Almodóvar on Faking It

Do things ever happen in your life and in order to get by without giving up hope or losing your cool you “fake it till you make it?” Then, in the middle of doing that, does something else happen? And does it make you think: Well, my coping strategy for things like this has been to fake it, but I'm already just rolling with the punches as it is and now this all is beginning to feel more like a dance piece choreographed by a calculus professor than an article in Popular Psychology.

Of course they do. Of course it does.

Some of us are better at faking it in the roles we're in and we have to create for ourselves to get by. That is what I took away from an article that has been sitting in a stack of things on the nightstand to get around to reading since Hiram passed it to me last month. The stack is tall enough now that it was probably interfering with my sleep so I was about to throw the piece out with the rest of the mess without looking at it. Pedro’s pensive gaze in the accompanying photo wouldn’t let me though. 

Mr. Almodóvar, too, was watching his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, as he grew up in the La Mancha region of Spain and agreed that many of his characters were inspired by her. “She had the capacity to fake things, fake things in order to solve problems,” he said, explaining that as opposed to the men in his family, the women “would resolve situations with the greatest naturalism, with the greatest ease, they would just fake that certain things were happening in order to protect us as children, and they did it with the greatest conviction.”

He added, “Life is filled with these miniature plays, scenarios, where people are forced to act or fake, and women are naturally born actresses.”

Julie Bloom, “Pedro Almodóvar and His ‘Cinema of Women’,” New York Times, December 2, 2016

Making tall stacks of all the things to get around to reading is, of course, a completely different coping mechanism.