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BOGUS 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, really a homosexual or a transgender? The question comes so quickly as to wonder why the people who love the novel and those who love the movie—with William Hurt as heroine Molina—aren’t asking it themselves. Puig’s book is, of course, stacked against Molina in irony—eight lengthy footnotes are included, explaining away homosexuality by the likes of Freud, Anna Freud, Lang, D.J. West, and Marcuse. What’s suspicious is the novel provides these archaic references as a collective apologia about a character simply not there. Closer to the disguised truth, the novel is unwittingly ahead of its time while the novelist stagnates. The tip-off 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 purred this to entice and shock, we’d accept it as part of the process of being an emerging gay—acting out campish vernacular we hope he’ll soon discard. But Molina’s no chicken; he’s middle-aged and adamant. Making a clear separation between real friends 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 essential criteria for candidacy is just what Molina feels: he doesn’t consider himself a man, and much less a homosexual. It’s a freakish folly to call himself a faggot and engage in homosexual behavior but doesn’t feel homosexual; in fact, he hates homosexuals. And never once does Molina betray his innermost feelings; the character is more faithful to himself than the author. Puig allows Molina his fantasy—being fucked 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 prison. Puig extends the fantasy to the ultimate: he explicitly has Molina state, after having had his desires fulfilled, he’s ready to die—happily! This makes for fermented 40s psychodrama and by no means an accident, but as mechanism it’s gimcrack. The spider weaving its fateful web for Molina is the trap of hopelessness. Puig sets Molina up as a nonfunny Carmen Miranda-like heroine and then strips him of his affectations at the end by turning him into a modern hero. The startling role reversal might have worked had he been a sissified gay who wanted to remain a man. But how can this be when Molina wants desperately to be a woman? 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. Because of the raging politics of AIDS at the time, every major American movie company passed on filming the book, despite the fact—or maybe because—director Héctor Babenco wanted Burt Lancaster as Valentin and Richard Gere as Molina. Refusing to give up, Babenco asked Raul Julia, who agreed to do Valentin and suggested what otherwise would seem improbable: William Hurt as Molina. Begging for every dollar, deferring salaries against future profits, they headed to São 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 an indigenous actor for at least one the leads. Then there was the political consideration demanding the prison in Kiss, set in Buenos Aires, be changed to a nameless South American city in order to reduce alienation of the government of Argentina, as well as to avoid endangering potential grosses from the massive Argentine movie-going public. If these handicaps weren’t enough, Babenco had never made a movie in English. But he knows the terrain of crud: as with his docudrama 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 characters suffers from diarrhea, he approaches virtual Smell-o-Vision. Said Puig of William Hurt’s Molina: “You won’t recognize him in this film—he’s totally changed. A real transformation.” Some of the critics complained 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.” Maybe what they’re carping about it is Hurt intruding on their own personal comfort levels. Raul Julia holds his own against Hurt’s show: watching and having to respond to the 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 fantasy is better than reality, the confusion and irritation are terrific balances; we can feel his exasperation because it’s also ours. And Julia performs the infamous Latin sexual ambivalence with astonishing assurance. The tribulations of Molina as a self-destructive misfit might have been meaningful if, after getting out of prison, he booked an appointment with a specialist in sex reassignment surgery, giving him something to be happy about, instead of becoming a victim of the fascist 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.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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