In 1930s Argentina, a young boy grew up going to his local movie theater - sitting in the same seat, five nights a week, for ten years.

It was there, in front of the silver screen, from a seat perfectly shaped to his pompis, that he fell in love with the glamour of it all.

And do you know who that little boy turned out to be?

Ricky Martin.

OK fine, the boy turned out to be a beloved novelist.

I was just making sure you were paying attention.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] Does art imitate life?

Or does life imitate art?

These are some of my favorite questions because there's no one way to answer them.

Art and life imitate each other in countless ways that span the entire globe and all of human history.

And literature is no exception.

It's influenced by history, politics, science - even other kinds of art.

And on the flip side, literature influences life and culture right back.

So, today, we'll zoom in and look at one very special relationship: the one between film and literature.

You've probably seen your share of book-to-screen adaptations - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But it's not a one-way street.

What's often considered far less is the way that movies show up in books.

Which brings me back to that little boy in the theater.

His name was Manuel Puig.

And he went on to become a huge name in Latin American literature... after his filmmaking career flopped.

But despite switching from film to books, he found a way to meld the two: by infusing his love for cinema into many of his novels.

It's time for the Curly Notes.

Puig's novel "El Beso de la Mujer Araña," "The Kiss of the Spider Woman," is set in 1970s Buenos Aires and tells the story of two men sharing a prison cell: Valentín, a political prisoner, and Molina, a gay man arrested for allegedly corrupting a minor.

And it sort of resembles a screenplay, in that it's written mostly in dialogue.

Aside from their dismal situation, the two men don't have much in common.

So to pass the time, Molina recounts his favorite Hollywood movies to Valentín.

And like a movie cuts between scenes, Puig weaves these stories with scenes of the men's daily lives in prison, and their growing closeness.

For Molina and Valentín, films become an escape from their confinement.

And Puig really believed in this ability of films to help us transcend reality.

He told a New York Times reporter that movies "help you to not go crazy.

You see another way of life.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony.

It helped you hope."

And he was speaking from experience.

Like Molina, Puig was a gay man who turned to movies for inspiration and relief from his homophobic upbringing and culture.

As a child, he dressed up as the Hollywood starlets he adored - an activity his father punished him for.

But for Puig, movies and novels were about even more than escapism - they were also about change.

Real social change in the real world.

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" was published in 1976, the same year that he left Argentina in exile - and it was immediately censored by the military dictatorship it boldly critiqued.

The Uruguayan-American author Caro De Robertis writes that "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was the first Latin American novel to "directly link political liberation with the dignity of queer love."

"Two men in a room ..., talking to each other, becomes a microcosm of a dialogue that the culture desperately needs to have with itself, without which no one will be free."

And to tie it all in a bow, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" has been adapted to film - twice!

And total humblebrag, my friend Tonatiuh was in the remake with J-Lo.

But Puig was far from the only Latin American author to take meaning and inspiration from movies.

In fact, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez started a whole pop culture-inspired literary movement in the '90s.

The story behind it?

It's brilliant!

But it's also... petty.

My favorite combination.

Back in the 1970s, a genre called magical realism put Latin American literature on the map.

Readers around the world - and the publishing gatekeepers who decided which books would get translated and sold in their countries - couldn't get enough of books like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and the way that Gabriel García Márquez infused the ordinary with the magical.

But by the 1990s, the magical realism label was weighing heavily on Latin American writers.

It painted only one image of Latin America, and it was how they were all expected to write.

Fuguet ran into this conflict head-on.

As the story goes, he received a pretty brutal rejection from a US editor who dismissed his work because it didn't engage with magical realism, shunned Márquez, and challenged the idea that, in Latin American literature, "everyone wears sombreros and lives in trees."

Fuguet's words, not mine.

Pretty infuriating, right?

It's enough to make you want to start a whole new literary movement as petty revenge.

It all kicked off with a short story anthology that Fuguet and Gómez published in 1996, named "McOndo"... which featured not a drop of magical realism.

