SOURCE: "Figuring Hysteria: Disorder and Desire in Three Films of Pedro Almodóvar," in Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 99-124.

In the following essay, Epps discusses the use of hysteria in Almodóvar's Labyrinth of Passions, What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

There is something at once mad and methodical about Pedro Almodóvar's films. Frenetic, effervescent, wild, and rapturous, they are also willful, deliberate, and self-conscious. They focus on dispersion, center on marginality, and concentrate on excess. They seem designed, almost systematically, to scandalize and trouble; they seem fixed, almost obsessively, on the movement of sexual desire. They are also, of course, framed largely around figures of femininity and homosexuality: figures subject, in Almodóvar's eyes, to nervous anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and flamboyant...