Sem Essa, Aranha is a most trenchant, gruelling political comment/exhortation/vomit on Brazilian society (although not without humour), reflecting through a distorted lens the extreme conditions and difficulties of those times: the retrenchment of one's individuality; the impossibility of exercising free expression; the bourgeois hypocrisies and aphasia; economic instability and suffocating misery; and the endorsement of machismo.