Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. New York: Vintage, 1980.

This novel is almost entirely written in dialogue, without any markers. No "Valentin said"s or "said Molina"s. And yet we always know when it's Valentin—an Argentinian revolutionary thrown in jail for revolutionary activities—who is speaking and when it's Molina—a gay Argentinian window-dresser thrown in jail for corrupting a minor.

Molina treats Valentin as though he's a child and in the process of being imprisoned they fall in a kind of love with one another. In the meantime they pass the meantime by Molina telling Valentin in great detail the plots of various movies he remembers. This is interesting at first, the first movie he retells is Curse of the Cat People, but then it stops being interesting. I do envy Puig such an easy way of producing in his novel. How do you pass time? How do you fill the pages between key plot points? Apparently you can just have someone talk through a movie from beginning to end.

Let's try it:

Sarah is a young girl who doesn't reallly have many friends, and who likes—you can tell by the kind-of-Ren-fair-y way she dresses, what with the frilly pirate shirt and leather vest-like garment—the idea of living in a world of fantasy. A far-away kind of place. At the opening of the movie she's out in this park with bridges and maybe a couple fountains and she starts speaking to nobody, like she's reciting lines. "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way to the castle beyond the goblin city, to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great..."

She stops there, because she can't remember the rest. And then she pulls from her jeans pocket a little leatherbound paperback of a book and it turns out she is reciting lines. The book is like a play, maybe. And the next line is: "You have no power over me." So then it starts to rain and she has to run home with her dog, Lancelot (see what I mean about living in a fantasy world?), and when she arrives her stepmother demands that Lancelot, soaking wet, stay in the garage. This establishes her as an enemy. Turns out she and Sarah's father are going out that night and Sarah needs to stay home to babysit her infant half-brother Toby. Sarah complains vocally in the home's large foyer, with steps spiraling up along the wall and a large chandelier hanging down in the middle. But she doesn't mention having any other plans. One imagines she had a night planned of reciting lines from various fantasy texts, but no: Toby needs looked after.

The parents leave and Sarah runs up to her room. Here we see the shameful extent of her love-affair with lives and worlds other than this unbearable one in which she's forced to wander, alone. On the wall is the requisite Escher print, the one with all the wayward steps. She's got little stuffed animals of bears-as-knights and bears-as-damsels and motley little things. A ballerina inside a glass dome. &c. Toby starts crying almost immediately and Sarah goes into her parents' room to check on him. Toby's like blond and dressed in a red-white mini-striped onesie that makes him look like something a sailor might take care of. He's indeed crying and Sarah tries to get him to stop. She starts telling him a story about "an evil stepmother" and a "persecuted young maiden" or some such, and it's clear that she's once again bending fiction and fact. "One night," Sarah says, "when he stepmother had been particularly cruel, the young girl called on the goblins for help.

"'Say the right words,' the goblins told her, 'and we'l take the baby away and you will be free.'"

And then we cut to a up-close cluster of little goblins. "Listen," one of them says. Turns out there are goblins, see, and they actually can listen to Sarah tell this story to her younger brother. This is maybe the first of the movie's steps toward metafiction. I think maybe there'll be others.

At any rate, Sarah grabs Toby and holds him up in the air. There's all kinds of thunder and lightning happening outside, and she screams, "Goblin King, Goblin King, wherever you may be, take this child of mine far away from me!"

Nothing happens. The goblins are disappointed. "That's not it!" they say. "Where'd she learn that rubbish, it doesn't even start with 'I wish'!"

Because this didn't work, even though of course Sarah didn't really expect it to, she sets Toby back in the crib and lets him cry himself to sleep. "I wish the goblins would come and take you away," she says, shutting out the light. "Right now."

Well, then he stops crying. Turns out this is exactly what she had to say to get the Goblin King to come and take Toby away. So, thinking it a little odd that the crying just stopped like that, she creeps inside and tries the light. But nothing. And she starts hearing all these little creeping sounds and giggles and such. Plus, again, tons of thunder and lightning. Well Toby isn't in the crib when she gets to it, and suddenly she sees all these little goblins scurrying around corners and such, and suddenly the large picture windows burst open and an owl, that we've been watching trying to get into the room, flies all around her head. It's like a snowy white owl with the eyes that make it look a little Oriental, you know? The owl lands and turns into this tall wizardy looking man with high, teased hair and extremely tight pants. Like, the tightest. Oh and a purple cape/robe deal.