McOndo - which became the name of the literary movement - was a reaction to the assumption that Latin American literature could be boiled down to one thing.

But it wasn't a mere refusal of what came before them - it was an expansion of what Latin American lit could look like.

Rather than telling stories of yellow flowers raining down from the sky, McOndo literature was devoted to exploring gritty, modern-day realism with pop culture references and hallmarks of the modern urban experience.

Even the name, McOndo, is a pun on García Márquez's legendary Macondo, the setting of "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Fuguet writes, "In McOndo there's McDonald's, Mac computers, and condos."

In other words, nothing magical, but the stuff of everyday culture.

And as the poet Beyoncé says, the best revenge is your paper.

The McOndo movement led to some incredible work.

Like Fuguet's 2002 novel "Las Películas de Mi Vida," "The Movies of My Life."

It's written from the point of view of a seismologist, Beltrán Soler, as he looks back on his life through the lens of movies.

Fuguet divides the middle section of the novel into fifty chapters, each dedicated to a specific film and moment in Beltrán's youth.

"Dumbo" is the backdrop for his fears of maternal abandonment.

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" explores complex feelings towards his father.

"Oliver" encompasses the family's struggles with homelessness.

B-movie disaster films underscore his journey to his chosen profession.

And "Soylent Green" is a vehicle for understanding Beltrán's shock at moving back to Chile from Southern California.

These cultural touchstones not only help Beltrán make sense of his life, but they bring us into his world, acting as a sort of shortcut to emotional and thematic understanding.

And for readers like me, pop culture references in books can help us relate more deeply to the story.

Characters who watch the same movies I do feel familiar - even if their situations and storylines aren't.

Like, the protagonist of Clarice Lispector's novel "The Hour of the Star" is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe.

Kinda like how I'm obsessed with Selena.

We get each other!

But like I said at the start, all of this artistic and cultural exchange?

It doesn't just flow in one direction.

Books are a huge source of inspiration for filmmakers, too.

Sometimes indirectly - like how Christopher Nolan cited Jorge Luis Borges as an inspiration behind his blockbuster film "Inception."

And sometimes directly - like when a filmmaker adapts an author's text for the screen.

Now, if you've ever found yourself in a heated debate about which did it better - the book or the movie - I feel you.

A bad adaptation of a beloved text is one of my biggest pet peeves.

But I'm also not a reader who demands word-for-word faithfulness in an adaptation.

Because when you're adapting a written work into a film, it's more about capturing... a vibe.

The translator Ros Schwartz likens it to translating a text from one language to another: the goal isn't literal accuracy, it's to "distill the spirit" of the original.

Few adaptations are more vibey than "Blow-Up," Michelangelo Antonioni's take on Julio Cortázar's short story "Las babas del diablo," "The Devil's Drool."

It's set in the Swinging London of the 1960s, and follows a fashion photographer named Thomas who maybe catches a crime on camera.

And a lot changed in the move from page to screen.

In Cortázar's story, the protagonist is named Michel, and he's an amateur photographer and translator in Paris, a lot like Cortázar himself.

And what he accidentally captures on camera is a much different act.

But at their core, both stories are exploring the photographer's relationship with reality.

As one film critic put it, the scenes that appear in the movie but not the book "further entrench Cortázar's ideas, but with Antonioni's flair."

When Cortázar saw "Blow-Up" for himself, he said he "had the feeling that Antonioni was winking at me, and that we were meeting above or below our differences."

Of course, Cortázar's story is far from the only work of Latin American literature that scored a famous adaptation.

Tons of the novels we've talked about in this series have their own, like "In the Time of the Butterflies," "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "The House of the Spirits," and "Fever Dream."

So, keep your popcorn buttered for Latin American Movie Night.

Literature, like all art, reflects our culture back at us - but it also helps us make new culture.

The stories around us help us understand, process, critique, and even escape from our realities.

But they also help us understand ourselves - who we are now, and who we might someday be.

Next time, we'll wrap up the series by exploring how literature creates community, from writers to translators to readers like you.

See you then.