American Horror: Studying Argento's Trauma (1993)

All of Argento’s films are deceptive. I don’t refer only to the narrative techniques he uses to mislead the viewer like a street magician, though they offer an interesting parallel. I refer rather to the appearance of simplicity or even superficiality that masks the often ambitious complexity of his films. Trauma may be one of Argento’s most complex and ambitious. Trauma appears on first viewing to be a convoluted narrative littered with a mess of characters and saved only by the obvious efforts at the elabAurate stylistic techniques for which Argento is known; on repeat viewings it reveals itself to be a very deliberate homage to America.

‘Homage,’ however, may not be the right word. Trauma was, or at least was intended to be, an important step in Argento’s career. Had it been successful, Trauma would have moved Argento into Hollywood. Difficult though it might be for Argento fans to imagine him as an American filmmaker, there is ample evidence that going to America is just the career trajectory Argento had been planning for some time. He had four years prior produced Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Argento’s previous film, made just two years before Trauma, is Two Evil Eyes, an anthology film made with Romero. Trauma at last was Argento’s own American horror movie. What Argento does with Trauma is not just pay tribute to his favourite American horror filmmakers, or even the history of the Amrican horror film—though he does that—but uses the opportunity to engage the very idea of America, or at least his idea of American, perhaps one formed primarily from viewing American horror films. Trauma is not just an American horror film, then, but in its self-conscious American-ness is an American horror film about American horror films.

What we want to do in analyzing Trauma is understand what Argento has to say about America. And to do so we have to begin by interrogating the film’s self-consciousness. The best starting point, then, is the very surface, the film’s cast and crew. Given Argento’s admiration for Romero, it’s no surprise that for his first American film he acquires Tom Savini’s services for make-up effects. Piper Laurie is cast in the role of the psychotic mother, an unmistakable and intentional parallel to her role in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Brad Dourif, of horror and cult film fame, also plays a small role. With this casting Argento makes a deliberate effort to provide audiences with cues to the film’s American-ness and with these cues he places Trauma within the history of the American horror film.

This casting has deeper significance, furthermore, by paying tribute to particular and influential—and to Argento, it seems, thematically important—American horror filmmakers. Savini, of course, provides Trauma a link to the quintessentially American horror films of Romero, whose films are perhaps second only to Hitchcock’s in establishing the modern horror film. De Palma for his highly-stylized, Hitchcockian horror thrillers is often seen as the closest American correlate to Argento, albeit even more Hitchcockian and, I think, more talented. Dourif calls to mind both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the electroshock therapy motif it shares with Trauma and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a film Argento admires enough to reference favAurably over Eraserhead in Do You Like Hitchcock? So Argento is not just placing his film in the history of the American horror film, but of the very best, most important American horror films, ones that scrutinize aspects of American life.

That Argento’s perception of American and what characterizes it is largely mediated by American films, particularly the films of a few key filmmakers, would therefore be a fair statement. Trauma is a comment then on the idea of America that itself is a comment upon the American cinematic perception of America. The films in American horror history to which Argento draws attention are therefore necessary ciphers for decoding the vision Argento expresses in Trauma. How plot and Argento’s personal style and ideas interact with these influences provide the means whereby Trauma is understandable in its complexity.

