Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time afterward to discuss whether the films Molina tells are escapism, art, politics, or all three — and what the difference is.

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MANUEL PUIG AND THE NOVEL: A BOOK THAT INVENTED ITS OWN FORM
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  1. The Novel Without Narration: Pure Dialogue and Footnotes
    Puig’s novel is one of the most formally radical works of Latin American literature — it consists almost entirely of dialogue between two cellmates, with no conventional narration, no scene-setting prose, no authorial interjection. We learn about the world through what Molina and Valentin say to each other and through a series of academic footnotes about theories of homosexuality that appear throughout the text. Did the novel’s form feel like the right container for its material, or like a deliberate formal experiment that the reader has to work to inhabit? And does the film, which necessarily adds images and music to the dialogue, feel like a translation of the novel’s formal argument or a departure from it?
  2. The Footnotes: The Novel’s Hidden Argument
    The footnotes — academic analyses of homosexuality ranging from Freudian pathology through behaviorism to radical politics — are one of the novel’s strangest and most discussed formal choices. They appear to offer clinical context but gradually reveal their own limitations and biases, effectively staging an argument about how institutions try to categorize and explain what Molina simply is. The film eliminates them entirely. Did reading the footnotes change how you understood Molina, or did they feel like a separate academic layer that the novel held at arm’s length from its emotional core? And is the film better or worse for their absence?
  3. The Films Molina Tells: Stories Within a Story
    Molina tells Valentin the plots of several films — a Nazi romance, a zombie melodrama, a panther woman story, others — in elaborate, loving detail. These tellings are the novel’s great formal pleasure and its central metaphor: Molina’s gift for inhabiting other stories, for living inside films, is both his survival mechanism and his mode of connection with Valentin. The film uses actual period footage and new scenes to render one or two of these film-within-films visually. Which approach made the embedded films feel more significant — Puig’s prose descriptions of Molina’s tellings, or Babenco’s visual renderings?
  4. Argentina Under the Junta: The Political Context Each Version Carries
    The novel is set in a Buenos Aires prison during Argentina’s military dictatorship — a context in which political prisoners were tortured and disappeared, in which Valentin’s revolutionary activity is genuinely dangerous, and in which the state’s use of Molina as an informant carries specific, terrible stakes. Puig wrote the novel in exile. Did the political context feel sufficiently present in each version to give the story’s stakes their full weight? And which version made the political dimension — not as backdrop but as the specific, historical violence being perpetrated against specific people — feel most real?

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CHARACTERS: TWO MEN IN A CELL AND EVERYTHING BETWEEN THEM
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  1. Casting Call from the Cell
    When William Hurt appeared as Molina — gentle, theatrical, devoted to his films and to the people he loves, navigating an impossible position with the specific grace of someone who has always had to be careful — did your mental image of Puig’s Molina say yes, exactly, or hold something in reserve? Same question for Raul Julia as Valentin. Who felt most like the character Puig built through dialogue alone, and who felt like a screen creation that has now become the definitive version?
  2. Molina: The Man Who Lives in Films
    Molina is one of Latin American literature’s great characters — a gay man in a Brazilian-Argentine prison whose primary survival mechanism is his ability to inhabit and retell the films he loves, and whose love for Valentin is as genuine and as complicated as anything in the novel. William Hurt won the Academy Award for the performance. Did Hurt find the right quality of Molina — the theatricality that is also genuine feeling, the self-protectiveness that is also generosity, the love that is also a kind of political act? And which version made Molina’s gift for storytelling feel more like a form of power than mere entertainment?
  3. Valentin: The Revolutionary Who Has to Unlearn What He Knows
    Valentin begins the novel as a man who has organized his entire consciousness around political commitment, who dismisses Molina’s films as bourgeois escapism, and who gradually learns — through being cared for, through being told stories, through allowing himself to feel things he has theorized away — that his political framework has been protecting him from his own humanity. Raul Julia plays him with contained intensity. Did each version trace Valentin’s transformation convincingly, or did it feel too schematic — a character study organized around a thesis rather than a person?
