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Broken mirrors/broken minds: the dark dreams of Dario Argento

2010; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 48; Issue: 02 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.48-0764

1943-5975

Maitland McDonagh,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

The colors are aggressively unnatural, perhaps like stained glass-saturated yellow and deep cobalt blue-perhaps artificially limpid, glittering pale turquoise and green. And always red, rich and clear. The camera is nervous. Restless. It swoops and glides, slinking along corridors, crouching at the bottom of staircases, perching on rooftops. It cranes up for dizzying highangle panoramas, hunkers down to admire the tippy-tops of buildings against the blue, blue sky. Unrestrained by strictly narrative concerns, the camera reflects no point-of-view save its own as it creeps across the facade of a sharply angled building for a startling two-and-a-half minutes or hovers over two girls in a baroque swimming pool, their pale legs floating like seaweed beneath the water's rippling surface. The imagery is bizarre, almost surreal; juxtapositions are aggressively inappropriate. A lightbulb glows until its glass skin is shattered by a straight razor; a puff of smoke and then the darkness. A man's drawn face is reflected in a pool of blood; a black gloved hand manipulates a curious collection of fetishized objects-children's toys, knives, bits of braided yarn-in disorienting close-up; a young woman reaches into the shallow puddle where her keys have fallen only to see her arm vanish into water up to the elbow. A woman's shiny red high heel in a boy's screaming mouth, the blue sky above, the white sand below. The world of Dario Argento is one of twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess; it is true Twentieth-Century Gothic with all the inversion, formal imbalance, and riotous grotesquerie the term can encompass. His is a romantic vision, informed by an instinctive appreciation of the contradictory nature of erotic appeal: Argento's camera is alternately enthralled and repelled by ripe flesh and blooddrenched fantasy. A film such as Tenebrae (1982) or Deep Red (1976) peels back the skin and exposes a phantasmagoric maelstrom of secret desires and dreams of death and night and blood. Argento's talents are peculiar and his consistent interest in the horror/thriller genre' has not won him widespread critical acclaim. This is not to say that no genre director is ever taken seriously; Hitchcock is now almost universally revered and his foremost acolyte, Brian de Palma, has always been treated seriously if not necessarily favorably. Consider the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, whose most recent films-Blue Velvet and The Fly (both 1986)-have been accorded mainstream accolates that would have been unthinkable for They Came from Within (Cronenberg, 1976) or even cult favorite Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977). Granted, theirs are still dangerous visions, overdetermined fantasies of treacherous flesh and deadly sex. Lynch's hot flashes from the heart of darkness and Cronenberg's doomed love stories for the plague years will never please all the critics-or all the audiences-all the time. But they are noted, discussed, and examined. Argento's films are largely ignored. Perhaps his assaults on linear logic are too thorough-going; perhaps the hollow, extradiegetic quality of his post-dubbed sound tracks is too disconcerting to the unaccustomed ear; or perhaps there is just too much cerebral drugginess in the air when Inferno (1980) or Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972) is on the screen. The secret puritans in Cronenberg and Lynch-who for all their evident fascination are also clearly appalled by the things that crawl out when they turn over rocks-build penance into the package: images aslime with pus and slobber, dissonant sound tracks, vistas of bruised and deformed flesh undermine the perverse pleasures of the text. Argento murders and maims and splatters blood with abstract abandon, revelling in the mayhem with glorious unselfconsciousness; he is a hedonist who finds his pleasures in unacceptable places and has no compunction about letting everyone in on the fun.