The plot of Trauma concerns a young girl, Aura, who is rescued from suicide by David, a graphic designer for a news station. When Aura believes both her father and medium mother suffer a double murder at a maniac’s hands, she flees to her hero, David. While he gives the teen a place to stay and tries to help her overcome her anorexia, they become sexually involved. This infuriates David’s girlfriend, who turns Aura in to her psychiatrist, Dr. Judd. Soon the killer is trying to get at Aura in the mental hospital. David rescues her before the maniac can get to her and they begin trying to solve the murders. By looking into a victim’s storage locker they find a clue that all the victims were doctors or nurses at the same hospital. Each potential victim they try to talk to refuses to communicate and is murdered. Finally, Dr. Judd and the killer invade the David’s house at the same time. While he pursues Judd, the killer escapes with Aura, leaving a bogus suicide note behind. The trunk of Judd’s car is found to be full of heads, so he is presumed to be the killer. David is plunged into despair and drug addiction, believing Aura dead, until he notices by pure chance a woman wearing Aura’s bracelet. He follows her to the house of the killer where the little boy has been snooping throughout the film. There David discovers Aura is being held. While investigating the house, he is incapacitated in a nursery dedicated to ‘Nicholas.’ He awakes in chains. The killer is revealed to be Aura’s mother, Adriana, who was traumatized when her son, Nicholas, was accidentally decapitated during labor. Though the trauma was repressed by electroshock therapy, it spontaneously erupts, sending her on a decapitation spree. Aura’s memory is clarified now. She realizes she saw not her parents’ heads in two hands, but her mother holding her father’s head. Adriana readies to kill Aura and David, but is prevented by the neighbor boy, who lowers the decapitation device from a hole in the ceiling and turns it on, decapitating her. The police arrive to question David and Aura. The movie ends as a girl dances to reggae on a balcony.

Beginning with the general, what generic structures and tropes can we identify in this plot summary? I think what we find is a fusion of the slasher with film noir. The complex and extensive plotting, though uneven in execution, derives particularly from the noir tradition of films like The Big Sleep and especially The Seventh Victim. In many noirs, including those mentioned, innocent, young girls with psychological issues draw men into the roles of hero and detective, and into a world of perversion and murder. This is just what Aura does for David. One of the elementary events that begin the plot is David rescuing Aura from suicide. His efforts to rescue her bring him into the mystery of her mother’s decapitation murders.

The American genres of horror and film noir were both born from the import of German Expressionist filmmakers to America. Noir was really crystallized in the horror-crime films of Val Lewton, however. These films begin with Cat People and reach perfection in The Seventh Victim. Both of these films are important, not just for the horror and American cinema, but for Argento in making Trauma. Indeed, Argento names the film’s psychiatrist “Judd” after the only re-used character in the Lewton films, Dr. Louis Judd, psychiatrist of both the ‘cat person’ of Cat People and the titular character of The Seventh Victim.

In Lewton’s films, Judd is a particularly interesting character for his moral complexity. He has a tendency to take the cases of strange and alluring females. Once he takes them as patients, they tend to go ‘out of circulation,’ as it’s put. He himself is highly intelligent, emotionally detached, perhaps diagnosable as a narcissist. He strives to genuinely help his patients, however, despite his unorthodox methods. He is ultimately a good person with amoralistic and libertine values; a person who casts himself too prominently in the lives of his patients with the best of intentions. At war with his narcissism is his tragic hero complex that leads him to his doom.

The Judd of Argento’s film, who could conceivably be a descendent of Louis Judd (and without a doubt is his cinematic descendent), similarly takes on the cases of the alluring women, Aura and her mother Adriana, with unorthodox techniques and strange behavior. And he, as his forbear had done, casts himself too prominently in their lives. This Judd, we realize from his introduction wearing a neck brace in the film’s early séance scene, knows all along that Adriana is a murderer. Throughout the film he wears the neck brace only when Adriana is near and functions fine without it so long as she’s not present. He is ensuring his head remains where it belongs, at least physically. He also very likely knows she faked her own death. For this reason Judd subjects Aura to a psychotropic berry. In his effort to sharpen Aura’s hazy memory of her parents’ murders, we realize, he’s trying to discover what has become of Adriana. He doesn’t have to wait long, because Adriana breaks into the clinic to kill the nurse and get Aura. Judd presumably finds her and, in order to help her, keeps her murders a secret. He even puts the decapitated heads in his car truck when he drives her to get Aura from David’s lakeside cabin. He dies for his trouble, however, just like his grandfather, the great Louis Judd dies in Cat People for getting too close to his patient.

