Torso: A Masterpiece of Misogyny

Perhaps my former Catholic background has made me distrustful of the psychoanalytic feminism employed by Mulvey and most feminists since; perhaps, however, my experience as a man is sufficient. Mulvey and many subsequent feminists have argued that women in films are sexual spectacles, objectified by the male gaze. This, they claim, demeans women as pure object and empowers men (or rather, allows men to remain safely in power). Life experience as a man readily contradicts this conclusion. When a woman is an object of sexual objectification for one's gaze, she's in power. If I lust over her, especially if she doesn't lust over me, she has considerable leverage over me. She's in a position of dominance, able to make requests of me I can't make of her.

When the woman is a very attractive woman, a woman whom many men find attractive, she has even more power. She may choose any of the many men for herself; but only one man (or a few men, as she wishes) will be chosen by her. Note the passive voice. She chooses; the man is chosen. She is active and he is passive. He can't make himself chosen. He can only try to appeal to her tastes so she chooses him. The highly-abstract, nebulous notions of male gaze and objectification seem, in such an instance, ridiculously academic in the face of lived experience. So the men are 'objectifying' her sexually. Humans are objects; being a sexual one is not necessarily a weakness. In fact, as we see in lived experience, it's usually a strength. The 'objectification' gives the 'objectified' female power over the males. She is the object of adoration. Her commands will be met with obedience if only to become the object of her adoration. The males seek to be sexually objectified by her.

The Western prejudice is that a man pursues and a woman acquiesces. Her process, we're to believe, is passive. She says 'Yes,' and nothing more. The man does the rest. However, in reality the woman tempts and the men acquiesce to the temptation of the woman. What makes western heroes like Django such powerful examples to men is that they aren't manipulated by feminine wiles. Usually the women lust after them and they can choose the woman they want. The other men in the film, weaker men, are more like the men we encounter in real life: they see attractive women and can't help but look, can't help but mention to their friends large tits and a nice ass; they are overpowered by the sexual desire they feel for the woman but can only hope, with a hope that depends upon that woman's whim, to realize. Men who aren't very self-conscious or introspective react in this way instinctively. More meditative men, intellectual men, are more guarded and feel manipulated by attractive women. They recognize that to give in to objectifying her is to submit to her.

This honest interpretation of male-female interaction is the central dynamic of Torso (1973), a misogynistic splatter-giallo. The misogyny of Torso is so pronounced one could not mistake it for a bubbling forth of subconscious attitudes; the treatment of women in the film is too consistant and too hyperbolic to be accidental. The film intentionally displays women as sex objects and it intentionally presents men as imbeciles readily captivated by these objects. Nearly every man in Torso is a sleazy, libidinous creep and nearly every woman is sexy and sexually dominating. This, I will argue, is done for a purpose.

[Note: In what follows I will be discussing the motives of the killer. I will not, however, reveal his identity, though some red herrings will be spoiled.]

The film concerns a maniac who begins killing and mutilating attractive, sexually active women on a Roman campus. When the maniac was a child, a young girl requested his brother fetch a doll from a cliff-edge on condition she flash him her panties. His brother agreed, fell, died; and he was traumatized. The event formed his attitudes toward women. If they are sex objects, they are "dolls" and therefore without significance as human beings. In fact, not only are they dolls, but they're dangerous and impure dolls that deserve destruction. The doll becomes a symbol of female sexual power, its eyes staring blankly in the flashbacks as his brother unsuccessfully reaches for it. The maniac has kept this attitude repressed and has lived a normal life. Then two college girls sleep with him, take pictures, and blackmail him. This is the first scene in the film. During coitus he punches out a doll's eyes, indicating some return to potency and normalcy: he's not the object of their gaze, but they're the object of his. He is the Mulveyan Male. When he's blackmailed, he realizes he wasn't in power at all; rather, he was trapped. That moment sparks his subconscious misogyny. These attractive women used their sexuality to manipulate him and to potentialy destroy him, just as a girl destroyed his brother with her sexuality. He made the mistake of "reaching for the doll." He won't reach for it any longer: he will destroy it.

