argento dissertation by Keith Hennessey Brown

deep red

A sense of Argento's confidence is immediately evident from deep red's opening sequence, not so much from the pronouncement that this is "A film by Dario Argento" which merely reiterates an auteurist statement of intent evident since The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, as from the way it unfolds1: After 20 seconds Goblin's compulsive bass driven theme and the stark white on black procession of credits are interrupted by a enigmatic vignette, playing out to a child's lullaby styled singing2.

From a low angle we see a Christmastime interior complete with decorated tree and a shadow play of one figure stabbing another. A child's legs emerge into the foreground and a bloody knife drops into view. Sound and image fade and the main theme resumes as the remainder of the credits play. What we have, then, is a classic giallo take on the quasiFreudian 'primal scene', presented differently. It is not so much the enigmas posed who attacked whom? is the child murderer or witness? nor the mise en scène, neither being all that dissimilar from the norm (though the influence of Argento's previous gialli makes a pre/post Argento distinction near impossible to draw), as the temporal positioning. Is the sequence important, as its interruption of the credits attests? Or is disposable, given that in the latecomers would miss it? (Regarding the Argento-Hitchcock relationship we can thus also note the difference from the latter's Psycho (1960) whereby latecomers were to be refused admission.)

The immediate post credits sequence is equally inscrutable: A jazz combo is playing, the camera arcing round and craning above them to immediately showcase the sheer extravagance of Argento's mise en scène, with innumerable setups and movements that perform no obvious function, existing more as displays of technique in itself. The musicians stop as the pianist admonishes his colleagues. Their playing is "Too good, maybe a little too clean. Yes, too precise, too formal;" it needs to be more "trashy". In other words, then, the filmmaker is problematising his own practices, drawing our attention to the dominant and conflicting aesthetics and concerns arthouse and auteur versus commercial mainstream and formula cinema with which his film will engage. If reflexivity of this sort has increasingly become a commonplace in 'post-modern' popular cinema, as the likes of the Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's Scream trilogy (19971999) attest, it must be remembered that in the mid1970s it was much less prevalent, being most frequently exhibited in films like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (both 1974) and High Anxiety3 (1978) that were comedic, parodic and 'not meant to be taken too seriously'.

Our sense that deep red is a more overtly modernist work is enhanced by the knowledge that, extradiegetically, we have just been introduced to the film's star, David Hemmings, who necessarily carries with him relevant intertextual baggage through his role in Antonioni's Blow Up (1966). These associations resonate with Argento's foregrounding of formal issues and, by extension, questions of the ontological and epistemological status of photographic and cinematic images. Those familiar with Argento's previous gialli will also surmise that Hemmings is another of Argento's artistic/creative protagonists, following the writer of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the rock drummer of Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This can likewise be read as another self-referential, authorial element rather than a genre one. Mario Bava, for instance, frequently exhibited a preference for the rich and privileged whose venal, grasping natures he would then expose in ways politically minded critics might well appreciate for their quasiSirkian/subBrechtian ironies.

As we move in on Hemmings the sound fades, followed by a cut while continuing the forward movement as the camera eye/I (in Vertovian terms) or pure scopophiliac perception (in a more Laura Mulvey influenced/psychoanalytic formulation) passes a sign announcing a parapsychology conference and glides through and past a pair of deep red curtains the colour symbolism is obvious, the drapes themselves identifiable as a recurrent Argento motif to take up position in a red furnished hall. On stage Professor Giordani is introducing the psychic Helga Ullmann:

Giordani: Butterflies, termites and zebras. All these animals and many others use telepathy to transmit orders and to relay information... This is telepathy, a faculty which comes naturally to the newborn in the early stages of life but which they generally lose as they acquire the means of verbal communication. On the other hand certain rare individuals, for reasons yet unknown to us, do not lose this inborn faculty. One such is Mrs Helga Ullmann from Lithuania... This lady has extraordinary powers of telepathy and a natural disposition for paranormal phenomena.

Helga Ullmann: I would like to point out immediately that my faculties have nothing whatsoever to do with magic, the esoteric or foretelling the future. I can see things the very moment they occur nothing of what is to come. I can see thoughts the very instant they are formed, and even much later if the thoughts are very strong, where they linger about the room like cobwebs.