I have digressed at such length on the subject of the two Judds because I believe the connection between Cat People, the first and greatest horror-noir, and Trauma is intentional and an important element in Argento’s conception for Trauma. Both films, Trauma more explicitly, attribute the sudden burst of violence from a non-violent person to the awakening of something repressed, a trauma. For Irena, in Cat People, the trauma is her belief in her cursed genetic lineage, which entails becoming a vicious cat whenever she is in a sexual relationship. For Adriana, it is the much more real trauma of her son’s gruesome death during birth and the electroshock treatment designed to repress the memory of this event. Irena’s trauma is excited by her new husband, who has convinced her to marry him and to consummate the relationship. Adriana’s trauma is excited by an unknown event, though the first scene of the film, a short and seemingly out-of-place shoebox theatre vignette of the French Revolution with historically-accurate decapitations, may have been the innocent spark.

In both films, moreover, there is a sexual component to the trauma. Irena is afraid of sex and of how it may transform her into a monster. Adriana’s trauma occurs at a much later stage of the reproductive process, namely birth, but is nevertheless sexual. Argento’s homage to De Palma, all of whose horror films are predicated upon sexual confusion in some form, is not so trivial in this light. Nor is Piper Laurie’s casting, for, in De Palma’s Carrie, her role is a mother whose religious fanaticism psychosexually retards her daughter until the repressed energy is released in psychokinetic mayhem. Her character in Trauma is similarly repressive to both herself and her daughter.

But the real significance of the link to Cat People is Argento’s view that all of American horror and noir is predicated upon the notion of trauma, a first, repressed trauma, the escape from which is violence and death. From the early, great, and truly American horror that is Cat People on through Romero and De Palma and Lynch, psychosexual repression and trauma appear, Argento seems to suggest, as the essential characteristics of American cinematic violence.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Argento begins the film with the French Revolution vignette. The vignette links the idea of decapitation with that of revolution. And America, unlike, say, Canada, begins with revolution, the Revolutionary War in particular. America achieved its freedom with revolutionary violence. Argento could be suggesting America’s revolutionary beginning was a historically traumatic event that continues to motivate America’s sexual ills, drugs, anorexia, and violence. More likely, however, Argento is suggesting decapitation as a revolutionary act. Adriana’s decapitations are her revolution against her own trauma and externally-enforced repression. The scene in which the boy next door sees the first victim’s head supports this view. He sees the African-American woman’s head in a pan, her dreadlocks getting snipped by the hands of the killer. The shot of the head, with its particularly ordered dreadlocks, intentionally resembles paintings of Medusa’s head--particularly Rubens's, which contains the salamander motif Argento employs in Trauma--a motif Argento would return to in The Stendhal Syndrome. The decapitation is thus linked to the triumph of Perseus over Medusa. And Medusa’s petrifying stare, which the boy notes, isn’t unconceivably intended to be the electroshock therapy designed to repress but not destroy traumatic memory. This is not, however, to be confused as a pro-violence statement from Argento, but a representation of the mindset of Adriana, who does believe that in violence there is liberation.

 What we see, then, is that there is some complexity to what Argento is saying about America. He is not merely noting the importance of trauma or of violence, but using the idea of trauma to express his view of America. And he seems to see America, or rather the American people, as being generally traumatized. David admits to having been a heroine addict and returns to drug abuse when Aura goes missing. This is to say nothing of his sexual relationship with a troubled and vulnerable sixteen-year-old girl. We discover no further background regarding this character, but he is clearly ‘troubled,’ which, for Argento—and Freud, for that matter—suggests some past trauma.

Aura’s trauma, however, is of much greater concern to Argento. While anorexia afflicts males and females in many parts of the world, it does represent a particularly American sort of disorder, a reaction to the conflict between American abundances and American vanity/perfectionism. Anorexia is really a reaction against a parent, however, particularly, as Argento has one of the film’s minor characters explain, a domineering mother. Aura’s mother, Adriana, certainly runs the household, ultimately not just castrating but decapitating Aura’s father. When Judd administers the psychotropic berries to Aura, a major and traumatic event she recalls is walking in on her mother and Judd mid-coitus. If Adriana represents Aura’s dark side, as Argento claims she does in a DVD featurette, she also represents America’s dark side. Let’s see how.

