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.

Borges and Bertolucci

While Bertolucci is probably correct in noting that The Spider’s Stratagem is an exact adaptation of what he calls the “mechanism,” that is, the basic plot structure, of “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” the film obviously exhibits significant differences when compared with the source story. As Robert Stam notes in “Beyond Fidelity,” all adaptations, even those attempting absolute faithfulness to their literary source, must necessarily make innumerable modifications on the original given the different requirements and characteristics of the different media. While Borges at the start of “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” imagines alternative versions of his story, Bertolucci’s changes go beyond those envisioned by the Argentine author, those necessary to flesh out such a concentrated text, and those required by medial difference.
The first significant modification made by Bertolucci is the setting of the story. Borges, in his story, argues that “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” which in his telling takes place in Ireland in the 1820s, could just as well have been set in “Poland, Ireland, the Venetian Republic, some South American or Balkan state.” According to its author, the key to the story is that it is set “in an oppressed and tenacious country.” For Borges, therefore, the story implies a colonial or neocolonial situation, in which a national majority is oppressed by a minority whether foreign or domestic. Obviously, the Ireland of the story, oppressed by the English but actively resistant to foreign domination, fits Borges’s description perfectly.
Borges could have easily included 19th century Italy which, as we all know, fought against Austria in order to achieve it its unity. It is much more difficult to insert fascist Italy, the setting of Bertolucci’s film, in the series proposed by Borges. While an understandable choice given Bertolucci’s then radical politics, the fact is that, as he shows in the movie, fascist Italy of the 1930s was not a period when an a national majority resisted an oppressive minority. The anti-Fascists in the movie are a handful of people. Even if it is not clear that most of the population of Tara, the fictional town of the movie, support the fascists, the latter are obviously more than the resistance. If in Borges’s story, “Ireland idolized Kirkpatrick” and “hundred of actors collaborated with the protagonist,” in Bertolucci’s film, Athos will become a local hero only after the defeat of fascism.
But perhaps the major difference between “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and The Spider’s Stratagem resides in the fact that the film is focalized through Athos fils. This helps explain why in the historical flashbacks the anti-fascist clique are portrayed by the same actors who play them in the “present” scenes. This makes the flashback less like historical representations than dreamlike versions of the events uncovered by Athos.
The anti-realistic, even oneiric, staging of the flashback is, in my opinion, directly linked to the psychoanalytic undercurrents that run throughout the film. In fact, the film can be seen as a modified oedipal narrative. Athos fils embarks on a “search for the father,” but upon learning the truth that he was a traitor, is unable to take the next step and kill Athos père’s reputation, etc. There is even the possibility that he could end up living an alternative version of his father’s life—Draifa wants him to stay with her niece and supervise the lands.
Again the contrast with “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” is noticeable. While Ryan, who discovers the truth about Kilpatrick, the “hero and traitor,” is his great-grandson, it is not clear whether filial loyalty or, more probably, a refusal to destroy the reputation of a national hero is what leads him to repeat the myth. (Is this is why the story claims that this “perhaps, was foreseen”?) Granted that Athos, also does not tell the truth about his father, but here Bertolucci’s psychoanalytic spin on Borges’s “mechanism” transforms what is a comment about the social need for myths into an exploration of psychological mechanisms.
Curiously, this aspect of “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” has been present in a few major movies. The first filmic exploration of this “theme of the traitor and the hero” I am aware of is John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), where Captain York (John Wayne) validates the whitewashed myths created around Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda), a version of Custer. Ford would return to the topic in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In this film, Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart) makes a political career out of having shot the Liberty Valance, even though , in reality, it was Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) who had killed the ruffian. A more recent, though less systematic, exploration of this topic is found in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), when Harvey Dent’s criminal actions are blamed on the Batman so as not to damage the former’s reputation as a hero.

Borges and Yeats

Somewhat hastily in class I mentioned that I wasn’t sure about what Borges thought of Yeats or, for that matter, whether “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” was influenced by the Irish poet. Of course, I had forgotten that a quote from Yeats, precisely on the “eternal return,” opens the story. However, I would still prefer not only to see the story as dealing principally with the tenuous difference between hero and traitor, but also as presenting a kind of social and structural view of the event narrated: given colonial oppression and concomitant anti-colonial resistance, events such as the ones narrated are bound to happen. The idea that history repeats itself does not strike me as necessary to an understanding of “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” (Obviously, Bertolucci and Enrique disagree with me).

