KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Reading Manuel Puig's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, I kept having this nagging doubt: Is Molina, the self-described homosexual window dresser imprisoned in Buenos Aires for corrupting minors, a real homosexual or a candidate for a transsexual operation? The question actually comes so easily as to wonder why all the people who love the novel and the movie -- with William Hurt as heroine Molina -- aren't asking it themselves. Puig's book is, of course, stacked against Molina in such an obvious way -- eight lengthy footnotes are included, explaining away homosexuality by the likes of Freud, Anna Freud, Lang, D.J. West, Marcuse -- that how could it be possible to interpret Molina as anything else? That's what's fraudulent about the book: It provides these archaic references -- almost as a collective apologia -- about a character that simply isn't there. Closer to the disguised truth, the novel is unwittingly ahead of its time while the novelist is not. The tip-off that we're dealing with someone more than just an old queen comes less than twenty pages into the book: Molina says, "Since a woman's the best there is...I want to be one." If a post-adolescent said this to entice and shock, we'd accept it as part of the process of being an emerging gay -- acting out the vernacular one hopes he'll soon discard. But Molina is no chicken; he's middle-aged and adamant. Making a clear separation between himself and faggots, he says, "As for my friends and myself, we're a hundred percent female. We don't go in for those little games because that's strictly for homos. We're normal women; we sleep with men." As shaky as transsexuality may be on physical and psychological grounds, one of the essential criteria for candidacy as a transsexual is just what Molina feels: he doesn't consider himself a man, and much less a homosexual. It's a sad craziness that he calls himself a faggot and engages in homosexual behavior, but doesn't feel homosexual; in fact, he hates homosexuals. And never once does Molina betray his inner-most feelings; you sense that the character is more faithful to himself than the guilt-soaked author is. Puig allows Molina his fantasy: being pumped by a "real man" named Valentin (in the movie Raul Julia), a revolutionary who battles the oppressive Argentine military rule (it's roughly 1976) and who is jailed in the same cell. Puig extends the fantasy to the ultimate: He explicitly has Molina state that, after having had his desires fulfilled, he's ready to die -- and happily! This makes for fermented 40s melodrama and by no means an accident, but as mechanism and message, it's nonsense. First of all, as plot device, Puig has already put Molina in prison for having sex with a minor before the story starts. Except to tell Valentin why he's been jailed, Molina never speaks about it, we never get to "see" the minor so that we can judge for ourselves what is meant by minor, and, most telling, just what would a "one hundred percent female" be doing with a boy anyway? Secondly, given that Puig is unmistakably writing more a sexualized polemic than movie-inspired escapism -- had it been escapist reading, or strictly a compassionate plea for tolerance of differences, it would likely not have been banned in Argentina -- the novel's unwitting harbinger to the political Homocaust, and the movie explicit exemplification. That spider weaving its fateful web for Molina is the trap of hopelessness -- and who the hell could ever die happily with that kind of resolution?
The late Puig, who answered the perpetual question "Are you gay?" with "I'm a person," shows a detached sympathy for Molina that isn't dishonest, exactly, but it suggests the psychologically wormy: Puig, like many Latin homosexuals, might have been trying to kill what's inside him, while at the same time revelling in and giving one's self over to gay melodrama, flaunting contradiction as self-preservation. What's dishonest is that he sets Molina up to be what's not really in his own head -- a silly old queen -- and then strips him of his affectations at the end, turning a 40s heroine into a modern hero, a startling role reversal that may have worked had he been a flaming sissy who wanted to be a manly gay. (Which seemed to be the rage during the Jeep & Jeans 80s.) But how can this be when Molina wants desperately to be a woman? One f... and he's a butch martyr? The novel isn't persuasively analytical to the degree and intent Puig rather desperately aims for, unless the reader accepts all the footnoted psychobabble. And if a reader does, how can he reconcile it to the character? Though there's a ton of detail designer chat from Molina, it's all in reference to the lullabies he dreams up to pass the time while in jail; the info, voluminous and amusing, basically tells us nothing. KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN really isn't a novel at all -- it's a full-of-holes screenplay in search of actors who have to fill in what's missing.
