Two hearts stab as one: Brian De Palma + Dario Argento (a Reptile Dysfunction)

The critics say they're indebted to Hitchcock for their tropes, obsessions and subjects, but what I really see in Italian horror director Dario Argento and Italian-American suspense director Brian De Palma is a bizarre psychic twin connection, a shared reptile dysfunction that springs from Catholicism, ancient Rome, and the kind of scopophilia-driven sexual obsession (a good genre director must be obsessive, otherwise why bother?), all mingled into a love story linking across the oceans and continents from Rome to the USA, a round trippy immigrant passage between the mammalian higher brain's compassion and the cold cortex of unsocialized pre-empathic killer in all of us. De Palma has made a few films exploring this sort of split-subject connection (SISTERS, THE FURY, and RAISING CAIN) while Argento leans back on it for his dark fairy tale sensationalism, but he cast Jessica Harper for SUSPIRIA after seeing her in De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

from top: Jessica Harper w/mic in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (De Palma);
Jessica Harper w/knife in SUSPIRIA (Argento)

And I didn't even know this when I started this post, but they were born the same month (September) of the same world war-ridden year (1940), six days apart. They are both Virgo, sign of the virgin, sign of obsession, poring over film strips and sound boards with the repressed energy of a thousand unreached orgasms!

Clara Calamai, Jacopo Mariani - DEEP RED

Both have been accused of objectification and misogyny due to their detailed gruesome violence against the female body. I used to agree with that diagnosis, but now I blame their reptile killer instincts on intense Italian mother-love and Catholic guilt ( Hitchcock, too, was Catholic), wherein Mom's giant hydra apron strings cling to their minds no matter how much their onscreen avatars hack at them, each new woman's body a tendril-tentacle. I've come to feel my own feminist ire is founded in my discomfort, the unbearable level of anxious dread and soggy liberal arts guilt that is what being a man is all about --the compulsory mammalian need to protect the women and children. When a camera doesn't look away from the horror wrought by our helpless positions as observers on the opposite side of the screen, feminists like myself blame the camera, the director for our discomfort seeing it. Better we should have our eyes gouged out than see such traumatic butchery! Rather than examine this response, we lash out, labeling the directors misogynist in a vain attempt to scrub the horror from our eyes.

But Argento and De Palma stare long and hard. Even if we gouged our eyes out they'd find a way to reach us with these images.

from top: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA (see Mater Testiculorum)

They use similar post-modern effects, deconstructing their own misogyny and their audience's demands for blood; each goes deep into the human eye, ever searching for what lies past the inscrutable inky black roundness of the eye. Cameras, mirrors, photographs, film sets, stage sets, plays, taxidermy, and elements of performance abound. I generally don't like dream sequences, they're like vents in which to dump cheap manipulations and sudden shocks without the burden of context. That said, De Palma entrenches the two together so completely that one must allow it and in SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, Argento does away with waking life altogether. Occasionally a character comes up for air, drops by an outdoor parapsychology conference for some exposition, then its back down into the candy-Freudian murk.

from top: De Palma - CARRIE, Argento - INFERNO, De Palma -
DRESSED TO KILL, Argento - 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET

Interesting too is that Argento's work has by critical consensus really sucked since 2001's SLEEPLESS, while at the same time De Palma's been pulling out of a sucky period (with 2002's FEMME FATALE), as if these aging auteurs sharing a pair of traveling genius pants. De Palma's been returning to his old haunts, where cheap raincoats, razors, masks, split screens, double cross media-blackmail-stalk-and-snap PEEPING TOM's media theory is coupled to a PSYCHO-style cross examination, and a psychiatrist's explanatory monologue wrapping the catalog of kinks back up in its brown wrapper before a final gotcha which often ends up being a dream within a dream, or was it (as in his recent PASSION). Argento's simply lost his rudder in the meantime, he's like he's just another late night Cinemax director with more attention to disturbing gore and less to the tropes, post-modern insights, and tricks for which we love him. Maybe it's because De Palma is making smaller movies that suit his fancies, while Argento seems laboring under the pressure of his name. Either way, and as an aside, this does not betray my grand theory that they are twins linked by some strange telepathy, like Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens in THE FURY (1977). 

Top: THE FURY (De Palma), botom: PHENOMENA (Argento)

None of this is to accuse either Argento or De Palma of being a mama's boy, a misogynist, or potential murderer (or worse, derivative of Hitchcock and each other to the point of near-identity theft), though in a way the critical backlash against the slasher movies, teen sex comedies of the early 80s helped usher in the PC-era. With feminist ire building in nearly everyone the blatantly phallic drill, endless softcore strutting and groping in De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (1984) was like an affront, the drill scene being exhibit A in the case he's a misogynist. In Argento's similar films, sexual fetishizing is never an issue, except as far as elaborating on the madness of the mother or father fixation which then (usually) triggers a schizophrenic break with reality.

