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.