“Kiss of the Spider Woman” a Mid 80’s Societal Critique More Relevant Than Ever Today & a Critical Analysis of the Representation of its Characters.
(Originally written in October, 2018 — Updated May, 2021)
The 1985 Brazilian-American film Kiss of the Spider Woman (Portuguese: O Bejia de Mulher Arenha), is a passionate period piece that reveals the nature of the human spirit in isolation, and the power of escapism under authoritarian control. The film was directed by Hector Babenco, an Argentine born, Brazilian raised writer, director, producer, and actor. Babenco recently passed away in 2016 at the age of 70, but in his career, he also directed Ironweed, the 1987 American drama starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, Pixote, the 1980 drama documenting youth living in poverty in Sao Paulo and My Hindu Friend, his final film released the year of his death, starring Willem Dafoe.
Based on these references, it is not hard to tell that he spent most of his career creating films that acted as social commentary on the world around him. He did not just explore topics and issues in his home country of Brazil, although much of his filmography was set in and around Sao Paulo, but he also explored and exposed stories set in the United States (Ironwood, 1987) and Mexico (Words with Gods, 2014) as well. I came across the screening of this film while I temporarily lived in Colombia from April 2018 to August 2018, auditing courses at the Universidad Autonoma de Bucaramanga in Audio-Visual production. It was my third time in Colombia since my first trip to the country in June 2017, and second in December of 2017. Next, I’ll present a brief piece of backstory explaining my reasoning and personal connections and experiences that form the lens through which I viewed this film.
My family was an international homestay family from the day I was born in 1996, when my parents arrived home from the hospital after my birth, a 20-year-old student from Colombia was also arriving to stay with us for her semester here in Calgary. I grew up, from birth to early adolescence, with a new brother or sister from a different part of the world staying in our home, typically from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, as well as Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, as well. In acting as a homestay family, my parents made lifelong friendships and connections with people from around the world, which allowed us to visit former students’ families on a trip to Mexico in 2001, as well as a snowball effect of continual friendships internationally through mutual friends.
Flash forward to 2016, some years after the end of my parent’s tenures as homestay hosts, I finally had the chance to return to Latin America as a wide eyed nineteen-year-old, with a trip to Cuba. This trip exposed me to so much historical discovery and spurred a passion into travel photography that I still possess today. Later, in 2016, I felt the need to travel further outside of my comfort zone, and for whatever reason I instinctively knew it would be to South America, but I thought this might just remain a fantasy. Not long after this feeling consumed me, I coincidentally met my partner who I would be with for the next four and a half years, through Instagram and a shared love for an array of the same interests. Our relationship began by distance between Canada and Colombia as we became closer through shared admiration of each other’s photography, film, and artistic endeavors.
The Colombian peace process had just been signed in the fall of 2016, and the country had seemingly never had so much media attention around it. There was a feeling of excitement, positivity and magnetic energy pouring out of the country and out to the rest of the world. Along with being head over heels in love with my girlfriend, this built up to my eventual trip to Colombia in 2017. The country’s natural beauty and historic cities further pushed my sister and her now husband into heading there with me for our first trip as a trio, and our next unforgettable adventure. I travelled to Colombia at the age of 20 years old, with my sister and brother-in-law, and they stayed in Bucaramanga while I lived with my girlfriend and her parents nearby, who graciously welcomed us in their city. June to July of 2017 saw us tour the Santander region, including the historic towns of Barichara, San Gil, and then the capital of Bogota and finally the Caribbean coastal jewel of Cartagena.
Our second summer together began by attending Radiohead’s festival headlining concert featuring the Israeli born composer Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express from India, alongside the Cartagena based Ghetto Kumbe in Bogota in April, 2018. The night made for one of the most memorable experiences of my lifetime, and completely overwhelmed me to be in the giant crowd in Colombia during a time of the country’s reopening to the rest of the world, and a bastion for a youthful optimism and a sense of moving on from a scarred past. Following this experience we drove with her father eight hours north of chilly, high-altitude Bogota back to their balmier hometown of Bucaramanga, a beautiful journey along the Andean cordillera.