It's David Bowie. This is Gareth, the Goblin King.

Sarah pleads to get her brother back and Gareth tells her "What's said is said."

"But I didn't mean it!" she says. And then Gareth starts doing this thing where he like "juggles" these glass orbs, except they never leave the surface of his hands. They like roll around and defy gravity. Turns out Gareth can offer Sarah her dreams if only she'll let him keep Toby, but she can't do it. "Please," she says. "It's not that I don't appreicate what you're doing for me, but I've got to have my brother back."

"Sarah," Gareth says, and then somehow the orbs turn into a snake in his hands. "Don't defy me!"

Then he throws the snake at her neck, where it turns into a scarf, which then is revealed to be hiding a small goblin.

"You're not match for me, Sarah!"

And so on. It's possible that I'm getting into far too much detail, but this dialogue between Sarah and Gareth is really what makes the movie so good. That and the songs, which are coming.

At any rate, it turns out that Toby has been taken to Gareth's castle, which is at the center of this great maze. He points out the window and suddenly they've been transported to these hills overlooking the entirety of Gareth's kingdom. If Sarah can solve the labyrinth within 13 hours she can have Toby back, otherwise he'll "become one of us, forever."

Gareth then disappears, which he's good at.

So Sarah heads down the hill to try to find an entrance into the labyrinth, and there she finds a goblin pissing into a lake. His name is Hoggle and he's very dismissive and unhelpful. "Oh, it's you," he says, as though he knows her. Hoggle is one of the first people to teach Sarah various lessons. One of them is simple: she sees these little Tinkerbell-like fairies all over the place and plucks one of out the air. It promptly bites her finger. "What did you expect fairies to do?" Hoggle says. Sarah learns that all is not what it seems in this place.

Eventually, she wheedles from Hoggle information on how to get in, and all she can see is one long corridor. One side is a little more cleared of debris than the other. She takes the other, and she runs and runs and there's this high-energy 80s music playing to help her on her way, but all she can see is one long corridor. It's frustrating and she collapses along the wall to rest, where she hears a tiny voice say "Hello." She looks down and there's a little worm there, who invites her "inside" to "meet the misses." She explains that she needs to get into the maze, and the worm tells her that the walls may look like walls, but are in fact walk-throughable. She tries it and voila! She's off.

"But don't go that way!" the worm cautions. "Never go that way!" She goes off the other way and the worm says, to himself, and us of course, "If she'd have kept on going down that way she'd have gone straight to that castle." One of the movie's many little ironies.

Now Sarah's in the maze proper and she comes up with the brilliant idea of marking with her lipstick arrows on stones to remind her where she's come from. But we see that once she marks a stone, these tiny little carrot-sized goblins that speak like Italian stereotypes having inhaled helium, start lifting and rotating her arrows. When she hits a deadend, she looks abck and sees what's happened and throws her lipstick to the ground. "What a horrible place this is. It's not fair!"

"That's right," a voice says, "it's not fair." Then a bunch of laughter. Behind her, the dead end has turned into two doors, each guarded by two men who are like, flipped on one another. Like the one standing on his own feet has the head of another hanging below the shield and that one's feet up by the standing one's ears. Make sense? So one red pair and one blue pair. They look a little like hound dogs. Apparently the only way onward is through one of those doors. One of them leads to the castle and the other one leads to ... "certain death."

"Well which door should I take?" Sarah asks.

"You can't ask us, you can only ask one of us. And I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies."

So Sarah needs to use some brainpower to figure out how to play the game while also getting the right answer. She goes up to the one on the left, the red one I think, and asks: "Would he tell me if this door leads to the castle." The goblin commiserates with his upside-down partner and says, "Yes?"

"Then the other door leads to the castle and this door leads to certain death," Sarah announces, proudly.

"But he could be telling the truth!" the goblin says.

