Profondo Rosso and the Persistence of Memory

Within Argento's Deep Red, there are two central conflicts taking place that drive the action of the film. The one is within the character of Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) and the other is between Marcus and Martha, the killer. Both conflicts are essentially conflicts of memory, Marcus trying to remember a briefly witnessed piece of evidence and Martha trying to ensure Marcus never remembers.

The first sequence in the film is preparation for the playing out of these themes. We see the substance of the memory that is at the heart of the film. A child watches as his father is murdered with a knife. Martha is the murderer and her son Carlo is the child; this memory will haunt and destroy them both.

Years later, a renowned psychic--1975 was the peak of Uri Gellar's fame, recall--is in Rome and is taking questions in an auditorium. Although we don't know it yet, Martha is in the audience. In the midst of the presentation, the psychic begins to pick up some powerful information from the mind of someone in the audience, she can't be sure who; she even acts out the murder before the audience.

This event serves to pull the submerged memory to the surface of Martha's mind. Not just for her own safety--although that is an issue--but to suppress the memory itself, Martha undertakes the murder the psychic and succeeds. There would be no further killing, as the memory has been destroyed, were Marcus Daly not a witness to the killing.

It so happens that Marcus is detained by his drunk fellow-pianist friend in the plaza, Carlo, the child from the opening sequence. Carlos, we learn, regularly douses himself in alcohol; this is his way of suppressing the memory. We learn he's a good pianist, but unable to apply his talents. So is the memory of the traumatic event acting on him.

As Carlo detains Marcus, Marcus finds himself in the gravitational pull of this memory, trapped between the two characters who share it, for he sees the psychic being murdered from the plaza. Running up to her apartment, he is convinced he has witnessed something important to the case. As he tells this to Carlo, Carlo drops some semi-coherent nuggets of wisdom about the importance of his memory.

By chance a reporter who arrives at the crime scene prints a story about Marcus being a witness to the crime. In effect what reporters do is transfer events as soon as they happen into a form that lasts, inserting them, as it were, into the collective memory of society. This information apparently falls into Martha's hands.

Thus is the stage set. Marcus now believes he has important information on the fringes of his memory that he must try and dig out. He does not simply decide to play the sleuth. He is obsessed. It is there in his memory and he must unveil it. Simultaneously, Martha is aware that Marcus has apparently seen something, and this brings her to the conclusion that the memory, her traumatic memory, is given the possibility of surfacing once again. Martha will thus try to kill Marcus, all the while Marcus shall be trying to get to the bottom of his suspicions by following a rather illogical trail of clues.

While we discover that what Marcus actually witnessed was Martha's face in a reflection, his investigations curiously lead him directly to the event of the trauma. He first speaks to the parapsychologists who were involved with the psychic, gathering as much as he can about what the psychic witnessed, and later about a tune he hears and believes is played by the killer. The seemingly useless information leads him to a book of urban legends. This book contains a picture of a house. Through botanical data, he discovers exactly where this house is and investigates. Inside the house, he discovers first a painting of the murder and later the body of the murdered man. In so doing, he has uncovered the memory itself in it's purest form: the very residue of the traumatic event.

In the meanwhile, Martha stalks Marcus and murders each person he pumps for information. What is significant is that she murders each person is a ritualistic fashion. She first looks over a set of toys arranged on a surface, as she suits up for the murder. She later plays a doggerel tune on a record player within the hearing of the victim before she strikes. The toys and the song are linked to the opening sequence of the first murder. These rituals, then, return her to the traumatic event, so that by murdering all those she deems as having some connection to its unearthing, she is effectively murdering the memory itself.

There is, moreover, a certain cosmic memory in the film with a dark sense of irony. Each murder is foreshadowed by an innocuous event earlier in the film. At one point Marcus is scalded by steam from an expresso machine; later the author of the book of urban legends is later killed in a tub of boiling water. Marcus claims playing piano is symbolic of bashing his father's teeth in; the parapsychologist has his teeth bashed against a corner. It is as though some karmic force were remembering events relating to Marcus during his investigation into the memory, and unleashing them with vindictive force during Martha's attempts to purge the memory.

When Marcus is finally brought to the final point that connects the information he has discovered to a name, he is assaulted by Carlo. Now out of his drunken stupor, Carlo makes a more valiant effort at destroying the traumatic memory, but ultimately fails. However, Carlo's sacrifice is not without effect; the investigation seems to be off.