The first two victims of the film are the women who try to blackmail the killer. (What's somewhat perplexing is that the second blackmailer doesn't go to the police after her co-conspirator is murdered. She is, at least, shown to be on drugs.) He catches the first victim in the middle of a sexual encounter with her boyfriend. The second victim he catches prostituting herself to two bikers at a free-love party. Again, he targets them when they're sexual objects, overpowering men with their sexuality. The second victim is especially powerful, walking out on her johns after they try to unzip her jeans.

The killer strangles and mutilates the girls, his mutilations becoming more gruesome with each victim. He fondles then cuts open the torso of the first victim. He fondles, pokes out the eyes, and cuts open the second victim. The Italian title of the film, The Bodies Showed Traces of Carnal Violence, also suggests he rapes the bodies. As in Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (1962), the killer can only have true sexual dominance over women when they're dead, when they're doll-like corpses. Torso and The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock were, in fact, written by the same screenwriter, Ernesto Gastaldi, a prolific screenwriter in Italian horror and, as we see, an auteur. Where Gastaldi's Dr. Hitchcock is a man with a fetish and strong sexual insecurity, the killer of Torso is more of a man-on-a-mission, targeting what he deems a social flaw represented by attractive and sexually active women.

Gastaldi and Martino give some credence to the killer's social philosophy. Throughout the film men are depicted as easily conquered by female attractiveness. A scarf salesman falls to his knees, pretending to check his stock, just to get a glance up the second victim's skirt. A girl, Daniela, is ogled by her uncle from a crack in the door. Stefano pursues Daniela for years, even to the point of enrolling in the university's faculty of fine arts just to be near her. Most impressively, however, is a scene in homage to L'Avventura (1960). In L'Avventura, all the men of a small town stare at Lea Massari as though they'd never seen a woman before. In Torso, Daniela and her friends are sent by her uncle to a country villa to relax; their arrival in the nearby small town brings out all the town's men to stare with lust. The girls remain perched atop their vehicle, long legs stretched out, seemingly oblivious of the attention they're drawing. They couldn't, of course, be oblivious; they're just accustomed to having that power. The camera allies us not with the girls but with the men of the town, panning over the long legs and ogling the statuesque beauties. A later scene shows a milkman physically frozen to the spot when he brings milk to the villa and finds the girls sunbathing naked. Significantly, he is freed from his unusual plight by Jane (Suzy Kendall), the film's protagonist and the only girl wearing clothes. Jane doesn't sexually dominate men, though she easily could if she so desired. The same milkman is later heard giving his friends an enumeration of the girls' parts, "Eight legs, eight tits, four asses." Men are, in Torso, totally overpowered by women. Men are no match for female sexuality.

Stefano is an interesting case. His obsession with Daniela has lasted for years and she never returns his affection. He is totally under her spell, yet unable to exert any power at all over her. He tries to regain his sexual potency by hiring a prostitute. He finds himself unable to handle the prostitute, however. He realizes that he's paid for her; she hasn't come after him. His masochistic pursuit of Daniela is not relieved. The prostitute consents too willingly. And yet, not willingly enough. He would, perhaps, rather she pay him. When he doesn't touch her, she calls him impotent. He may not literally be impotent; yet psychologically he is. As she begins to mention payment, he becomes angrier, ultimately beating her. Stefano's pursuit of one woman has made him a failure as a man, a psychological eunuch. He beats the prostitute out of frustration. Also out of an attempt to restore his potency. But as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, sadism, a step beyond sex for domination, is no more successful at regaining power through objectification as sex is. Stefano has been destroyed as a man by his lust for Daniela.

Jane's sexually-adventurous friends (they let men ogle them) are, to the killer, mere dolls. They weren't involved in the blackmail plot. That plot, rather, set the killer off on (what he believes to be) a righteous rampage. When he kills Jane's friends, he doesn't merely cut them open, he cuts them to pieces. Their bodies, the objects of their power over him and men in general, are to be destroyed. Jane alone is spared for literally not being a part of the group--she sprained her ankle and under the influence of medication slept through the murders. She is also metaphorically not a part of the group. As noted above, she doesn't use her attractiveness to dominate men. She dresses conservatively and relates to men, such as her professor, through intelligent discussion. Her professor goes so far as to congratulate her on not being a usual American object, which, in my analysis, amounts to a congratulation on not being sexually overpowering. When the killer discovers Jane was a part of the group, however, he decides that she too is a doll and must be destroyed.

