Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Spanish name: Pantaleón y las visitadoras) is a short novel of Mario Vargas Llosa about an army captain send to the jungle with a mission: to form a professional team of “visitadoras” (that is, prostitutes) to alleviate the troops’ needs. Basically, a mobile Red Light District. Hilarity ensues, as the captain is both too efficient and way too principled for the thing to work as his superiors intended.
| Original Title: | Pantaleón y las visitadoras |
|---|---|
| Written by: | Mario Vargas Llosa |
| Central Theme: | Moral hipocrisy, enhanced by the Army |
| Synopsis: | An army captain is assigned to create a mobile red distruict to improve morale on jungle deployements. |
| First published: | 1973 |
In other words, the same things he criticized in The Time of the Hero, this time Played for Laughs.
It has had two flm adaptations, in 1976 and 1999.
Tropes used in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service include:
- All Men Are Perverts: Constantly played with. It’s even more obvious at the end, when we see a lot of previous masculine characters with prostitutes.
- Band of Brothels
- Easy Evangelism
- The Fundamentalist
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Not gold, per se, but almost all the "visitadoras" are in fact very likeable (as in personality).
- Hungry Jungle: The jungle engulfs everyone in it and drives them slowly insane, proven by the soldiers’ horniness and the Arc sect.
- Japanese Ranguage: By a Chinese. Oh well.
- Lawful Stupid: Pantoja. He stands to his orders even if that’s bad for him.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Most of the "visitadoras".
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Pantoja, at the end.
- Red Light District
- Talk Show
- Unusual Euphemism: "Visitadoras".
- Write What You Know: Word of God says the story is based on fact. Make of that what you will.