"KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN."   Term Paper ID:30414 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines the intertextuality of the 1985 film.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines the intertextuality of the 1985 film. Its alignment with several different genres including literary adaptations, prison genre, gay film genre, film musicals and political drama. Interaction of the genres. Connection to texts from theatre. How movies are used by the two protagonists to pass the time in prison. Motif of escape. Paper Introduction: In the film of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. One is Molina, a homosexual sentenced to eight years in prison for the corruption of minors, and the other is Valent?n, a young Marxist imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Molina tries to pass the time by telling the younger man about films he has seen, recreating the stories with words. It is in the course of these retellings of the different films that the viewer gets to know these characters and sees how they develop as they interact with one another and with the images recalled from films by Molina. Over the course of the film, the two men become much closer, developing a friendship they would be unlikely to have in the "real" world outside of prison. The setting is artificial in that it brings together two people from different class Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The filmspecifically makes use of the idea of popular art as an escape from thereal world yet at the same time turns the idea on its head by presentingmen who cannot escape from their real lives no matter how hard they try.Popular art is thought of as insubstantial, but these men find deep meaningin their experience of such art and suggest how such experience often seemsmore real than reality. Over the course of thefilm, the two men become much closer, developing a friendship they would beunlikely to have in the "real" world outside of prison. The reader is thus constantly urged to reconsider all impressionsgathered of the two men and their relationship. When theviewer is finally taken outside the prison cell when Molina is released,the real world is a shock, so very different from the film world Molina hasevoked. The film version of the novel (and the play that Puig also wrote) ismore explicit about the death of Molina and the probable survival ofValent?n. This may necessitate another consideration ofeverything that has gone before, again in light of this new information. Molina tries to pass the time by telling the younger man about films hehas seen, recreating the stories with words. However, it does so in a way that undercutsany memories the viewer might have of musical comedy, for these sequencesare exotic and dramatic rather than humorous. The two men do the samething from time to time, though it is not always clear to the reader in thefist half of the book what the relationship really is and from what pointof view each man is approaching that relationship. Molina sees the film as ameaningless but beautiful fantasy; Valent?n believes it is political, ananti-Semitic film. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Lost in the film version is the intimacy of the relationshipbetween the two men, for while in the book nothing is heard but their twovoices, in the film we also see them and their fantasies brought to lifeand placed in a real cell in the real world. The movies are all older films andshow that there is a generational gap between the two men, and in additionthere is a social gap that means that Molina would know about films thatValent?n would be less likely to have experienced in his social milieu.Yet, Valent?n becomes very enamored of the game of telling the movies, forit passes the time on the one hand and involves him with another world onthe other. Until that point,the reader sees the two men as precisely what they say they are--two menimprisoned for quite different crimes and merely happening to be in thesame cell and trying to make the best of it. Work CitedBabenco, Hector. There is also adialogue here between reality and illusion, between the real world and thefilm world, between the lives these men really live and the lives they seein the films described by Molina. As Molina says, "I don't explain my movies. Soon we learn that Molina has revealed nothing that he haslearned to the authorities, presumably because of the relationship he iscreating with Valent?n. The theater meets the filmwhen images from the film are seen--the Jewish men unloading a truck,evoking images of wartime Paris; the Spider Woman in a cabaret setting,with a spider-web design behind her; the strange criminals who watch fromtheir car; and so on. The Spider Woman herself becomes apowerful evocation of this other world, which in some ways is more realthan the real world. Molina clearly wishes to escape from the external real world justas from the cell. A film can be both an emotional exerciseand an intellectual challenge at one and the same time, and every image haselements addressing both aspects of the experience of art. The reality of these two men is evoked for the viewer throughspecific symbols associated with different genres and dramatic recreations,especially the cell, the bars, the lock, the bunks, the small windowthrough which the men can see outside, and so on. In Chapter 8, the readerlearns that this is not true and that Molina was deliberately planted inthe cell to gather information. The film can also be identified with the prisongenre, gay film genre, the musical genre, and the political drama genre.The scenes of the Spider Woman singing in the cabaret refer back to theGerman films of Marlene Dietrich, though the era evoked is later, morelikely the early 194 s than the late 192 s and early 193 s. The true nature of theirbeing cell mates is revealed in the middle of the novel. The film is highly theatrical, as is seen immediately in the wayMolina acts out the movie and "becomes" the Spider Woman as he speaks. The film does seem to be seeking a way to visualize thewritten word, and this creates a certain tension outside of the actions andthe characters themselves. This desire for escape is a strong factor in the prison films thatKiss of the Spider Woman invokes, though the