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 word, and this creates a certain tension outside of the actions and the characters themselves. The film can also be identified with the prison genre, gay film genre, the musical genre, and the political drama genre. The scenes of the Spider Woman singing in the cabaret refer back to the German films of Marlene Dietrich, though the era evoked is later, more likely the early 1940s than the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The way these genres mix and interact leaves...