Jane's saviour is, of course, a man. Importantly, he's not just any man: he's the one man in the film who never ogles any women. A very handsome doctor, he is actually the object of female sexual interest. The second victim eyes him as he buys a scarf. Jane and her friends remark on how attractive he is. We also see a female patient pretending to have illnesses, obviously just to spend time with him. He, like Django, James Bond, 'The Blackmailer' from Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970), is sexually attractive enough to have power over women and to not have to submit himself to them. He doesn't have to objectify women. They already give him power by objectifying him. On the conceptual level, Jane can only be saved by a man who has sexual power over women, which is a role only the handsome doctor fills. So the film ends with the pure and non-manipulative Jane walking off with the sexually powerful doctor, much like the end of The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock when Barbara Steele is saved by a handsome, young doctor. These are the perfect man and the perfect woman in Gastaldi's world.

While I claim Gastaldi gives some credence to the killer's philosophy, he doesn't for that reason give credence to the killer's behaviour. There's no question that the killer is just a lunatic. Yet, curiously, the killer is just what feminists like Mulvey think all men are in patriarchal society. In her nebulous, Freudian readings, she sees the objectification of women as just was the killer sees: women become non-persons, dolls. Gastaldi's point is that men don't think this way when they objectify women. Only lunatics do. I don't know for sure if Gastaldi had read any feminist criticism--although it'd be hard to miss it in the '70s--but Torso stands as a sophisticated challenge to their claims, making those claims appear as fictions from the ivory tower.

There's no question that Torso is indeed full of beautiful women, often naked, on display for male viewers to enjoy. That male viewers do enjoy is our being overpowered by Sergio Martino's film. The girls seduce the male viewer, capture us. We gaze at them, like Stefano, unable to obtain them. As objects they dominate us. The film dominates us when we enjoy it for its T&A. Gastaldi's script liberates us by destroying all the beautiful bodies that dominate us on screen, giving men an empowering catharsis and yet honestly presenting men as sexually weak. The film is thus exultantly misogynistic. But it is misogynistic, or rather uses misogyny, for a distinct purpose, a purpose that Gastaldi returns to frequently in his many screenplays, from The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, through Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, Death Walks on High Heels (1971), and of course Torso. The purpose is to make clear to us the real balance of power in the sexual world. For Gastaldi, men are dominant through violence, women through sex.

The Reflecting Skin (1990)

The Reflecting Skin is a grotesque picture on childhood horror, the terror of being innocent. This is especially the case when one's father is incinerated before one's eyes, one's closest friends are murdered by a gang of bored teens in a shiny car, and the mysterious foreign woman might be a vampire with a taste for one's older brother (a young Viggo Mortensen). The film is told entirely from the point of view of Seth Dove, a fairly typical boy with a strong imagination trapped in a lifeless rural area and surrounded by creepy and/or disturbed adults.

Renowned playwright Philip Ridley wrote and directed with a fine touch for the visual. The hanging jaws decorating the whaler's widow's home threaten to devour the meek Seth as he apologizes for a cruel prank. A dessicated fetus he finds buried and begins speaking to, an exploded frog, a sheriff missing multiple bodyparts (a reference to Lionel Atwill's character in The Son of Frankenstein, I wonder?), amongst other things contribute to the grotesque texture. Visual motifs of contrasting green and yellow grasses, some smooth and some jarring transitions comprise Ridley's visual style.

While Ridley's background as a playwright lends the films many strengths, it also detracts in some ways. Even had I not known Ridley wrote and directed, I would have guessed a playwright wrote the screenplay, simply because it reeks of the modern dramatic style. If you've ever read or seen performed Beckett, Pinter, or Shepard, the mother's muttering about gasoline, the economy of objects (heaven forbid that whaling spear not be used as a weapon!), and the sometimes too-evident linguistic motifs will seem familiar and artificial. And if you haven't read or seen any of those performed, think of the play with which Barton Fink opens.

