on his camera so that he and Lena can be photographed arm in arm.
But the film’s title is Broken Embraces. We know already from the current scenes that the lovers will be separated. The broken embraces also refers to the photographs of Matteo and Lena which were found in their room on the island, cut into pieces so that the lovers’ images were separated. This is the fantasied revenge of the helpless onlooker, the child of the primal scene, envying the lovers embraced and wishing to separate them. Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of jealousy knows that wish.
It sometimes happens that a film which features the primal scene culminates in a dramatic primal scene of some sort. We see the lovers driving, presumably to a train station where he will leave Lena to go back to town. They reach a cross roads marked by a giant mobile that he had photographed earlier. In the lights from the mobile, we see that they are followed by another car, driven by Ernesto Jr. As they enter the intersection, an SUV comes hurtling through, crashing into them.
We learn that Lena has been killed and Matteo blinded. The primal scene has been interrupted permanently. It is at that point that he denies his name and answers only to Harry Caine, the name with which he had signed into the motel on the island. Judit comes to him and begins to help him return to his life. His days as a director are over, but he will continue to be a screen writer, with Judit as his agent.
But mystery remains. We now know what happened, but not why and not whodunit. We suspect that Ernesto Sr. is involved, the enraged, powerful, narcissistic jilted older lover. We suspect Ernesto Jr., the angry young man who is seen trailing them on the fateful night. Interestingly, perhaps in the spirit of the darkness of noir, the film does not tell us outright. Instead it leaves us the clues, clear but subtle enough that many viewers may not see it on first viewing.
The first clue comes very indirectly. As I have referenced before (in an analysis of the film, Finding Neverland), Leon Balter has written about the significance of a dream within a dream and a work of art within a dream (2005) as well as a work of art within a work of art (2006). He points out that the embedded dream or work of art contains a hidden truth that is somewhat disguised in the manifest dream or work of art. Broken Embraces contains an embedded film, Girls and Suitcases. In Broken Embraces, Ernesto Martel pushes Lena down the stairs. In Girls and Suitcases, she is pushed by another woman, the psychotic ex-wife of her lover, Ivan. In a later scene from Girls and Suitcases, we learn that Lena’s character has prepared a pitcher of poison gazpacho aimed at the cheating Ivan, who has run off with another lover. We are pointed towards the jealous woman. We also have a reinforcement of the distrust of women in a little humorous aside early in the film, when Diego and Harry have fun with an idea for a screenplay about a woman vampire who has to protect her male lover from her urges to bite his jugular vein.
With all the drama around Ernesto Sr. and Ernesto Jr. filming and observing the primal scene lasciviously and angrily, we are distracted from Judit. We can see her worried glances at the lovers. We see her as a mother hen watching out for the womanizing Harry Caine at the beginning of the film, but her jealousy is left purely for the imagination.
The film gives us clues in the form of mysterious reactions on her part. She seems to react strongly to Harry’s story about Arthur Miller and the son he ignored for many years. Early on, she is worried when Ernesto Jr. attempts to approach Harry, even telling Diego to tell her immediately if Ernesto Jr. tries to contact Harry. We think she is protecting Harry, but she is protecting the hidden past.
We easily see Judit as a jealous lover, but the extent of her involvement comes out only near the end of the film. On returning from a business trip and hearing that Matteo has told his story to Diego, Judit decides to make her confession to both of them over drinks celebrating Matteo’s birthday. She confesses that she complied with Ernesto Sr.’s plan to destroy the movie by using the bad takes for the final editing. She confesses that out of shame over what she had done, she didn’t answer the phone when Matteo called. She confesses to giving Ernesto the information about their whereabouts. Matteo forgives her for all these actions from long ago, blaming himself for not having told her where he and Lena were going.
What she does not tell him, but tells Diego the next morning is that Diego is Matteo’s son. She had had a brief affair with Matteo. When she was pregnant, she told Matteo that the father was some man she had met. There was such a man, but he was not the father. The first time viewer will not notice it (and maybe the second time viewer as well), but this helps explain her reaction to the story about Arthur Miller and his forgotten son. Judit had motive to be a third player in the primal scene triangles, another jealous observer as Matteo and Lena played out their love affair before three pairs of eyes and multiple cameras.
Harry: “From the start, Judit didn’t like Lena But I liked her more every day.”
The proof is subtle, but definite. When Judit returns from her business trip and sees Diego, we see small bruises on both her cheeks. She sees that Diego notices it and says she didn’t have time to put on makeup to cover it up. She has been hiding these bruises from us and from the world throughout the film (and they will never appear again) and for the intervening years. They are meant to tell us that Judit has also suffered an accident at some time in the past. There is, of course, only one accident to account for this in Broken Embraces.
Towards the end of the film, Diego and Matteo watch the end of Ernesto Jr.’s documentary. We see flashbacks of Ernesto Jr. driving behind Matteo and Lena, a forward facing camera mounted in his car. We see the lovers stop at the intersection in the light from the mobile. They embrace for one last kiss before moving into the intersection. Movingly, Matteo goes to the screen to try to touch the image of his last kiss with Lena, himself a passive viewer to their kiss as Ernesto Sr. was earlier. As they move into the intersection, an SUV comes from the cross road slamming into them violently and then driving away. Ernesto Jr. gets out of his car to run to their aid. He is not the driver who killed them.
Of course, the killer and the destroyer of the lovers’ embraces is Judit, the only sign of her guilt showing on her cheekbones and easily disguised with makeup. The film’s characters never show any recognition of this solution to the mystery. In fact, at the end, a happy Matteo, Diego and Judit are putting together the original version of Girls and Suitcases from film that Judit had secretly kept. They buoyantly plan to re-release it, their own bonds secured and Judit’s guilt known only to the viewer.
Judit has her revenge and is now part of a happy family with the man she blinded while killing his true love. As with all the “primal scene movies” I have examined, the happy ending satisfies the needs of the envious viewer of the primal scene, making her a part of the loving couple. Matteo has been cured by this analytic approach of re-working his bottled memories of the past, so that he now can re-assume his full identity.
But we are left with one unanswered mystery. Someone has cut in half Matteo’s photographs taken during his time alone with Lena, the “broken embraces” of the film’s title. Was it Ernesto Jr., still caught in a jealous rage, who came back to their room to exact his revenge on their visual images? Was his father somehow drawn to their love nest after hearing of the accident? Was it Judit? When she later comes to the motel to gather Harry’s things, she finds the torn pictures. She appears to be there for the first time, seemingly innocent of this destructive act. We may wonder if Lena destroyed them, herself, reacting to her premonition that she would not be with Matteo again.
I am left with the sense that the these broken embraces are left for us to ponder and experience without attributing the act to a single character in the film. Perhaps we can say that this symbolic separation of the loving couple was enacted simply by the jealous and passionate witness to the primal scene. Perhaps it represents our own hidden envy at the perfect loving couple we were forced to look up to in a forgotten time of our lives.
Arlow, J.A. (1980). The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association., 28:519-541.
Balter, L (2005) Nested ideation and the problem of reality: dreams and works of art in dreams.The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 74:3.
Balter, L. (2006) Nested ideation and the problem of reality: dreams and works of art in works of art. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75:2.
Freud, S. (1918). From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 1-124,
Published originally in The PANY Bulletin Summer, 2010