At just this time, the memory at the fringe of Marcus' brain comes back to him and he returns to the psychic's apartment. He remembers it was Martha's face he saw in a mirror. At that moment, Martha arrives to finish Marcus off and Martha is decapitated instead. Our last image is Marcus' face reflected in a pool of Martha's blood.

This ending is the triumph of memory. As I noted of the reporter earlier, we live in an era of Archive Fever. Everything is recorded, stored away--like the drawings with Carlo's name Marcus discovers--and seemingly indestructible. It is databased and cross-referenced. Photographs snap events into externalized memories; video cameras ensure no performance is lost.

Prior to the invention of writing, scholars like Walter Ong argue that information was at the service of the present. Imagine a king divides his kingdom between four sons, for instance. Oral historians will tell stories of the four sons of the king. But if one of the sons dies and his kingdom is absorbed by another, historians will tell stories of the three sons of the king. There will be no memory retained of the fourth son, as knowledge of his existence has no practical value. Today knowledge is valued for its own sake and we can indulge this luxury due to writing, printing, and now computer technology.

Deep Red illustrates these themes. In Deep Red it proves to be a futile effort to destroy memory altogether, and ultimately a destructive one. However, the hero is he who is obsessed with the recovery of memory; the truly Modern Soul, Marcus cannot resist discovering and archiving the memory, the knowledge for its own sake. And his romantic companion, the reporter, is sure to record and archive the memory for posterity.

Burnt Offerings and the Horror of Homemaking

Burnt Offerings is a film that does not create horror but reveals it. It takes a mundane reality, a possibility, as its premise, then pushes that premise to the farthest possible conclusion, and thereby reveals the horror and the tragedy. The premise it carries forward is that the home and the homemaking be privileged above the family itself. The conclusion is a sterile, vampiric force.

The house at the center of the story is owned, ostensibly, by three people: An eccentric brother-sister pair and their unseen mother, who never leaves her locked bedroom. Like the brother and sister Femm in James Whale's Old Dark House, they form a naturally sterile family arrangement. There are no offspring to take the household, which they are convinced is immortal. The denizens are mortal and unproductive, but the household is immortal. The home is thus elevated above those to dwell in it. Most central to the household is the mother, for whom they profess love; the matriarch is unseen, but her presence is felt, the presence of homemaking for its own sake.

The protagonists, forming a standard example of the modern, Anglo-American family, consisting of a father (Oliver Reed), a mother (Karen Black), a child, and an elderly aunt of the father's (Bette Davis), are the antithesis. They are clearly reproductive and productive. They have the notion of spending the summer out of the city. They want a brief home to be at the service of their family--the most important thing in their lives--until they go back to another home.

Upon arrival at the manor, it is shown to be in a delapidated state. We later learn that it is in this state because its upkeep demands the energies and lifeforce of families in order to sustain itself. It is this that gives the sterile household its sinister implications. Not able to maintain itself by propagation, this household supports itself by the destruction of other beings. The home must devour the family that will be attempting to make their homes in it, leaving it again an empty barren place until the next family arrives.

The manner in which the house proceeds to achieve this goal is significant. It acts primarily upon Karen Black. When she first sees the delapidated manor, she betrays her obsessive personality, declaring, "I just hate waste!" She repeats the sentiment upon finding the greenhouse full of dead plants. The brother-sister couple left only two injunctions prior to giving up the house, that the family love the house and care for the old mother who refuses to leave the house. Coupled with Black's obessive personality, her desire to build the house to a glorious home, these injunctions drive Black to subordinate her family, for whom she is ostensibly making the home, to the home itself.

Black begins to withdraw from activities with her husband and son in order to lounge in the sitting room of the old mother. This specter of matriarchy, it is revealed, is gradually taking possession of Black. She dresses in antiquated clothing. She begins sleeping in the sitting room, listening to a music box. She only comes downstairs to engage in homemaking, endless homemaking, unrolling rugs, polishing mirrors, setting table, scrubbing the concrete (!) around the pool. Any accident to disrupt this is treated as a criminal offense. The house flourishes under this treatment, whereas the family languishes, to the point that Oliver Reed asks Black to choose the family or the house. Tellingly, she does not answer.

