ON SIMULATION AND STIMULATION Doctor-Centered and Patient-Centered Practices of Care in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Brain-Dead Trilogy”

This chapter explores the emergence of a new threshold condition through an analysis of the figure of the brain-dead patient in Pedro Almodóvar films. Almodóvar’s films showcase how phenomenology can provide insight into the embodied experiences of clinical practices of care, as well as into the film spectator’s experience of witnessing these practices of care on screen. Drawing on the work of scholars in phenomenology and feminist science and technology studies, the chapter first describes the historical emergence of the category “brain death” and the performance of that category in clinical practices, including in Almodóvar’s home country of Spain, before turning to how Almodóvar incorporates these clinical practices into his films. The chapter then shows how Almodóvar stages brain death as a biopolitical event that produces transitional figures and spaces in which new forms of care are enacted. The chapter contrasts scenes of clinical simulation as a doctor-centered pedagogy of care to help facilitate organ procurement and transplantation with modes of multi-sensory stimulation-practices of affective labor, including talking, touching, and erotic healing-as a patient-centered pedagogy of care to facilitate recovery from coma.