Now that I'm older though, I see the misogynistic violence of De Palma and Argento through this same schizophrenic break prism, and realize only by expressing these wormy fantasies can we expel them. How many hydra apron strings were severed or unstuck or untangled thanks to PSYCHO (1960)? It made such a splash on its initial release that the ripples haven't ceased in 50 years - it changed the way America went to the movies and gave armchair psychologists now had a gold standard for the dangers of maternal suffocation. Who knows how many closeted or overprotected men would still be living at home and doing their mothers' toenails on a Saturday night if not for PSYCHO? It kicked them loose. Who knows where De Palma or Argento would be without it? PSYCHO snapped the 60s off at the shower curtain 50s root, and tossed it into the inky black pupil drain, where emaciated 20 year-olds like De Palma and Argento at the time, were waiting with their celluloid nets. 

Color-coded patterns from top (alternating De Palma/Argento):
 FURY, SUSPIRIA, RAISING CAIN, INFERNO,
UNTOUCHABLES, SUSPIRIA, PASSION, DEEP RED, FURY, 4 FLIES

MUSIC:

Naturally these psychic twins are not identical: Argento's psychoanalysis is perhaps deeper while De Palma is more into politics (Italy wasn't mired in Vietnam so Argento couldn't find his horror there). Argento's connection to music is more wryly contrapuntal than De Palma's, making innovative use of children's songs, whispering, percussion and even electric bass-driven funk from Goblin and Ennio Morricone. In DEEP RED, particularly a real break with convention is begun: swooning pop balladry as heads get slow motion sliced by shattered windshields--the glass a pop art snowstorm--and rattling nerve-grating, plastic cup echo-drenched percussion leaping into life and then stopping just as suddenly all just because David Hemmings steps on a bottle, then resuming just as abruptly when a shade falls--or accompanying an impromptu Daria Nicolodi vamp. This approach is the total opposite of the usual emotional-telegraphing of Hollywood, though De Palma gets great mileage out of Bernard Herrmann.

From top: NORTH BY NORTHWEST, DR. NO, the full ambiguity of
casual sex at its most chilling, and therefore truest.

Both both Argento and De Palma use romantic music in a subversive manner, riffing on the lovers-on-the-run style of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) by having romantic comedy tropes tossed nervously in with the suspense, sifting through the queasy mix of dread and attraction that occur during a casual hook-up, when the other person's hot but it's all happening a bit too fast to not seem suspicious (where only Connery era-Bond or Cary Grant can safely tread). Is that what happens when a charming sociopath puts their moves on you? The winding up in bed with them is carefully crafted to make you think it's chance and fate, the night conspiring to bring you together, but already they're allying you away from your old life with surgical expertise. Even if she doesn't end up boiling your rabbit, or he doesn't have someone's head in a box, it can still be dangerous.  It's like a romantic comedy is coming true and you think somehow you deserve it, that you make the mistake of rising above your class and habit, or lower than it --and the top and bottom are far closer than the middle. What would mother think? Something's not right. A grown man shouldn't be sitting down to martinis with executives at the 21 Club and then exclaim aloud, "I forgot to phone mother!"

from top: De Palma (DRESSED), Argento (BIRD), De Palma, Argento - etc.
BIRD, DRESSED

Over in the U.S, De Palma had Bernard Herrmann scoring a few of his last and De Palma's earlier films (SISTERS, OBSESSION), which cemented the Hitchcock connection, but genius of creating undulating nervous tension died with him, OBSESSION was his last. Even geniuses like Herrmann doesn't get how sweet romantic songs should accompany murders and suspense music play over romantic parts or that electric guitars and percolating Moogs are awesome under any scene; I've never been too crazy about the jazz music in TAXI DRIVER for that reason, it's like Herrmann doesn't get the ambivalence and Herzogian inscrutable stone face of the natural gods thing the way, say, Tangerine Dream got it for SORCERER. It takes a madness and the ability to convey the full breadth of that madness to another person so immediately they don't have time to pull away like you're crazy person. Wasn't that the genius of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, that it opened us up to genuine madness at such an advanced level we didn't have time to formulate a defense?

