Gender Stereotypes in Carlos Saura’s Carmen

Gender Stereotypes in Carlos Saura’s Carmen (1983) 

Hannah Apen 

Introduction 

Carlos Saura’s 1983 cinematic production of Carmen provides a modern metafictional retelling of Mérimée’s classic tale (1845). Carmen has since been adapted into several artistic works, famously including Georges Bizet’s opera, telling the story of a beautiful Andalusian Romani woman, Carmen, who triggers the downfall of protagonist Don José into a life of vice and sin. The narrative ends with Don José’s murder of Carmen, symbolising his rejection of her wicked feminine wiles that led him astray, and his return to grace. Carmen allegorises the trope of the diabolical woman, the femme fatale, guiding men away from God and toward perversion. 

Lema-Hincapié writes that in his reworking of the narrative, Saura plays into cliché bordering on vulgarity, failing to challenge stereotypes and critically reinvent Mérimée’s story (Lema-Hincapié, 2005). Although a harsh denunciation of the film, there is truth behind the claim that Carmen is uncritical of many gendered cinematic tropes which play into deep-rooted stereotypes. This paper will explore how Saura’s Carmen fails to challenge gender stereotypes, focusing on the motif of the unknowable woman, represented through the aggressively othered femme fatale, the strict, essentialist binary drawn between the male and female protagonists, and phallocentrism, that is, the centring of the traditionally masculine phallus as the ultimate source of (sexual) power. This paper will also examine and respond to the claim that Saura’s exposition of the performativity of identities in the film, using metafiction and dramatisation to this effect, questions and undermines the gender stereotypes which dominate the narrative.  

Unknowability 

As the narrative progresses, Carmen demonstrates herself to be an unruly, subversive, unpredictable character. Her beauty, mystery, and fiery independence make her the object of several men’s desires, and she succeeds in seducing apparently whomever she so wishes, to the annoyance and hurt of Antonio. The spectator comes to realise that Antonio is often tricked by Carmen – enthralled by her beauty and moments of what the spectator comes to recognise as fraudulent vulnerability in which Carmen reassures Antonio that he is the main object of her affection, though this repeatedly fails to cohere with her actions. For example, Carmen says to Antonio “Sólo te quiero a ti.” [I only love iyou.] (1:10:39), only to then be discovered having sex with another man by Antonio shortly thereafter (1:24:30). The result is the impression that Carmen will tell Antonio whatever it is that he wants to hear in order to maintain their love affair, whilst demonstrating no lasting commitment to their relationship or regard for Antonio’s wellbeing. Carmen, here, is shown to be a malignant actor who triggers the emotional undoing of Antonio, trapping him with her feminine wiles and torturing him with her personal volatility.  

Saura’s portrayal of Carmen adheres to the trope of the femme fatale, defined as “An attractive and seductive woman, esp. one who is likely to cause risk to or the downfall of anyone who becomes involved with her.” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). Doane argues that “[the femme fatale’s] most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be. She harbours a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable.” (Doane, 1991, p. 1). It is this unknowability which characterises Carmen and predicates her conformity to gender stereotypes.  

Beauvoir argued that the definition of femininity as a mysterious, unknowable deformation of masculinity has defined negative gender stereotypes regarding women (2011). Problematically, many historic academic disciplines regarding gender and sexuality, including dominant strands of psychoanalytic thought which are often pivotal to cinematic analyses of gender (Moscovici, 1996; Kuhn, 1985; Chodorow, 1994), have taken this approach to femininity, treating it as an unknowable other (Beauvoir, 2011; Millett, 2016; Firestone, 1970). Saura’s Carmen adheres to this stereotype through the lack of clarity of her (sexual) intentions throughout Carmen’s narrative, epitomised in her failure to define the nature of her relationship with Antonio. Carmen’s emotional responses seem erratic, signalling further the mystery that this femme fatale conceals. Carmen is contrasted with the straightforward masculine subject, Antonio, prepared to commit to Carmen and hurt by her unpredictability. This is shown, in one instance, in the difference between Carmen’s and Antonio’s answers to the other’s questions in the two bedroom scenes. In the first instance, Carmen leaves late at night without explanation, caught by Antonio as she attempts to exit without waking him, only offering the line “Me tengo que ir.” [I have to go.] (53:14) when questioned. In a second bedroom scene, Antonio appears lost in thought, to which Carmen asks him “¿En que piensas?” [What are you thinking about?] (1:11:50). In response, Antonio explains his thinking, showing Carmen a wad of banknotes and saying, in reference to what Antonio believes to be Carmen’s estranged husband who continues to attempt to make contact with her, “Supongo que tendrá bastante con esto. Dile que te deje en paz.” [I suppose he will have quite a lot with this. Tell him to leave you in peace.] (1:12:02). Through this epistemic transparency, Antonio makes himself knowable to both Carmen and the spectator in a way that Carmen never does, highlighting the aforementioned notion of the unknowability and epistemic secrecy of the femme fatale in contrast to the simplicity and transparency of the masculine subject. 