These speeches serve to (re)introduce two recurring Argento themes: the importance of language and the frequent intermingling and indivisibility of scientific/rational and magical/supernatural approaches to the life world. While language is necessarily an important aspect of many gialli through their application of psychoanalysis in terms of the Freudian 'return of the repressed', as in the dreams whose meanings must be deciphered in Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Lucio Fulci, 1971) or the hysterical female who needs reintegrating into the Lacanian 'symbolic order', as with All the Colours of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972), there nevertheless seems something distinctive and excessive about the preponderance of writers, typewriters, books and similar metaphors and metonyms within Argento's oeuvre over and above these common genre concerns.

deep red's reluctance to distinguish between science and magic after Arthur C. Clarke's well-worn dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" perhaps is, meanwhile, prefigured by Four Flies on Grey Velvet, where the titular clue that leads to the unmasking of the killer is accomplished through the use of a experimental camera that can captures the image supposedly imprinted on the retina at the moment of death; a piece of Victorian era weird science4 that tellingly resonates with notions of the eyes as window to the soul and the realist theorist's assertions as to the especial power of photography to reveal the essence/aura/emanations of natural phenomena5.

Even if this ambivalence was not necessarily unique to Argento's gialli, the fluidity of the filone always affording filmmakers the opportunity to give it supernatural and other inflections6, it can nevertheless be seen as a distinguishing element of his filmmaking at this time. (In Trauma a similar séance is shown to be fake; the 'revelation' that a murderer is present among the participants a setup that enables the medium herself to inaugurate a campaign of murder.) Thus, the force that overwhelms Helga comes across as unanticipated and inexplicable, more a case of supernatural possession7 than psychoanalytically derived notions of language speaking 'through' the human subject:

There is something. Someone... Something strange and sharp, like the prick of a thorn... I can feel death in this room. I feel a presence. A twisted mind sending me thoughts. Perverted, murderous thoughts... [Points into audience] You have killed and you will kill again. There's a child singing in that house. Death. Blood. All blood. [Cries out again, speaking in another voice]... We must hide everything, everything in the house back the way it was. No one must know, no one, no one! Forget it, forever, forever!

Likewise, it is difficult to see how Helga's prophesy that the killer will "kill again" fits psychoanalytically with her previous statement that she cannot predict the future can we really accept that it is a case of unconsciously willing her own death, encouraging the killer?

As this is going on Argento cuts back and forth to the audience's reactions, providing a multiplicity of perspectives on the event. Neutral, unmotivated shots are then replaced by that of a handheld point of view shot as someone in the audience gets up and leaves, marking the first clear appearance here of one of the defining traits of gialli in general the subjective shot conventionally understood as encouraging a somewhat dubious spectator identification with the killer8, with this being confirmed as, following a couple of inserts of the washroom sink that function as intertexual reference to Psycho and/or Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) and to introduce another recurrent authorial and generic motif, that of the eye9, we/the figure don the black gloves comprising part of the fetish uniform10 of the giallo killer11.

Some time later, back in the now empty hall, Helga tells Giordani that she will produce a report on her experiences. Our position, meanwhile, is that of a hidden voyeur. A chill draft sweeps through the hall, highlighting another recurrent Argento motif, that of elemental and primal forces albeit one that works better here than hitherto on account of the emergent supernatural inflection. (How many otherwise 'realistic' films have we all seen where the weather nevertheless expresses the interior states of the characters with rain, storms and sunshine occurring as if on cue?)

The sense of deep red as a transitional work in which Argento is reconfiguring the giallo to his own distinctive ends is enhanced by the next sequence as, coupled with Goblin's theme music the camera glides above a procession of objects a woollen doll with pins stuck in it like a voodoo dummy; a child's drawing showing one figure stabbing reminiscent of the credits sequence; a scarlet devil figurine etc. magnifying them in the manner of hyperrealist art such that our sense of scale is momentarily lost until a hand comes into view to toy with some ('lost') marbles before the parade of objects ends ominously upon two knives. The music continues as we cut to another extreme close-up, with an eye being made up in a manner, as McDonagh says12, more akin to military camouflage than feminine beautification.

The whole sequence is, one would venture, better experienced than synopsised, clarifying as it does the fundamentally different way Argento is approaching things here: "deep red wasn't the traditional thriller. There was something in it that was very strong and very new... a new way of using the camera to present the facts... the film was a nightmare so all the facts were exaggerated."13 The sequence is also noteworthy for restating the importance of Goblin's scoring to Argento's developing vision, with music on an equal footing to image: While Ennio Morricone's scores for the film Animal Trilogy were effective their function was supplementing the visuals.

Paradoxically, however, it is not that Argento ever really neglected the aural component of his work previously, more that the visuals tend to dominate discussion. A perfect illustration of this comes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: Despite Sam Dalmas's obsessive attempts to solve the enigma of a painting "somehow mixed up in all this" the key to the mystery finally comes through his friend Carlo's almost incidental identification of a strange sound heard on a phone call as that of the titular bird and here one might note in passing the equally cryptic nature of many of Argento's titles the only specimen of which in Italy is located in the zoo near the killer's apartment14.