It's only when De Palma hooks up with an Italian composer (Pino Donaggio, Giorgio Moroder, Ennio) that he captures the full potential of music in a film as more than just telling the audience what they should feel from moment-to-moment. When Frankie Goes to Hollywood wedge their "Relax" video into the middle of BODY DOUBLE (1987) it's audacious but sensationalistic and gaudy, the love child of the porn world in that film and the T&A-filled killer POV horror film John Travolta works on in BLOW-OUT (1981).

They see you (from top: DRESSED, DEEP RED)

MISOGYNY

Lest we forget, BODY made its starlet, Melanie Griffiths (Tippi Hedren's daughter), an overnight star and that Nancy Allen in DRESSED TO KILL uses her sexy body as a weapon to overwhelm the killers gaze. It's this idea of feeling exposed as the viewer that activates the killer hiding in plain sight within the viewer's "normal" psyche-- such as when the psychic 'sees' the murderer while on stage at the psychic conference in Argento's DEEP RED. 

In point of fact, part of the feminist arousal of ire stems from the anger at being forced to feel what the murders are depicting, not just from the stabbed side but the stabber, the horror and savagery of the murders leave their mark our murkiest reptilian recesses. But they are meant to be disturbing, to heighten our senses through fear. That is the correct reaction to these violent depictions and to presume it's not is to presume a vast nation of rain-coated social drop-outs who get off on seeing sexy women terrorized. The response of feminist outrage is connected to the same repressive mechanisms that motivate the killers in De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL and Argento's DEEP RED. Seeing themselves being seen, they freak out - like Argento and De Palma are doctors who touch these viewers in places within themselves they don't want to admit exist, so the urge is to sue for malpractice, to accuse of chicanery and no-goodnicks-ism. And brother, I know because I was one of those, as a sullen 13 year-old hearing with shock as my Sunday school teacher and his kids gleefully recounted the details of every murder in FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), which they'd seen with his kids the previous night. 

The stuff that really traumatizes me now is the unconscious, casual violence of other films (like VACANCY or WOLF CREEK), that aren't necessarily good or scary but leave me damaged for days. Argento and De Palma are more compassionate in that the very idea of film violence obsesses them to the point that they can target and exorcise it through a double blind mirror-to-the-audience gaze reflector, such as the movie screen-shaped white art gallery entrance in THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (below), or the (wider) screened window of De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (below that). We're given a profound and very arty illustration of the perverse appeal of such violence on the big screen, and the reason for our sometimes violent offense over it -- our urge to rush the screen and pull it down before the unthinkable happens. When I was young in the 70s-early 80s, seeing an R-rated murder like in SUSPIRIA or DRESSED TO KILL was the equivalent of a scary roller coaster, a rite of passage, something you needed friends to go to with (at the drive-in or dangerous downtown theater). But if the audience laughs and cheers the murder (as they would going down a roller coaster hill) and someone is there alone and sulky to review the film for the Times, would they not worry that these films are mere pornography for vicious misogynist freaks? I know that's what I would have felt. Because these murders also tap into our mammalian protective instincts, disrupting the thread of narrative immersion as best we can, causing us to scream at characters onscreen in helpless frustration. But our anger over their counterintuitive behavior is our attempt to shirk our responsibility as men, we want desperately to feel like the endangered woman brought it on herself for making so many counterintuitive decisions, to absolve us of the guilt that we couldn't be there, that her death onscreen is the result of our real-life absence from our own lives.

traversable screens - from top: Argento, De Palma, Hitchcock

METATEXTUALITY

But it's really the powerlessness of being tied (more or less) to our chair and unable to be heard through the screen (often represented in De Palma like a shower stall or rainy window), and guilty at our own bloodlust, the deep dark reptilian-dysfunctional part of our viewing brains (the type that eats their young and has no empathy), but it's simplistic to call that misogynist, because if we didn't feel that way, if we relished her weakness and bad choices as chances to strike then we have no mammalian brain. Do this and we reduce ourselves to the lonesome status of the reptile, rather than a mammal-reptile hybrid. As so often in Argento films, we shudder enough watching the stalkings and killings that we need our own avatar for that shuddering, someone similarly trapped outside the screen - unable to save and unable to look away - the reptile mind holding our eyes on the blood as well as the Ludovico Technique.

from top: CLOCKWORK ORANGE, OPERA

It's also true that when other artists tries to mix media theory and sex and violence, then giallo tropes can't help but appear--as in Irvin Kirshner's John Carpenter-scripted EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978), which somehow manages to be very Italian just by being into fashion and photography (via Helmet Newton) in New York. To incorporate cameras and films within films and musicians and sound engineers hearing something they shouldn't or seeing something they can't quite remember, is to enter a realm where De Palma and Argento can ace you in their sleep. And they understand something those other films don't that even Fulci and Bava don't mess with, (though I'd say the recent BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2013) does, and Michel Soavi's 1987 STAGE FRIGHT ), the meta-framing of the performance of horror as a rite, an ancient re-enactment of pagan sacrifice older than modern civilization can even grasp but ever present in our DNA just waiting to come out.

children of meta giallo: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, STAGEFRIGHT:
AQUARIUS, EYES OF LAURA MARS

SHARED MOTIFS:

AVENGING ANGELS and DEMONESSES: They might be scared and a victim but they shall rise, oh they shall.

from top: Argento, De Palma, Argento, De Palm -etc.

