kiss of the spiderwoman

Well, so I sat down and watched Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. I’m not here to talk about the film — it’s good, Raul Julia as Valentin is as great as you’d expect, William Hurt is good (if a little broad) as Molina, the score is fantastic, the look is unexpectedly and delightfully gritty, the ending is tragic — but more about how the movie interacts with the book that it’s based on.

Kiss of the Spider Woman has been adapted a number of times: translated from its original Spanish, turned into a play, turned into this film, then into a musical (which I have a hard time picturing, but then Little Shop of Horrors makes absolutely no sense if you just describe it as a musical version of a Roger Corman film about a man-eating plant). The book likes to play around with narrative conventions, dispensing entirely with any description whatsoever up to and including dialogue tags. All the information we have about the protagonists and villains we gather from the conversations themselves. It’s a very theatrical approach, stripped of the faces and voices which would normally help the audience separate Valentin from Molina, Molina from the Warden, the Warden from his subordinates. It casts an ambiguity over the whole book, especially in scenes where the personalities of the characters are suppressed or where they don’t refer to each other by name. The love scene between Valentin and Molina benefits particularly strongly from this; the assumptions you bring to the scene and your understanding of who’s doing what to whom is all internal.

Obviously, all of that ambiguity goes out the window when you pin Valentin and Molina down to this particular face, this particular voice. There’s never a question of who’s speaking and when; Raul Julia is clearly not William Hurt and vice versa, so what was crucial to the novel — the blending and exchanging of personalities between Valentin and Molina — just evaporates. In the book, the line between the two is sharpest at the beginning of the book, when you have Molina the gay aesthete spinning out a movie for the hardline revolutionary Valentin; as the book develops, the boundary blurs. Valentin softens, becomes more willing to accept small pleasures and fantasy, and Molina is spurred into action and out of his apolitical escapism. Without a narrative framework to overtly place the characters, this exchange of personalities and narrative voices effectively transposes the characters. Molina becomes Valentin, Valentin becomes Molina. The film faithfully follows the arc of the book, but the transition is simply less effective when you’re looking at huge, blond Hurt and not the small, dark Julia. The physical distinction is simply too great to admit to any ambiguity.

All of which isn’t to say that the film is bad in any way. It isn’t. It’s great! But something of what made the novel so compelling is inevitably lost when it’s taken away from the page, and any understanding of the Kiss of the Spider Woman has to be grounded in this recognition.

Little Caesar

So a few days ago I watched Little Caesar, the gangster movie that started it all, and the thing that struck me the most was how very, very gay Caesar Rico seems. I’m sure there have been a thousand film school essays written on exactly how gay he is, and whether or not he’s actually supposed to be gay, but whatever, I’m writing this thing and I want to talk about it.

First of all, let’s talk about characters and relationships. Little Caesar Rico (Edward G. Robinson) has two major relationships over the course of the movie, one with longtime pal Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), who wants to go straight and tries to pull Rico with him, and one with fellow gang member Otero (George Stone), who wants nothing more for Rico than that he make it all the way to the top of the racket. Everyone else in the movie is either an antagonist or a stooge; either somebody trying to smack Rico back down or somebody for Rico to exploit. The one exception – and the only major female character in the movie – is Olga Stassoff (Glenda Farrell), Massara’s lover and dancing partner, who doesn’t like gangsters and especially doesn’t like Rico.

Little Caesar builds parallels between the Good Partner and the Bad Partner. The Good Partner represents the conventional, the legitimate, the social; the Bad Partner the freedom and danger of antisocial individuality. Olga and Rico vie for Massara and Massara and Otero vie for Rico. Massara pulls Rico towards legitimacy and Otero pushes him further into lawlessness; Rico tries to force Massara to stay in the gang and Olga woos him into marriage, employment, conventionality – heterosexuality. As the movie views Massara as essentially lawful and Rico as essentially lawless, the choice for Massara is between homosexuality and heterosexuality instead of Rico’s more damning limited choice of homosexual partners. Rico cannot choose heterosexuality; the movie offers him no potential female partners. Rico himself is aware of this, and declares several times that “dames aren’t for me.” Even the scenes between the pairs of new lovers – Olga/Massara and Rico/Otero – are filmed in a similarly stylized way. Olga teases Massara: “Have you had a lot of steady girls before?” He responds carelessly, “Oh, sure, but what does that matter? We’re going to make this real, aren’t we?” It’s a stock scene and might have come from any other light romantic comedy; replace Douglas Fairbanks with Leslie Howard, Ralph Bellamy, or Zeppo Marx. On the other side, Rico is going up the Hill to meet “The Big Boy” and Otero is watching him get fitted for a tuxedo. “You look good, Rico, real good,” he purrs. Rico coughs and frowns then looks at himself in the mirror. “Maybe I don’t look half-bad after all,” he says. Make Rico and Otero female and you’ve got any of a dozen similar scenes in the same romantic comedies – Rico as stand-in for Sister Carrie or Scarlet O’Hara. Rico gets shot and there’s a scene with him and Otero in bed together – Rico in a bathrobe and sling and Otero fully dressed, of course – that would play nearly the same between a traditional heterosexual couple. The scene ends with a tight shot of Rico and Otero’s faces: Rico is sneering out at the camera and Otero is gazing worshipfully at Rico.

