The Potential Neoliberalism of Kiss of the Spider Woman

Kiss of the Spider Woman is undoubtedly an important example of international artistic collaboration, especially given its creation in the Cold War era. Yet the corporate positioning of the film today can be interpreted as a neoliberal project, as it projects a vision of international collaboration for artistic rewards, while more accurately jockeying for profit, serving as an example of John Hartley’s claim that "consumption is a hotspot of international social, cultural and economic research" (Hartley 2004, 6).

This process is exemplified in the film’s website. The film is a Brazilian-American co-production that was not only nominated for four Academy Awards (itself a marker of mainstream success), but became the number one limited release film of its year, earning over $17 million in domestic receipts alone.[1]

Yet instead of being content with that impressive commercial showing, living on in classrooms and DVD collections, the almost thirty-year-old film has its own website.[2] Given that there is no ongoing political or interactive component of the film (as you would expect from a activist documentary or a superhero movie, respectively), the site can be assumed to serve more practical purposes.

First, it reinterprets the film through an overwhelmingly American lens. Although there is a tab for “world acclaim,” the vast majority of the articles cited are from American periodicals. Even the downloadable Press Packet (itself somewhat ridiculous, as few journalists would need to rely on a studio-produced packet of information for a film that has been written about for almost three decades) seeks to emphasize the paramount important of America, pointing out that novelist Manuel Puig preferred American films, and refers to the numerous narratives told by Molina in the Kiss novel as “a virtual homage to Hollywood's "B" movies,” despite the fact that the primary film Molina describes is a Nazi propaganda film (5, 16).[3]

 

Second, the site seeks to undercut the political message of the piece, focusing most of the site on the film’s imagery (through a photo gallery) and the acclaim it attracted (the main page's text mentioning its nominations and the like). In the Press Packet, it explicitly reminds us that Puig was habitually wary of politics, and “mainly wanted to talk about was the possibility of people changing." (5, 6).  

By effectively excising politics and foreign interest, the site achieves its true purpose: opening the property for international capitalism to swoop in and make a profit, as in the tell-take section of the website, “purchase dvd”.

Thus, if one were to judge solely from these promotional efforts, the film can be seen as not only y a capitalistic project, and not only that, but a neoliberal one, as the utopic collaboration of international businesses to create an excellent artistic product has been subsumed by the American desire to “re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites,” which in this case, are the members of the society on which the film itself is based (Hartley 2005, 19).

---

[1] http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=kissofthespiderwoman.htm

[2] manufactured by Agita Productions, Inc., a Los Angeles-based company.

[3] The site also includes a tie-in to a documentary, Tangled Web, about the making of the film. However, I was unable to find any trace of that film, suggesting that this site was made years ago and has not been updated (a theory supported by the fact the site’s copyright only extends to 2010). Significantly, though, the parent company continues to pay for the presence of the site itself.