Post 5

Julie Taymor’s Frida is a biopic in which various techniques work to fuse the artist and her work (literally and figuratively). Many sequences feature shots of Kahlo’s artwork morphing into the action of the narrative helping to cement the popular perception that Kahlo’s art and her biography were inseparable and that her artwork was a reflection of her innermost emotions. This premise that Kahlo’s life became her art is a notion very evident in the sequence in which Kahlo paints The Two Fridas (1939) after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Salma Hayek is shot sitting next to her actual match in a white room which fuses into a shot of the painting, presumed to show the angst of the Frida that Rivera no longer loved. The many colorful sequences such as this, in which Kahlo’s artwork draws the viewer through the narrative, make the film a pleasure to watch as the film is a veritable art exhibition in motion.
The Frida Kahlo the film portrays is a free-spirited, bi-sexual woman artist driven by her emotions. The film puts great emphasis not only on her artwork which reflects Kahlo’s inner suffering and life events, but also on Kahlo’s sexuality and her constant shift between stereotypical gender roles. Depictions of Frida’s shifting sexuality can be related to Sherry B. Ortner’s essay on women’s universal secondary status because women are more closely associated to nature than men, who are commonly associated with culture. In accordance with the idea of the gender binary of male/female, Ortner discusses how the female is associated with lesser value once again in the binary of nature/culture. As Ortner writes, women are the “middle,” the “intermediate between nature and culture.” Ortner gives three reasons why women are seen as closer to nature:

“Woman’s physiology, more involved more of the time with ‘species of life;’ woman’s association with the structurally subordinated domestic context, charged with the crucial function of transforming animal-like infants into cultured beings; ‘woman’s psyche,’ appropriately molded to mothering functions by her own socialization and tending toward greater personalism and less mediated modes of relating…” (Ortner 84).

This distinction of male/female, nature/culture is addressed in Frida and it puts greater emphasis on Kahlo’s ambiguity, as she is shown having elements of both nature and culture (arguably even more elements of male & culture) in regard to her physiology, her domestic social role, and her overall psyche. Kahlo was never a mother and motherhood is the notion upon which Ortner bases most of her argument. In Kahlo’s refusal to be confined to the domestic, traveling to America and Paris despite her injuries (and taking many lovers, male and female, along the way), as well as in her overall involvement in a traditionally male profession, she is associated with culture. She shows very few hints of the female psyche associated with concrete feelings, things, and people, as she really did not lead a routine life as a homemaker (routine comparable to nature’s cycles), but rather she is more directly involved with culture and the abstract, with the mediating role of the male, a role outside of the domestic.
Frida is identified as a female, closer to nature, most evidently during the sequences of the movie addressing her conception of a child and her miscarriage. Frida’s Kahlo’s physiology is a theme featured throughout the film--from the devastating injuries she suffers after a bus accident, to a gangrenous toe towards the end of her life—and the sequences of Frida’s miscarriage highlight her as having “[great] bodily involvement with the natural functions surrounding reproduction… seen more of a part of nature than man is” (76). The persistence with which she discusses having a child with Rivera (who is hesitant), and her consequential devastation following her miscarriage—shown in her hospital bed lying in blood, and painting the jarred fetus of her son— suggest Kahlo’s closeness to her body’s organic function and her feeling of loss as a mother.
Frida is, above all, a commentary on mass culture’s depiction of the female artist and is exemplary of the convergence of visual arts and media. As both Stephanie Mencimer and Janis Bergman-Carton write, the biography and artwork of Frida Kahlo are extremely marketable (though Mencimer and Carton speak of marketability in different terms). Carton discusses Kahlo’s connection with Madonna, “their fluid identities,” and the manipulation Kahlo’s art as a mechanism to sell: “a ploy of by Hollywood publicists, artworld entrepreneurs, and Madonna herself to exploit an old and reliable advertising device.” Carton explains how both Madonna and Kahlo use their womanhood to their advantage “seiz[ing] control of their bodies in order to dramatize the ideological issues of gender representation…Madonna’s work is (like Kahlo’s) about women’s capacity for self-reinvention” (Bergman-Carton 36). This notion of Kahlo challenging gender representation, manipulating her womanhood, is played up in the film in many of the sequences—she is shown dressing in boys clothes, as well as painting art which features the morphing of her head on a male body. In the scene when Kahlo attends a party with Rivera, she takes the biggest swig of tequila in a contest to win a dance with another female, ending this dance with a kiss.
Though Carton makes some interesting points, Mencimer’s article is more pertinent to the film. Mencimer writes about the elevation of the artist over their art, of their biography over their work, and the ultimate disservice this is to a woman artist. Referencing artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, Mencimer describes “Fridamania” and the so-called inflation that occurs when female artists are treated as “phenomena rather than simply as artists” (Mencimer 29). Mencimer’s description of the detrimental sensationalizing of Frida’s tragic bio, the depiction of Kahlo as the female victim, is very apparent in Taymor’s film which seems to neglect to show any of the “warts” of Frida’s persona. The narrative is seemingly constructed around the tragic events of Kahlo’s life: it suggests her artistic inspiration was propelled by her involvement in a devastating bus accident, it features Kahlo struggling to be acknowledged in a male dominated professional throughout, and Kahlo, though righteous, is ultimately shown as the victim of Rivera’s cheating ways. Though Frida undoubtedly highlights the tragedies of Kahlo’s life for the sake of mass appeal, it is equally celebratory of her art and has an upbeat ending with no conventional death sequence, featuring instead Spanish colonial animation, Day of the Dead animation and a quote: “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to return.”