National Allegory and Metaphoric Gesture in Money to Burn

At the end of Money to Burn, Piglia quotes Berthold Brecht: “throughout the book I have attempted to maintain the stylistic register and ‘metaphoric gesture’ (as Brecht called it) of the social reports whose theme remains illegal violence.” Although Piglia’s quotation seems to indicate that the “metaphoric gesture” is already present in the “social reports”—“relatos sociales”—which, it appears, underlie the actual narrative of Money to Burn, the fact is that he admits that the novel attempts to be more than a straightforward narrative of events. (The “social reports” in question are, I believe, not only the narratives generated by the different media, but also by the population as a whole). If one remembers the epigraph which opens the book—“After all, what is robbing a bank compared to founding one?”—the “metaphoric gesture” seems to be an attempt at presenting the story as an illustration of the principle implicit in the epigraph, in addition to a fictionalizing a real event. In other words, if Brecht’s epigraph presents capitalism itself as theft in the grandest scale—represented by the founding of the bank—the narrative of the robbery and the brutal extermination of the criminals would be indicative of the ultimate criminality of the system under which, obviously, we live.

I cannot avoid associating ’s “metaphoric gesture” with Fredric Jameson’s notorious statement that “All third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories.” However, while both Jameson’s national allegory and Brecht’s and Piglia’s “metaphoric gesture” imply the existence of a second meaning underlying the surface one, the fact is that Money to Burn takes great pains to break free from the ideological boundaries of the nation. In other words, Money to Burn is not a criticism of Argentine society or even primarily of capitalism in Argentina. Money to Burn is a criticism of capitalism per se.

The space depicted in the novel is, obviously, transnational: the robbery takes place in Buenos Aires (Argentina), but the shoot out is in Montevideo (Uruguay); the robbers aim to drive up the Pan American Highway all the way to Miami or New York, where some plan to invest their money in Tango joints; Giselle is an Uruguayan hippie, that is a local exemplar of an international type, and the music they listen to is rock; etc.

Perhaps the key moment that marks the “metaphoric gesture” as exceeding national boundaries, is the reaction to the burning of the money: “Burning money is ugly, it’s a sin.” As we know bills are not tied to any material object. They are signifiers without, in appearance, any signifieds. In fact, in appearance a rational response to the burning of the money would have been indifference. After all, one could assume, though it’s not mentioned in the novel, that the money could be insured and, therefore, its burning would have not affected anyone.

However, the response of the population to the burning of the money is one of extreme indignation, much greater than the reaction to the death of police, innocent bystanders, or criminals. It is seen as “an act of nihilism and an example of pure terrorism.” The reason underlying this moral indignation is precisely the emptiness of money as a signifier, which has permitted it to become the signifier of capitalism itself, of the possibility of acquisition of goods, services, and even more money. This moral indignation is, therefore, not culturally specific. It could just as well take place in Brooklyn as in Montevideo.

Not One but Many "Pantis"

As Bingham noted in class, the version we saw of Captain Pantoja is shorter than the one originally screened in Latin America. This led me to search for alternative versions of the film. Despite claims in imdb.com for the existence of a 2hr 55 minute print, the one that is generally mentioned in the web is 144 minutes (2hr 24 minutes). There is a 137 minutes version available in you tube. http://www.youtube.com/user/pestegoriko#p/u/15/s9kwe3coFlc However, the only other version I have been able to watch is a 131 minute one.

At least in the 131 minute version I saw, the additional minutes (or better said the minutes that had been cut) served to flesh out scenes that were abridged or, sometimes, completely eliminated from the subtitled version we saw. For instance, while there is no moment in which rape is depicted, as was suggested in class, there is, however, a scene in which pregnant local women are brought face to face with the soldiers who had raped them and asked to choose one for marriage (starting 7:00-7:50 in the youtube version). Thus the need for the service is brought in a somewhat humorous but still more pointed manner. Secondary characters are introduced in a clearer manner. Alicia, for instance, is introduced as a neighbor rather than simply popping up in the plot without any explanation. The relationship between Pantoja and Bacacorzo is developed, as is the one between Pantoja, Chuchupe and Chupito.

Personally I found the longer version more efficient than the shorter one in that the relationship between Pantoja and “la Colombiana” does not overshadow the other aspects of the movie. While one can understand some of the cuts for the US market—there are a couple of scenes where gay stereotypes are mildly mocked –most of them privilege the romance or soap opera aspects of the movie over those that actually make the characters more believable or htat explain the “service’s” creation and ultimate closing.