Adriana, as discussed above, is herself not free of trauma. Indeed her trauma is the main force moving the whole plot. Adriana’s trauma is the loss of her son in birth. The trauma can only fester because it has been repressed by shock therapy. When it is reawakened—we don’t know for sure how, but as stated above I suspect it is the revolutionary shoebox play and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suspect Judd intentionally set that play up—then she reacts to the trauma with violence and vengeance. Where Aura’s response to trauma is violence against herself, an excessive self-criticism, Adriana’s violence is toward others. She struggles to cope with the trauma by destroying those who participated in its cause, for only in these terms does she see the possibility of liberation from her trauma. Both reactions to trauma are doomed to failure. The difference is only that one results in the death of oneself and the other in the death of others.

This is why I think we can say Argento sees Adriana as America’s dark side. As Argento seems to see America as a traumatized nation, Adriana represents its violent, aggressive, domineering aspects as a reaction to its own revolutionary trauma. The alternative reaction to that represented by Adriana, however, cannot be Aura, for that reaction is no healthier. It must be the other influence in Aura’s life, David. His approach to trauma, while originally as self-devastating as Aura’s, is ultimately balanced between reaching out to help others and artistic expression as a graphic designer. 

What we find, then, is that David represents the bright side of America, the side of America that deals with its own, peculiar traumas in Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, and Blue Velvet as much as in its global relief efforts. Violence can be liberating for Argento, but it must be used correctly. In American cinema, through fantastical violence, horror purges and purifies, and so helps the nation deal with its own trauma and the individual traumas of its citizens.

Similarly, by the conclusion of Trauma, Aura has been liberated of her ‘dark side.’ The voyeur boy living next to Adriana finally comes into action and rescues the protagonists. A message to the audience is sent that it is the voyeurs, the filmgoers, who save the day, who conquer the dark side and trauma. By viewing horror films like Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, Trauma, and especially the American films of Hitchcock, by enduring the horror, we emerge as Aura and David purged.

In this way, therefore, Argento places Trauma within the lineage of American horror films while simultaneously commenting upon the nature of that lineage. A great deal of complexity is required to work out these ideas in a horror film, bound as it is by generic conventions. Thus is Trauma so convoluted for a film of its type. This complexity does sometimes interfere with the momentum of the pace and obscures the narrative moves, requiring from the viewers more effort to comprehend. Nevertheless, for these same reasons, Trauma rewards multiple viewings and reminds viewers that Argento’s films ought not to be taken superficially or trivially.

Giallo (2009) - 2/4

There is considerable presumption in titling a film, even a film directed by Dario Argento, Giallo. The giallo film is, of course, a highly-influential subgenre of horror-thriller that flourished in the '70s thanks primarily to Argento, as well as Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, and, the maestro, Mario Bava. For Argento, after making giallo films for nearly four decades, to make a film called Giallo is tantamount to promising us a total summary of his career thus far, a summa of the whole subgenre, from The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) to Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005). Giallo does not keep that promise.

Giallo concerns a killer, known as "Giallo," who kills for abstract sexual gratification. A hideous, troll-like man, he targets women whom he could never bed and traps them in his taxi cab. As a proxy for real sex he tortures and kills the women. One of the women is a model who happens to be using her cell phone when kidnapped. Her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) thus has a lead and works closely with the maverick inspector Enzo (Adrien Brody), whose mother was murdered before his eyes as a child. The film is a straight-forward police procedural of trying to find the killer and save the girl.

Giallo, alas, is not written by experts, but by casual fans whose previous works have all been CGI monster movies for the Syfy channel. Had the film been scripted by Argento himself, it may have attained some sublimity. Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, however, only understand the superficial conventions of the giallo film: sadism to women, an opera (referencing Opera (1987)), a taxi (referencing Suspiria (1977)), and the man-woman detective team (referencing Profondo Rosso (1975), amongst others). Imagine a Hitchcock tribute film consisting primarily in close-ups of keys. This is indeed a link to Hitchcock, but a very superficial one. Similarly, Keller's and Agnew's grasp of the essence of the giallo film is superficial.