We rejoin Helga Ullmann on the telephone one of the iconic giallo props/technologies since its overt referencing in The Telephone segment of Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963) onwards as the again unmotivated rovings of Argento's camera picks out the extravagant décor and design of her apartment, including a long line of paintings in the hall and a stylised menorah design on the wall15, to establish a sense of foreboding even before the strains of the singing child signal to us, if not Helga, that the murderer is approaching. Helga goes to answer the doorbell but recoils from a psychic shock. The door crashes open as Goblin's music kicks in again and a black gloved hatchet wielding arm swings down, inaugurating the first of the film's set piece murders. The bloody spectacle presents a quick fire montage of images, seen from a multiplicity of perspectives/subject positions the killer's, the victim's and nobody's that deny any simple gendered pairs of oppositions.

The roles of victim and victimiser are not consistently and systematically gendered within Argento's cinema. His aggressors are often female, as is the case here and in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Phenomena and Trauma, whilst the victim is equally likely to be male, as will be confirmed later when Giordani is also murdered. The gaze, then, is hardly unequivocally a male one. Though we could undoubtedly perform some intellectual and theoretical gymnastics to present such sequences as demonstrating the director's fear of and hostility towards women in one way or another especially given that by often quoting his hero Poe's dictum that "the death of a beautiful woman is a beautiful thing" he seems almost to invite such responses at times noting the invariably 'vaginal' qualities of the wounds inflicted the attacker's customarily phallic, penetrative, sexualised weaponry, a better interpretation would seem to be to recognise that a more complex and nuanced understanding of the vicissitudes of filmic identification is required, more akin to that of Carol J. Clover and Linda Willliams than Mulvey16.

The formal accomplishments of the set piece are, however, unquestionable. They might, by way of Mario Bava and Sergio Leone's influences, be positioned between Hitchcock's Psycho and Frenzy (1972) murders, combining something approaching the technique of the first film with the relative explicitness of the second. This emphasis on technique is, in turn, something that distinguishes Argento's handling of set pieces17 from most of his counterparts, showing an awareness of montage principles largely alien to, for instance, Lucio Fulci's penchant for relatively static setups and staging that placed greater emphasis upon showcasing the Grand Guignol effects as the main 'attraction'18. An abrupt cut then disrupts chronology more the arthouse strategy and heightens tension more the generic requirement as we emerge into an expansive piazza where the pianist, Marc Daly, encounters his drunken friend Carlo. As the men talk an element of social commentary emerges, Carlo seeking to elucidate the difference between himself, the "proletarian of the keyboard" playing for money in a bar and his "bourgeois" friend teaching at the conservatory.

Though one would not wish to say that Argento was a political filmmaker per se the remarks nevertheless seems broadly representative of his sensibilities whilst also functioning as another instance of excess, hardly necessary in functional narrative terms19. There is a scream, but its source cannot be placed. Then the shock of the moment amplified by a crash zoom out from the men to a position high above Helga crashes through her apartment window, re-establishing our spatial and temporal relationships and drawing attention once more to Argento's disruptive strategies. As Goblin's music reasserts itself Daly races to the scene. Arriving, he cautiously advances along Helga's hallway past the ranks of paintings. For the briefest of instants and positioned to the periphery of the screen, the face of the killer, the as yet unidentified Martha, Carlo's mother, is visible in a mirror along with the Munchian faces of the painting opposite. But, misreading the image, Daly continues on his way to find Helga impaled on the glass. As he gingerly lifts the body down he glimpses a figure in a dark trench coat and hat other parts of the classic giallo killer's ensemble crossing the piazza parallel to his inebriated friend.

If we think here merely of the combination of painting and mirror Daly's misreading of the scene is all but inevitable: The former suggests the formalist metaphor for the cinema screen as a frame around the world, implying the creative intervention of the human agent over the mechanistic reproduction of an external reality. The latter, as part of the later linguistic turn, emphasises that any recognition is always simultaneously misrecognition, distortion and/or ideological effect in the classic Lacanian and Althusserian senses (We might also note that a third prevalent metaphor for cinema, the documentarian/realist 'window on the world' is also present in the sequence, albeit in a nugatory way, with Helga Ullmann's body crashing through as if to shatter the realist illusion.20)

While this scenario and its obvious precursor in the gallery sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are not uniquely Argento's, being predated by sequences in for example The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1967), they can nevertheless be distinguished somewhat in terms of formal rigour and, to a lesser extent, gender aspect: Whereas Argento's male protagonists misread gender signals to assume that the aggressor and killer must be male, the naïve female protagonist of Bava's film operates under the prejudice that any Italian male is a potential threat21. While Questi's film conceals the murder that is not one from audience and characters, Argento is more willing to show his hand.