Oliver Reed's father character is frustratingly impotent. While the audience can see the direction things are tending, and while he also seems suspicious, Black's weak but stubborn protestations always dominate. The more foolishly and strangely she behaves, the more he gives in to her demands. It is symptomatic of the feminization of males in Western society. Feminism is not a purely positive force, but also a negative one, insofar as it involves the reduction of masculinity, the feminization of men. The one thing that would save the family is for the father to take control, end the homemaking, and get them away from the house. However, Reed consistently bows to matriarchal authority: Black's authority, and by extension the authority of the unseen woman in the attic. The presence of Bette Davis as his aunt adds to this: he is a mama's boy of sorts. His one, haunting obsessing is a mysterious chauffeur who grinned broadly at his mother's funeral--his horror is over a chauffeur who does not regard the passing of his mother with sufficient solemnity. He has been feminized; he's a pussy. At a certain point, Reed is rendered completely immobile and watches powerlessly as his son is nearly drowned, encapsulating his complete impotence as his wife's domination and obsession increases. In the last moments, his fault is to let his wife return to the house against his protests; he had the power to force her to stay, but he chose not to use it, and his family is destroyed.

The somewhat predictable ending is that the old woman upstairs does not seem to exist; rather, Black becomes her, having been absorbed into the role. After she kills her husband and the chimney collapses on her son, the brother and sister return, pleased to find the house in perfect condition, as if new, and their 'glorious' (their word) mother returned to her throne in the attic. The house has renewed itself as the perfect home, but at the expense of a family, of souls to dwell within and enjoy the home. All that remains is the sterile, vampiric couple who are, it seems, entirely at the service of the house.

Thus is the horror of the film a revelation, deriving from this disruption of the regular order that privileges families over homes. The revelation is that infinite homemaking is the destruction of the family itself. And the endless homemaking derives from the domination of the regular homemaking member of the family, the female; a perverse, matriarchal authority preys upon productive family forms.

Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Themes of Horror

Picnic at Hanging Rock is often cited as a horror film, as one of the greatest ever made. Yet, it is conspicuous in that nearly nothing happens and most of what happens is never explained. It is an ethereal mystery. The mystery strikes chords. Like the titular Hanging Rock, the film plays the atavistic strands of the human psyche like the strings of a zither.

1. Dignity and the Flesh

The film's main concern is the clash of Victorian English formality with the mystically primal, untamed, overbearingly natural world of Australia. The girls of the all-girl school are seen corseting up for the day, pulling one another's laces tight. When told they would be going to Hanging Rock, they are given the promise that, if it is warm enough, they shall be permitted to remove their gloves.

Throughout the history of Western culture, humanity has had to straddle the border between animal and something unrecognizable in the animal world. Traditionally this has been treated literally: humans have souls, animals don't; humans are between animals and angels, sharing the nature of both; humans have a spark of god, whereas animals are like humans without the divine spark. More recently this is seen as merely the product of intelligence, whereby humans have developed ways of treating one another as beings deserving respect. Even without the religion, the notion of humans as deserving respect above and beyond mere animals persists.

This conceit has born fruits for both good and ill. While the view that humans have special dignity gives rise to morality, manners, and spirituality of all forms, it has also yielded as oppressive forms as Victorian manners, Islamic treatment of women, Christian fear of sexuality, and the general body-hatred that pervades Western spirituality. This is the direct result of privileging the apparently 'angelic' nature of humanity above the 'animal' nature; an approach at least as old as Socrates.

This theme has been perhaps the most pertinent to the horror genre. The very motive force behind the horror genre is the conviction that humanity is special and should not be butchered, violated, or treated without dignity and respect. The perpetrators of horror in these films, however, insist upon treating the human being as just another animal, from Dr. Caligari's experiments on humans to the visceral butchering in films like Saw. Had we not already agreed within ourselves beforehand that the victims deserve better and do have human dignity, there would be no horror film, but a calculable coherence of special effect and technique to be gauged in cold detachment.

It is this special problem of the angel-animal that afflicts the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, who are purposely shot in soft focus in their white dresses while at the bottom of the rock in order to appear angelic. Squished into the oppressive Victorian views of the body, with particular care for sexuality, the girls have been brought to a land formation more ancient than any human cultural form and for that reason resonating with the certain mysterious quality of primal, animal nature, close to the rocks, the earth, the physical reality of the environment around them and within them.

