Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

The 1968 experimental stream-of-consciousness novel Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is the first novel by acclaimed Argentinean author Manuel Puig, best known for his later work Kiss of the Spider Woman. Using a relatively simple plot about the coming of age of a young teenage boy in the mid-twentieth century in small-town Argentina (most likely a fictionalized autobiography), Puig paints a portrait of a place deeply affected by European and American cultural imperialism. Even as the town strains under the usual betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip common to an insular community, its residents are in thrall to the lessons they glean from the movies.

Puig creates complexity by eschewing traditional narrative and replacing it with a Faulknerian exercise in stylistic confusion. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth comprises sixteen tonally, structurally, and perspectively different chapters. The first four chapters consist of unattributed dialog barely separated by speaker, in which several people, including the novel’s main character, discuss their everyday issues. Other chapters are a mix of other formal approaches: monologues, diary entries, letters, and one school assignment essay titled “The Movie I Liked Best.”

Through these different ways into the town’s psyche, we follow its transformation from a place ruled by the dictates of religious institutions to one that gets its values from what townspeople—especially teenagers eager to engage with the opposite sex—see in Hollywood movies. Older entertainment like checkers and dominoes first gives way to novels and sports, then to radio and jazz records, then to opera performances, and finally—and most influentially—going to the cinema. As the title suggests, this trajectory isn’t a force for good; Puig criticizes the commercialized and false expectations raised by movies and the ways in which they replace family and community-enforced models of behavior (although he eyes the authority of the churches, convents, and religious schools with skepticism as well).



Within this cacophony of thoughts, we meet the novel’s protagonist, José Casals, nicknamed Toto. In the early 1930s, before Toto’s birth, his mother, Mita, leaves her large and prosperous family in a well-developed town in order to move to the small village of Vallejos to marry his father, Berto, a man with gorgeous, movie-star looks. Because Berto is less educated than Mita, she continues working—much to Berto’s chagrin. However, after Mita has Toto in 1933, she becomes absorbed in her son and his future siblings. Mita also is increasingly enraptured by the movies. Instead of telling her children bedtime stories, she describes and acts out movies like Romeo and Juliet and The Great Ziegfield. Soon enough, Toto also becomes a movie lover, captivated by beautiful leading ladies like Rita Hayworth.

Toto grows into a brilliant and likable young man, but it is clear even from a young age that his sexual identity is in flux. He is obsessed with movies, dolls' clothing, and his mother; privy to the town’s secrets through the gossip he overhears her sharing with friends, he grows up conscious of the inner lives of the adults around him.

The second half of the novel takes place in the 1940s, ending in the year 1948. Toto grows curious about sex, which is the constant topic of sometimes incredibly off-putting conversations, speculation, and daydreams from his cousin Hector, his school peers, and his family members. Paquita, a teenage neighbor, tells him increasingly scandalous tales of sexual intrigue to tease him. Later, a biology teacher explains to him the principles behind digestion and reproduction while drawing diagrams of both bodily systems. Most disturbing are the violent and degrading fantasy lives of the sexually knowledgeable Héctor and the rough Cobito, who offer a strange contrast to Toto’s own softness.



At the same time, Toto’s sense of himself is being shaped by the dual pulls of movie clichés and the Argentinean culture of machismo. Those around him think that he doesn’t measure up to the standards of masculinity set by this very narrow definition of acceptable behavior. Instead, Toto reads as small, weak, and effeminate. This combined with the fact that he prefers the company of girls and his mother to that of boys and men marks him as different.

Eventually, Mita and Berto are convinced to send Toto away to a boarding school. There, the relatively defenseless Toto becomes the target of older boys’ sadistic games and sexual harassment. The novel ends with Toto emerging into what will be his young adult self—a possible homosexual man and a full-fledged Latin American revolutionary whose radicalization has happened not least because of the ways his life refuses to conform to the beautiful standards set by the silver screen.