According to A Dictionary of Borges (Evelyn Fishburn and Psyche Hughes), in the story: “Yeats is presented as the prototype of the Irish poet, in opposition to the English Shakespeare, mentioned in the same context. The theme of betrayal and the ensuing desire to confess and make amends are well within the spirit of the lines spoken by Yeats on behalf of the Irish who repudiated Parnell.” While I do not agree that Yeats represents the Irish writer in “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” given that he is only explicitly present in the epigraph, Fishburn and Hughes point out intriguing possible links between the plot of Borges’s story and Yeats’ “Parnell’s Funeral.”

Yeats is a sporadic presence in Borges's writings. “The Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” begins with an epigraph taken from the Irish poet. Some of his essays mention him, though mostly in passing. When writing about Walt Whitman, in an essay included in the translated Other Inquisitions, Borges presents Yeats as a precursor of Jung, who looked for “symbols that would awaken the generic memory”. Yeats is referred to in a footnote in his essay about the “Nightingale of Keats.” For Borges, the nightingale in question is the idea of the bird, not a specific bird. Yeats is presented as one of the many who misread the poem. Borges, in his anthology of fantastic stories, co-edited with Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, included a story by Yeats titled “The Sorcerers.” He refers to Yeats in his Book of Imaginary Beings when writing about “fairies” and “the double.”
Borges’s had a problematic relationship with Yeats’ writings. In his Introduction to English Literature (1965), co-written with María Esther Vásquez, he mentions Eliot’s statement that Yeats was the greatest poet of “our time,” but gives no personal opinion. In interviews, he frequently concurred with Eliot, only to point out that he enjoyed other poets more. He described his take on Yeats’ poetry to the Argentine writer Osvaldo Ferrari: “the fact is that his verses impress us, let’s say, as verbal artifacts; beyond what they attempt to mean.” The fact that he uses some of Yeats’s verses as epigraphs to two of his stories may be evidence of Borges’s admiration for these “verbal artifacts.”

Should one interpret Borges’s ambiguity towards Yeats as representing a kind of anxiety of influence? Although Borges tended to embrace his predecessors—a gesture represented in “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” by his mention of Chesterton—it may very well be that he felt threatened by Yeats’ achievement as a poet. After all, Borges, despite the brilliance of his prose, tended to identify more as poet than as a short story writer. But investigating the psychological aspects of this literary relationship is clearly beyond the topics we are examining in our course.

Bertolucci on Borges

According to Bertolucci, he took from Borges “the mechanism” of the story, that is, the very basic plot, which he then translated to the Italian context in which he is interested. There is something very appropriate in this change of setting. After all, as Borges notes, before deciding to actually narrate “Theme of the Traitor and the Her o” in Ireland: “the action takes place in an oppressed and resistant country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice. . .”. Moreover, the abstractness of Borges's presentation also permits it to be adapted to less clearly colonial, but still repressive, situations, such as the divided Italy of the fascist period.

Moreover, the text as written resembles a treatment for a film script. The story is summarized so that only the basic twists and turns of the plot are retained. In my opinion, it is not too far fetched to even imagine it as a kind of pitch for a movie idea. Borges, the would be filmmaker, telling a skeptical producer: “we can film this movie in the cheapest or more convenient of these locations.”

However, I can’t help feeling that Bertolucci misunderstands Borges’s short story. While Borges was interested “in the cyclical nature of things,” as the Italian filmmaker notes, and the topic is present in other stories, such as “The Library of Babel,” and was the subject of one of his essays, “Cyclical Time,”I think this is not the core idea explored in “The Theme of the Traitor and Hero.” Instead, I believe that the story is more concerned with the tenuous separation between hero and traitor, a topic in which the Argentine writer was also interested. (This blurring of the antinomy hero/traitor is part of Borges’s consistent undermining of binary oppositions in his stories). For instance, in “The Shape of the Sword,” another story (partly) set in Ireland, Borges narrates the story of an apparently Irish patriot, ironically known as the “Englishman” in the Uruguay where he now lives. However, at the end it is revealed that he is actually John Vincent Moon, traitor to the independence movement. In “Three Versions of Judas,” the archetypal traitor is presented as the true martyr and savior. In “The Theologians,” the deadly struggle between two fathers of the early Christian church—Aureliano and Juan de Panonia—culminates in their discovery that: “for the incomprehensible divinity he [Aureliano] and Juan de Panonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the hater and the hated, the accuser and the victim) constituted one person.”

I am not arguing that the Nietzschean “eternal return” is not present in the story, just that it’s not the main topic of the story. However, Bertolucci, who claims to have been particularly impacted by psychoanalysis when making The Spider’s Stratagem, may have been influenced by Freud when interpreting the story. For repetition compulsion is one of the core traits of the unconscious and, in particular, of psychological trauma. Breaking free from its “cyclical nature” is one of the goals of all psychoanalytic treatment.