Yet his increased self-confidence is demonstrated by one vital difference from his debut: There he had actively misdirected the spectator at the crucial moment, presenting a shot that would have shown the knife to be in Monica Ranieri's hand from the reverse angle, breaking the '180 degree rule' and 'line of action' to conceal that she was the aggressor and not the victim. deep red's sleight-of-hand is altogether subtler, relying on framing and patterns of perception: Viewing the film for the first time and not knowing who Martha is remembering that she was not among the faces glimpsed at the conference and has not yet been introduced to us officially we are extremely unlikely to notice. (In passing we may also note that Argento's approach again perhaps indicates something of a difference from Hitchcock, or at least the Hitchcock of the false flashback22 of Stage Fright (1950) and the misleading voiceovers and voice offs from Mrs Bates within Psycho.)

The police arrive to question Daly, who was Ullmann's neighbour, although their ineffectuality is evident from the way Inspector Calcabrini is more interested in his sandwich23. Combined with Daly's certainty under questioning that some crucial detail of the scene is eluding him, it is evident that the amateur rather than the authorities will undertake investigation, showcasing general tendency of the genre, allying it this time with Hitchcock (whose sentiments that the police are both boring and frightening led to his famous 'double pursuit' narrative structure) and some film noir, but against the krimi, where these propensities tended to be reversed24. Yet, as another indicator that the giallo needs to be understood as an ongoing discourse than a reified product, we might also here note how certain broadly contemporaneous entries like What Have They Done to Your Daughters (Massimo Dallamano, 1974) and The Pyjama Girl Case25 (Flavio Mogherini, 1978) placed more emphasis on police procedural elements as the polizia cycle became more prominent. In Argento's case, meanwhile, we can note how his most recent three gialli feature police protagonists and an emphasis on realistic detective work that may come as a surprise to the viewer familiar only with our primary subjects of discussion here.

Amid Calcabrini's musings that playing the piano is neither a 'real' nor 'masculine' job (or, perhaps, an equivalence between them) we learn that Daly is a foreigner resident in Italy. This is significant in connecting deep red back to discourses of tourism, travel and the 1960s vogue for Italian culture and 'La Dolce Vita' identified by Needham above and earlier referenced by Argento within The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But, whereas Frank Burke (2001) has read his debut as offering a critique of Colonialist attitudes towards the Other for the ways they engender violence26, the presence of these themes here seems more about convention and convenience, affording a way of explaining Hemmings qua iconic star rather than Daly qua character in a rare instance of deep red being less saturated with interpretive possibilities than its predecessors.

Next the journalist Gianna Brazzi arrives seeking a scoop. She was at the conference that afternoon, thereby establishing the possibility although the knowledgeable giallo viewer would likely take it as too obvious that she could be the killer, and photographs Daly. Here Argento frames Hemmings as if through the camera, a variant on a device previously deployed in the opening of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The function of the two sequences is, however, somewhat different: There it served as an immediate signal that the image was going to be problematised. Here, with this already well-established, the device foreshadows the gender dynamics of Marc and Gianna's relationship.

After "four hours" at the police station, elided by Argento as another indication of that his interests are elsewhere, Daly heads home and quizzes Carlo, who is still in the piazza and still drinking:

Daly: Did you see a man coming towards the fountain?

Carlo: A man?

Daly: Yeah, a man in a brown raincoat... He may have been the murderer. I dunno.

Carlo: Yeah, yeah, for a second. From the back.

Crucial here, then, is Daly's misidentification of the suspect as male. The path of his investigations is further determined by Carlo's confirmation that the painting his friend saw must be important, setting the stage for a classic (psycho)analytical detective narrative27:

Daly: There's something else that's funny you know. It's very strange and I don't know if it's true or not, but when I went into her apartment at first I thought I saw a painting and then a few minutes later it was gone. Now how could that be?

Carlo: [Mumbling] Maybe the painting was made to disappear because it represented something important.

Daly: Sorry? What?

Carlo: [Yells] Something important!

Daly: No, no, I don't think so. If I remember well, it was... it was some sort of composition of faces. Something very unusual.

Carlo: Look, maybe you've seen something so important you can't realise it.

The difference, however, is that whereas most gialli would now present us with to make another, if admittedly somewhat facile and (posthoc) reference to Antonioni 'The Investigation of a Woman', the primary emphasis here soon emerges as Daly himself, thereby reconfiguring a pattern previously established in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet with their doppelganger like pairings of Sam Dalmas and Monica Ranieri and Roberto and Nina Tobias respectively. For, as Daly's light suit and dark shirt and Carlo's dark suit and white shirt and the juxtaposition of the two friends on opposite edges of the widescreen space (a touristic statue dominates the centre) indicates, here it is Marcus and Carlo who represent one another's mirror images/doubles28.

Next Daly and Gianna meet up at Helga's funeral, where the reporter suggests they pool resources as an element of His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) style screwball comedy quickly emerges:

Daly: Ah yes, by the way I wanted to thank you. [He shows her the newspaper with his picture accompanying her story] It's always nice to let the murderer know who you are.

