Femininomena

Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.

Here is Argento on Suspiria (the original Suspiria, not the compromised second draft): “In Suspiria I wasn’t primarily interested in the theme of motherhood but, rather, in women’s lives. In fact, if you want to give a deeper reading of the film, it can be seen as a vaguely lesbian story; where lesbianism has a certain importance, or, more precisely, where the relationships between women are sometimes of a lesbian nature and are characterised by power struggles.” (My best friend read a version of this quote where that last part goes “a world where the relationships between women” etc. and just said “so, any world with women in it.”) And here he is on Phenomena: “When I was thinking of Phenomena, I imagined that between 1940 and 1945 there had been a very serious incident, the war, and that the Nazis had won. After thirty-forty years, the people had wiped this dramatic event from their memories and didn't talk about it anymore. In reality though, the Nazis won the war, and life therefore has a totally different vibe, it's a world where the Nazi order won. If the movie is watched attentively, then it is obvious that, from that perspective, whoever made it was working from this principle.”

Phenomena is a movie that I like a lot, and I like it in part for the same reasons others don’t, starting with the diffuse and meandering plot (what does the knife-wielding chimp have to do with Jennifer Connelly’s insect powers? What do either have to do with the serial killer’s motive? Why is Connelly’s character, who is also named Jennifer, the daughter of a famous Italian-American actor? What’s with the extraneous argument about the Bee Gees partway through? Who knows? It’s called Phenomena, not Phenomenon!). There are, as Umberto Eco might put it, no privileged causal chains in this movie’s universe, because privileging a series of events and attempting to clarify exactly how one leads to another would, if the characters were to do it, inevitably lead them back to the Ishiguronian “buried giant” they’re all avoiding. Jennifer wears a high-fashion blinged-out Iron Cross as a statement piece and has never heard of Passover despite having a Jewish lawyer, who in turn is (rightly, as it turns out) extremely reluctant to come pick her up in Continental Europe when she’s getting tormented at her boarding school. None of this seems to bother anyone; it also oftentimes doesn’t seem to bother anyone in real life that Donald Trump and JD Vance are running a supposedly-populist political campaign enthusiastically supported by the richest people in the world, or that various Nazi and/or Stalinist and/or pedophiliac and/or wife-killing thinkers are still titans of Continental philosophy despite these things having been widely known about them for decades. (I’m not entirely innocent of this last example; I haven’t fully figured out how to account for some of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s more repellent behaviors around adolescent boys in my reception of Pasolini’s intellectual and artistic remains.)

The movie’s intense ableism, where deviations from the norm are approved or deprecated by the protagonists based on cool and special they do or don’t make someone, so angered Daria Nicolodi that she divorced Argento and vowed never to work with him again (although she would end up in Opera two years later). Yet in the Buried Giant account of what the movie is doing, this too makes perfect sense; the preteen with trisomy 13 who incites his serial killer mother becomes somewhat akin to the main character of Wright’s Native Son. At one point Jennifer sleepwalks around muttering “I must wake up!” So must everyone around her, from Donald Pleasance’s paraplegic entomologist (who explicitly spells out, at his own expense, the movie’s hypocrisy about difference while trying to make Jennifer feel better about herself) to much less sympathetic characters like the bullying schoolgirls and the serial killer headmistress and the various fascist cops.

Opera is a movie that Argento specifically did not want to be viewed as a companion piece to Phenomena, but I still think this movie informs that one in some ways. Argento respects animals more in Opera than he does in some of his earlier work; the slasher kills animatronic ravens whereas in earlier Argento one sees things like real lizards getting killed onscreen. Indeed the last shot of Opera has the heroine, Betty, freeing a lizard that is trapped under a piece of undergrowth. Phenomena required so much animal work, both with the Jennifer’s insect powers (a scene of a firefly leading her to a murder scene is a standout; this is a real firefly with a nylon string tied to it!) and with the chimp, that it’s hard to imagine it not permanently changing its director’s understanding of nonhuman life. Betty’s sexuality in Opera doesn’t fully return to the vaguely communicated lesbianism of Suspiria, since she sleeps with men and by the end of the movie is implied to have started enjoying it. There is, however, still a bloody-minded anti-civilizational separatism to the movie’s final moments, when she dissolves psychologically into a mountian meadow after everyone she loves has been murdered and her career as a dramatic coloratura probably irrevocably derailed, as indeed there is to Jennifer embracing the chimp in the final shot of Phenomena when every other character in the movie is dead.

Argento understands gender and particularly women in an interesting way, and it’s hard to tell why. He likes to present dark-haired young women escaping peril, but only just barely. Once again much like with Ikuhara, it’s impossible to really understand what cocktail of, to name just a few potential contributing factors, dysphoria, feminist sentiment, and prurience motivates this. Argento almost certainly fucked up the task of raising his daughter, enormously and sometimes in publicly knowable ways, like by casting her as Christine Daaé in his Il fantasma dell’opera. Whatever is happening with Argento Sr. and gender, or sexuality, or both, might well also be happening with Argento Jr. and through her with the late Bourdain. On the other hand, it’s perhaps best not to speculate too much about this, because I don’t actually know any of these people and there is almost certainly a lot about the lights and shadows of the famiglia Argento that would surprise me very much if I somehow learned it. In any case, gender in Argento is not done in a style that served him well in the 90s, a magical time in which beautiful young women could become famous singers for screaming vulgar threats onstage (hi, Courtney Love!; hi, Aikawa Nanase!). After a certain point he just stopped making movies that were good. Phenomena and Opera, though, individually or as a diptych, retain an odd sort of power around sex, death, and fascism, especially for people who like horror movies and can deal with almost-cartoonish gore.