THE NOVEL AS FILM

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig is an entirely cinematic book. Its content and style, indeed every sentence of the novel, appeals directly to the reader's visual perception. There are no author's digressions or abstract concepts which often intersperse a novel's text; Puig's main concern is with what people do and say, and when he does reveal what they think, it is through visual (cinematic) images rather than words. Virtually the whole novel is written in the present tense, which reinforces the effect of actions taking place right now, this moment, in front of you. There is no space or time for the reader's meditation; he is absorbed in visualizing the text—in a state more of seeing a movie than of reading a book:

And then you see them later on they're out in the dark night air, her lying in a hammock, with a good close-up of the two faces, because he bends down to kiss her and it's all lit up by the full moon kind of filtering through the palm trees … (Puig 165).

Perhaps Kiss of the Spider Woman could be considered a “written film”; this would explain the specifics of the novel's form and style. Without recognizing the cinematic nature of Puig's text, one could reach the wrong conclusion, as one critic did, that the novel is a “structural failure” (Sorrention 1).

Kiss of the Spider Woman was published in 1976 but attracted attention only recently, after the release of the film by the same name, directed by Hector Babenco. While the film was commercially successful, it misrepresented the book to some extent. Impoverishing novels when turning them into films is almost unavoidable, but in the case of Kiss of the Spider Woman it is more than that. The depth of the content, the dynamics of the drama, and the full dimensions of the characters are lost in the film, and this is not simply because of unsuccessful “translation.” Puig's novel is an accomplished “film” in itself, and Babenco's film is only a shallow version of it.

It is well known that there are three main stages in making a film: writing, shooting, and editing, but historically these stages did not appear simultaneously. At the turn of the century, shooting was the sole stage in making a film. By the 1920s, with the trend having been set by Porter and Griffith, editing became the most essential stage in film-making. For a long period of time the writing stage was almost entirely ignored. Although artistically accomplished scripts began to appear in the 1920s (e.g., Nosferatu by German writer Henrik Galeen), it was not until a decade later that the importance of writing was fully understood. Today, now that the techniques and aesthetics of shooting and editing are highly developed, we are able to see that the success of cinema depends largely upon the inventive ideas and humanistic depth of film's dramatic content. The writing stage—scripting—has become increasingly important and sophisticated; indeed, just as early films were created by shooting and editing alone, today, paradoxically, a film could be fully visualized without any shooting or editing. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a quintessential example of that.

THE ROLE OF FILM IN THE NOVEL

The novel is set in a South American prison where Molina, a window dresser convicted for corrupting minors, is describing movies to his cellmate, Valentin, a political activist. The movies that Molina recounts are from the 1930s and 1940s, some of them with an easily recognizable Hollywood touch. They are romantic, suspenseful, highly sentimental, and full of melodramatic cliches (“such trivia” says Valentin at first), yet these film-stories create a common ground for communication between two very different individuals—an intellectual political fanatic and a coquettish, homosexual window dresser. The fiction of the films exposes real feelings and eternal human problems, and by experiencing them together, an atmosphere of openness and sincerity develops between the cellmates. While discussing the films' situations and characters, their conversation inevitably slips into their own pasts and their dreams: they “probe each other's past like duelists—parrying, lunging, seeking out the vulnerable center” (Herrick 19).

It is hardly surprising that film plays such a pivotal role in Puig's novel. As a former film student and film-maker, he is very fond of movies, especially old ones: “Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption … [but] it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force” (Freedman C11). Puig is also convinced that film-watching is a form of escapism which gives people hope: “They help you to not go crazy. … It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony” (Freedman C11).

For Molina and Valentin, films literally become the substitute of life. Escapism for them is a matter of survival. All that a moviegoer experiences—identification with film characters, total emotional involvement—is intensified for Molina and Valentin, particularly the ending of every film they experience:

Molina: “Tomorrow we’ll be all finished with the film.”