The higher the girls ascend the rock, the more they strip themselves of their cumbersome but ever-so-proper costumes and become more animal. They run barefoot out of sight and most are never seen again. One appears again, at an impossible interval later, completely dressed, with only her corset mysteriously gone. The doctors and women use some euphemisms--"Is she intact?" "Yes, she's intact"--to imply she has not been violated sexually. Perhaps she has been violated on a more spiritual level; we're never told. Nor are we told where the other girls have gone; it is as if their new-found freedom, the explosion of the deep, primal, animal natures breaking free from limiting forms, made their existence impossible in the oppressive world at the bottom of the rock.

2. An Unstable World

If the conflict between animal nature and human dignity is one of the major horror themes, not far behind is the encounter of an essentially unstable world. The films of Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, and other ethereal horror films proceed not on the premise that there is a monster in the world, but that the world itself is somehow monstrous, disordered, or ordered in a way entirely unsympathetic to the human individual.

The girls who disappear at Hanging Rock, along with their governess, are never seen again. The one girl who does return is inexplicably alive and well, without any cuts on her bare feet, without her corset on, though her dress has not been removed. Before vanishing, the girls seemed propelled forward, as if in a frenzy, not unlike Euripides Bacchae. The governess and these girls were seen to be removing their clothes. A pink cloud was witnessed in the area. The watches stopped upon arriving at the rock. Some locals boys watched the girls obsessively, as if they were pixies.

This sounds like the ground for a great mystery film. A scientist-detective should enter from another movie and solve the mystery, pipe in hand. This does not happen. The sum of the clues does not equal any solution. They are so many red herrings. Because there is no answer. The ultimate truth of the film is that the universe is ultimately unstable, both metaphysically and epistemologically: It is in itself unstable and we are also unable to understand it.

Despite a society that tries to exercise such control of its members and their nature, that believes it has the physical world mapped out and understood in its entirety, the mystical properties of the world rebel and shattered the illusion. The girls throw off their forms and run free; the girls disappear without a trace; the headmistress begins drinking; all facts about the instability of the world, of which humans are a part, just as unstable. Perhaps we too will just disappear.

To sum up, what makes Picnic at Hanging Rock the horror classic it is is not any actual horror, but a mystery that essentially involves the most basic themes of horror and exploits them in possibly the purest, if airiest, manner cinematically possible.

What's so great about George Romero?

I.
Romero is generally praised for two major points. The first is his innovations within the horror genre. He invented the flesh-eating zombie; he introduced a highly realistic, almost documentary style with Night of the Living Dead; he ushered in remarkable, new gore effects with Dawn of the Dead, etc.. The second is his social commentary, particularly critiques of consumerism and capitalism. This is not so beneficial to him. His horror innovations are confined within his genre, for one, and are more mechanical than central to his vision. Whereas his social commentary is criticized, rightly, for being heavy-handed and just too sincere to be artistically serious (Oscar Wilde once said that all bad poetry is sincere).

What, then, is Romero's strength? It is at the level of the pen, first of all; and it is in a particular area, to wit, dialogue. And not just any dialogue, but the dialogue of heated debate, i.e. arguments. No-one, in the history of cinema, has written more realistic, grueling arguments amongst their characters. Many have tried, but have always written themselves down to the level of cliches--whether literary or cinematic--Romanticism, and poetic stylization.

Romero's arguments occur at all levels: between the protagonists and the perceived threat, amongst the protagonists themselves as a group, between individuals within the protagonists' group, and perhaps even within protagonists themselves. In what follows, I'll present an overview of the role of argument in Romero's films.

II.
Romero's use of argument naturally begins with Night of the Living Dead. The living dead don't talk, they just keep coming. They never stop. Fighting against the zombies is not entirely unlike being trapped in an argument with a relentless opponent; the stubborn opponent who will never give in, no matter how well you've made your point.

The zombies, a physical manifestation of argument, mirrored by the real arguments within the farmhouse. At first leadership is gladly yielded to Ben. But when Cooper arrives, there is a constant atmosphere of tension, poised for or in the midst of argument amongst the protagonists. They argue heatedly, realistically, without succumbing to the pressures of cooperation, kindness, and apology that plague most films--including very good ones. There is a sense that neither side is willing to give in a little, not even to the point of listening to what the other is saying.