Vargas Llosa: Humor and Politics

The first novel written after Mario Vargas Llosa’s public break with the Cuban Revolution in 1971, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service has been described as marking his “discovery of humor.” Vargas Llosa’s earlier novels were characterized by their searing seriousness, by their ruthless, perhaps even exaggerated, foregrounding of the corruption of Peruvian and, implicitly, Latin American societies. However, Captain Pantoja and the later Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter are two novels in which humor predominates. What makes this discovery of humor of interest is that the topic of Captain Pantoja is, in some ways, as revealing , if not more so, of the country’s profound corruption and immorality than those of his earlier novels.

Prostitution is, after all, a “serious” social problem. It frequently originates in the conjunction of social inequality and patriarchal structures. It is a specifically patriarchal form of exploitation. Moreover, by having the army become involved in the business of prostitution, he brings together the institution that, at least in The Time of the Hero, represented patriarchy at its most naked and brutal. Thus Captain Pantoja had the potential to become an expose of patriarchy, the exploitation of women, and, of course, of corruption in the army.

Moreover an important subplot in the novel is that of the cult of Brother Francisco, As we know, this is a religious cult that practices ritual crucifixions, not only of animals, a gory enough activity for my taste, but, on occasion, even of humans. Their rituals, which include the drinking of the blood of the beings crucified, could easily have been part of one of his earlier novels. One can easily imagine one of his “telescopic dialogues” in which prostitution and crucifixion would be juxtaposed presenting women as Christ-like victims and men/the army as crucifiers.

Vargas Llosa with great mastery manages to turn all of these potentially dramatic, even tragic, elements into an outright comedy rather than another direct denunciation of Peruvian society.

It has been argued that this “discovery of humor” is linked to a loss of faith in socialism. Caught between the earnest belief in the possibility of revolution, which had characterized his earlier novels, and his later belief in the need for neoliberal reforms, the Vargas Llosa of Captain Pantoja had necessarily to turn to humor in order to face, and enable the reader to face, the brutality depicted. That said, the problem with this view is that his earlier novels, while brutally honest in showing the failings of Peru, do not show any alternatives to the corrupt society depicted. Socialism or, better said, the possibility of socialism is kept outside the narrative. Vargas Llosa only shows the problem and scrupulously avoids showing any possible solution in his novels of the 1960s.

The same case can be made about Captain Pantoja. Again Vargas Llosa brilliantly depicts Peruvian patriarchy, fanaticism, and the irrationality into which military rationality can easily transform. However, as in his earlier novels, the actual solutions to these problems are never intimated. But by transforming his earlier anger into humor, the narrative no longer arouses in the reader the need to find a solution to these social problems. Subcomandante Marcos, in an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, pointed out the role of literature and, specifically, that of The Time of the Hero, in his personal political development. It is doubtful that he would also single out Captain Pantoja.


*In the photo, Vargas Llosa directing his film adaptation of Captain Pantoja

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.

Not One but Many "Hypos"

In his essay “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Robert Stam applies to film studies Gerard Genette’s relational concepts hypo- and hypertext, to indicate an intertextual an relationship between an anterior (hypo)text and posterior (hyper) text which “transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends” the former (66). The usefulness of Genette’s and Stam’s reflections for the course is obvious. Film adaptations are by definition hypertexts of the literary hypotexts they adapt.
However, Kiss of the Spider Woman can be seen, at least in part, as a case in which film or, better said, films, become the hypotext(s) for a literary hypertext. After all, Molina’s telling of film stories are themselves adaptations of film into literary terms. (In class, Peter noted that the narrative situation is particularly complex in that the novel, a written text, reproduces what are meant to be “oral” adaptations of the films The structure of the narrative is, therefore: film Molina’s narration novel’s representation of Molina’s narration and its contexts). Moreover, the novel does not imply one hypotext, but many. Cat People, The Enchanted Cottage, and I Walked with a Zombie are minor Hollywood classics which are incorporated or cannibalized, to use a word and concept dear to Stam. Kiss of the Spider Woman is comprised, therefore, of adaptations of film into literature.
But even the made-up movies are not without film precedents which Kiss of the Spider Woman interprets and modifies. Not only because as Puig has pointed out, his Nazi “film” was inspired by Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love), directed by Rolf Hansen in 1942 and one of the greatest hits in wartime Germany, or because the Mexican Cabaret “film” was, in turn, modeled on Aventurera (Adventuress), directed by Alberto Gout in 1950, but because regardless of these influences , the made-up “movies” are responding to the general traits of the film genres which they are then reproducing and modifying as they do so. In fact, one could argue that the film genres are here a kind of critical hypertext constituted out of numerous specific filmic hypotexts, which would, in turn, both the actual films and the generic abstractions, become hypotexts referred to in the novel.