Rico’s downfall is directly due to his inability to let go of Massara. Rico reaches the top of the gangland pile and Massara tells him that he’s out, he’s through, he’s getting married to Olga and going straight as a professional dancer. Rico flares while Otero looks on: “No one ever quits me! It’s got to be me or her, and it’s not going to be me!” Later, Olga offers Massara the same choice: turn State’s Evidence and betray Rico or lose her. Massara twists and turns and eventually gives in just as Rico and Otero show up. Rico can’t bring himself to shoot Massara in spite of everything – his torment is underlined with an extreme closeup of his suffering, teary eyes – and it’s up to Otero, the new lover, to kill the old one.

Massara doesn’t die, of course, for the same reason that Otero and Rico do, later on. Little Caesar is firmly on the side of society, marriage and heterosexuality despite its fascination with the alternatives, and everyone who breaks out of those norms has to be, must be punished. The more the character refuses to knuckle under to society, the worse the punishment. Massara is shot – karmic retribution for his earlier assertion of antisocial individuality/homosexuality – but survives to get married and re-enter the society he repudiated. Rico’s old gang boss, who was against murder, gunplay, and antagonizing the police for all that he’s a gangster, gets off with a clearly pro forma jail sentence. Most tellingly, Otero dies immediately after trying to kill Massara in his role as the Good Partner. Otero is guilty of the worst sin – the active renunciation of society as represented by the affianced, testifying Massara – so his punishment is swift and severe. He is shot while fleeing with Rico from Massara’s apartment, and the lovers share one final embrace before Rico scurries into an ultimately futile obscurity/repression.

The important thing to remember about all this is that Rico’s arc is essentially that of the Girl Gone Wrong, with gunplay standing in for sex. Rico comes from a Small Town and moves to the Big City, where he is led down a glittering and decadent path that finally ends in his destruction. His advancement in the gang, trading on his willingness to use his guns (read: have sex), and his steady adoption by increasingly powerful male figures parallels that of any stock heroine of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Of course, the question is whether or not Little Caesar was actually supposed to be gay, and it’s hard to say for certain. There’s a long tradition of homosexuality associated with gangsters and gunslingers in American fiction – see the tailors in The Public Enemy, for example, and every single one of the villains in The Maltese Falcon – and there’s plenty of evidence for the idea in Little Caesar, but there’s been enough cultural drift in the last half-century that what might have passed for purely heterosexual banter or relationships can look just the tiniest bit queer to modern eyes. I doubt that Captain Renault and Rick in Casablanca were intended to be lovers, but it’s hard to take the line “If I were a woman, I should be in love with Monsieur Rick,” and not read it in a homoerotic light; the same sort of crosscultural static surrounds Little Caesar.

–DJ Lamont Cranston

Videodrome

WHAT: Videodrome
WHO: James Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry, d. David Cronenberg
WHEN: 28 September 2008
WHICH: DJ Lamont Cranston

Review

Man, is TV producer Max Renn having a weird time. His head of piracy has tapped into a Malaysian feed of a half hour of torture and murder called Videodrome and Max can’t tear his eyes off of it. It’s the new thing, just what he’s been looking for, the perfect addition to Channel 87’s roster of “softcore pornography and hardcore violence,” but the more he learns about Videodrome the stranger things get. His masochistic girlfriend runs off to audition for the show and never comes back; she shows up on a tape of the show and swallows him through the TV screen. He wakes up to find the director he sent to investigate the show dead and tied up in his bed. He tracks down the creator of the show and he’s dead, his brain blown apart by an enormous brain tumor, but immortalized on thousands of hours of prerecorded videotape watched over by his creepy, creepy daughter. The show’s producers contact him and try to record his hallucinations, then decide they’d rather use him as a video-programmed assassin. He grows an enormous video slot in his stomach that really looks a LOT like a vagina. THEN things start to get weird.

There are a lot of similarities here with Cronenberg’s other films, especially Naked Lunch. James Woods and Peter Weller might be the same character, baffled and frustrated by their decaying and fragmentary perception of the world; both Max Renn and Bill Lee are forced into subversive, destructive roles by conspiracies that may or may not exist, and both eventually break away through their own destruction. The same body horror fills both films, Naked Lunch’s sphincter-beetles prefigured by Videodrome’s enormous VCR vagina. Videodrome oozes style and weird cult cachet – which is great – but it’s kind of unsatisfying in a way that, say, Naked Lunch isn’t. Naked Lunch keeps up a jittery feeling of unreality all the way to the end by always suggesting an outside viewpoint, but Videodrome doesn’t. Once the movie commits to Max’s version of reality – once the paranoia becomes justified and factual and Max’s hallucinations become more and more the dominant viewpoint – a lot of the ambiguity and interest leaks away, or anyway I got less interested. I liked the paranoia, the sense that there was no way of knowing what was true and what wasn’t, and once that took off it was all giant vaginas and bloody death.

Which, you know, is cool and all, it just wasn’t as cool.

–DJ Lamont Cranston