When I returned to the place that I now felt close to as a second home from my 2017 summer and Christmas/New Year’s trip at the start of 2018, I looked forward to having the four and a half months to receive the chance to audit abroad with her as she attended her Audio-Visual classes, documentary production and Latin American cinema class. In this span, we travelled to Peru in June for a week, did the Cusco to Machu Picchu loop, returned to Colombia in July, attended more classes, and then left for the Dominican Republic in August to reunite with my family for my sister’s wedding.
I returned home to Canada through a stopover in Mexico City, at the end of August and painfully said goodbye to my girlfriend and her family again following the unbelievable experience in their home. Sad to depart from the people I developed such a connection to, who showed me the best time possible in their beautiful country for yet a third time in a year, I was soon right back to full-time work and class at Mount Royal University. The films I saw, this one included, as well as the Colombian produced The Embrace of the Serpent, a critique on colonialism and the destruction of the Indigenous Amazon environment, were the two that made the most lasting effect on me from my time attending the classes.
The specific class I saw this film screened in was a Latin American cinema class, and this was the Brazilian exemplar chosen as part of the program. The Kiss of the Spider Woman, is considered Brazilian-American due to its diverse range of hands in the production, and would go on to become a musical on Broadway in the 1990’s following its 1985 release, as well as tour in Argentina, the U.S., Australia and the Netherlands. The film is based on the 1976 novel, by the same name, written by Argentinean author Manuel Puig. In the novel, the story is set in Buenos Aires, during the time of political instability between left wing guerrillas and the military de facto government.
It is hard to deny that the film isn’t wrapped up in a Eurocentric grip, due to its American production and being filmed entirely in English, yet set in Brazil, with the two characters meant to be Brazilian citizens themselves. Although this is a definite flaw at times, for reasons that movies like Scarface or Evita are also supremely flawed. They are both American produced films meant to represent the Latin community; Scarface is an extreme example, with ridiculous stereotyping and inaccuracies ranging from badly performed accents to blatant historical mistakes. Evita, while featuring a few Latin actors is also a poor example of an authentically cultural film, due to its heavy American production and casting, and its English dialogue, while set in Argentina, telling an Argentinean story. (Oh no, Hollywood!).
Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, the Italian American actor, portrays the Cuban refugee turned drug kingpin who takes over Miami with his criminal empire. The entire film is in English, few of the actors were born outside of the United States, and it essentially plays as a potential propaganda piece, discriminating against Latin American migrants, refugees and plays into the U.S.’ ridiculous and horrendously damaging “War on Drugs” policy at the time. These are all examples of Fleras’ writing on Media Gaze, referring to the stereotyping of ethnic minorities in the United States, and the spread of xenophobia through sensationalized media coverage of such issues such as drug trafficking, crime and poverty shown on mainstream news outlets.
These are obvious traits of colonialist influence in the media, as both European and American people are the ones to represent Latin stories for a predominantly North American/European audience. Kiss of The Spider Woman follows a similar pattern of contradiction in its place as an English language history piece depicting South America in general, albeit it stays closer to representing the country of origin than a film like Scarface, in my opinion. This is probably due to Babenco’s direction, as a Brazilian native, and one who lived through the military dictatorship that lasted from the 1960’s to the 1980’s himself.
The film is both fictional and reality-based, a historical period drama that has taken some liberties for the sake of an entertaining plot to engage a global audience, without needing to know much about the history or the situation in Brazil at the time. It doesn’t explain why the military coup controlled the country for twenty years, it doesn’t really show the everyday citizens who suffered at this time, and instead it just selects two characters to represent the marginalized and minority groups of Brazil at the time of political and social persecution.
From the moment the film started, as I watched in the darkened room on campus at UNAB, I was captivated by the characters’ dynamic on screen. The plot and setting were straightforward at surface level, one single prison-cell and two wildly contrasted main characters. Luis Molina (played by William Hurt) is a white transgender woman who has been jailed for a sex crime, while cellmates with Valentin Arregui (played by Raul Julia), a homophobic, macho communist revolutionary who has been imprisoned under military dictatorship for political crimes. From the get-go, I couldn’t ignore the way in which Luis Molina is portrayed, keeping in mind the film was produced in the mid-80’s, a time when the LBGT community was oppressed globally, largely due to the paranoia of AIDS and HIV.
