ok the thing is that like, speaking of the novel alone because I still haven’t had the option to see the film, but I take real umbrage of the idea of the love story being about Molina being specially radicalized and Learning about Marxism by being in prison with a radical Marxist and I also take umbrage at the idea of Molina as linearly being “apolitical” or something. She is IN PRISON. She is in a political prison with someone she knows is really, really bad at keeping his mouth shut. It doesn’t matter what her politics are because her position, actually, requires shutting her damn mouth. Which she does. She doesn’t “discover her femme fatale femininity” by fucking over a revolutionary movement, as it transpires, because it fucking turns out she did not fuck them over at all and left the guards with the idea that Valentín hadn’t told her anything. Her decision to deliver the wee message to the leftist group is like… on certain levels less a rebellion than a submission to what society’s views on being a woman are, someone who submits to the ideas of men. The problem at large is not ONLY molina’s internalized transphobia but, very strongly, the social programming held by 1970’s society in general (and still by is) that the enacted practices social view of women and romance requires women to sacrifice themselves grandly and tragically for men, and the fact that she still believes this is on some level the cage she’s still living in.
I also think it’s just so important to note how the last couple chapters of the novel really turn so much of this stuff on its side, like, first of all, Molina has been to an extent playing the prison. She doesn’t tell them what Valentín could not fucking shut up about telling her. but it also reveals how successful Molina is at just fucking hiding everything to the extent that this is both her salvation and undoing because no one can live like that forever, and how interlinked it is with just how fully she is living life as a middle aged trans woman outside of the walls of prison, as a person who uses multiple feminine names and maintains connections both to trans female friends and coworkers and to female family members. One of the big shining moments of the book to me came after Molina tells valentín that she doesn’t really love anyone apart from her mother and him and that she is competitive or not super close with other trans women, and then the police records that track her after prison reveal a much wider range of contexts - her mother, several aunts, a niece, other trans women, coworkers, employment in a mainstream shop. Is Molina openly out or close to all those people? Probably not. It’s very likely that it’s tried on some level, that she’s not as close to them and that she’s telling some aspect of the truth to Valentín. But it’s also certainly true that she’s got enormous reason to protect all of these people, both family and friends, who are all under suspicion due to relation to her, and that the only thing you can really do in prison to help your comrades and friends outside of it is NOT to vent leftist ideology. It’s to shut the fuck up and start lying.
Anyway scream forever but I think it must be underlined that this novel did so much with the fact that even if traditional notions of femininity are severely flawed, so is masculinity especially when it hits the wall of the total loss of personal autonomy that entails being a political prisoner and Pugh was making real commentary by ultimately reframing a lot of the questions of who is saving who around trans femininity and femininity in general. I think a lot of the adaptations are uncomfortable with just how fragile Valentín is as a poisoned, tortured political prisoner and just how dependent he is on Molina’s ability to negotiate the prison on a practical level, because ultimately, this is her show.