Doane notes that the female subject, in light of her unknowability, is regarded as epistemically privileged; the secrets she hides are, implicitly, known to her (Doane, 1991). The scene in which Carmen watches herself in the mirror, sharing with her reflection a look of recognition, exemplifies the notion that she is self-aware yet refuses to share this awareness with Antonio (25:40). Epistemic privilege supposedly forms a key part of the feminine subject’s appeal, since the man desires to become privy to this knowledge and thus is drawn to the woman, seeking to learn her “true” nature, reminiscent of Antonio’s pursuit of the unknowable Carmen. As in Mérimée’s novella, Antonio/José is drawn to Carmen precisely because she represents the unknown, the exotic. This perceived privilege is doubly problematic. In the first instance, the differentiated epistemology of masculine and feminine subjects “others” the latter, reiterating the previously mentioned concern that women are deviations from a male norm. Secondly, and relatedly, the implied underlying “true” femininity, hidden by feminine mystique, embodies the gender essentialism which underpins gender stereotypes, which I shall explore in the following section.  

Binaries 

Gender essentialism is intimately connected to gender binaries, connoting a necessary difference between men and women. This dichotomy is problematic, making way for gender stereotypes and allowing a strong naturalistic formulation of the classic patriarchal notion of masculine superiority, as is argued by countless feminist theorists, including Butler (2015), Wittig (1992) and Beauvoir (2011). Carmen demonstrates the steadfastness of this binary in important ways aside from the epistemically privileged position of the femme fatale.  

The physical difference between Antonio and Carmen is demonstrated in the bedroom scene in which Carmen’s breasts are revealed (1:11:42). The positioning of Carmen’s and Antonio’s chests centrally in the frame in this scene draws the spectators’ focus to this difference, emphasising its significance, allowing the spectator to construct their sexual difference, with Carmen’s breasts connoting her otherness from the masculine norm exemplified by Antonio, reinforcing gender binarism by demonstrating the “biological” dissimilarity between male and female forms. Kuhn notes the importance of the artistic portrayal of such difference, emphasised in pornography, stating that “[the] conviction [of these images] is that sexuality equals femininity: their promise that femininity may be investigated, even understood by scrutinising its visible marks” (Kuhn, 1985, p. 38). The revelation of Carmen’s physical difference serves this purpose, implying that Carmen’s femininity is reducible to her sexuality as represented by her breasts. This reduction of femininity to physical difference is not only, as mentioned, essentialist and othering, it requires participation in an inherently heteronormative, masculine definition of femininity, adhering to patriarchal gender stereotypes that (sexually) objectify the feminine subject. The conformity to gender stereotypes is further emphasised in how Carmen is revealed. The camera’s panning, displaying clothes strewn around the bedroom, mimics a striptease, alluding to the nudity of the unseen characters, engaging the “flirtation with perception” (Doane, 1991, p. 106) that Doane refers to with reference to works of film noir. The camera eventually reveals Carmen’s body in an anti-climax; the mystery is more exciting than the body itself. Doane notes that fetishism relies upon what we do not see, maintaining the object of desire as other. Once the fetish object, in this case the nude female body, is revealed to us, it loses much of its appeal. Drawing on Doane’s work, there occurs here a simultaneous demystification and re-mystification of the feminine subject. She is deconstructed for the masculine observer by the phallocentric camera through her symbolic stripping to the “natural” core of her femininity – her sexuality – yet remains indecipherable to the masculine subject through her epistemic obscurity; the camera can only reveal what the eye can see, and thus the mind is left a mystery. The fact that in this scene Carmen is revealed to us totally in her physical form through her nudity yet remains the unknowable, fetishistic object of desire that characterises her femme fatale character underscores the prevalence of the notion of the epistemically privileged woman in Saura’s narrative. Moreover, as Doane asserts, “the gesture of stripping in relation to the female body is already the product of patriarchy” (Doane, 1991, p. 167). The striptease is a failed patriarchal attempt to discover the “secret” of femininity, reinforcing the aforementioned gender stereotypes of feminine subjects as unknowable and essentially sexual. Whilst this scene does highlight the failure of this patriarchal attempt to know the female subject through her nudity, challenging the assumption that she is entirely synonymous with her physical, sexual form, there is arguably an underlying implication that her failure to be known in relation to her sexuality marks Carmen as deviant. It is the very fact that both Antonio and the spectator are unable to know Carmen in this way that characterises her as the dangerous femme fatale that poses a threat to Antonio and, by extension, to “good” men in general.  

