Mass Cinema as Dream in Walter Benjamin’s Thought: Possibilities of Awakening in Manuel Puig's Literary Montage

Abstract

In this article we reflect on how technical reproducibility can prompt an active response from the viewer based on a product of the cultural industry that, in principle, intends to duplicate the illusion of reality through reactionary topics, in the same way passages from Paris did during the nineteenth. To this end, we will focus on the paradigmatic case of the post-auratic art par excellence, cinema, and the possibilities that montage offers for the estrangement of content through formal subversion. This will allow us to analyze the elements in tension that appear in some of Puig's work: popularly consumed materials, kitsch aesthetics, and reactionary stereotypes that generate a dream world around the readers and characters of his novels; however, the formal subversions of cinematographic models (even the most regressive ones) generate the possibility of re-contextualizing the representations of identities and situations, such as the idealization of the artificial aura of the stars, behaviors relevant to a certain social status, romantic love, and gender roles.