The essence of a giallo film, more than anything else, is grounded in amateur detective work. From The Girl Who Knew Too Much onward, the police are scarcely a presence in solving the crime in a giallo. The police proceed by a rational methodology, much like the viewer weened on Sherlock Holmes stories, that proves ineffectual. The protagonists are nearly always individuals who are by chance privy to a sliver of information they can't fathom. (That, incidentally, is an important trope left out of the Agnew-Keller screenplay.) Like the symbolism of a novel, one must reach the end before the significance becomes clear. The detective process is thus not one of deduction, as in Sherlock Holmes stories, but one of hermeneutics, interpreting material as one interprets a poem; the amateur detective uses lateral thinking, following instinct, personal inclination, and sometimes ideas that are entirely inexplicable. The masterpiece of hermeneutic detective work is Argento's own Profondo Rosso. In that film, Marcus Daly first remembers a lullaby he hears during an attempt on his life; he is then informed that the lullaby was written of in a book of local legends; he then tracks the book down and finds a picture of a house inside; he then inquires from a florist about the plants in the photo so he can locate the house, even though he has no idea if the house is significant. After finding the house, we realize he's actually stumbled into the site of a murder we witnessed in the film's prologue and on it goes until he does indeed stumble upon the killer. Marcus's detective work is not a process of deduction. He couldn't logically draw any links between the moves he makes. Yet, he finds the killer while the detectives eat sandwiches and shrug their shoulders. That is the essence of the giallo.

Starting with The Card Player (2004), Argento started to evade this giallo convention into flat-out police procedural. I would go so far as to argue The Card Player is not a giallo at all, but that's a discussion for another essay. Giallo continues the style of The Card Player, following a detective, Enzo. Enzo claims to not play by the book, yet his investigative procedures are basically logical, tracking evidence and waiting for lab results. The only unorthodox feature in his method is how he treats the criminals. Basically, he kills them. I'll come back to that later. Enzo does get an assistant in Linda, the sister of the killer's latest victim. While she aids in the investigation, her discoveries too are purely logical. She deduces from the last words of a victim, "yellow," that the killer probably has a liver disease. That makes too much sense for a giallo. So one of the most fundamental aspects of the giallo tradition is absent. The investigation in Giallo is not a hermeneutic effort, but a deductive one.

Complementing the amateur detective work is the audience involvement in the investigative work. Ordinarily the killer kills for a motive of sexual perversion so convoluted as to be virtually un-guessable, such as the gender confusion in Four Flies on Grey Velvet. That the amateur detective manages to figure out who the killer is comes as something of a shock. And yet, when the motive is itself illogical, how could anything but an illogical investigation uncover it? The method of investigation ideally suits the object of investigation; the form fits the content. One might even go so far as to say the elegant murder set pieces that occupy a traditional giallo (also absent from Giallo) are works of art that demand not investigation but interpretation to solve. The consequence, at any rate, is that we never know more than the protagonist. In fact, as the protagonist's leaps of "logic" can be difficult to follow, we often know less. Discovering who the killer is and why the killer has been killing all along is one of the singular pleasures of the giallo tradition, sometimes outstripping the coda of Psycho (1960) in sheer over-explanation.

This, too, is absent in Giallo. We're shown the killer around the middle of the film, before Enzo and Linda find him; and when they discover who he is even by name, we can only shrug. He's just a guy. There are no red herrings--a fundamental feature of giallo films, especially Sergio Martino gialli--leading us to think it may be one of several familiar characters. Even The Card Player featured this trope. Giallo does not. The killer is a man named Flavio Volpe ("Blond Fox"). This is not a spoiler, as you will never meet him except as the killer. And his motive is uncharacteristically simple: He's ugly and gets his sexual gratification from torturing girls. The sexual perversion trope is indeed present, but highly simplified in comparison to Argento's earlier pictures, such as the baroque Trauma (1993).