Carmen is exaggeratedly heterosexual, both as an agent and as an object of desire. Her role in the narrative revolves around her desirability and attainability as a sexual partner for men. It is also arguably the case that the narrative succeeds in portraying that the relationship Antonio seeks to have with Carmen – heteronormative, patriarchal, monogamous – is desirable and right, in contrast to the perceived undesirability and destructiveness that Carmen’s resistance to this interpersonal relationship generates. It is in this sense that I argue that the narrative perpetuates stereotypes surrounding the proper role of women in relationships, reinforcing not only heterosexuality but heteronormativity as a characteristic of good women, echoing Chodorow’s sentiment that in mainstream psychoanalytic thought it has historically been the case that “normal” women are heterosexual (1994). This not only has dubious connotations for non-heterosexual women but furthermore underpins essentialist notions of gender in which women are seen to be necessarily other, deformations of the masculine norm.  

It is perhaps in this sense that Chodorow worries that Freudian conceptions of feminine sexuality rely upon seeing through masculine eyes, perceiving women as objects, not as subjects in their own right. Feminist critiques of psychoanalysis argue that (Freudian) psychoanalytic thought fails to account for the complexity of women’s experiences, both in the way that women are essentialised and treated as a monolith, and in the way that classical psychoanalytic literature has phallocentric tendencies (Beauvoir, 2011; Millett, 2016). This phallocentrism leads to a discourse on women which fails to theorise the feminine experience in its own right, instead seeing it as the sort of aforementioned deformation of masculinity that is central to many naturalistic justifications of patriarchal oppression and masculine superiority. This can be seen, for example, in Freud’s centralisation of his concepts of the Oedipus Complex and, relatedly, penis envy, which explain girls’ experience of the self solely in relation to their absence of penis, considering them in virtue of this to be fundamentally lacking (Fongay, 2012).  

Despite Chodorow’s concerns about the objectivity of women is some Freudian discourse, she argues that a rethinking of classical Freudian theory can indeed provide valuable psychoanalytic theories of feminine subject formation. Chodorow argues that Freud goes a long way in laying the groundwork for feminist theories of selfhood and subject formation. Chodorow references the Freudian theory of identification, noting that the way in which women identify with other women, as noted by Freud, is indeed an important part of the formation of the feminine subject. In the following section I will argue that whilst it might be the case that women’s identification with other women overcomes concerns about the objectification of feminine subjects under psychoanalytic theory, the way in which this process is portrayed in Carmen, nonetheless, is far from feminist. 

Identification and Subjectivity 

A key element of Saura’s narrative in Carmen is Carmen’s gradual adoption of the characteristics of the Carmen in Mérimée’s classic tale, that is, the Carmen which she is portraying in the metafiction of Antonio’s flamenco production. In this way, the process of Carmen’s subject formation through her identification with another woman is clearly portrayed throughout the course of the film. Carmen’s infidelity, quickness to anger, deceitfulness and sexual insatiability, which develop as the narrative progresses, mirror the characteristics of Mérimée’s Carmen, implying Carmen’s identification with the character she is portraying in the metanarrative. Carmen’s identification with other women is further demonstrated through Carmen’s imitation of dance coach Cristina in the mirror (24:30). In this pivotal scene, not only does Carmen copy the movements of Cristina, once again demonstrating this identification, as she learns from Cristina to be Mérimée’s Carmen; she also shares a distinct look of recognition with her own reflection, accentuated by the zooming in of the camera upon this look.  

This can be understood as a comment on Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage of the construction of the ego (2010). This scene draws attention to the imagined nature of the self, highlighting the way in which, in Lacanian thought, the recognition of the self during the mirror stage is based upon a misrecognition of a unified self, with self-alienating consequences as one recognises oneself as other. This scene replicates this confusion of misrecognition, as the spectator understands the Carmen in the mirror, Mérimée’s Carmen, with which Carmen identifies, to be a fictional character. However, it is also the case that the mirror is simply reflecting the image of Carmen herself, and it is thus paradoxically also true that Carmen does not identify with a fictional character, but with herself, or at least with the image of herself. In this scene, we might understand Carmen’s recognition to be a sort of performative thought which brings into being the very thing which is unconsciously understood to be the case. It is perhaps only by recognising the image in the mirror as herself that this image comes to be her reflection, in the sense that her characteristics come to mirror those of the Carmen in the mirror precisely because she begins to recognise her as herself. What is certainly the case is that there is, here, an enmeshment of fiction and reality which reflects the hazy distinction between the internal and external worlds in relation to the self during the formation of the ego in the mirror stage of development in Lacanian theory. Saura’s narrative, in this sense, makes explicit reference to Carmen as subject, as opposed to object.  