ART: art galleries and artist studios represent art as the crucial outlet to legitimize scopophiliac expression, allowing for more a broader palette of associative symbolism. Via headless statues and statue-less heads, Bosch and Bruegel, Escher and surrealists. Through art, Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze is equalized, or at least - broadened. It's where pornography goes legitimate or even further, into the realm I call the gaze of Mecha-Medusa (wherein the object looks back, freezing us with the uncanny, skeevy horror of our own initially lewd stare). See also: subliminal screens, metaphors for the immersive film viewing-experience, the mass hypnosis of the theater where for awhile we merge into a group mind caught in the grip of a crazy person.

 frpm top: STENDAHL SYNDROM, DRESSED TO KILL
Associative and literal misogynistic devouring / dismemberment / triggers

from top: Artento, De Palma, Argento, De Palma, Argento, etc.

There are other tangents and shared motifs:

BLINDNESS: blindness allows for heightened variations on the HVR or helpless viewer response (we can't help them across the street); fetish objects for objectifying scopophiliacs (they can't look back); seeing eyes are ever threatened by what they see (as in the blind men other matriarchal coven-ruled social order in the 1978 TVM, THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME --blindness as symbolic castration).

Argento x 2, De Palma x2

MIRRORS / DOUBLES: They fog, and when something or someone looks in them and freezes stock still, they become their own objects. DOUBLING is related to that --evil twins, and the inherent split of actors and characters (as in the split between the woman playing a terrified woman in a horror film, or literally split in the case of the body doubles in De Palma's BLOW OUT and BODY DOUBLE, figuratively in the separated twins of SISTERS or RAISING CAIN or the eerie similarity romances (someone looks just like someone else the protagonist was in love with and saw die-- stemming from VERTIGO - -Geneveive Bujold in OBSESSION, Melanie Griffith in BODY DOUBLE, Margot Kidder in SISTERS, the two raincoats in DRESSED TO KILL, and so forth.

PRIMARY COLOR SYMBOLISM: Deep Red is the color of menstruation, child birth, the link to sex and excitement, flushed cheeks, heat / dark blue the color of swollen wounds, the chill of the deep, dark death, etc.

DREAMS / DREAMLIKE FLASHBACKS: De Palma relies on them but drags them really slow and methodical and dream-like, without any dialogue and often backwards; Argento flashes to them now and then, more out of stories told or childhood memories of the asylum or before or after (where everyone acts like automatons). De Palma links dreams with horror movies worked on by characters of his movie (John Travolta in BLOW-OUT), or wordless operas, or the clockworkiness of Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES or Dali's dream clocks in SPELLBOUND and MOONTIDE.

CIRCULAR STAIRWAYS: Great for chase sequences and as symbolic of the 'descent' into the unknowable squirmy recesses of the subconscious.

frop top: Godard, Coppola, Argento, Argemto,  De Palma, De Palma

SOUND RECORDING: The visual screen is just part of it, of course. Coppola's THE CONVERSATION was hugely influential on both De Palma and Argento (the scopophilia kink extends to eavesdropping); eavesdrops through a listening device while the 'screen' of the detective's office is visible to the left. They both similarly took notice of Godard and Truffaut (as in the DON'T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER-style arc of BLOW OUT) whose incorporation of the recording studios and screening rooms they were using into the films themselves indicated an unhesitating post-modern bent. Godard, especially, began to show the workings of recording machines obsessively in his films, even if they were eventually spouting communist rhetoric.