"But then you wouldn't be," she says. "So if he says yes I know the answer is no."

"But I could be telling the truth!"

"Then he would be lying. So if he says yes, I still know the answer is no."

They let her pass through the door on the right and she says, "This labyrinth is a piece of cake!"

And then she falls through some trap door in the ground, and she's falling down this very dark hole, kind of like Alice's, except this one has all these weird grey arms and hands grabbing at her. Eventually they catch her and she hovers there, yelling, "Help!"

The hands then form into these faces, with fingers making lips and thumbs poking out like eyes. "What do you mean help, we are helping," one of the 'faces' says.

They ask whether she wants to go up or down, and Sarah stupidly, stupidly chooses down. They drop her into this completely dark hole and seal up the lid.

We cut to Gareth, who's hanging out in his lair in the castle. Oh, I forgot to mention that we've seen this lair before. When Sarah was running through the maze we cut to the castle and he sang this song with all his goblins. There was a lot of "magic jumping" doing on, with goblins hovering in the air. Gareth tossed Toby almost up to the ceiling. Very dangerous. Here, though, he announces that Sarah's in "the oubliette." The goblins laugh and Gareth yells that she should have given up by now, so we get our first indication that he's getting worried about how smart and resilient she's being.

Down in the oubliette, which comes from the French word for "forget," Sarah hears noises and suddenly there's Hoggle with a candle, explaining that he'll take her back to the beginning of the maze. But Sarah's gone too far to take him up on that deal, so she offers him her ring. Hoggle likes jewelry. It's made of plastic, which excited him even further. Sarah says he can have if it he takes her as far as he can, and he agrees. He then goes to the wall and finds a broom closet which he opens in, like, the other direction? Like he grabs where the hinges are? And it opens into a cave: the way out!

As they're walking through the cave, all these faces are cut into the rock walls. "DON'T GO OOOON!" one says, and they all start speaking in turn.

"GO BACK, WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"

"THIS IS NOOT THE WAAAAAY!"

"TAKE HEED AND GO NO FURTHER!"

"BEWAARRE. BEEEWAAAARE!"

"(soon it will be too late)"

This last one is like muttered, oddly enough. The rock man seems to be the effete one in the bunch. Sarah and Hoggle make it to a long corridor, where a goblin is begging with a little tin cup. "What have we here?" it says.

"Nothing," Hoggle says.

"Nothing? Nothing?!" It's Gareth in disguise!

"Nothing, tra la la?" he says, shaking what's now a puppet of a goblin.

He asks Sarah how she's enjoying the labyrinth and she says it's a piece of cake. This pisses Gareth off enough that he "finds" a clock hanging in the air, and speeds up the time by an hour, giving Sarah less time to find her brother. Then he plucks out another glass orb and throws it into the depths of the tunnel. "Let's see how you handle this little slice," he says.

From the blackness comes this big scary mass of rotating knives and blades. It fills the perfectly round tunnel and is coming right for them! They run for it, and fortunately break through a door in the side of the tunnel at just the right minute. There's a ladder here! They go up.

When they ran into Gareth he accused Hoggle of helping Sarah, rather than following his commands to lead her to the beginning. Hoggle denied any help and said he was just tricking Sarah. Clearly, it's hard to figure out whether to trust him, and so they talk it out as they head up the ladder. "I told him I was leading you back to the beginning just to throw him off the scent," Hoggle insists.

"How can I trust anything you say?" Sarah says.

"What choice have you got?" he asks, and Sarah concedes.

They surface inside a large urn back in the middle of the maze, except here most of the walls are hedges and not brick. There's a man with a bird for a hat that they talk to, but the only thing important about it is that Sarah refers to Hoggle as her friend, and he's visibly moved by this. So they keep going through the maze and hear a large scary roar. Hoggle runs off in fear and disavows anything about being Sarah's friend. But she won't be scared, and she goes around the corner to look. There, a large, bigfoot-like creature is hanging by his feet and these little armored goblins are poking him with spears.

And I'm not even halfway done. There are the fieries that can take their heads off, and the Bog of Eternal Stench and the dream sequence at the masquerade ball. So maybe there was some artistry in typing out movie plots after all....