The Kiss of the Spider Woman: A Hybrid Film?

It is tempting to see in Hector Babenco’s The Kiss of the Spider Woman an example of a hybrid film that brings together North and Latin American cultural and filmic traditions. After all, if the film is produced by Hollywood and the screenplay written by a US screenwriter, the director and most of the crew are Brazilian. (Babenco, although an Argentine by birth, has long been ensconced in the Brazilian film industry). Likewise, if the two main actors are from the US—even if Raúl Julia is Puerto Rican, he is based in Hollywood—the rest, including Sonia Braga, who performs all the main female roles, are Brazilian. And, while the film is in English, the source novel is by an Argentine writer, Manuel Puig.

If one looks superficially at the film, one could easily come to the conclusion that the film actually fulfills this promise. The grittiness of the world depicted—the prison, the city (Sao Paulo)—are obviously linked to the neo-neorealist aesthetic of Babenco , as exemplified by his earlier Pixote. The ending, in which Molina’s body is thrown into a garbage heap, reminds one of that of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Even the somewhat over the top acting can be seen as linked to Brazilian soap operas—a genre in which all the local actors have worked. (Sonia Braga had first become famous as the queen of soap operas).

Moreover, can one imagine a Hollywood film with a leftist and a drag queen as protagonists? But Puig had already scripted a 1978 Mexican film that had a drag queen as its main character: Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin limites (Hell Without Limits). (The protagonist is portrayed memorably by Roberto Cobo, best-known as Los Olvidados’ Jaibo). Moreover, Mexican Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s had begun in the early 1970s a directing career centered on the exploration of sexuality, including homosexuality, in all of its manifestations. And movies about revolutionaries had already been made in Latin America, not only in Cuba—for instance, El joven rebelde (1961, directed by Julio García Espinoza) but in other countries in the region. For instance, the 1978 Mexican film El apando, directed by one of the best-known directors of the period Felipe Cazals, not to mention agitprop masterpieces, such as The Hour of the Furnaces (1965-68), directed by the Argentine filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. Revolutionary politics and homosexuality were, therefore, topics that had been dealt with seriously in Latin American film before The Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Nevertheless, there are aspects of this film that seem to undermine the core of Puig’s novel. For instance, already in the novel, Valentín’s political activities are presented as an amorphous union activism, rather than the obvious radical and violent Marxist/Peronist guerrilla and terrorist activities that actually took place in Argentina in the 1970s. (It seems that Puig is already concerned about the possibility that a reader would not sympathize with a character who actually ascribed to the revolutionary politics of the time). However, Valentín is presented as a student of Marxism and, in a very Argentine twist, as a firm believer in the validity of psychoanalysis. The film waters down his politics even further. Now he is presented as having only lent his passport to a radical political leader despite his stated loss of faith in violent political action (that is, revolution). Moreover, Valentín is transformed from the student revolutionary—or, at least, activist—to a journalist. In the movie, the (implicitly) Brazilian government is guilty of the greatest political sin conceivable in (US) American society: curtailment of the freedom of the press.

The dynamic implicit in the novel, in which a Marxist and a drag queen—two individuals belonging to groups rejected by the patriarchal and reactionary society depicted in the novel—come to understand, respect, and, why not?, love each other, is diluted in the film. If Molina is more or less accurately represented in the film—despite the weirdness of the casting—Valentín’s only truly radical trait is his fidelista beard. After all, for good or evil, the 1960s and early 1970s were a period in which “change we can believe in” was seen as only achievable through violent revolution. One wonders whether the film does not imply that the torture Valentín is subjected to would have been acceptable had he been a true Marxist revolutionary. By erasing Valentín’s Marxist beliefs, by transforming a guerrillero into a liberal journalist, the movie is erasing one of the central Latin American cultural traits present in the novel. It also responds directly to US cultural and political concerns, even at the expense of the novel’s plot and Latin American history.