Gianna: [Smiles] That's okay. Look, you may not believe me, but I don't have a steady boyfriend right now.

Daly: Me neither.

Gianna: Ah, I should hope not!

Daly: I meant a girlfriend.

Gianna: Ah, that's why you're always so jumpy!

Daly: Me jumpy? Oh please! I am not jumpy at all!

Gianna: Yeah right! And stop fidgeting! You're always scratching, your hands are shaking. Tell me, what's going on?

Daly: How many times must I tell you that I'm an artist? In case you're forgotten, we artists are very sensitive people, is that clear? We don't have elephant hide like you journalists! [playfully punches her on the arm]

Gianna: Elephant hide? I'm told I have very delicate skin.

To some extent this signals another departure from Argento's previous gialli, where comic relief tended to come through quirky supporting characters such as the calculatedly eccentric, cat eating painter Berto Consalvi of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage ("I'm going through a mystical phase right now… Why? Because I feel mystical!"). It can also be taken as another indicator of excess who else would have considered mixing in screwball comedy with grisly thriller?29 Likewise, while readable as a throwaway joke, Daly's remark about a boyfriend is again revealing as classic Freudian Para praxis, once more highlighting the centrality of issues of language, meaning and gender/sexuality within Argento's filmic universe. The comedy continues as the couple drive back in Gianna's car, a two-seater supermini type that conspires against Daly's masculine dignity and provides ironic commentary on a piece of iconic Italian design as first his seat falls down and then the door jams.

Having visited Giordani to discuss the case, the mise en scène here again highly stylised as the 'performers' actually take to the stage, Daly and Gianna return to his apartment. Gianna asks why Daly is a pianist, leading to the prosaic answer of liking music and an (over) interpretive one "my psychiatrist would say that it's because I hated my father... when I bash the keys I'm really bashing his teeth in" that serves to highlight Argento's awareness of a Freud "always present in [his] work"30 and the corresponding problems this may give the overzealous psychoanalytically inclined critic. Daly responds by asking Gianna about her work, leading to another revealing exchange that situates the film firmly in the context of early1970s feminism:

Daly: What about you? Why did you decide to become a journalist?

Gianna: Because I like working. I believe that a woman's got to be independent.

Daly: Don't start with me about all that woman stuff. It is a fundamental fact that men are different from women. Women are weaker, well they're gentler.

Gianna: Weaker! Gentler! [Laughs, sits down at table ready to arm wrestle]

Daly: What on earth are you doing?

Gianna: Indian wrestling... Then we'll see who's the weaker.

Daly: Don't be ridiculous.

Gianna: Are you backing out?!

Needless to say, Daly loses the arm wrestling contest fair and square, prompting him to go in the huff and declare he will carry out the investigation alone. This suits Gianni fine. She will do the same and they will see who "comes out on top" in round two of their 'war of the sexes'.

Daly thus goes to visit Carlo, whom his mother says is absent. For some reason Martha consistently misidentifies Daly as an engineer. That she is the killer is again unlikely to cross the viewer's mind unless they schooled in the genre, trained to dismiss obvious suspects like Gianna in favour of unlikely candidates, or in what amounts to a director led formulation of the same thing have previously seen the The Bird with the Crystal Plumage31. (Those searching for auteurist keys to the Argento film might meanwhile note the that in Inferno protagonist Mark Elliot meets the witch Mater Tenebrarum in the guise of a nurse who repeatedly thinks he's a toxicologist rather than a musicologist.)

Escaping Martha's (s)mothering attentions, Daly catches up with his friend at Ricci's apartment, only to be surprised by the effeminate man32 who answers the door. He thus learns that Carlo is homosexual one hesitates to use the appellation gay to refer to this tormented, self-destructive alcoholic, whose orientation would ultimately seem the consequence of his childhood trauma and insane "castrating" mother33.

But if this representation thus cannot be said to be a particularly 'positive' one that would garner the approval of a Vito Russo (1981), we can nevertheless suggest that Argento long allowed for more significant and nuanced homosexual presences within his gialli than were generally evident elsewhere, where gay coded characters tended be used as comic relief and/or a way of generating the requisite atmosphere of "perversity"34 and lesbians as sexual titillation for the male spectator. While Argento can also be guilty here35, his general interest in gender issues means that he often presents homosexual characters with surprising complexity and empathy. Besides Carlo surely more sinned against than sinning, ultimately we might cite Four Flies on Grey Velvet's private investigator Gianni Arrosio, with his witty putdowns "You're thinking this fairy is going to jump on a chair and scream bloody murder if he sees a mouse. Oh you heterosexuals!" and general likeability, especially as against a weak, neurotic 'hero' whose main motive is to conceal the murder he believes himself to have committed.

