Note on contemporary Baroque: from Amenábar to Almodóvar

Abstract

Generalizing René Thom's catastrophe theory model, we could understand the world of semantic exchanges as a «combat» (Heraclitus) between countless propositions (or phrases governed by a verb) that act in the world. Propositions take on the character of morphologies defined by a potential or conatus (Spinoza) that compels them to persevere in being. The most pregnant morphologies or those that are repeated most insistently ultimately «win» and can become axes of reference or attractors toward which multiple morphologies-propositions for a given semantic or conceptual field are drawn. In the era of the predominance of the image, cinema is one of the most impressive attractors for the deployment of semantic units. In this way, we establish a criterion for distinguishing «classic» from «ephemeral» works: The former are so unstable that they always provoke attention (which is why it is often said that classic works admit multiple interpretations and each era can rediscover them; among the abundant examples, we recall Tom Stoppard's Hamlet). I will test this criterion with two films that seem to me exemplary for exposing the conceptual instability/stability pairing: Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and Pedro Almodóvar's Volver. If the former's film is a film of maximum instability in a cultural milieu like the Spanish one, today we can affirm that it has been stabilized by the latter's recent film.