All of this discussion is to say that Giallo is not a summa giallica; it may not even be a giallo. This wouldn't be significant were the film not obviously representing itself as the ultimate giallo, or, what the screenwriters themselves called a "kitchen sink giallo," were the film not superficially attempting to be a summary of giallo tropes. That does not, of course, mean the film is necessarily a failure. Even if it isn't a giallo, it can still be a good crime-thriller. But it isn't that either.

Enzo is a frankly charmless detective, very far removed from David Hemming's Marcus Daly in Profondo Rosso. Brody, himself a very charming screen presence, struggles to make Enzo appealing with minimal success. The notoriously wooden Emmanuelle Seigner, moreover, is fiercely arborial thanks to her vapid character. This leaves the twisted Giallo to amuse us and he actually does, with broken English lines like, "No move or you blind" and the general glee with which he sets about torture. He's seen reading a pornographic comic at one point. A knowledgable friend informs me the comic is a Final Fantasy 7 comic depicting one of the main characters sexually engaged with a dog. So he masturbates to cartoon bestiality as well as pictures of the tortured women. What a guy. He's a grotesque portrait of slacker/doper culture, inhaling aerosol and masturbating all day. Unfortunately, we spend much more time with Linda and Enzo than we do with Giallo.

The film's strongest point is in drawing a link between Enzo and Giallo. Both characters have suffered trauma and both characters have turned to violence in response. Enzo, as mentioned, witnessed his mother's murder. We see this in a beautiful flashback. Giallo also gets a frankly implausible flashback to his in utero existence, where his heroine-abusing mother ruined his life from the start. Giallo mutilates women, perhaps as revenge on his mother and perhaps out of sheer resentment. Enzo plays maverick detective. Once he finds a killer, he kills him. He never explicitly says so, but the film strongly implies this is what he does and that the chief employs him for cases that require this maverick behaviour. He's a police assassin and his current target is Giallo. This creates the narrative's sole moment of moral complexity: If Enzo kills Giallo, they may never find the girls he's kidnapped. Satisfying his bloodlust would therefore be as selfish an act as Giallo's self-gratification.

The film's weakest point is in the near absence of female content. One of the most curious stylistic choices of the film, and one that's repeated too often to be unintentional, is having helpless women yelling out repetitive insults at men from the background. Men dominate and women are helpless and irritating voices of outrage, chastising them from the background or from out of frame. Rather than have any emotional effect, these moments are annoying. One of the victims yells at the killer, as he goes about his business, that he's ugly and he's sick. She yells this a good two dozen times, mostly from out of frame. A later rhyming scene has Linda yelling at Enzo from the background for far too long. I can see what Argento and the writers were trying to achieve. For one, they again link Enzo and Giallo. They also represent women as a damaging influence from behind--the background and offscreen serving as a metaphor for the past, haunting both Enzo and Giallo. But the effect is just to make the only women in the film with any significant screentime extremely annoying. They are shrill voices, banshees, assaulting from out of frame or out of focus. An interesting but ultimately flawed stylistic choice that poisons the few glimmers of femininity in the film.

Despite the multitude of flaws, Argento's visual style pulls one along so that the film never quite becomes boring. Occasionally it insults, occasionally annoys, but never bores. Nevertheless, one hopes Argento either return to writing his own screenplays, or find much better screenwriters in the future. Argento's style just couldn't save the film from a hopeless and misguided screenplay, or, to be fair with the blame, his own peculiar artistic choices.

Classic: Tenebre (1982)

This write-up contains spoilers.

