the webs we weave
Leonard
Schrader (screenplay), Héctor Babenco (director) O Beijo da Mulher Aranha (Kiss
of the Spider Woman) / 1985
It’s
nearly impossible to even begin to describe a film made by Argentine-Brazilian
heterosexual director Héctor Babenco, based on a novel by the gay Argentine
writer Manual Puig, staring a many-times married British actor John Hurt as an
effeminate gay man opposite a Puerto Rican macho political figure, played by an
apparently gay man, Raúl Julia, set in a Brazilian prison during that country’s
dictatorship, while being based on the terrible Argentine dictatorship of Jorge
Rafael Videla Redondo, with a script by American writer Leonard Schrader.
If you’re getting a bit confused let me
just add that the role of that effeminate gay man was originally to have been
performed by the macho US superstar Burt Lancaster, who was rumored, according
to the Wikipedia article on Kiss of the Spider Woman—unknown to me until
writing this piece—to have been a notable Hollywood crossdresser!
Let me just add that the films Molina
describes to his beloved fellow prisoner, Valentin, are based centrally on Nazi
propaganda films and those of his own imagination—particularly the title film
about the Spider Woman—while he himself has been arrested for pedophilic sex
and is offered freedom only if he succeeds to get secret information from his
would-be lover.
And if your head’s still spinning, let me
just add that most of Puig’s works were brought into English by the remarkable
lesbian translator Suzanne Jill Levine (whose translation of José Donoso’s Hell
Has No Limits both of my presses also published). The webs this “spider
woman” weaved were terribly complex, and evidently woven so deeply that all those
involved simply could not escape the ties that bound them.
Lancaster is listed as one of the producers
since his age at the time forced him to bow out of the performance he desired
to undertake. I wish he had; it might have been as utterly fascinating as his Felix
Happer role in Local Hero or his Prince Don Fabrizio Salina performance
in The Leopard. I believe Lancaster was one of the most underrated of
Hollywood stars.
The publicity and commentary on this 1985
film, moreover, is highly unreliable, most of them simply suggesting that the
two oppositional prisoners—the one a true loving, but passive humanist, the
other a terribly caring, but active, political figure—“form a bond,” or, even
worse, “become friends.” Yes, they do both of those things, but far more
importantly, the come together into a sexual relationship: in short, they fuck.
This happens, not just in prisons, but every day life, everywhere when a macho
being releases him or herself into sexual same-sex ecstasy, when men and women
suddenly realize that they are not limited by the sexual decrees of the society
at large.
Molina’s kindness, his protectiveness,
seductiveness, and self-serving tendencies finally break through the wall of
the true believer and, yes they become friends, they bond, and finally they
fuck, even able to share a deep kiss as Molina is released in order to further
torture the man with whom he has now fallen in love.
Given the clear brutality of the
government which surrounds them—the true spiders which encase their lives—we
already know the result. Desperately in love with the only man who seems to fit
his endless impatient “Waiting, waiting and waiting…for a real man” the weaker
Molina is even willing to join the political underground for that intense
momentary kiss.
It is, of course, the kiss of death, yet
simultaneously that kiss, a bit like Snow White, brings him back to life, to
commitment, to a fire in his stomach that will surely kill him but turn himself
into that “real man” for which he has so long sought. Even the macho Valentin
demands of him, as they part, to no longer accept the homophobic abuse he has
previously suffered.
In the end, ironically—a word that does
not any longer seem to have much meaning—the previously uncommitted, now
believer is killed not by the evil right followers but by the left figures to
which he is attempting to provide information. In Puig’s vision there are no
real heroes. Valentin himself was a modest political figure, hiding out in his
girlfriend Marta’s wealthy bourgeois home. It seems to me now that he, not
Molina, was the “Spider Woman,” someone involving people into his own
well-meaning, but not very thought-out intentions.
Once shot, Molina dies slowly, falling to
his knees after a long perception that he has been killed, refusing to reveal
anything to anyone. We don’t know what his still-imprisoned and terribly
tortured cell-mate has revealed. A hospital assistant illegally shoots him up
with morphine, which, if nothing else allows him visions of his beautiful, lost
lover, Marta, as they cross the perfect pond of water together—an illusion that
might never even be allowed in Molina’s more visceral and painful vision of the
cinematic world, where women were cruel, and men so, so very seductive.
Maybe, just maybe, in describing all the
films I have discussed, I have become a kind of Molina, a spider-man who cannot
totally break out of the web I myself have constructed.
Los
Angeles, March 14, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (March 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment