Who is the Spider Woman?

Who is the Spider Woman? Carolyn Pinet Montana State University Much has been said about the various types of discourse in the Argentinian Manuel Puig's novel, El beso de la mujer araña. In particular, critics have commented on how Puig, influenced by his love of 1940s Hollywood movies, introduces them through one of his main characters, Molina, and how they become recreated as they are retold, first by him, then by his friend Valentin, who joins in with comments and interpretations.1 When the book was made into a movie, Kiss of the Spider Woman, by the Argentinian director Hector Babenco, and opened in the U.S. in the summer of 1985, the critical acclaim was almost universal. William Hurt eventually won the Academy Award for best actor, and the Academy was praised for recognizing a film on the subject of homosexuality. Manuel Puig himself was categorical: "I hated the film," he said in a Boston Globe interview. Ironically, and apparently in a manner not to his taste, the work had come full circle: 1940s film discourse (the movies Puig saw growing up in Argentina), written discourse (the novel Puig wrote), 1980s film discourse (the movie Babenco made). But something had happened on the way: just as Molina had changed and edited the 1940s movies he had seen, so did Babenco change and edit Puig's 1976 text. Vincent Canby and others have discussed the trend to internationalization in movies. Internationalization really means homogenization: that is, more and more, movie directors are bringing together a cast of different nationalities to make a film in English set nowhere in particular about a topic that is "universal," supposedly with which we can all easily identify. When the American audience first viewed Kiss ofthe Spider Woman, what they saw was a film in English with a North American, a Puerto Rican, and a Brazilian playing the main characters, and street signs in Portuguese (the movie was made in Brazil). What they could not see were the streets ofBuenos Aires where the novel is set or, given the political situation in Argentina in the early 1980s, a simulation of such a scene. What the audience is encouraged to believe is that, first, all Latin Americans (all people?) are alike and, second, that all Latin American countries are the same, in fact interchangeable. Puig has been concerned from the beginning with the colonization of Spanish culture by North American popular culture. In his earlier novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968: in English, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), he shows how Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand), an American movie based on a Spanish novel, is a blatant example ofsuch 19 20Rocky Mountain Review colonization. It is appropriate and necessary to ask, then, what is the result this time when a work has been uprooted from its specific social and cultural context to be translated into film? What kind of "filmic discourse" do we end up with? It is my contention that the resulting product is what I'll call "generic discourse"—that is, in the effort to be "universal," the director has produced a soft, diluted, and distorted version of the original text. Puig has important and provocative things to say in Kiss of the Spider Woman about Argentinian sexual politics, gender, and power. He wrote the novel after being exiled from his country because he had been critical ofthe existing regime in an earlier book, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973). From his perspective as a political and cultural exile he is very much concerned with the particular situation of Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s under a repressive military dictatorship. His view of Argentinian society is subtle, detailed, and paradoxical and he comes up with no easy answers. Our natural, "liberal" tendencies are to reach out to others, to stress sameness rather than difference. But it is only by respecting and appreciating difference that we can come to a true understanding of other cultures and peoples. In this article, then, I will show how, in stressing the universal and neglecting the particular, the film oversimplifies and distorts its subject to such a degree that the true nature of the...