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.