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.

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.