Recasting the Medieval Rom Com

Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) is not a film for today. I can imagine fewer things more transgressive to our sensibilities than the tale of an orphaned and institutionalized stalker who kidnaps a porn actress trying to breakthrough into mainstream movies. Worse yet, events are played as a comedy, complete with two musical numbers and a color palette straight out of your high-school Spanish textbook. Other similar films like Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986) get around the dangers of lightening such crimes by transferring any violence to tertiary characters or making the woman the assailant rather than the victim. Almodóvar refuses these outs. His stalker hits his victim; he ties her up. Any laughter will need to be half-covered in polite company.

Yet, it works, or at least it did for me. It’s artfully done and challenging, even if I don’t think many people (myself included) could endorse its implicit message. Then again, I’m not sure that its message is all that clear. But we’ll get into that later.

In terms of plot, the film is rather straightforward. Ricky (Antonio Banderas) is released from a state facility after years of sleeping with the director and nurses; we don’t initially know why he’s incarcerated or what his plans are upon getting out. Concurrently, we meet Marina Osorio (Victoria Abril) the aforementioned adult actress turned mainstream scream queen. She’s on set with her sister Lola (Loles León) and old wheelchair-bound director-cum-sexual harasser Máximo Espejo (Francisco Rabal). Their paths cross when it becomes clear that Ricky is obsessed with Marina, first (in a wig) performing a handstand for her as the film wraps and later breaking into her apartment and holding her hostage. As it turns out, they had sex some time ago; he has never known any other genuine intimacy and became attached to her as a result.

At first, Ricky is violent. His goal is to subdue her, or at least make her immediate escape impossible; after these initial outbursts, however, he ties her up only when he leaves the apartment, going so far as to get more comfortable ropes and tape. In no time, Ricky is trying to get her a drug for her toothache, then the heroin she wants (she’s an addict, though it seems in recovery). Bit by bit, Marina is falling for her captor, not as a result of Stockholm Syndrome (it’s been a couple days), but for some other implied reason. Her final “conversion” comes when he’s beaten up by street youths while trying to buy her drugs. She quite literally kisses his boo-boos.

By the end, we have an almost parody of a romantic comedy finale in which Marina, saved by Lola, professes her love for Ricky to her sister. The two then make their way to his hometown, where they’d been planning to elope. A wide shot shows Antonio Banderas’ character, standing next to the car he’s hotwired, looking out across the landscape, waiting for (or imagining he has lost) his love. Soon Marina and Lola come tearing up, saving him from a doomed, lonely life. The ride back to civilization involves Lola quizzing Ricky: “what sort of trades have you learned? You don’t mind working, right?” The hard-to-win-over sister-in-law has finally accepted her new relative. She’s a tough cookie, but she wants what makes her sister happiest deep down. Wait, what?

The key to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is how awful all the men are. We don’t hear much about Marina’s time in porn, but we do witness her breakout director constantly commenting on her body, hitting on her, calling her while she’s kidnapped only because he’s just got to see her. Given her heroin addiction and the variety of religious art in her home, we get the feeling she’s a woman of contradictions, perhaps a female old soul trapped in a world of male old souls (pornographers, creeps). When Ricky and Marina first have sex, for example, Almodóvar cuts to a shot from high above, refracted through glass so that each portion of a pentagon captures their intimate writhing. Both parties here are broken—Ricky’s problems are just more obvious, worn on the outside in a way unavailable to the shut-up-and-smile ethos foisted upon Marina.

Even Lola, though she is supportive and protective in her way, does little to liberate her sister. She calls and knocks on the door, worried her sister has relapsed. But she leaves quickly, even though we later learn she has a key. Even when Lola tries to contact Marina, it’s superficially because Max wants her for something to do with the movie (he just, he pines, can’t finish it without her. I wonder why? Maybe the scene where he’s watching one of her old movies while his wife looks on might hold a clue). Initially, Lola is mad that the musical number she puts on at the wrap party strikes the audience less because Marina is nowhere to be found. Is this her sister or just her producer?

Indeed, “love” (call it whatever) seems to be the only impulse to feeling Marina has. On set, she takes direction from Max, unable to summon any emotions of her own. Ricky’s obsession is twisted, insane really, but it’s something. Success, it seems, is hollow, a one-way ticket to rooms full of predators and parties where everyone’s just schmoozing or worse. Ricky is, if nothing else, authentic. Their consensual sexual escapade spurred a genuine fixation. His skills are those of a laborer—he’s an electrician, a carpenter, and a car thief. Indeed, it’s only once they have sex that she remembers him, so passionate was their dalliance compared to her deadened sex life caught on camera for all to see.

None of this, of course, makes Ricky a “good guy.” He’s a violent, possessive stalker whose limitation of his own potential for harm is a real rarity among actual criminal fixators. Almodóvar, however, indicts us and our world—it made Ricky after all. Generally, we laugh at characters like Max, who are pathetic in their pining, while we laugh with the “couple” as they figure out the “boundaries” of their relationship. If the end of history produces only last men, what does love look like anyway? Isn’t it always a kind of violence, a transgression, a destroyer of social values? In our age, perhaps only the crazy take risks such as love; perhaps people would rather feel something rather than nothing.

With the growth of contractual language around romance, things have not exactly gotten better (to be clear, I do not mean getting consent from others—that is good. I mean the ways in which we establish new lexica to create distance between ourselves and others; I mean the way in which anyone on a forum like Reddit will tell you to dump a marriage or a relationship the moment you detect a disagreement or an impasse). I can’t blame anyone for retreating into romantic legalese. From Hugh Hefner to Jeffrey Epstein to Harvey Weinstein and now Andrew Tate, our society’s crimes against women are beyond comprehension. Love and promises of success are often the proverbial cheese in the trap. Women want to protect themselves and who can really blame them?

The problem is that love is never that simple; it refuses to be bound, sometimes with healthy results, sometimes with unhealthy ones. Why do you think medieval aristocrats were so obsessed with Romances? Living in a society founded on a religion with love at its center, they were still restricted by a number of rules rooted both in the Church and in class structures more broadly. Courtly love was a game, a set of customs. But even this could not hold back the madness of romantic power, comparisons between knights and wild animals, men driven insane by their desire. In many cases, poets figure even Jesus as one who died for love of a quasi-erotic kind, bound to his beloved Church to the point of death.

In that sense, I read Time Me Up! Tie Me Down! as a modern fairy tale, a horrifically violent, absurd recasting of the prince rescuing the princess, saving her from the boredom of imprisonment or arranged marriage. Sick times get sick heroes. It is unfortunate for us that we live in very, very sick times.