As noted, Carmen’s subjectivity might overcome stereotypes concerning the objectivity of women, however I argue to the contrary that this subjectivity in the wider context of the film’s narrative actually has the inverse effect. I claim that it is precisely through her failure to be object, through her daring exposition of her own subjectivity, that Carmen comes to be seen as a bad example of womanhood. She is the object of masculine desire, but it is through her sexual subjectivity, her active response to her own desires which perhaps a “good” woman ought not even to have, that she truly assumes the role of the femme fatale which marks her as deviant, conniving and dangerous. In this way, then, Carmen may be a subject, but her subjectivity is what makes her the “wrong” sort of woman. Saura’s Carmen’s subjectivity is implicitly reliant upon her identification with Mérimée’s Carmen. Since Mérimée’s Carmen is a hostile character with her femme fatale traits, the identification of Saura’s Carmen with her marks the subjectivity of women as dangerous, mysterious and destructive to the masculine subject. There is, here, a sort of tacit inevitability in Carmen’s process of identificatory merging with Mérimée’s Carmen, inferred from the fact that Lacan’s mirror stage is a supposedly necessary and inexorable element of the infant’s development. To recognise oneself is not something which can be avoided; it is a sudden state of consciousness. It is in this sense that when Carmen recognises herself in the mirror she is not choosing to become Mérimée’s Carmen but realising that she is this latter Carmen. This goes hand-in-hand with D’Lugo’s notion that within much of Saura’s cinematic work his protagonists experience a troubled relationship with their own autonomy, with external constraints frustrating their desire to author their own lives (2021). We might then draw the conclusion that this plotline implies the inevitable downfall of woman into sin, in a move reminiscent of biblical misogyny. The ideas that women are the root cause of Original Sin, are easily tempted, and lead men morally astray can all be read in the canonical texts of Christianityii and have been blamed for upholding Western sexism and misogynistic practice (Radford Ruether, 1993). I argue that Saura’s narrative in Carmen as well as the femme fatale archetype in general lean into this common biblical trope of the sinful nature of agential women, feeding into discriminatory, essentialist stereotypes regarding the nature of women.  

Additionally, there is arguably an element of gender essentialism in psychoanalytic tropes in general, which often see there to be a necessary and inevitable difference between masculine and feminine subjects (Beauvoir, 2011, Millett, 2016). It is thus perhaps the case that such essentialism is highlighted by the explicit reference to Lacanian psychoanalytic subject formation. Some feminist theorists, notably including Butler (2015), are sympathetic to psychoanalytic accounts of femininity. Such accounts are often seen as tools which can be used to avoid biologically essentialist perspectives on gender and sexuality given how they note the distinction between the psyche and the physical body, supposedly challenging the deterministic connection between the physical body and the self. However, although the body is seen as largely distinct from the psyche, it is often used “as a prop” (Doane, 1991, p. 169) for many of the psychoanalytic explanations of subject formation offered in contemporary literature, maintaining these essentialist strands of thought as dominant. Whilst the psyche is not synonymous with the physical body, it is dependent upon and moulded by the body.  

Carmen’s subject status can be questioned in the realm of (hetero)sexuality given her role as the object of much masculine desire. Under the male gaze, Carmen remains largely objectified, as something to be appropriated for masculine pleasure and possession as is demonstrated by the focus on her sexual appeal and the competitive nature of the relationship between Antonio and Montoya for ownership of Carmen. This culminates in a physical fight between Antonio and Montoya following a card game in which Carmen subtly indicates to Antonio that Montaya has been cheating (1:14:45). The tension which has been fomenting between the two men because of each’s desire to have Carmen for their own, and Carmen’s proximity in this scene to Montoya as he places bets with Antonio whilst the other players fold, create the impression that the real prize being played for is Carmen herself. This, again, demonstrates the masculine objectification of Carmen in the sphere of (hetero)sexuality. One might contend that Carmen’s subjectivity does indeed extend into the arena of sexuality given the apparent autonomy and power she exercises in her sexual encounters, as is characteristic of the femme fatale archetype which she represents. However, as this paper shall go on to explore, this power is arguably not actually held by Carmen and instead represents a form of phallocentrism which eventually undermines Carmen’s sexual power and recentres the masculine subject as the ultimate source of power.  