There is a certain way in which gay and transgender characters were often labelled in very discriminatory ways in the 1980’s, all too often portrayed on film as either predators or “others”. The film’s production and release in 1985 was the turning point in Brazil, when the military dictatorship ended and the new eco-socialist, pro-environmental New Republic took office. Brazil rapidly turned into a progressivist beacon in mostly conservative Latin America, and the standard for gay rights grew exponentially, even faster than it did in North America, in many ways.
While the U.S. and to a lesser extent, even Canada, still clung to outdated and often homophobic ways of framing the gay community, the late 80’s and 90’s in Brazil was almost a renaissance of sorts for the international LGBT population. Upon watching the film again for a second time, I still believe that the way in which Luis Molina is characterized initially is very homophobic. The plot lets his character become more three dimensional, as he becomes the most human, empathetic, kind, likeable and important character of the film. There are also many elements of Dyer’s take on Whiteness, in “The Matter of Whiteness” one of the assigned course readings, with the main character acted by a white American celebrity, who does not speak a word of Portuguese or with any hint of a Brazilian accent. This is inconsistent with the writing of the character in the original novel and screenplay, as it makes no mention of the physical characteristics of character Luis Molina described as a white Brazilian.
In my opinion, Luis is the main protagonist of the film, although technically it is a shared role between him and cellmate Valentin. Upon reanalyzing the film, I realize what director Babenco was intending to do with the characterization of Luis — breaking the stereotype of the gay character as the film goes on, although I still believe that there was some influence of general homophobia in the film and media industry in the way the movie was produced. William Hurt’s performance as Luis Molina is tremendous, riveting and believable and there is no knock on him for his portrayal of the character. With the addition of the occasionally questionable way Luis’ character was written from a progressive 21st Century lens, it is also odd that an American, English speaking actor is playing a Brazilian prisoner.
The film was produced by Francisco Ramalho Jr., a Brazilian and David Weisman, an American. It makes me question why a 2:1 ratio of Brazilian to American director/producer control of the production would have led the film to be so Americanized. This could be a side effect of neo-colonialism, Eurocentrism, and white domination of media, because these are all common traits in entertainment at large, not only limited to South America. The population of South America in total is incredibly mixed between those of European, Indigenous, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent. Yet, repeatedly, the actors, models and faces on the screen within media outlets in Latin America are dominated by white South Americans of European descent.
The characterization and stereotyping of Marxist rebel, Valentin Arregui, pins him as the epitome of machismo, male aggression, and defiance to authority. What I found interesting upon further research is that actor Raul Julia was not Brazilian himself either and was also American (although born in Puerto Rico), and grew up in New York. This makes the two main protagonists, the two characters who share most of the dialogue and screen-time, for long periods of the film, the only characters at all, as both American actors playing Brazilian characters. The only truly Brazilian born actors are most of the secondary characters of the film, including the violent and abusive prison guards and corrupt political figures that make brief appearances, without much dialogue or depth into their own characters.
This is definite a symptom of Eurocentrism in the media industry, despite being produced in a foreign country, showing little to no authentic local actors in the film as important or main characters. Upon more searching, there is mention online that director Hector Babenco was not fluent in English, and the actors had to take most direction from the English-speaking assistant director instead. It seems rather unfair and strange that the director, filming a Brazilian story in Brazil, with a producer funding the film from Sao Paulo, would have to take a backseat due to the language barrier. In the film industry, not knowing English might be too much of a restriction to make a film that could impact North American audiences, due to a lot of mainstream moviegoers and viewers disinterest in foreign films and subtitles in movies. Thus, even if a foreign film has an excellent story, a large resource of funds from powerful producers and a masterclass in cast and performance, if the film isn’t in English dialogue, it risks a massive loss on the international box-office.
Luis Molina is a transgender woman in character, played by a straight male actor, which is also another way in which the film could be at risk of not properly representing minority groups. There are also only a few minutes of screen time that includes a female character, the love interest of Valentin Arrgeui, Leni Lamaison/Marta/Spider Woman played by Sonia Braga. Her character is only represented in voice and in a fantastical way, through the bedtime stories of cellmate Luis. With little to no female representation, except in an objectifying manner, with no character beyond their beauty and image, the film misses the mark on being impactful for gender equality, (in-fact the dream sequences are quite straight up sexist), which was an all-too-common shortcoming for movies in the 1980’s.
