Covering One's Tracks

I've made no secret of the fact that I have little love for either Manuel Puig's novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman or it's 1985 film adaptation, directed by Héctor Babenco. However, I would agree with what seems to be the general consensus class in that the film adaptation is inferior to the original text. In addition to making some questionable changes to the original text (the loss of the claustrophobia and intimacy of the cell, the realignment of Valentin's politics, the loss of most of the movies recounted by Molina), the film magnifies many of the problems that were already to be found in the novel. One of these issues is the only Molina-film to make the crossover to silver screen reality, Puig's invented Nazi fantasia, Her Real Glory.
My problem with Puig's original version was this. The character of Molina loves the film for its romance, for the "bravery" and tragedy of the heroine, for it's costumes, handsome men, for the overwhelming, perfumed fragrance of European luxury and decadence that hangs about the thing. This is all very well and good. His adoration is true to his character, and his ability to see beauty where most would only find "stinking Nazi Propaganda" is, in its own way, touching. As audience members with (hopefully) a less naive political worldview and understanding of mass media forms in the twentieth century, we have enough self control to not get entirely carried away by Molina's daydreams, to maintain a certain level of objectivity and criticize the obvious inaccuracies and cruelties of the film: its depiction of the French Resistance and of Jews.
However, Puig doesn't quite trust our capability to think for ourselves. He gets worried, nervous; he frets, "What if they think I'm a Nazi? What if they think I agree entirely with Molina? What if they like the German officer and his beloved horizontal collaborator?" So he camps up Her Real Glory with a preposterously foaming at the mouth, anti-Semitic press release (notably exterior to Molina's subjective reading and recounting of the film), so bizarre and belligerent that it could never have existed in reality, just to make absolutely dead certain that there can be absolutely no confusion as to where he stands on the Nazis. Terrified of offending or alienating his audience, Puig has his cake and eats it too, but it leaves a bad taste in our mouths. His inadvertent, ironic crime is that, in manipulating and brutalizing us into accepting that the film is pure propaganda, his own book becomes, in it's own way, political propaganda.
In the film Babenco takes this one step further, but in a direction that panders not just to the oversimplified, naive political expectations of a modern Democratic audience, but to the stigmas and prejudices that contemporary viewers have towards older, classic, especially Black and white films. Babenco's filmed version of Her Real Glory is an absurd pantomime, a ludicrous clown show with actors whose faces have been painted into the gave and whose stiff, exaggerated movements seem to outline glass boxes less often than real emotions. It's shot, not in true black and white, but in a faded, manipulated color, a crass compromise with a pampered audience. It is not a reasonable representation of a classic film, or even one as Molina might see it (his appreciation of the films is entirely unironic and uncynical), but as Babenco imagines his viewers expect a classic film to look.