Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig is smuggling a defense of “trash” into a statement that sounds almost modest. The key move is the word disposable: it evokes an entire cultural hierarchy in which certain movies are engineered to vanish the moment the credits roll, while “serious” art is meant to endure. Puig flips that hierarchy by pointing out the quiet failure of the gatekeepers. The supposedly throwaway films didn’t just last; they kept “growing,” a verb that treats culture as a living organism rather than a museum inventory.

The subtext is autobiographical and aesthetic. Puig, whose fiction famously absorbs melodrama, Hollywood rhythm, and popular genres, is arguing for his own method: the mass-produced image as real emotional infrastructure. Those movies were “fine for quick consumption” because they were built to be legible, pleasurable, and repeatable. That repeatability is exactly what lets them accumulate meaning over decades, as viewers age, rewatch, and bring new politics and private grief to the same scenes. Longevity here isn’t about purity; it’s about reuse.

Context matters: Puig came of age in mid-century Argentina, where imported cinema and local melodramas offered both escape and a coded language for desire, class aspiration, and gender performance. To say they’ve “survived 50 years” is also to describe how popular culture outlasts the moral panics and critical fashions that try to police it. His line lands as a sly rebuke: what elites dismiss as consumable often becomes the very archive a society can’t stop revisiting.