Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig treats "bad taste" less like a guilty pleasure than a litmus test for whether art is still alive enough to embarrass polite society. The line snaps with a paradox: he claims interest in the disreputable only when it delivers something intensely felt a "gruesome tango", a movie potent enough to wrench tears. Kitsch isn’t defended as quality; it’s defended as effect. If the so-called low can move the body and puncture the composure of the viewer, it earns its keep.

That’s classic Puig, the novelist who smuggled melodrama, gossip, cinema, and pop genres into literature without apologizing for their perfume. In Latin American letters, where the prestige economy often rewarded seriousness and symbolic restraint, Puig sided with the stuff that people actually consumed and privately wept over. His phrasing implies an enemy: good taste as a form of social discipline, a way of protecting oneself from being seen wanting, shaken, or ordinary.

The tango matters because it’s already coded as theatrical and excessive, a choreography of desire and danger. Calling it "gruesome" doubles down on the taboo: pleasure entangled with morbidity, romance with violence. The movie that makes him cry isn’t a confession of softness; it’s a challenge to the hierarchy that ranks irony above sincerity. Puig’s subtext is blunt: if refined art leaves you untouched, what exactly is it refining?