Valentin: “You don't know how sorry that makes me. … It's a shame to see it ending” (Puig 37). With the end of a film the illusion disappears and only the reality of the jail remains.

Valentin: “I've become attached to the characters. And now it's all over, and it's just like they died” (Puig 41).

The films recounted by Molina not only help both men to transcend the reality of their predicament; they also influence their behavior and even change their personalities.

CINEMATIC INTERCUTTING AND MONTAGE

Throughout the book, Molina related five movies to Valentin: a story of a panther woman; a drama of a French singer and a German officer in German-occupied Paris; a political film about a race-car-driver and guerrillas in Latin America; a thriller about a girl from New York and her macabre visit to an island in the Caribbean; a tragic story of a poor newspaper reporter who falls in love with an actress who already has a vengeful and powerful tycoon for her lover; and one film which Molina recalls just for himself about an ugly housemaid who is loved by her employer after he suffers severe war wounds which make him ugly too. Scenes of the films are interwoven with scenes of the two prisoners' daily lives, their dreams, and their growing closeness, friendship, love affair, and parting. This combining and shuffling of different “footage,” intercutting, is a purely cinematic device; in fact, it is the very nature of film.

Puig uses a whole range of “cuts” in his text. He links life and film footage in order to maintain clear narrative continuity. All the “cuts to” and “cuts from” move the plot of the novel further and further to its culmination—Molina's death for Valentin's cause (he was killed, like a movie heroine, while meeting Valentin's comrades), and then its resolution—Valentin's enlightening dream in which he comes to accept life the way it is: full of emotions and sentiments; intense and illusive like Molina's films.

Puig also makes some “cuts by association.” He goes from the coolness of dawn, which wakes up the panther woman, to the prison cell: “The cold wakes her up, just like us,” says Valentin (Puig 14); from a film heroine abandoned and scared in a vast jungle to Molina “scared of everything, scared of kidding myself about getting out of here” (Puig 214); from the cellmates' discussion of their last night of love-making to a dancing couple in a Mexican palace talking about their “perfect encounter, (that's) just one night of carnival and that's that” (Puig 224).

The novel also contains examples of “discontinuity” editing, when episodes mismatch each other. For instance, a soap opera scene in Monte Carlo is “edited” with Valentin's suffering from diarrhea; the panther woman stalks her victim while the prisoners carry on a leisurely conversation. The contrasts brought together by these “jumps” heighten the novel's dramatic expressiveness and make its images more intense.

Some of Puig's cuts remind the reader of Eisenstein's intellectual montage; i.e., he communicates with the reader not by means of dramatic continuity, but by “colliding” different textures together: reality, films, dreams, and memories. Puig expresses abstract ideas that are not present in any of the single textures, alone—they become apparent once certain images are brought together in sharp juxtaposition. For example, when Puig “edits” together Valentin's recollections about his love for a waiter, scenes from a film about a romantic French singer, and scenes of Molina's and Valentin's growing intimacy, the message becomes very clear; life and films have striking similarities, they influence each other, and film has enormous impact on life. Movies are part of our lives, and it is largely due to them that our sense of reality, like Molina's and Valentin's, “isn't restricted by this cell we live in.” This is the “sub-message” (sub-text) that Puig endorses in his book.

Intercutting from one texture to another is also used as a device to create suspense for the novel's characters and for the reader. From time to time, for example, Molina stops in the middle of recounting one of his films in order to get Valentin into becoming more involved in them, more intrigued, and more pensive about them: “I like to leave you hanging; that way you can enjoy the film more,” says Molina. Puig, in turn, interrupts scenes of Molina's and Valentin's life with films, and by doing so creates suspense for the reader so that he cares more about the couple and their relationship than about the films' melodramas.

THE MOVING CAMERA IN THE TEXT

When reading the novel, one strongly senses the presence of a camera. Many of the descriptions, it seems, are made through its lens. The camera tilts up and down, pans, moves in tight on an object or figure, then recedes to capture the entire scene, sometimes travelling slowly, sometimes quickly:

“She looks fairly young. … petite face, a little cat-like small turned up nose. … She looks at her subject: the black panther at the zoo, which was quiet at first, stretched out in its cage. … the panther spotted her and began pacing back and forth in its cage and to growl at the girl. … It's winter, it's freezing. The trees are bare in the park. There's a cold wind blowing” (Puig, 3–4).

Sometimes the author uses technical language to make his cinematic descriptions even more cinematic: “And the camera again shows you the silvery garden, and there you are in the movies but it's more as if you were a bird taking off because now you see the garden from above, smaller and smaller, …” (Puig, 56).

FILMS AND DREAMS

In his novel, Puig masterfully reveals cinema's similarity to an essential human function, dreaming. He shows that film is related to dreaming as naturally as music is related to the heartbeat or the rhythm of walking. In Kiss of the Spider Woman the substance of the characters' dreams and the substance of the recounted films are almost one and the same: the free flight of fantasy in space; the instant transitions forward and backward in time; the easy switch of the imagination from the long shot of an entire scene to a close-up of a detail; the very natural combination of reality and symbols. Molina's film images are often loosely connected, in free associations, like the images that fill Valentin's last dream:

I keep swimming underwater. … it's so very deep … the only one who knows for sure is him, if he was sad or happy to die that way, sacrificing himself for a just cause. I think he let himself be killed because that way he could die like some heroine in a movie. … I'm swimming with my head above water now so that way I won't lose sight of the island coast, … such a strange woman, with a long dress on, that's shining. … she's wearing a mask, it's also silver, but … poor creature … she can't move, there in the deepest part of the jungle she's trapped in a spider's web, or no, the spiderweb is growing out of her own body, she's smiling but a tear rolls out from beneath the mask … and I ask her why she's crying and in a close-up that covers the whole screen at the end of the film she answers me that that's just what can never be known, because the ending is enigmatic … and the spider woman pointed out to me the way through the forest with her finger, and so I don't know where to even begin to eat so many things I've found now, … thanks to the spider woman, and after I have one more spoonful of this guava paste. … (Puig 279–81).

REALITY, FILMS AND DREAMS

In the beginning of the novel there is an enormous contrast between the exotic panther-woman story and the reality of the prison cell, although on a deep subconscious level the panther-woman is Molina's image of himself: “She's not a woman like all others” (Puig 3). The subsequent films that are recounted introduce several other themes which are repeated over and over again—love at all costs, betrayal, fear, repression, liberation, and sacrifice—and when Molina and Valentin talk about films; they gradually reveal themselves. The films and the cellmates' lives move closer and closer together, and at the end of the novel reality and illusion merge together. The film teller, himself, becomes a “heroine” and his own life turns out to be no less romantic and unusual than life portrayed in his films.

In the last of Molina's recounted films, the heroine becomes a prostitute—she needs money in order to feed her mortally ill lover. Molina, like the film heroine, continues to collaborate with his jailers in order to get food for Valentin. In this highly sentimental film, the man dies—as is going to happen to Molina very soon—and only his song for his woman is left; “I never thought … I could become … so obsessed with you … it's you I remember … I love you more … cry for me …” (Puig 257–59). This love confession becomes Valentin's and Molina's, too. “And well … that's all … folks …” says Molina as he finishes recounting his last film (Puig 259). Reality and illusion, life and death have become one.

Works Cited

Freedman, Samuel. “For the Author of ‘Spider Woman,’ Hollywood Provided Hope” New York Times, 5 Aug. 1985: C11.

Herrick, William. “Alienated Within and Without.” The New Leader, 28 June 1982: 19–20.

Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1976.

Sorrentino, Gilbert. “South American Fantasy, Obsession, and Soap Opera: Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” Washington Post 1 Aug. 1982: A1–2.