The titular 'Tenebre' is a murder mystery novel within the film. The novel and the way the characters relate to it provides Dario Argento with the means to address some of the discourse surrounding his films. While his films were very popular in Italy, or because his films were very popular in Italy, criticism of their violence was plentiful. Some critics accused Argento of misogyny. Others tried to find Argento himself within his films, as though the man were just waiting to snap and murder women. Others tried to draw a link between violent behaviour in real life and watching Argento's films. Still others noted the profusion of perversions. Having left the giallo genre to make his supernatural classic Suspiria and its cult-classic follow-up Inferno, Argento returns to the giallo with a sense of purpose: to put everything in the open. The intention to hide nothing is represented in the film's overall style, where the characters are not wells of perversion but ordinary people, and where every murder occurs in either broad daylight, indoor lighting, or relatively bright nights. Ironically for a film entitled Tenebre ("darkness"), very little in fact happens in the dark. The killer, at one point, all but announces he's the killer to a detective and the book, 'Tenebre', is nearly a blueprint to his murders. Everything is in the open. Similarly, what critics believed lurking in the dark of the film's subtext is here exposed in plain light.

Three theories about the novel 'Tenebre' are presented in the film. These theories are the crux of Tenebre. The first, what the novel's author, Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), himself tells us, is that the killer of the novel kills to remove life's humiliations and offer himself a sort of freedom he couldn't get without 'the act of annihilation.' The second is offered by a feminist journalist, accusing Peter Neal of misogyny for writing a novel about killing women. The third is offered by a Catholic journalist, arguing that the killer of the novel is ridding the world of those perpetrating aberrant behaviour. In a clever shift employing the critique that his films could make people violent, Argento allows every one of those theories about the novel to be true, not of the novel, but of the 'real life' killing within the film Tenebre.

With the third theory Argento is able to play with the claims that his films could cause violence. The journalist who proposes the theory himself begins killing, not according to the pattern in the novel, but according to his own theory about the killing in the novel. He kills shoplifters, lesbians, trespassers--anyone whom he considers aberrant. Peter Neal is only involved in the case because the killer obsesses over both the novel Tenebre and Neal himself. Ironically, the killer also targets Neal as the Corruptor, a man whose novels don't just depict the killing of the aberrant but also encourage aberrance.

Thus Tenebre contains what must be Argento's fiercest retaliation against his critics: here is the Critic-as-Killer. The critic is not satisfied merely to condemn perversion in the novel, but must also destroy the author in the most literal way. The critic's belief that others are corrupted by the novel, however, is merely a projection of his own perverse psychology. He himself is motivated to kill; in an attempt to escape guilt, he thrusts responsibility from himself to the author. He is not the pervert, he tells himself, but the novel is a perverting influence that has moved him to the destruction of the perverse. The Critic-as-Killer justifies his need to kill the artist by claiming the artist's own work forced him to do so. The Critic-as-Killer, of course, is merely a pervert, a madman who finds in books a key to his own repressed drives and a means of deflecting the guilt that must ensue.

Then the first and second theories take over with a sudden blow of the axe, as the artist, Neal, suddenly kills his would-be-killer. (With Argento's perverse sense of humour, he very likely had the English phrase "hatchet job" in mind.) The first killer's interpretation was incorrect, except about his own motive for killing. The first and second theories, however, have validity both within the novel and within the action of the film. They also allow Argento to humourously deal with the preposterous claims that Argento himself is psychotic. The second killer is Peter Neal himself. Up until the point where he kills the first killer, he has, in fact, been working out his murderous urges by writing violent crime novels. The reason he's been doing so is revealed in some stunning flashbacks. As a youth, he struck a girl he presumably liked but was disappointed to find leading three boys for a sexual romp on the beach. After striking her, the boys hold him down while she kicks him in the grown three times and places the heal of her shoe (red high-heels, an important symbol in the film) in his mouth.