Overall, The Reflecting Skin is not so heavy on narrative as it is on experience. Ridley's strength is really in recreating for the audience the genuine experience of childhood encountering, even creating, horror with innocence and gradually losing that innocence. A series of interrelated experiences over a single, awful summer in Seth Dove's life serve to steal Seth's innocence away as he ultimately makes a decision that costs someone their life. I could feel Seth's bewilderment and dread at many points, whereas at other points his psychology was alien to me. He's not a normal kid; but with parents like his, how could he be? At times one sympathizes with him and at other times he's a terrible puzzle. I think that's true of most innocent things, particularly children. We've all done odd things as children and experienced things of which we couldn't quite grasp the ramifications.

It's notoriously difficult to direct children, probably even more difficult to capture childhood in a film, let alone a horror film. The Reflecting Skin is second only to Night of the Hunter in accomplishing this. On the one hand, it's much more honest about children and childhood than Night of the Hunter. Lilian Gish's insipid comment that children "abide" is frankly embarrassing. On the other hand, The Reflecting Skin manages to set that childhood in a drastically more perverse landscape.

Prisoners of the Casbah (1953)

There are countless Technicolor gems amongst the forgotten Hollywood studio pictures of the '50s. Prisoners of the Casbah is one of them, produced by Sam Katzman during his time with Columbia. Prisoners is one of those gorgeous Arabic epics, full of vibrant colours, sword fights, and pretty harem girls. There's always a scheming vizier (Cesar Romero), of course. One wonders why Sultans and Emirs bothered appointing viziers, since they always turn out to be evil. There's a twist with Prisoners: the lovely Princess Nadja (Gloria Grahame) is a spoiled brat and she's totally infatuated with the vizier Firouz rather than our brazen hero, Ahmed, the Captain of the Guards (Tuhran Bey, a favourite of mine). While the Emir would like Ahmed to marry his daughter and take the throne, the Captain despises the loathsome woman as much as she despises the playboy Captain. These twists on the format are refreshing and open the representation of genders and the various other format stereotypes to scrutiny.

The visuals, whether by the intuition of the director or a conscious creative decision I can't say, affirm Nadja's potency and her initial presumption that she is master of her own destiny. While the Emir and Ahmed try to discuss to whom she will be wed, they remain still in the shot like part of the furniture. Nadja, on the other hand, darts around the frame, slinking around her father, then over to give a barbed aside to the Captain, then back to her father. Her control over the frame is such that once she manages to bring Ahmed into her father's disfavour by rejecting her, the shot closes in on Nadja and her father, leaving Ahmed offscreen, literally 'out of the picture.'

Prisoners could almost be said to be more about the breaking of a headstrong woman's will than about overthrowing a usurping vizier. While there is a climactic sword fight, the movie's real climax is when Ahmed, infuriated by Nadja's continued sympathy for Firouz, despite everything he's done, throws her over his knee and delivers unto her pretty rump a sound spanking. At this moment she falls in love with Ahmed and they begin to kiss. It is a truly startling moment. All along Nadja has had a very distinct view of masculinity: ambitious, bearded, serious, dominant, and, most importantly, potentialy violent. It's made clear early in the movie that Firouz is more just than merciful, a serious man who believes in totalitarian order. Nadja seems oddly drawn to men who will punish her and dominate her.

Whether her vibrant presence within the frame ceases post-spanking, whether Ahmed builds his kinetic force within the frame before he spanks her, and how other characters might relate to these visual motifs, is something I, alas, became too caught up in the enjoyable plotting to discover and I didn't manage to record the movie. It's a subject for future study. Nadja isn't the only 'strong woman' character in the film; indeed, the Queen of Thieves tends to dominate her husband with glances. Her character would also need to be observed. Perhaps the visual information I noted above is a mere fluke or perhaps the intuition of the director for mise-en-scene persisted throughout.