From top: PEEPING TOM, REAR WINDOW, BLOW-UP, TAXI DRIVER

PHOTOGRAPHY: Antonioni's BLOW UP, Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and Powell's PEEPING TOM are huge (obviously) influences to both directors. To a lesser extent, TAXI DRIVER (if Travis had a 16mm movie camera to point at the mirror and the pimps, imagine the movie he would make! It would look exactly like TAXI DRIVER!)

from top: DEEP RED, BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, INFERNO

SUBLIMINAL SCREENS: De Palma is more obsessed with the hot female body threatened by the gaze (and threatening to it as well) while Argento is obsessed with childhood dreams, fairy tales elaborated into operatic tableaux (the automaton movements of the characters in the DEEP RED flashbacks, etc.) Argento's is more centered directly on metaphors for media viewing itself (note the way the shadows in the picture above makes the childhood drawing look like its projected on the wall or the radiated light from a TV, or a window (into the primal scene of a killer's squirmy mind); below that is the image from BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE: a theatrical screen-shaped door that the anxious writer can't cross to rescue the bloodied damsel (his desire to enter eventually results in a different screen toppling down on him like a slab); in INFERNO, the screen defenestrates the PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO-style traverser.

For De Palma it's not the art house he recreates but the drive-in, the NASHVILLE or TARGETS or PATTON-style backdrop, such as the flag behind the climax of BLOW OUT or the blue behind Carrie at THE PROM (just as in SCREAM or THE RING it's not the theater or drive-in but the TV), like a kind of multi-media breakdown (the intern introducing the film festival is stabbed onstage right as she's announcing the after-screening Q&A).

I don't see anybody else here.
(from top: CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, TAXI DRIVER)
(for DRESSED witness two lights like eyes with Allen's sexy back the nose
and the phone the mouth, that's the Other!)

THE GONE-DEAD GAZE: De Palma's films are never, to my mind, as focused on art, instead dwelling more on politics and on the curvy flesh of hot girls and how the act of sex leaves one vulnerable; the orgasm as last rites; and the terror of that objectifying being reversed, of the woman desired returning the gaze, provoking a response which is always in direct relation to the viewer's fear of being viewed, of being judged by the image with the same ferocity with which we view it. Feminist critics attach too much power to the male gaze, seeing it as ownership, which is like wanting to arrest someone for looking at merchandise without buying it, for "owning it with his eyes" - the killer's look isn't the source of the homicide, it's power but only until the seen looks back, at which time the killer is as exposed as his intended victim, even if we in the audience don't see who it is, the person being attacked has seen As men we love to imagine what studs we'd be in the sack with some hottie we pass on the street. As long as she doesn't turn around and invite us upstairs for a tryst, we're safe in our delusion of male infallibility. But if she drops the pretense and offers or asks for sex, even the most courageous of studs will usually rear back like a startled mare --it's too sudden, too soon, we perceive it almost as a violent slap, we're like Medusa flashed by a mirror raincoat.

from top: 4 FLIES IN GREY VELVET, PSYCHO

And so it is that the ideal object that arouses or fascinates the killer is one that never looks back (portraits with the eyes cut out aside), allowing unchallenged staring. When the portrait of LAURA suddenly appears, in a raincoat and bad mood, the enchantment is instantly dispelled. The murderer's fantasy is to keep his prey from being able to return the gaze (by turning around, taking the killers' mask off, etc.) to becoming simply another object-- the vision of her killer reflected in her dead dilated pupils clears up like a post-PSYCHO shower bathroom mirror. Unless they scan the last image your eyeball saw and project it onto film (as in 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET), or you come back from the grave, you'll never be able to make amends, divvy up your fortune, go through the seven stages of grief, hide your porn, or tell us who your murderer was. "Poof!" You are inanimate. God knows what strange pains and ecstasies such sudden death would bring as you soul wrenches loose from time, place, and space. I imagine it would depend a lot on your mood at the time whether there was a light to go into or not, and how many Ahmet-style demon dogs were waiting just off camera to devour your heathen soul the moment it pops free of our earthly plane. They sniffed out your soul's immanent arrival like a pack of bears plucking salmon from the river. God knows when, but the cinema of Argento and De Palma know those bears are coming, and prepared for the rending gnashing rip from the mortal coil to come.

Lastly, don't forget AMER (2009): perhaps so meta as to transcend narrative altogether, it presumes a certain familiarity with Argento and De Palma's oeuvre and their shared psycho-sexual roots as well as the distinctly Antonioni-esque experimental ambiguity where Jungian fairy tale subtexts go so deep down they come out the top like digging to China. One of the rare feature length films credited as being directed by a couple (she's French, he's Italian), the film is truly split, not just into three chapters but into experimental and narrative, not scene-by-scene but shot-by-shot, moment to moment, it's the ultimate - here the twins of fairy tale sexual psyche are united, the children of the giallo are born, and the unification of male and female halves make a unique whole, the fulfillment of the promise in Argento and De Palma's most dream-like works, distilled with all the plots and narrative weeded out. Glorious.