Before going on, I should say something about the depiction of women in Tenebre. Men are represented as predatory and women are represented as sly, dangerous to male security. The first woman to be murdered is caught shoplifting. She escapes charges by promising the store manager sexual favours and leaving him her address. On the way home, she's grabbed by a vagrant in an effort to rape her. She kicks him in the groin and runs away. Note Tenebre's second instance of a groin kick, a humiliating act that targets a particularly male weakness. Another girl attracts the attention of Neal's young assistant, but is later seen with a biker. The biker deposits her outside a fence where a dog beings barking at her. After hitting the fence with a stick, the dog jumps the fence and chases her. In some sense, this is the opposite of the vagrant sequence. Her insult to the (male) dog's strength gets her pursued and mauled. Both the vagrant and the biker scenes match Neal's flashbacks. In one, he strikes her for her behaviour, which seems to sexually humiliate him or offend him. She then humiliates him deeply and sexually by kicking him in the groin and stepping in his mouth. He later stabs her and steals her red shoes. The pattern established here is murder as a solution to humiliation. However, the humiliation is particularly emasculation, sexual humiliation of the male.

So the first and second theories appear one and the same. Peter Neal is not just murdering in his books for catharsis, he's murdering women in his books for catharsis. He needs the catharsis because, we learn, he's in a humiliating relationship with a woman he's too much of a pushover to dump. He knows this woman is having an affair with his agent, yet he remains engaged to her. He also has a beautiful assistant (Daria Nicolodi) with whom he has had no sexual relations for six years. Four of those years were because of his fiancee's proximity and the remaining two, after a split, are unexplained. In a film where males are so predatory or sexist (the male detective, for instance, continually pushes his female partner out of the action and farther from the lens; and Argento's framing explicitly gives greater weight to males), the handsome, famous and wealthy Peter Neal is strangely sedate. When his assistant jokes about a young girl exiting his hotel room, he's quick to ensure her, honestly, that the girl was just fixing the plumbing. He is burdened by sexual humiliation and unable to exert sexual dominance until he performs the act of annihilation, as he calls it in his novel, that removes humiliations: murder.

Consequently, after Neal's first murder, he returns to the hotel to finally have sex with his assistant Anne for the first time. He is now free. This freedom is twofold. For one, the act of murder is itself freeing for him. In this sense, the liberation he wrote of in his novel turned out to be true: life imitates art. However, the ability to murder opens up a world of possibilities. Tom Ripley, in Patricia Highsmith's novels, makes the point that moral qualms present an unnatural limitation to possible solutions. If murder is the ideal solution to a problem, why restrain yourself looking for lesser solutions? Neal has discovered just that point. He realizes he can kill his fiancee and his agent, liberating himself from the possible financial complications as well as the humiliation.

On the one hand, Neal's murders are not entirely calculating and rational. He sends a pair of red shoes to his fiancee before he murders her. Sending her the red shoes symbolically makes her the object of humiliation in his life, an objecting weighing down his masculinity; she is the humiliating obstacle that once removed will free him. On the other hand, Neal seemed to genuinely regret killing (a woman he believed to be) Anne. He no doubt intended to stop killing once his fiancee and her lover were out of the way. His killing was therefore both practical and cathartic. This point suggests that the second theory is actually incorrect. Neal is not really a misogynist, but merely defending his masculinity. He is not killing women in his book, but one woman over and over again. He actually kills four men and two women. Berti, however, kills four women and no men. If the second theory applies to anyone, it's Berti.

There is also a sense in which Neal's killings are constrasted to those of Berti. The Artist-as-Killer, Neal, claims that killing is as easy as writing a book. Murder is for him a creative act. Killing liberates him as art liberates an artist. Interestingly, the Artist would not have become a Killer were it not for the pressure of the critic trying to find in his work what was not really there. The first theory was entirely mistaken; but that misinterpretation set off the whole killing spree. The Critic-as-Killer opens the door for the Artist-as-Killer and becomes his first victim.

Tenebre is, then, Argento-as-Killer--of his critics, that is. The film subverts enough giallo traditions that it demands not to be taken superficially. Everything is exposed. Those critics who focus on the superficial points, such as violence and pop psychology, are Critics-as-Killers and Tenebre, little do they realize, is their death knell. While not the atmospheric masterpiece that is Argento's earlier Profondo Rosso, Tenebre is still one of the finest giallo films ever made and Argento's only explicit statement to the superficial critics of genre cinema--his critics: You're the perverts and you're the killers of great art.