Manuel Puig & Kiss of the Spider Woman
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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 backgrounds and with very different views of the world, holds them together over a long period of time, and leads to a rapprochement that might never take place in the outside world. Considering this film from the standpoint of its intertextuality, it is apparent that the film aligns with several different genres, at least in some degree, and with various other kinds of text as well. The film clearly aligns with the class of literary adaptations to film, especially adaptations of dense works that would be considered difficult to translate into film terms. The film does seem to be seeking a way to visualize the written wo
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y that Puig also wrote) is more explicit about the death of Molina and the probable survival of Valent?n. Lost in the film version is the intimacy of the relationship between the two men, for while in the book nothing is heard but their two voices, in the film we also see them and their fantasies brought to life and placed in a real cell in the real world. Some of the more outr? aspects of their living arrangement are emphasized much more than they could be on the printed page, especially when the novelist stands back and lets his characters speak for themselves. In both, though, the motif of escape is strong, with Valent?n trying to escape the tyranny of his society, Molina trying to escape his dual sexual identity, both men seeking escape from their cell, and so on. Neither escapes for more than a temporary period.
This desire for escape is a strong factor in the prison films that Kiss of the Spider Woman invokes, though the concept of escape in this film is broader and serves as a metaphor for an escape from an oppressive government or from the oppressive regime of the universe at large. The two men are isolated in the social order, one a homosexual in a society where that it illegal, the other a revolutionary who wants
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1974
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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