concept of escape in this filmis broader and serves as a metaphor for an escape from an oppressivegovernment or from the oppressive regime of the universe at large. Some of the more outr?aspects of their living arrangement are emphasized much more than theycould be on the printed page, especially when the novelist stands back andlets his characters speak for themselves. The dramatic impact emerges from the interplay of these elements andfrom the tension between the generic expectations of the viewer and themore elevated philosophic discussions between the two men. Molina can satisfy his desires through his imaginationand by acting those desires out, while Valent?n is tied to the real worldand can only escape so far through drama. It is also evident that this film connects to texts fromthe theater, for as a film, this one tends toward theatrical conversationand gesture as much as filmic image. Valent?n says that the storyhelps pass the time, while Molina considers it "fabulous" and "beautiful."This raises another difference between the two--Molina believes Valent?n ismore the intellectual, while he, Molina, is more the emotional person wholives vicariously through his stories. The reader is forced at this point toreconsider everything that Molina has said, in essence to reconsider thosewords to see if they have had a double meaning or if more of Molina isrevealed in these words than one might have ben able to see on firstreading. Molina is indeed a prisoner, but he istrying to win his release by finding out what he can about the terroristgroup from which Valent?n has come. Neither escapes for more than atemporary period. Molina tells the storyof movie after movie to pass the time. The film alludes to a variety of film musicalsand has a film-within-a-film structure, with the internal film referencingthe genre of the film musical. Most of Puig's novel is presented as a dialogue between the two men,and they reveal themselves in their own words. Placing the two in the same cell is an overt form of the dialogismdescribed by Bakhtin, and the way the two men interact with external textsrepresented by the films Molina recalls in vivid detail. The external world is given an image in the formof the film-within-a-film, making the external world less real. One is Molina, a homosexualsentenced to eight years in prison for the corruption of minors, and theother is Valent?n, a young Marxist imprisoned for revolutionary activities. While Kiss of the Spider Woman derives from thegenre of adaptations of novels to film, it does not try to "open out" themain story much more than the play version would have done and instead usesthe idea of isolation and enclosure to draw the viewer into the world ofthese men more directly. This mixture of real and imaginary is evident from the first momentas we hear Molina describing the Spider Woman in great detail, evoking aworld and an idea far from the enclosed space in which he and Valent?n arefound. The film connects withthe genre of gay-themed works through the flamboyance and costumes ofMolina, with the political drama through the speeches and demeanor ofValent?n, with the musical through the Spider Woman and her films, and soon. In both, though, the motif ofescape is strong, with Valent?n trying to escape the tyranny of hissociety, Molina trying to escape his dual sexual identity, both men seekingescape from their cell, and so on. Thefilm seems much like a play as we see the two men in their enclosed stagearea, with Molina acting out all the parts. The actor, Molina, is fancifuland living in his memory and imagination; the audience, Valent?n, is arealist who tries to keep the fancies of Molina within acceptable bounds.Valent?n says there is to be no discussion of food or of naked women,clearly because both create desires within him that cannot be fulfilled inthis small cell. For the viewer, the textures of "reality" and filmare blurred given that the reality seen here is also a film. The filmclearly aligns with the class of literary adaptations to film, especiallyadaptations of dense works that would be considered difficult to translateinto film terms. The wall Molina has decorated also evokes Hollywood images, andthere is a stark contrast between the small cell where Valent?n sweats inthe hear and the bathroom in which we first see the Spider Woman, cleansedand cool. It justruins the emotion." The contrast between the two men suggests something about art and ourresponse to art, showing that the same artifact can have very differenteffects for different viewers. It is in the course of theseretellings of the different films that the viewer gets to know thesecharacters and sees how they develop as they interact with one another andwith the images recalled from films by Molina. In the film of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, two menshare a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. The setting isartificial in that it brings together two people from different classbackgrounds and with very different views of the world, holds them togetherover a long period of time, and leads to a rapprochement that might nevertake place in the outside world. Considering this film from the standpoint of its intertextuality, itis apparent that the film aligns with several different genres, at least insome degree, and with various other kinds of text as well. Ideas about both emerge from the generic expectationsraised and from the way images are presented and issues discussed in thetext of this film as it connects with other texts, real and implied. The way these genres mix and interact leaves only echoes of eachgenre, for the film does not fulfill the expectations raised in the viewerby these different genres. The two men are set up as different types, not just as revolutionaryand homosexual, but as audience and actor. The twomen are isolated in the social order, one a homosexual in a society wherethat it illegal, the other a revolutionary who wants to overthrow that samesystem. Island Alive, 1985. A semiotic analysis of theinternal film reminds the analyst of Hollywood productions with MariaMontez or some other exotic star, with the setting being not the real LatinAmerica but an echo of the way Hollywood presents Latin America and LatinAmerican music. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.