Prisoners is indeed heavily plotted for such a short film (the runtime is 78 minutes). Nadja is to be married to Ahmed, then Ahmed falls into disfavour for refusing and is dismissed. Just then Firouz sends some of his men to hold the princess hostage so he can rescue her and appear the hero, but the plan goes wrong leaving Firouz thinking her killed both the Emir and Nadja. But Nadja is of course alive and with Ahmed. Nadja doesn't want to be with Ahmed and resists him, while he tries to protect her and seeks shelter within the Casbah--a citadel in Algiers within which was a society of criminals that couldn't get out but would also let no-one in. That covers the first thirty minutes. It's rare to see so much narrative packed within a short feature and that movie still maintain an elegant visual style. Generally such a balance is reserved for Val Lewton's productions.

It's curious how in Arabian-themed pictures, thieves are often romanticized. In crime pictures, bank robbers and mobsters tend to be romanticized; in Westerns it's outlaws. Each genre tends to have its criminals to offer as underdogs with an interior code of honour more reliable than the conventional and externally-imposed code within the bounds of the law. In this film, it is only the den of thieves that offers protection from the dangerous government of Firouz. Perhaps it is in the spirit of Jean Genet: crime is liberating, makes one's spirit free. Laws of any kind enslave one to an authority. The thieves are here represented without a hint of cynicism. They're the sort of people you'd like to have a drink with. It's a sign of the sort of innocence in storytelling that seems lost these days, but is wholly present in Prisoners.

I'm a fan of such small but glamourous Technicolor epics as Prisoners of the Casbah. It's a shame so many of them remain undistributed. Were it not for heroic networks like Turner Classic Movies and, in this case, Drive-in-Classics, these movies wouldn't be seen at all. The Adventures of Hajji Baba is another obscure, Arabian epic that deserves viewing. It was made a year later and is similar in its charms.

The Black Cat (1968)

The Black Cat is a love story. A vampire story. A ghost story. A samurai story. A family drama. A tragedy. A morality tale. It is emotionally and psychologically complex, but narrativistically simple.

A beautiful young woman and her mother-in-law are raped and murdered by a group of samurai. They sell their souls to 'the evil gods' in exchange for revenge: eternal blood-thirst for all samurai. The husband of the young woman got lucky and killed an enemy general, earning him instant promotion to samurai. The myriad conflicts that ensues you'll have to watch to see.

Japanese horror of the '60s had a fixation on several elements that are instantly recognizable: 1. Samurai. 2. Morality tales. 3. Raped women. 4. Vengeful, life-sucking ghosts. 5. Exquisite cinematography. I've only seen three myself, Kwaidan, Ugetsu (which isn't quite a horror film), and The Black Cat. While Kwaidan is the most beautiful visually, it achieves this with glacial pace. You wouldn't think short, anthologized stories could move so slowly. Ugetsu has the greatest story and the strongest impact with its morally complex vision. But The Black Cat is the best out and out horror film with the superior kinetics.

The Black Cat can only be described as choreographed. It's like a ballet with the celluloid as the stage. Every element of movement is controlled: the women somersaulting through the air, the fog in the wind, the samurai's blade. Disorienting jump-cuts accompany the highly mobile evil spirits whenever they're fighting, giving them a much more vital feel than the actually living people. Their vitality is their hatred. Where emotions like greed or ambition are self-serving, love and hate are purely other-directed. They expend all one's energy. In The Black Cat they are pitted against one another.

This is a gorgeous example of the fine era of Japanese fantastique cinema, to be watched alongside Onibaba, Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidan and even Ugetsu as an equal.

The Wolf Man (1941)

This review contains spoilers. It's recommended you watch the film first.

Having just watched Werewolf of London earlier this week, I have werewolves on the brain. Of all the classic monsters in horror movies, I don't think any is so tragic as the werewolf. For one, the werewolf is almost always the protagonist. Two, the werewolf is the victim of a curse: whatever he does as a werewolf is not something he can control. Three, the werewolf tends to end up dead at the end of the film. I noticed something else about werewolf stories. The protagonist is usually a somehow ostracized individual, someone who is insecure, not belonging. In Werewolf of London, Glendon is simply an unsocial man with a younger wife.