Sergio's Guilt

Perhaps the one moment in which Sergio, the protagonist of Memories of Underdevelopment, breaks from his “objective” stance towards Cuban society and even the revolution, comes after he is declared innocent by the revolutionary court. Sergio, in his voice-over narration, notes: “There is something that leaves me in a bad position. I’ve seen too much to be innocent. They have too much darkness inside their heads to be guilty.”
What makes this comment particularly relevant to an understanding of the movie is that it seems to link culpability and class. Sergio has “seen too much,” both metaphorically and literally, precisely because he is a member of the bourgeoisie. The elite education, which has permitted him to develop his intelligence, is based on his economic position within Cuban society. His wealth has also permitted him to travel abroad and “see” the US. (He’s clearly been to New York). His guilt would then ultimately reside on his social privilege.
Moreover, Sergio’s relationship with Elena is predicated on social inequality. Sergio’s connections with the film industry; the fact that he was able to buy his wife luxury clothes, which, in turn, she had been unable to take to Miami; the fact that he owns a luxury apartment, etc; make it possible for him to seduce Elena. One can add to these economic factors, their age difference. One of the reasons, “he has seen too much” is because he is twenty years older than Elena. While Elena is seventeen years old, not sixteen as she claims during the trial, there is little doubt that he has been able to use his greater experience to seduce her.
To its credit, Memories of Underdevelopment avoids populist sentimentality which identifies goodness with poverty, the working class with progressive values, etc. The family’s obsession with obsolete moral values, Elena’s and the family’s lies, undermine any Manichean vision of class relations.
However, the fact is that the court is able to evaluate the case brought against Sergio by Elena’s family based exclusively on legal considerations. The trial can thus be seen as implying a positive view on the Cuban revolution. If the movie presents a lucid and, perhaps, pessimistic view of the Cuban people as divided between a “guilty” bourgeoisie and confused working class, it also presents revolutionary institutions, such as the court, as overcoming this negative dichotomy. One can, perhaps, make the case that the film ultimately justifies the Cuban revolution on the grounds not only that it is justified historically, a point made in the documentary sections of the film, but also in that it manages to overcome the social flaws of Cuban society. In Memories of Underdevelopment the only instance of Cuban society which has overcome “underdevelopment” is the revolution.

Cine cubano

If the Mexican and Argentine film industries, the two largest in Latin America, experienced significant contraction during the 1960s, that of Cuba began its golden age. In fact, while there had been isolated Cuban movies made in the Island, as well as some Mexican and US productions, the fact is that a film industry only began with the Revolution. ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry] was founded in 1959. For the Cuban revolution, especially during the 1960s, as was the case with Lenin’s Soviet Union, film was the most important of the arts. In part, this was due to the emphasis placed by the Cuban Revolution on film as a central means of communication of social and political values and values. Moreover, if the goal of the revolution was the creation of a “new man” (and, obviously, also woman), a new visual culture was also required.
But in addition to state support, the birth of the Cuban film industry benefitted from the explosion in creativity that surged throughout the Cuban artistic community and, more generally, population immediately after the triumph of the Revolution. As Michael Chanan notes: “ The Revolution . . . unleashed among a new generation of filmmakers a furious creative energy as they turned the cameras on the process they were living, and told the Cuban people—and anyone else who was interested—who they were and what they were doing.” Revolutions are wont to create upsurges in enthusiasm and creativity, at least until the optimism begins to cool and censorship starts tightening.

To its credit, ICAIC has managed to maintain a surprising degree of independence from direct government interference. This was particularly the case during the late 1960s. In 1969, when rock and other US musical styles were discouraged by the government and banned from television, the ICAIC created the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (Sound Experiment Group) which brought together, under the direction of the classical composer Leo Brouwer, folk/rock singer-songwriters Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, and Noel Nicola, jazz musician Emiliano Salvador, etc, who would later become central figures in the Cuban music scene. ICAIC not only gave them a space in which to develop musically during a time when they were marginalized from Cuban media, but even provided formal musical and film musical training. As Leonardo Acosta, a writer and musician who participated in GES notes: “A revolutionary system of theoretical and practical studies was elaborated, which were combined with practice and the listening of almost all possible music: from Beethoven to John Coltrane, from Gilberto Gil to Ravi Shankar, from Anton von Webern to Xenakis, from Frank Zappa to Blood, Sweat and Tears, from Sindo Garay to Juan Blanco and, of course from Bach to the Beatles.”

As we are discovering in our readings on Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment, many saw in this film a dissident, even anti-revolutionary statement. While Gutiérrez Alea consistently dismissed this interpretation of his film, as we have seen, the ICAIC cannot be seen as unequivocally representing the Revolutionary government’s positions. In fact, I think there can be found a “dissident” ethos in many Cuban cultural products, even if this “dissidence” can, at least during the 1960s and 1970s, be interpreted as coming from the left. The flaws denounced are not presented as the product of the attempt at implementing socialism, but as flaws in the manner in which socialism is being implemented. The solution is more socialism, not a turn (or return) to capitalism.