Feeling trapped as something you're not and living in a place where much of what makes life worth living is not freely available is a fairly accurate way to describe the vibes of Buenos Aires. The city is said to be the most European-looking in all of Latin America, and I think a travel agent friend hit it on the head when he cracked, "It's Vienna on a bad day." You're seized immediately not just by the derivative music, architecture and transportation or lifestyle, mannerism and dress but also by the heavy moldiness: the dark wood paneling, oversized furniture, dank draperies and yellowed lace dollies are so omnipresent and oppressive that you want to hit an exit almost as soon as you enter interiors of restaurants, hotels, government buildings, stores. (And that there could ever be a miniature Harrod's says much about the yearning of Argentines to be something other than what they are.) Even Buenos Aires's manicured boulevards seem to cut off your oxygen supply, and this may explain why the cemeteries -- and especially the one in which Eva Peron is said to be buried in -- are the city's most interesting tourist sights. (You don't feel fresh-air constricted in Vienna.) Though everything and everyone looks securely built, you somehow don't trust, you hesitate because you sense the atmosphere of all pervasive insecurity -- psycho Gothic, like the tombs. These faked Europeans myopically rush -- and I mean rush, even faster than New Yorkers -- to wherever it is they go. This rush doesn't only typify impersonal big city living, it also a permeation of the dreaded historical Latin American inevitability: that, sooner or later, the military takes over. If the tango is the national symbol of sexual dramaturgy, it can also represent the deeply-rooted cult of fascism: Peron, his Eva are felt in such strong, intangible ways that the tragedy of Argentina having no recorded moral history is strengthened. While leathers, sweaters and beef are Argentina's most prized exports, the arched, slick dance of priggish ritual is the metaphor for a nation unwilling to import honesty. In conversations with city dwellers, no one wants to remember the "killing fields" past; their dour, swarthy faces retrograde into paranoia at any discussion of the tactics of past regimes. This is what makes APARTMENT ZERO, a perfect companion piece to KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, particularly unsettling because it gets closer to verity: when the central character struggles to do the right thing but instead succumbs to murder and porno, he becomes the symbol of a willfully sick nationalism.
A few too many nincompoop critics and moviegoers missed completely the meaning behind the elaborate fictitious movie Molina describes to Valentin. This special lullaby is entitled "Her Real Glory," ostensibly Nazi propaganda about the Germans occupying France and how one dimwit, rich-hating French chanteuse falls in love with a Nazi officer after he shows her movies about how world hunger and depression have been caused by the Jews. (Reminiscent of Hitchcock's WWII propaganda shorts, recently released on home video.) Can it really be possible for people not to see that Puig's mocking Eva Peron and her fascist husband Juan? Eva was a third rate actress when she married Peron, an army colonel, in 1945. Eva became the living icon for the poor of Argentina -- she had a passionate hatred for the rich (though that didn't stop her from living lavishly) -- and not too unlike Leni in "Her Real Glory," died the death of a heroine. (Eva expired from cancer in 1952.) Not even our best movie critic caught Puig's clever subversion -- but Argentina did and banned the book. It didn't help Puig any that a previous book of his, about Peron, THE BUENOS AIRES AFFAIR, was laughably censored: any overt reference to Peron was left blank. Puig is condemning what is a grievous lack of critical Argentine biography, of truthful historical introspection. Whatever happens to Molina and Valentin, representing as lullaby the vast numbers of oppressed and forgotten, nothing will come of it, no record will be made of it. When Molina's body is dumped in garbage, who will know of it? Probably not even his mother.
Because of the raging politics of the Homocaust at the time, every major American movie company passed on filming the novel, despite the fact -- or maybe because -- director Hector Babenco, who did the 1981 stunning Brazilian muckraker PIXOTE, wanted Burt Lancaster as Valentin and Richard Gere as Molina. Refusing to give up, Babenco asked Raul Julia, who agreed and suggested what otherwise would seem like an impossibility: William Hurt as Molina. Begging for every dollar, deferring salaries against future profits, they headed to Sao Paulo to film, only to be met by more resistance. Members of the Brazilian film industry kicked up quite a fuss because Babenco was neither filming in Portuguese nor using Brazilian actors for the two leads. Then there was the political consideration which foolishly demanded that the prison in KISS originally set in Buenos Aires, be changed to a nameless South American city in order to reduce potential alienation of the now-civilian government of Argentina, as well as to avoid endangering potential grosses from the massive Argentine movie-going public. As if these handicaps weren't enough, Babenco had never made a movie in English. But he knows the terrain of crud: as with PIXOTE with its barf-inducing horrors of juvenile dormitories and toilets, he brings to KISS the decaying textures of grime and slime of cell walls and when one of the character's suffers from diarrhea, he approaches Smell-o-Vision. He's a master at shocking sex scenes, taking Pixote's Oedipal suckling and Molina & Valentin's anal intercourse and makes them deeply haunting, almost lyrical. (He was equally prodigious at squalor in IRONWEED, though more as a cold, Depression muralist: keeping us at a distance, that movie is like a month of Saturday nights with candidates for A.A.)