Yet Carlo's bloody demise here, along with the fact that neither Arrosio36 nor the lesbian couples of the later Tenebrae and Trauma make it to the end credits, would hardly please Russo, who would doubtless interpret them as yet more instances of the gay = dead or diseased syllogism and a homophobic filmmaker at work. Against this we can only suggest the need for a more thoroughgoing examination of Argento's developing representations of homosexual characters than we have room for here, along with the somewhat simplistic nature of Russo's formulations compared with the more nuanced approaches favoured by contemporary queer theory.

Two further points might be noted: First, that art cinema has long been somewhat more open to homosexual characters and themes than the commercial mainstream, thus illustrating once more Argento's distinctive position at the intersection of the two, and, second, that his portrayals here are no worse than Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945), Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970)37, to cite three relevant examples culled from Italian art cinema. As Marcus and Carlo head towards the Blue Bar modelled by production designer Guiseppe Bassan on Edward Hopper's painting 'Nighthawks' in another of the film's artistic references the Italian tries to surreptitiously warn his friend off further investigations, their conversation also serving to indicate Marcus's growing obsession and, reflexively, several of Argento's parallel obsessions:

Carlo: Why did you come looking for me?

Daly: I wanted to ask you something. You remember the other night, the night of the murder? Well, I said I thought I'd seen a painting but a few minutes later it was no longer there. You remember?

Carlo: Yeah...

Daly: You said that maybe the painting represented something important. You said a lot of things about memory and truth a lot of things I didn't really understand at the time.

Carlo: I remember but for god's sake don't ask me now what point I was trying to get across... Hey, listen to me why don't you just pack up and clear out? What are you doing messing around with this business anyway? Can't you see the guy's crazy! Maniac anyone who would commit a crime like that.

Daly: I'm just fascinated by the whole thing in a morbid kind of way. But, but, just listen to me that painting was definitely there. I did not invent that. And maybe that's something important, so now it's become a kind of challenge to my memory. A challenge to myself...

Carlo: A challenge. I always lose...

Daly: But then I'm not you...

Carlo: I mean if I ever got the bug to do what you're trying to, I'd end up getting murdered myself...

Inside, they play a duet on the piano, reinforcing the sense admittedly part denied by the last few lines above that they are in some way each others' doubles, while, in another piece of vague socio-political commentary, the barman remarks that the manager better not find out about Daly or the unreliable Carlo will be out of a job.

Her son's warnings having going unheeded, Martha pays Daly a visit while he is busy composing. Argento again defamiliarises objects through massive close-ups, showing the mechanisms of the piano and panning along the score Daly is working on, effectively visualising sound in a quasisynaesthetic manner that perhaps presages elements of Suspiria. Engrossed in his work, he fails to notice the plaster accumulating on the piano top, only recognising the presence when he hears the children's song38. Daly arms himself with a nearby statuette (the keen eyed viewer may note that it is of a bird's head, perhaps alluding to Argento's debut) and manages to close the door and alert Gianna, who conveniently telephones at that moment, the shock being heightened by the subjectively amplified sound of the ring, the suddenness of the cut and the canted framing. Martha departs, but not before warning in a unrecognizable croaking voice that she can kill Daly anytime she wants.

Daly buys a record containing the child's singing piece and shares his discovery with Giordani, the scene opening with another 'familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle' and semi visualisation of sound in the form of the record player armature. Giordani speculates that the song is psychologically significant via a typical piece of psychoanalysis, giallo style: This little song may very well be the leitmotif of the crime. You see we are starting from what I presume to be a correct supposition: The murderer is a schizophrenic paranoid. Anyone who kills in this manner surely does so in a state of temporary madness… in everyday life this person could appear normal, as normal as you or I or anyone else and when he kills he must recreate the specific conditions which will trigger the release of all his pent-up feelings. A particular time of day, a particular day of the week, even clothing. Something that recreates the same images that, in the past, were the occasional frame of his provoking trauma.
Again, then, Daly's investigations and our own assumptions are being led in a particular direction with the shift from the gender neutral 'this person' to the specifically masculine 'he'. Meanwhile Giordani's associate Bardi remarks less theoretically, as he says that it reminds him of something about the "house of the singing child" he read in a book about modern legends.

Daly visits the library and tracks down the relevant volume, from which he takes a picture39 as a cut to a long shot and the rise of the wind on the audio track suggest he is being observed. He telephones Gianna to get her help in locating the book's author, Amanda Righetti, but the noisiness of the café and newsroom conspires against successful communication.