Upon digging deeper into the film’s production crew demographic, of the seven associate producers on set, only one was female. The film’s musical score was composed by two men and the trend of male domination of the production extends to roles in cinematography, film editing, production design, art direction, costume design, with just half of the makeup department consisting of females, and only one female production manager. In the sound department, of fifteen techs total, only four were female — none of which were Brazilian born. Among the nineteen of the “other crew” listed, only six are female, while the other thirteen are male. Most of the film was produced, created, managed and designed by predominantly white American men, despite the story set in Brazil, featuring a transgender character and the title of the film consisting of the word “woman”, based on a Latin American novel.
At the time I first watched the film on campus in Bucaramanga, Colombia was experiencing its most polarizing elections in years, due to a major drop in popularity among voters for peace-treaty signer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Juan Manuel Santos. Going into the 2018 summer in Colombia, I had no idea that there would be a federal election, which made me a little anxious upon realization, especially when I started to read the news and journalistic perspectives on the political landscape. The country seemed to be split in two, one side fearful of the nearby Venezuelan migrant crisis and its neighbours far left-wing ideology, and the other fearful of a return to hard right politics and near police state style government in Colombia.
Two figures representing the populist left and populist right emerged as frontrunners, Gustavo Petro, and Ivan Duque, which led to me witnessing some heated political debates between family members, friends and strangers. Though interestingly enough, I still witnessed and felt the incredible unity of the people of Colombia, particularly through the stretch of time in the summer of 2018 when the FIFA World Cup in Russia was ongoing. Although the political transition was ultimately the most peaceful in Colombia’s history, it helped me understand what it’s like when a country finds itself in the balance of two hard nosed political parties. The political atmosphere at the time in Colombia shared some interesting parallels to the plot and story of the film, The Kiss of the Spider Woman. I believe this might be a reason why the professor of the class chose the film, due to the resurgence in right wing politics in the last year in South America.
In late 2018, following the federal election in Brazil, the film’s relevancy has become even greater, especially compared to its time of release in 1985 amid a major upheaval and transition into centrism and stability for the nation. In 2018 the country was teetering on the edge yet again, with the extreme right winning the election in Brazil. The elected leader possesses an admiration for military domination of government and the encouragement of racist, sexist, and homophobic behaviour. It sadly seems as though the story told in this film, written under the shifting political scene in Brazil in the mid-80’s, has now unfortunately come to a full circle today. All of the fears and regrets and guilt put to rest by the community after many years of violence, pointless deaths and oppression of vulnerable people, was now being threatened to come back to life.
The Eurocentrism and white privilege that dominates American media and has led to a totalitarian like grip of the country, has made it seem far too normal for many other formerly democratic governments to convert back into a similar ideology. The film, although an important one, in my opinion, does not quite do enough to fight inaccurate stereotyping, prejudice and extremism, as it attempted to. Although an admirable effort to make a film that is a social breakthrough, it falls back into the same hegemonic and white-corporate dominated media industry that continues to misrepresent minority’s stories on film. Even in some filmmaker’s most earnest attempts, it often comes up superficially progressive and improperly minority represented in a media industry controlled by aging white corporations, who are still the ones who get to produce films for the international TV audience.
References
Ebert, R. (1985) Kiss of the Spider Woman Movie Review
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kiss-of-the-spider-woman-1985
Maslin, J. (1985) Screen: Babenco’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman”
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/26/movies/screen-babenco-s-kiss-of-the-spider-woman.html
Levy, E. (2007) The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
http://emanuellevy.com/review/kiss-of-the-spider-woman-the-1985-6/
Westenra, C. (2007) Web of Illusion. Why does Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig’s story of an unlikely alliance between a gay man and a Marxist revolutionary, still have us in its grip, asks Charlotte Westenra, director of a new stage version.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/stage
Napolitano, M. (2018) The Brazilian Military Regime, 1964–1985
Parkin Daniels, J, & Vulliamy, E. (2018) Colombia elections: rightwinger and former guerilla head for presidential runoff
Charner, F. (2018) Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro wins presidential election in Brazil
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/28/americas/brazil-election/index.html
Goni, U. (2016) The Long Shadow of Argentina’s Dictatorship
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/opinion/the-long-shadow-of-argentinas-dictatorship.html
