SOURCE: “Manuel Puig at the Movies,” in Hispanic Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 163-81.

In the following essay, Wyers analyzes the relationship between Puig's El Beso de la mujer araña and the movies.

Movies have a powerful effect on us because the photographic reproduction of the material world is put at the service of wishes and fantasies. The impression of reality is much greater in film than in novels, plays, or figurative painting because we are plunged directly into the imaginary.¹ A writer might have recourse to this experience of a paradoxically dreamlike reality or realistic dream by incorporating the devices of cinematographic narrative. By relying on our memories of film, a text might almost make us forget that we are reading instead of seeing. The written page might call for the projection of a visualized story complete with sound track. This particular kind of doubleness, moving...