Something else works for Babenco -- his clarity in showing that hypocrisy knows no rationale. It's this element that helps make PIXOTE the most powerful docudrama of its kind; it shoved an updated, more frightening kind of Pharisaism at us, one every major city is now dealing with -- throwaway kids. Through subversion and subterfuge, KISS has principals using and discarding each other, only it's never quite so explicit as in PIXOTE. Molina's homosexuality is used by the prison and government officials in order to get Valentin to open up about his underground organization and activities; Molina is using his sexuality as a tool to get out of prison; Valentin is using Molina's vulnerability -- knowing Molina wants the love of a "real man" -- in order to get a message to his compatriots; and, finally, the homosexual issue is used to make a statement about the worth of people different from the norm. It's obvious that Babenco uses Molina as a warning about God Squad Fascism, and in the process just about usurps Puig's caution against Argentina's more traditional brand of it. Babenco narrows the warning and updates it: Molina gets it because he's "a f...ing fag." The novel isn't as overt as that, but what it does say I didn't believe -- that he's somehow a hero now that he's been good and screwed. As I see it, Molina sacrifices himself because every fiber of his being said he was a woman but trapped in a man's body.
Unfortunately the majority of moviegoers who view KISS haven't seen PIXOTE, which has a character named Lilica, who's around 17 and is a swish, and who probably is by now a drag queen. (If he hasn't been cut short by AIDS.) Watching William Hurt as Molina, I thought, It's Lilica all over again, but this time it's not for real. And I mean that literally because the actor playing Lilica is gay, while of course Hurt isn't. This bothered some of the nincompoops: Richard Corliss, for example, cries that Hurt "does not have one queenly bone in his body. It's not just that he's playing a homosexual; he's playing a raging queen. And he doesn't have the voice for it, he doesn't have the gestures for it. It's a terrible piece of miscasting." Corliss conveniently forgets the glories of acting -- he doesn't want to see our better actors take risks. What he seems to want is for Michael Greer to reprise his performance from THE GAY DECEIVERS or Zorro David to pull another Anacleto from REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE. Is Richard Burton to be condemned in STAIRCASE because he didn't have a "queenly bone in his body"? Because of FRAIDS, there are many who don't want to see a raging queen in a movie, though MTV has given Rupaul the chance to broaden his audience in a way the late Divine only got from John Waters. I would argue that right now only a straight actor without a gay bone in his body could play a raging swish. Of course the audience is more comfortable with a Dustin Hoffman in TOOTSIE, or a Robert Preston in VICTOR/VICTORIA or, most recently, Robin Williams as MRS. DOUBTFIRE -- because the audience knows they're not turning serious on us; in other words, they're safe. Or safe in the way Peter Finch's homosexual doctor was in SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY or Tom Hanks in PHILADELPHIA. Maybe what they are carping about it that Hurt at times goes too far, moving beyond their own personal comfort levels. Said Puig: "You won't recognize him in this film -- he's totally changed. A real transformation. He plays Molina with red hair, flowing gowns. Very risky." Indeed. And it's this daring, this true gutsiness, that I most admire in his work here.
Surprisingly, Raul Julia holds his own against Hurt, which must have been quite a challenge: watching and having to respond to Hurt's tricks might have tempted a co-star to just hand the picture over to him. Julia doesn't; he thwarts Hurt a bit, and when Julia's character is rightly perplexed by Molina, frustrated by his steadfast belief that fantasy is better than reality, the confusion and irritation are terrific balances; we can truly feel his exasperation. And, unlike our willful suspension of Hurt's obvious lack of ethnicity, Julia looks the part, and performs the infamous Latin sexual ambivalence with astonishing assurance.
KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN fascinates more for what's not on the screen or the pages than for what's on them. The relationship between Molina and Valentin is bogus -- a self-destructive misfit's fantasy -- but it might have been meaningful, funny, ironic had just once either of them had said or hinted that Molina, after getting out of prison, should get himself an appointment with a sex change specialist. It would then have given him something, a real hope, to be happy about, instead of becoming a victim of the very spiders he conspired with. Romantically sacrificing yourself to your own self-hatred isn't very heroic if what you hate really isn't what you are.
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