That Daly was indeed under observation and another murder set piece is imminent are confirmed with another ritualised, fetished procession of everyday objects, this time with the camera rotating round for still more excessive effect, which is then rapidly intercut with the exterior of Righetti's villa in the countryside outside town. Martha torments her victim then moves in for the kill, drowning the woman in the bath in a bath of boiling water (prefigured perhaps by Daly's almost being scalded by the coffee machine moments earlier), with ocular motifs again present as she opens one seemingly eye whilst hiding in a closet an idea that makes little sense but allows for a powerful real or virtualisation of the Lacanian mal occhio or "evil eye" and a close-up of the eyelike tape player spools. The dying Righetti manages, however, to leave a clue written on the wall in the steam.

Daly arrives too late and meets with Giordani - an insert of two dogs fighting as they talk highlights the pervasive sense of unease - who pays the house a visit, the police having finished their investigations with a characteristic lack of effect. Noticing that Righetti appeared to be pointing at something Giordani has a moment of inspiration and by filling the room full of steam the combination is, of course, one of fire/heat, water and air imagery learns the murderer's identity. But Argento declines to inform us, the generic need to maintain mystery remaining paramount.

Meanwhile, Daly has found the house in the photograph. It is rumoured to be cursed, the last resident, a German writer, dying in a mysterious fall. The caretaker's young daughter Olga evinces a disturbing sadistic streak, sticking a pin through an unfortunate lizard - a minor, if perhaps too self-consciously auteurist motif that also appears without particular significance within Inferno, Opera and Trauma.

Daly searches the abandoned dwelling, complete with a flooded basement that seems in retrospect to prefigure one in Inferno, Goblin's insistent and powerful music temporarily dominant and crucial to the overall impact of the longer than strictly speaking necessary from a narrative perspective sequence. Eventually, the music reaching another crescendo, Daly finds a plastered over mural of the primal scene from the opening credits, rendered in a childish, grotesque manner identical to the sketch glimpsed among the murderer's fetishised possessions. With night falling the caretaker returns, compelling Daly to leave the "haunted house".

Meanwhile the preternaturally aware Martha moves to take care of Giordani. Another set piece murder thereby ensues, notable for the essentially illogical but unquestionably striking use of a mechanical doll to distract and unnerve Giordani and ironic coda delivered to Marcus's earlier self-analysis as Giordani has his mouth repeatedly smashed into the furniture; an instance of oral trauma that would recur with variation in Tenebrae, where the humiliation of the youthful protagonist as he is orally violated by an older woman's red stiletto heel provides the impetus to his first murder, and Sleepless, where the young murderer disposes of his friend's mother by repeatedly ramming an oboe into her mouth. (The phallic properties of the two weapons and attacks are almost too obvious to be worth mentioning.)

Re-examining the photo of the house Daly realises one of the windows has since been concealed, a clue that was staring him in the face in the manner of Poe's The Purloined Letter40. He leaves a note for Gianna and returns to discover the room behind the mural, with the Christmas tree still standing along with the mummified body of Martha's husband. Then he is knocked unconscious by a blow from behind41.

Daly comes to with Gianna above him, her uncharacteristic silence and the mise en scène momentarily implying she could indeed be the murderer until she explains how she dragged Daly out of the now blazing building, marking the initial appearance of another characteristic Argento image, with conflagrations providing the climaxes to Suspiria and Inferno and a coup de théâtre in Opera, while Tenebrae opens with a black gloved hand tearing up and burning its titular book42.

It looks as if the evidence has been destroyed, raising the possibility of a Blow Up style ending. When, however, the pair return to the caretakers' to call for help Daly is shocked to see a drawing identical to the mural. Frantically he asks Olga where she saw the original, learning that it is in the archives of her school, the Leonardo da Vinci Academy. Daly and Gianna race to the scene, with a succession of attention grabbing cuts and self-conscious camera movements heightening suspense even before Gianna goes off to investigate a noise and telephone the police. Daly discovers the artist's identity - Carlo - and goes in search of Gianna, whom he finds has been stabbed by the madman, who now advances on his friend:

Daly: Well, so now what are you going to do?

Carlo: [Breaking down and fighting to hold back tears] Kill you. I'm sorry because I like you. But I have to kill you. I told you to stay out of it. Pack up and clear out, I said. Why, why didn't you listen to me?! Don't you realise it's all your fault. You're just so damned stubborn If you hadn't meddled, stuck your damn nose in it all...

Compromised by remorse and, we might suggest, his sexual orientation he is even less of 'a man' than Daly Carlo shoots wide. Calcabrini and his men arrive, their ineptitude again confirmed by their inability to capture Carlo, who flees into the darkness. The film's nastiest and most gratuitous set piece death sequence then ensues, the kind that causes some commentators to have difficulties with Argento's work: A passing truck sideswipes Carlo, catches him by a trailing hook and drags him screaming through the streets. The vehicle then takes a corner sharply, swinging the man into a pole and leaving him lying prone in the middle of the road for an oncoming car to drive over his head. (Psychoanalytically we could also, of course, emphasise the phallic qualities of the penetrative hook and erect, rigid pole.)

