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2.5 Suspiria: Buildings and Becoming

A film with little regard for ‘rational’ plot and character identification technique asks the audience to pervert their traditional means of watching. The process of watching a horror film with a mystery that dislocates the secret/answer dichotomy, and hence dislocates (‘perverts’) the subject, will be explored in the following discussion of Argento’s Suspiria (Italy, 1977) which will be followed by a brief side-tracking in which I wish to explore the idea of monsters.

The eye is traditionally configured as the primary tool of filmic information, identification and image ingestion. It ‘tells’ the audience about the film. It is epistemologically constructed and morphologically imagined as leading directly to the brain, where the information it gleans is registered. This standard concept of the eye and its relationship with the screen sets up a situation that leads to direct character identification and rational plot narrative understanding, as explicated in much traditional film theory discourse.  The eye as primary ingestor of information is thus the dominant and normative tool in receiving visual pleasure. But the eye may be read also as internal organ, jutting from a red nerve and six sinewy muscles that rises from a secret place within the body. When watching ‘perversely’ pleasurable images, the eye’s relationship to the organs as they shift and rise uncomfortably in reaction to fear and disgust, is made more apparent than the eye’s purely functional rational symbolic incarnation. The symbolic eye, that which leads to the brain (intellect) and ‘tells us’ what we see, is to film what the genitals are to sexuality - a primary, normative organ. Any extension of reaction to a film is that which exceeds the armored symbol of the eye’s gaze. [56] Freud states, in his study of sexual aberrations, “Perversions are that which either a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union or b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.” [57] Reading this in terms of normative gaze theory, the primary organ of film is the eye. The eye, then, must be the only organ to ingest, react and invest in the film and the eye must tell the viewer about the film, answer the viewer’s queries, quell their fear. It must not linger in pleasure or confusion over the intent of the film. As stated earlier, an overly corporeal investment in watching film, (borne of disgust or confusion) is constructed as perversity. [58] Feeling a sense of dislocation or fear that the eye, and its irrefutable symbolic connection to the ‘brain’ (mind, self), cannot ‘solve’ may then be perverse.

Horror films appear as a terrain of perversity not only in plot and image at the level of representation but also in the very physiology of audience ingestion. Through an experimental exploration of the film Suspiria I will suggest the body, more than just the eye, identifies with non-human objects - structures, buildings - in order to re-negotiate theories of character-only rational identification. I aim also to explicate the notion of the secret in the film, that uncomfortable dilemma which causes fear when the subject is no longer able to rely on plot or narrative. [59]   I will suggest that in attempting desperately to ‘solve’ the secret of ‘what is causing the death/fear/horror’ the subject becomes the construction of the secret, that is, becomes a body which is fear. All attempts to solve secrets, be they filmic or scientific, launch subjects on a trajectory that no longer extricates them from their quest. Fear is hence the desired and desirable result, minus resolution or closure. The seeing subject is not eye but body, is not watching story but becoming filmic - a polymorphously perverse looking, to put it in Freudian terms. Once again I emphasize the identifications I am positing are exploratory and suggestive rather than prescriptive – they are an opening up of a space for play and not an analysis of a new true way of reading filmic affect.

“Secrets!”  One of the first words hissed in Suspiria. This word immediately engages, immediately begs for answers, or an answer. This word immediately troubles and dislodges the metonymic ‘formula’ standard to film narrative. Secrets interrupt and disturb the formula that causes us to ask what will happen next? Without this metonymic formula the comfort of the body being engaged with the images is disrupted, the concept of narrative is made redundant. Where there are secrets we cannot be the passive ‘lazy’ audience. Secrets buy into the notion of perfectly described action and reaction, query and solution. But in Suspiria secrets dislodge. The film sets up the question/mystery early but then refuses to answer or even to co-operate with the dilemma. [60]   Even before the dislodging effect of the unanswered secret however the body of the audience becomes corporeally involved with the film. A jarring insane violin, evoking other unpalatable sounds, nails on a blackboard, foil in the fillings, heralds the opening credits. There are minimalist white-on-black credits but otherwise, nothing to see. Coupled with nursery rhyme possessed wailing and violin are ritualistic rhythmic drums. The heart is drawn into the beatings, it is teased into beating erratically with the soundtrack even though there is not yet anything to fear. Although an irregular heart could reflect the drums, the wailing makes any lulling into the score impossible. These sounds are unnerving because they are unrecognizable as ‘music’; the rhythm jars yet the exact terms of their offensiveness are unclear. They are re-mastering the rhythms of the audience’s body before the image, before the audience is ready to invest in the film. The sounds feel traumatic, as the audience’s body feels.

Suspiria is a film set within a building that can be read as a body. [61] It concerns Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) an American who arrives late one night to enroll in the Tanzakademie Ballet Institute in Germany. She is refused entry into the building. When, the next morning, she is admitted we are introduced to a building with visceral walls and corridors. Red is the predominant color, the rooms and the many hallways are claustrophobic and occupied by fairy-tale like strangers, a huge warty old woman, an angelic boy in velvets and foppish bow, an unusually tall ogre of a man with huge fake teeth. Suzy walks the red corridors for the first time and sees the old woman, sitting with a midget. The old woman plays with a crystal and flashes its blinding light into Suzy’s eyes. It irritates her. It irritates the audience too.  Not only through the blinding of the crystal, which emphasizes what we cannot see even though we are the all-seeing audience, but through the sharp object and the distasteful characters lodged uncomfortably in the ‘esophagus’ of the building. The image is accompanied by jarring irritating music. The music is a brief screech, it may or may not be a word, which may or may not be ‘witch!’ If the audience is listening rather than watching they have just ‘solved’ the film’s secret; the building is a coven for witches. Suspiria then gives away its secret in the first twenty minutes but by this time it has confused the audience’s desire for a narrative into the desire for something else. [62] Here I forestall my discussion of Suspiria in order to explore becoming - then I will suggest, upon returning to Suspiria how the viewer could become through film.

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