Efficiency in Adaptation

One of the most prominent decisions in Hector Babenco's film adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman is the choice to use the fictional Nazi propaganda as the only full film-story that Molina tells to Valentin. This choice does not seem to be solely based on the limitations of time set by feature films as apposed to novels. It would seem Babenco and Schrader (the screenwriter) picked this film over the others in the novel because it does the most. This film, in the novel, serves as a frame for the development of Molina and Valentin's characters. It pulls the most weight when it comes to the surrounding narrative. From the character's reactions to this particular film we learn a great deal about their views of the world.

Molina only sees the Hollywood romance of the picture. All he sees is the starlet singer in soft focus and muted lights and her wonderfully tragic love-- he is oblivious, or at the very least uninterested, in the Nazi propaganda that permeates the film.

Conversely we learn that Valentin cannot see this romance and only sees the politics. He is strangely infuriated by Molina's love of the film. He cannot comprehend how Molina can ignore the film's dark fascist overtones.

Both characters take sides around this film and therefore it does a great deal to shape their individual persona. It is perhaps a matter of efficiency selecting this particular film out of the many described in the novel.

“And I don’t know exactly what happens then.”

The key stylistic feature of Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman is its intense meta fictionality. That is to say: central to Puig’s novel is the stylistic awareness to how the story is told. There are two characters in a prison cell that take the entire burden of moving the narrative forward through, for the most part, dialogue. In addition to moving forward their own story one of the characters entertains the other with bedtime story versions of films he has seen. Can we read this as a sort of meta fictional adaptation?

Molina, the character who tells the film-stories within the novel, “embroiders” the details of the movies. He retelling of the films are essentially decorated “mechanisms” of the actual narratives. “Mechanism” is the term Bertolucci used in his explanation of his adaptation of Borges’ short-story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”. In examining the original work in relation to Bertolucci’s adaptation we can define the mechanism of a story as its essential narrative workings.

Molina recounts the mechanisms of the films with fidelity but the embroideries and the affect of Valentin’s commentary intersecting with the retelling calls for us to read these as miniature adaptations. Framing the mini adaptations within a novel further defends a case that these retellings of films are trans-genre adaptations.

Perspectives of Adaptation

One of the key issues in Michael Chanan’s introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment (film script) & Inconsolable Memories (source novella) is the question of the adaptation of perspective from written work to film.
Desones’ novella is an extremely close first-person work. The aesthetic of the perspective of the novella is inextricably linked to the play with first person language and a metafictional attention to the act of the protagonist writing. These elements are scribal; they require the written word to be effective. Chanan strives to point out how Alea reconciles this problematic in his film adaptation, first by demonstrating the failure of film as a first-person genre, and consequently by showing us Alea’s solution. He writes
“How can you translate the first person of the narrator to the screen as more than a conceit? The convention of a voice on the soundtrack is logically not the same; in film, there is no true equivalent of the first-person narrator in literature, for the camera as an analogue of the writers pen is impersonal: it cannot say “I”; it always says “there is,” “here is”.
Alea’s answer is not to alleviate but to intensify this difference by incorporating documentary footage in which this evidential quality is foregrounded.“ (4)
Chanan sees, in Alea’s solution to the failure of film as a first-person form, an idea worth considering when judging the “success” of any adaptation. When Chanan calls the first person narrator of a film “a conceit” he is establishing the notion that any imitation of technical elements of literature in film are extended metaphorical representations of their sources. They are abstracted representations the of author’s play with complex tropes of a form. In this sense, a bad adaptation, for Chanan and presumably Alea, attempts to represent the tropes of its source material rather than interpret or enter into dialogue with them.
Alea is interpreting this first-person problematic by exploiting the fact that it cannot be achieved. The inclusion of documentary footage is in many ways a polar opposite of the first person journal style of Desones’ novella. It is impossible, however, to believe that Alea is simply ignoring the personal-ness of the original text. The change in title, as Chanan also points out, from novella to film is a distinctly private to public switch respectively. (3) Alea, instead of in vain attempting to re-created the personal, private language and lens of the novella, “intensifies” the breach in the language of the two different forms.
In doing so he is, in essence, mirroring Desones’ highly metafictional style without mimicking it.