With The Wolf Man, it is a bit more incisive. Let's take a look. Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), a youngish man, is returning from America to his modern-day nobleman father's (Claude Rains) Welsh country estate to take the reins (no pun intended). He and his father have not had an easy relationship, but the death of the elder brother has occasioned a truce and they both promise to show one another more affection. Now he has to get to know the villagers in order to fit into his new position. At the same time gypsies, about as emblematic of outsider-dom as it gets, show up with the werewolf curse. Talbot contracts the curse from Bela (Lugosi). From there he is persecuted by the villagers with increasing ferocity until he's killed by his own father in a particularly brutal instance of infanticide.

So the anxiety for young Talbot to fit in is high. First of all he must fit in with his father, who had evidently been grooming the elder son to take over the estate. While Claude Rains plays Talbot Sr. for a kind, thoughtful man, his relationship with his son is still a bit uneasy; they're discovering new emotional vistas together. Talbot Sr. is an astronomer whose libraries and observatory attest to an erudite mind. Talbot Jr. on the other hand only works with his hands; he becomes increasingly frustrated with the werewolf legend because of his inability to find concrete application for it. He understands things hands-on; he's a physical person. This puts more of a gulf between he and his father. Talbot Jr. is clearly eager for his father's acceptance and while I think he more or less has it, he doesn't realize he does. He feels like a monster before his father. An early title for the film was Destiny; and in some sense infanticide feels like destiny here.

Perhaps Talbot would have felt more accepted by his father if he'd felt more accepted by his father's villagers, whom he knows his father to value very highly. But he becomes inextricably bound up with the gypsies. They arrive at the same time he does. They are fortune tellers; Talbot jokes that he's psychic to his love-interest Gwen. After killing one of the gypsies in wolf form, he's questioned by the local authorities and the people begin to gossip about him. This is when he assumes wolf form himself. Here's an exchange he has with the sympathetic Dr. Lloyd: Lloyd says, "It might be a case of mental suggestion, by mass hypnotism." Talbot replies, "You mean by that, he could be influenced by the people about him?" This exchange occurs immediately after Talbot could not bring himself to enter the church for Sunday mass; he was stared at by the whole congregation until he retreated. A particularly vocal woman, the mother of Bela Lugosi's sole victim in the village, makes clear to him that they think he's a monster. Might these people have made their own monster?

As with Werewolf of London, there is a problem with communication. Where Glendon just kept his problems to himself, Talbot tries to tell people and nobody will listen. The most sympathetic to him is Dr. Lloyd, but Talbot Sr. interferes whenever the doctor tries to help. The doctor plainly suggests letting him leave town; Talbot Sr. will hear none of it. He prevails upon his father to bind him to a chair, but it is too little too late and he is bludgeoned to death by his father a short time later.

The Wolf Man is thus a tragic story of an outsider; the protagonist is a good person who is being afflicted, made a monster against his will. His downfall is no fault of his own. The spiritual center of the film, the gypsy Maleva, puts it thus: "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end." And the oft-repeated rhyme, "Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright," is almost tailored to Talbot, certainly a man who fits the 'pure in heart' bill. Chaney exudes that 'lovable oaf' quality, a man who's probably never had a dark thought in his life. He's an oversensitive man caught in a situation that destroys him.

I was gripped by The Wolf Man from beginning to end. It's a rare film that gives me a hankering to re-watch right after the first viewing, but I do want to re-watch it. Every character in this film is likable. That's an incredible feat. Even the domineering father has my sympathy; he loved his son very much, but simply couldn't believe the wolf and his son could be the same being. Chaney's engaging performance as an alternatively charming, jaunty man and tormented, depressed outcast draws a lot of sympathy, which is what such a sensitive screenplay required to work. It's startling to see his enthusiasm crushed so soon, his joyous entrance full of optimism turned into this pessimistic tragedy, "so tears run to a predestined end."