Phallocentrism 

Throughout the narrative, Carmen appears powerful, maintaining a hold over Antonio. However, she is empowered not by herself but by the masculine subject who desires her, turning this power into a form of phallocentrism. This argument is reminiscent of Doane’s notion that the femme fatale’s power is derived from the power of the male gaze, giving rise to the Lacanian notion that women, through their lack of phallus, cannot represent the lack that is essential for her representation of her being (Doane, 1991). Montrelay argues that women can access the symbolic lack, and thus be represented, only through heterosexual intercourse, as Carmen does (Doane, 1991). Carmen is not powerful in her own, feminine right; she must appropriate the phallus for this end, which, given her lack, must be derived from the male subject, subordinating her to him, reinforcing gender stereotypes of women’s powerlessness, reliance upon men, and second-class citizenship.  

As Johnston notes, “Women can only become the pseudo-centre of the filmic discourse” (Johnston, 1989, p. 65) under a system of spectatorship which ensures the omnipresence of the masculine gaze in cinema, echoing Doane’s sentiment that to become a spectator and derive pleasure from cinematic narratives, the female spectator must deny her sex and appropriate the masculine gaze (Doane, 1991). In this way, the conformation of Saura’s Carmen to gender stereotypes is an inevitability of cinematic productions in contemporary society. The phallocentrism of cinematic spectatorship inhibits the production of truly feminist cinema, hence patriarchal gender stereotypes will always present themselves in the creation and consumption of this artform.  

Performance 

D’Lugo explains that Saura engages in a wider project of revealing social myths and stereotypes through his use of metanarratives and the dramatisation of these myths in his filmmaking (1991). Such dramatisation implicates the spectator in their conformity to established cultural practices, allowing for a reconceptualisation of their interaction with these myths and stereotypes. With regards to Carmen, the intensely gender-stereotypical narrative may, following this logic, allow the questioning of these gender stereotypes through their disclosure to the spectator. Nevertheless, this process, reliant as it is on the introspection of the spectator, who as mentioned is part of a masculine fetishistic viewing structure (Johnston, 1989), is a somewhat unconvincing account of the interrogative nature of Saura’s Carmen insofar as gender stereotypes are concerned.  

Despite the failures of Saura’s Carmen to challenge gender stereotypes, it could be argued that it is precisely the upholding of these stereotypes in the narrative which allows Saura to question them. Throughout the film, construction and performance are dominant themes, as is true of much of Saura’s cinematic work, as he seeks to challenge the spectator’s ways of seeing, asking them to question how these ways of seeing have been constructed through social practice (D’Lugo, 2021). In the characters’ construction of the metafiction of the flamenco production of Mérimée’s Carmen, the importance and intentionality of language, music, costume and bodies are clear (Willem, 1996). This is seen, for example, in Antonio’s meticulous planning: his painstaking search for Carmen, curation of the perfect musical score (5:52), worries about Carmen’s dancing and desire to perfect it (17:00, 23:35). This intentionality exposes how both the metafiction and main fiction of the narrative are constructed and therefore not representative of any essential truth. Through the clarification of the fabricated nature of artistic productions, an exposition emphasised by the blurring of the lines between the metafiction and the main narrative, such intentionality in the construction of the (meta)fiction questions the demarcation of fiction from reality, implicating the latter as a configuration of the former.  The way in which the narrative plays with the distinction between reality and fiction within the film calls into dispute the distinction between reality and fiction from the point of view of the spectator. It is in this way that Carmen underscores the performativity of supposed realities and calls into question the existence of necessary, essentialist truths. 

Conclusions 

This paper has shown that through Carmen’s portrayal of women as unknowable, other, and strictly essentially different from men, Saura fails to challenge gender stereotypes. The use of the femme fatale archetype is detrimental to any project of questioning these stereotypes given its inherent mystification of the feminine subject. Furthermore, the narrative reduces the female protagonist to her sexuality through the emphasis it places on her physical, not just epistemological, difference from the male norm. Whilst it could be argued that Saura’s use of metafiction and the dramatisation of stereotypes, blurring the line between reality and fiction and attempting to inspire critical introspection on behalf of the spectator, is in itself a form of questioning and deconstruction, given the masculine gaze which dominates cinematic spectatorship, this argument is, at best, unconvincing. All in all, Saura’s Carmen has a phallocentric, gender essentialist narrative which maintains the foundation of gender stereotypes by portraying women as unknowable others.  

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