  4. The Relationship: What Grows in a Cell
    The relationship between Molina and Valentin is the novel’s and film’s central subject, and it defies easy categorization — it is not simply friendship, not simply love, not simply political solidarity, but something that each of those categories partially describes and none fully contains. Did each version honor the relationship’s specific complexity, or did it resolve it into something more legible? And which version made the relationship feel most like the genuinely unusual thing it is — something that couldn’t have grown anywhere but in this cell, between these two particular people?
  5. The Spider Woman: Symbol and Presence
    The Spider Woman of the title never fully materializes — she is a figure from one of the films Molina tells, and she is also, eventually, a metaphor for Molina himself: the woman who draws men into her web, who both traps and protects. Did either version make the Spider Woman feel like a meaningful presence in the story rather than a poetic flourish? And is the symbol’s ambiguity — the Spider Woman as both danger and refuge — better served by prose or by the film’s visual rendering of the films-within-films?

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BABENCO’S FILM: TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE
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  1. Babenco’s Direction: An Argentine-Brazilian Director’s Spanish-Language American Production
    The film is a genuinely unusual production: a Brazilian director, an Argentine novel, English-language dialogue, American stars. Did the film feel culturally grounded — did the Buenos Aires prison feel like a real place with real political stakes — or did the English-language casting create a distance between the story and its specific Latin American context? And is there a Spanish-language version of this adaptation, with Argentine or Brazilian actors, that would have felt more authentic to the novel?
  2. William Hurt’s Performance: The Most Discussed Casting of 1985
    Hurt’s casting as Molina was immediately controversial — a straight American actor playing a gay Latin American character in a film about gay identity and political persecution. He won the Academy Award. Critics then and since have debated whether the performance transcends its casting controversies or whether the casting itself is a problem the performance can’t fully solve. Where do you land on this? And does the question feel different now than it might have in 1985, given changed conversations about representation and casting?
  3. The Films-Within-the-Film: Babenco’s Visual Choice
    Babenco renders some of the films Molina describes in actual visual sequences — glamorous, slightly campy, deliberately stylized period melodramas that exist in a different visual register from the cell scenes. Did this choice feel like the right visual equivalent of what Puig does in prose — the embedded stories as a different world that Molina can access and share — or like a director solving a formal problem (how do you show a character telling a film?) at the cost of what the prose version achieves by keeping those films in language?
  4. The Score and Atmosphere: Music in a Space With No Music
    The cell has no music. The films Molina describes have music. The film’s score has to navigate between these two registers — the silence of the cell and the orchestral lushness of the melodramas Molina inhabits. Did the film’s sonic choices feel appropriate to the novel’s tonal range — the austerity of the prison and the excess of the embedded films — or did the score occasionally impose an emotional register that the film’s dialogue and performances were managing without assistance?

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POLITICS, IDENTITY, AND THE IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE
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  1. The Collaboration: What Molina Agrees To
    The novel’s most morally complex element is Molina’s position: the prison authorities are using him as an informant, asking him to extract information from Valentin. Molina’s love for Valentin and his eventual actions exist within this context of coerced collaboration. Did each version make this moral complexity feel fully present — the way Molina’s care for Valentin cannot be entirely separated from the institutional use being made of him? And which version made the specific shape of Molina’s impossible position feel most real?
  2. What the Revolution Excludes: Valentin’s Blind Spot
    The novel is partly an argument that Latin American revolutionary politics of the 1970s had a significant blind spot around sexuality and gender — that a politics claiming to liberate people could simultaneously dismiss Molina’s experience as irrelevant or worse. Did each version make this critique feel pointed and specific, or did it soften into a more general argument about inclusion? And which version made Valentin’s transformation — his gradual understanding that his framework excluded something essential — feel most earned?