With Gianna taken to the hospital, a numbed Daly heads home. Reaching the piazza he belatedly realises Carlo could not have been the killer. His friend was, as a flashback cued into by a dramatic near 360degree pan reminds us, present at the time. Daly thus revisits the murder scene once more, Argento repeating the tracks along the paintings until Daly pauses as he reaches the mirror. The missing detail is finally recalled, the revelation confirmed by an alternative flashback complete with a zoom that picks out Martha, who blinks and turns slightly.

Argento now cuts back, revealing that the assassin, clad in their familiar costume, is also present. Martha throws off her hat and we, if not Daly, finally see the primal scene that opened the film: About to be committed to an institution, Martha plunged a knife into her husband's back. The dying man fell before the young Carlo, pulled the blade out and dropped it at the boy's feet.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle drops into place, putting us in a position to comment on one of Argento's most distinctive contributions to the ongoing discourse of giallo cinema, namely his treatment of costume. The characteristic combination of a dark raincoat, hat and, especially, gloves was introduced by Bava in Blood and Black Lace. Within that film, set around a couture house that serves as a front for drugs dealing and sundry other nefarious activities, the costume served as both fashion statement and disguise: By wearing the same styles as everyone else the killer was able to hide his or - as also proves to be the case, as there are in fact two killers in a pre Argento instance of gender ambiguity and reversal of expectation - her identity43.

By the time of Argento's debut, meanwhile, the costume was conventionalized and fetishised as that of the giallo killer. Thus the insane Monica Ranieri dons the ensemble to become her attacker in a hysterical case of misidentification. That her appearance also serves as a kind of disguise, confusing Sam Dalmas into looking for a male suspect is secondary. (The fetishisation of the costume meanwhile to the extent that fetishisation is understood psychoanalytically as a masculine trait that functions as a source of reassurance against castration anxieties might therefore be explicated as relevant in that, by misidentifying with her assailant Monica is also misidentifying with a masculine subject position such that she qua he, as a bearer of the phallic knife, might now be symbolically castrated.) Here, pure conventionality comes to the fore. Martha was, after all, the initial aggressor and the costume conspicuously absent from the Christmastime scene, even if it has also functioned to confound Daly's gendered perceptions.

With the costume and, especially, the black gloves recurring in similar configurations in Argento's most of Argento's later gialli such as Tenebrae and Trauma, its conscious absence from The Stendhal Syndrome is noteworthy. There the identity of the rapist murderer a hyphenate villain not hitherto seen in the director's cinema and thereby again arguably representative of a different, more realistic sensibility of late is effectively known from the outset and, with fashion having moved on in the 30plus years since Bava's film the now traditional costume would have been conspicuous rather than anonymising.

Martha attacks Daly, her hatchet biting deep into his shoulder. He manages to exit the apartment and make it to the stairwell. As Daly fends Martha off once more her angular (and hence phallic?) pendant gets caught in the grille of the lift. Daly hits the button, with the descending lift pulling the chain around Martha's neck ever tighter and decapitating her the castrating, phallic mother herself symbolically castrated, perhaps, or the ironic prospect that Freud's oft cited "to decapitate = to castrate" formulation might also sometimes be overruled by its "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" counterpart, depending on how one wants to slant the analysis. A dazed Daly stands up and gazes at his reflection in a pool of Martha's blood, the image of the shattered narcissus frozen as the credits roll.

If, then, the commercial requirement for a concrete resolution means that ultimately Argento's film could not replicate Blow Up's still more devastating conclusion whereby Thomas is overwhelmed by the (non) mystery and comes to doubt Doubting Thomas, if we wanted to put another mythical slant on it in preparation for Suspiria the validity of his own perceptions, as epitomised by the closing images of a mimed tennis game where we can nevertheless hear the invisible racket make contact with the invisible ball, the conclusion here still evinces considerable ambiguity. Daly's investigations have had the effect of profoundly questioning his comfortable bourgeois worldview, particularly his assumptions around gender and sexuality.

Paralleling this, the process of making deep red can be seen as having provided Argento with a way through the impasse that had confronted him on his previous three films, the concept of formal excess providing one way in which the artistic/sui generis and popular/filone elements in his practice could be if not necessarily reconciled some might argue that the collision of low and high simply makes Argento into a meretricious middlebrow sort of filmmaker at least productively explored. For the giallo, meanwhile, Argento provided a newfound sense of respectability and seriousness; a sense that that at their best they might offer something beyond (arguably artificial) generic limitations. But, with Argento temporarily leaving behind the form for his next two excursions into a more overt horror/fantasy cinema, it was left for other filmmakers to carry the torch for the time being44.

It is to suspiria that we now turn.

[index][suspiria][footnotes]

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