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.