SOURCE: Loshitzky, Yosefa. “The Spider's Sexual Stratagem: Bertolucci's Poetics and Politics of Sexual Indeterminacy.” In The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, pp. 174–99. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1995.

In the following essay, Loshitzky analyzes the role of sexuality and sexual ambiguity in Bertolucci's films.

Bertolucci's fascination with bisexuality and androgyny is a recurrent motif in his work. On this matter he observes, “I would say that I like men who have something feminine about them and vice versa. Absolute virility is horrible. Absolute femininity, also.”¹ Yet, as Will Aitken observes, “gay sexuality has never been the central concern of any of Bertolucci's films.”² Bertolucci seems to be more interested in sexual ambivalence, than in pure and determinate sexual identity. Bertolucci uses one memorable image of sexual ambiguity again and again. In The Spider's Stratagem it is an image of a servant boy who provokes Athos's curiosity. The boy is...