  3. Escapism as Resistance: The Political Argument for Molina’s Films
    The novel’s deepest argument may be that Molina’s apparent escapism — his devotion to Hollywood melodramas, his ability to live inside stories — is itself a form of resistance: a refusal to let the prison be the whole world, a maintenance of interiority and imagination under conditions designed to destroy both. Did either version make this argument feel genuinely political rather than merely consoling? And is there a version of the novel’s politics that reconciles Molina’s escapism with Valentin’s commitment, or do they remain in productive tension?
  4. The Ending: Sacrifice and What It Means
    The novel’s ending — and the film’s — involves Molina leaving the cell to carry a message for Valentin, with full awareness of the likely consequences. This is simultaneously a political act, a love act, and possibly a form of self-determination after a life of constrained choices. Did each version make Molina’s final action feel like the right culmination of everything the story had built — his specific courage, his specific love, his specific situation? And which version made the ending feel most like something Molina chose rather than something that happened to him?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHOSE CELL WAS SMALLER?
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  1. The Novel’s Formal Achievement: Pure Dialogue
    Puig’s decision to tell the entire story through dialogue — without narration, without scene-setting, without authorial perspective — is both a formal constraint and a formal argument: the cell is all there is, and the only way into it is through what the men say to each other. Were there moments in the film where you needed the novel’s radical form — the disorienting plunge into dialogue, the absence of any perspective outside the two men — that the film’s visual presence inevitably provided? Name one passage where the novel’s formal restraint gave you something the film’s images couldn’t.
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Better Than the Novel’s Dialogue Described
    Name one moment where Babenco’s direction gave you something Puig’s dialogue couldn’t: a performance, a visual, the specific physical reality of the cell, a moment between Hurt and Julia that the camera made more immediate than any description. Which cinematic moment felt like the ideal version of what this story needed?
  3. The Language Question: Spanish vs. English
    The novel is in Spanish — the specific Argentine Spanish of the Buenos Aires underworld and the formal Spanish of the academic footnotes in specific dialogue with each other. The film is in English. Did the language shift feel like a significant loss of the novel’s texture, or did the English-language performances carry the story’s emotional substance adequately? Would this film be meaningfully different if it had been made in Spanish?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW MUCH DID THE CELL CONTAIN?
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  1. An Undervalued Film From a Celebrated Novel
    Kiss of the Spider Woman won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and William Hurt’s Academy Award, but it has somewhat faded from the cultural conversation in the decades since. Does it deserve wider attention than it currently receives? And is there something about its specific formal challenge — two men in a cell, a political novel that is also a love story, a Hollywood production of a specifically Latin American work — that makes it harder to place in the canon than more conventionally celebrated films?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the novel, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Formal Innovation That Makes Absence of Narration Into a Political Argument; Best Performance of a Man Whose Love for Films Is Also His Love for Life; Best Footnotes in a Work of Fiction; Best Film-Within-a-Film Sequence in a Story About the Power of Stories; Best Ending That Is Simultaneously a Sacrifice, a Love Act, and a Political Choice.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — novel or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want Puig’s radical formal experiment? If they want Hurt and Julia’s performances? If they’re interested in the political context of 1970s Latin America? And is there a case that the novel is the irreplaceable version — that Puig’s form is inseparable from the story’s argument — and the film is best understood as a complement that makes the novel more accessible?
  4. Order of Operations
    Novel then film, film then novel, or just one and done? Does reading the novel first mean you watch the film measuring Babenco’s visual choices against Puig’s radical dialogue form — tracking what the images give you and what they take away? Does watching the film first give you Hurt and Julia as the faces inhabiting the novel’s dialogue, which either enriches or narrows your sense of who is speaking? And is there an argument that the novel and film are most rewarding when experienced together, precisely because each does something the other structurally cannot?
  5. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “loosely inspired by a revolutionary Latin American novel that Hollywood translated into an English-language chamber drama with great performances,” where does Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman land? And the question Puig keeps asking through Molina’s film-tellings and Valentin’s political commitments: what is a story actually for — is it escape, or connection, or resistance, or all of those simultaneously — and did either version give you an answer you could hold?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your cell.