Inside and Outside the Spectacle: Fashioning Female Pain in Kika (1993)

This is a post by ReMAP Visiting Research Student, Prof. Álvaro Navarro Gaviño from Complutense University of Madrid.

This post is based on a session at the UCL Knowledge Lab where we watched, paused and re-watched fragments of Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993), asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when female pain becomes both the raw material and the packaging of a media spectacle? Rather than offering a full reading of the narrative, the discussion circled around three figures—Andrea Scarface, Juana and Kika—and treated them as proposals for subjectivity. As costumed bodies shaped at the intersection of script, camera and fashion labour, under the specific conditions of early-1990s Spanish auteur cinema and television, they are positioned to receive, accept and relay the transmission of violence.

Crucially, that transmission does not move only along the familiar axis from men to women; in Kika it is often routed through women themselves, who become both targets and mediators of harm, policing, staging and re-enacting one another’s exposure.

The point of departure was not the question “what happens in the story?” but “what kinds of subjects does the film build, and how are those subjects made –or forced to be– available to certain forms of harm?”

Spectacularity and the spectacle of the gaze

This brings us back to the interpretative paradox that underpinned the session: Kika operates inside and outside the spectacle at once. Inside the diegesis, costume and makeup function as devices that organise who can be seen, on what terms, and with what consequences. Violence is not merely shown; it is formatted—for recording, for editing, for replay, for ratings.

Outside the diegesis, the same images feed into the Almodóvar “factory”: actors, designers, festivals, fashion editorials and awards that convert aesthetic risk into prestige. Being cast, costumed and circulated as an “Almodóvar woman” comes with a specific kind of visibility—international, glamorous, intellectually validated—but that visibility is frequently anchored in scenes of suffering. The female characters are not only narratively exposed; they are also part of a star ecology in which female pain circulates as cultural currency.

The fashion world that dresses Kika is deeply implicated in this loop. For a brief, intense moment in the 1990s, women were hailed as the muses of a new, global modernity: supermodels on catwalks, pop stars in conical corsets, actresses in sculptural gowns. Yet they were also the bodies on which the contradictions of that modernity—its appetites, its anxieties, its misogyny—were written. In Kika, that history does not appear in theoretical footnotes; it appears in the cut of a dress, in the weight of a helmet, in the way a scar is lit.

The film does not resolve the contradiction. It cannot stand cleanly outside the spectacle it dissects, because its very possibility as an “important” international film depended on the power of those spectacular images. What it does, instead, is make the conditions of looking unusually visible: we see how the camera intrudes, how the television show rearranges a living room, how a fashionable outfit makes a woman more available to narrative harm.

For the purposes of the blog, the images selected—Andrea’s first entrance, Juana and Kika in the domestic makeup scene, Kika watching her own assault on television—are not illustrations of a plot. They are frames in a small atlas of how subjects are proposed and positioned: as agents or receptors, as glamorous or static, as visible or overlooked, but almost always as the screens on which violence is projected.

Staying with the discomfort

Perhaps the most productive gesture we can take from Kika is not a final judgement, but a mode of attention. To stay with the discomfort of these images is to acknowledge how thoroughly women’s bodies have been conscripted—by cinema, by television, by fashion—as both the carriers of modernity and the containers for its violence.  It also means noticing that this violence does not travel only in one direction. In Kika, harm often moves laterally, routed through women who witness, stage and sometimes profit from one another’s exposure.

When Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993) appears in critical conversations, it tends to arrive with a warning attached. Its now infamous rape sequence, edited and scored as grotesque comedy, has become a touchstone in debates on taste, ethics and humour in post-dictatorship Spanish cinema. Outrage is understandable, but if we stay only there we miss the thicker question the film raises: under what industrial and cultural conditions does a work like this become not only possible, but strategically useful?

By the early 1990s, Spanish cinema was no longer the fragile, improvisatory scene of the immediate post-Franco years. It had consolidated an international profile through festivals, co-productions and the circulation of a small group of emblematic auteurs. Almodóvar’s name, in particular, functioned as a shortcut—a promise of colour, camp irreverence and “transgressive” plotlines that could stand in for a modern, liberal Spain eager to leave the censors’ grey behind. Within that framing, female suffering—and the spectacle of female bodies in extremis—offered a strangely secure kind of risk: legible across borders, flexible enough to be stylised, serious enough to signal depth.

Outside the fiction, the same surfaces brand the film itself. The “Almodóvar look” turns Kika into a recognisable object in festival catalogues and video-store shelves, bright, excessive, easily excerpted. Style is not an afterthought here; it is the means by which difficult images become portable and saleable. This is sharpened by the fact that the film is literally dressed by the fashion system it seems to echo: Jean Paul Gaultier designs the spectacular, armour-like costumes for Andrea “Scarface”, while Gianni Versace contributes looks for Kika, translating the optimism and cling of his early-1990s collections to the screen. The same designers who helped codify supermodel-era glamour—with its mix of hyper-visibility, risk and disposability for women’s bodies—also shape the silhouettes through which the film stages and circulates female pain.

One of the main issues that should not be overlooked is the cultural history of Spanish television and tabloid culture. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, private broadcasters expanded rapidly, bringing with them reality formats and hybrid programmes that blended confession, crime and spectacle. Kika draws on that landscape without ever naming it directly. Andrea’s show simulates care while performing extraction; her scar and Gaultier armour mark her as both damaged and weaponised. Juana’s uniformed domesticity and Kika’s candy-coloured Versace optimism sit at different points in the same visual economy. Taken together, these women read less as psychological individuals and more as costumed positions within a circuit of harm—receivers and relays through which violence, especially between women, is made visible, made bearable and made to move.

In that sense, Kika becomes less a singular “problematic film” and more a concentrated case study of a broader visual culture, one in which spectacularity and the spectacle of the gaze are so tightly interwoven that critique and complicity share the same shot.

Reading Kika through its industrial and cultural context therefore means refusing an easy binary. It is not enough to file the film under “problematic” and move on, nor to redeem it as pure satire of media cruelty. The film asks us to sit with a more uncomfortable recognition: cinema that sets out to critique spectacularised suffering rarely stands outside the systems that reward spectacularisation. The post-Franco narrative of a liberated, colourful Spain, eager to be seen on the global stage, finds in Kika a volatile vessel. Female pain emerges as both an ethical problem and a narrative motor, no longer a static condition but a dynamic pattern of obsessive repetition and movement. At the same time, it circulates as a form of cultural currency.

Conclusions?  No clean way out

The film’s most troubling paradox lies in this double movement. On one level, Kika exposes the mechanisms that feed on women’s suffering—voyeurism, sensationalism, the alchemy that turns violation into spectacle. On another, it participates in an industrial economy where that spectacle is exactly what renders the film visible, marketable and usable within an international art-house circuit hungry for “edgy” representations of gender and sexuality. The images that provoke feminist critique are the same ones that secure its afterlife in retrospectives, essays and canons of “essential Almodóvar”.

What, then, remains for viewers and critics encountering Kika today? Perhaps the task is less to pronounce a final verdict and more to trace the circuits through which women’s suffering moves and gains recognition in cinema—from body to image, from image to commodity, from commodity to cultural memory. The film’s discomfort lies in how clearly it stages those circuits while continuing to depend on them. It presses, without quite resolving, a persistent question: when does exposing the machinery of spectacle deepen our thinking, and when does it simply add another vividly stylised entry to the ever-growing archive of women’s pain?