The Crazies takes this approach to another level. Not only is there a form of zombie on the loose, but there are multiple factions of heroes; and all are in argument with one another. The townsfolk are in argument with the military, violently protesting. The military agents are each in argument with the town leaders. The scientists are in argument with their military employees. The protagonists, fleeing from the military, are arguing amongst each other. Worst of all, the virus causes spontaneous violence: sudden, inexplicable argument. Out of all of these people, nobody is really listening to what anyone else has to say. It can be quite uncomfortable to watch all the heated arguments; one wants to withdraw, or to step in and command these people to be reasonable, to stop, to "smarten up" and be reasonable. This is, of course, testament to Romero's skillful writing.

Dawn of the Dead follows a similar approach to Night of the Living Dead, with the exception of the brutal arguing in the broadcast center at the beginning of the film and is therefore not worth dwelling upon.

Day of the Dead, however, is the pinnacle of this early period. The arguments are so heated and so relentless that they, as Ebert noted in his review, upstage the zombies. The zombies still represent the relentless, stubborn nature of human argument. They're always at the gates, pressing at the boundaries, just waiting to break in; and they never stop. Inside the compound, the constantly shouting characters create a hostile environment of such reality that many reviewers openly despised the film. Why? Because arguments are unpleasant; they are unpleasant to be in, unpleasant to hear, to watch, to the point that arguing parents can traumatize children. What the reviewers of Day of the Dead missed is how these arguments represent real humanity at its worst: stubbornly arguing. It is frustrating, as frustrating to watch as being involved in the real argument. While Romero doesn't work with the best actors and he has never brought out the best acting with his direction, his writing and his direction brings out the fullness of the tension between them and between they and us. Never has human argument been rendered so truthfully on screen.

With later efforts, like Monkey Shines, Romero made this notion of heated argument much more subtle. It is here represented not as human nature, but as the dark, primal side of humanity that is normally hidden. The monkey's presence draws the primal rage out of the protagonist and he begins lashing out heatedly at everyone who gives him the slightest reason.

This writer, alas, has not seen Martin--arguably Romero's most personal film--nor Romero's post-millennial films and is therefore unable to comment on this trait of argument in Romero's more recent films. It should be noted, however, that Romero's two King adaptations (Creepshow and The Dark Half) did not contain this trait; to claim they did would require mental gymnastics of a self-defeating order.

III.
What we may derive from the above light analysis is that the Romeroan worldview, as it were, is a rather cynical one. Even before it happens, one knows the scientist's discover in The Crazies will never make it to its destination. And this cynicism derives from this World In Argument depiction pervading Romero's early films. As long as people continue to argue, they damn themselves. When there is free exchange of views and ideas and the struggle for domination is relinquished, his characters stop arguing and start surviving. Hence the conclusion of Day of the Dead, which offers some hope.

The great breakthrough in Romeroan cynicism comes with Monkey Shines, a minor masterpiece. Romero no longer seems to see humans as doomed to relentless argumentation, as represented by his zombies. Rather, their struggle for power and for ideological domination and position is seen as an animal instinct that can be overcome; and it's overcome by respect of others as equals.

Respect, in Romero's films, comes in a variety of forms, but it has always been there. It receives one of its most positive expositions in one of the few calm interludes in Day of the Dead's madness, when our female protagonist allows the pilot and engineer to express their views even while she disagrees. What they say is not as important as that she listens.

Whereas in Monkey Shines, respect takes a sexual form. It is the respect males and females accord one another as males and females, not berating, challenging, or struggling, but an equal regard. The protagonist, whom we see in the beginning has a trophy girlfriend, is not treated as an equal male force throughout the film. He thinks he is by one female, the monkey, who turns out to be a master manipulator. The conclusion shows a male and female in a relationship of respect.

Again, this dynamic of argument and respect does not arise in Romero's King-written films; and their presence in his post-millennial films will be left to the reader to discover.

IV.
In short, what's so great about Romero is that he's developed, both in a semantic taxonomy involving flesh-eating zombies, evil monkeys, doppelgangers, amongst other things, and in his creation of fully emotional characters, a truly complex and fascinating worldview embracing a dynamic of conflict and respect with the natural consequences each of these entails. That, I hope I've supported, deserves respect.

I expect to revise this in the future, once I've seen Romero's complete oeuvre.