Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento

An Introduction to the Dark Dreams of Dario Argento

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE DARK DREAMS OF DARIO ARGENTO Aman named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, togo to luncheon oneday and had never returned... here's what happened to him. Goingtolunch he passed an office building that wasbeing put up -just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touchhim, though a pieceofthe sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger -well, affectionately -when he told me about it. He was scared stiff ofcourse, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened . He felt like somebodyhad taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.Flitcraft hadbeen agoodcitizen and agood husband and father, notbyany outer compulsion,but simplybecausehewasa man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings... Thelife he knew was a clean, orderly, sane, responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knewthan that men died at haphazard like that, andlived onlywhile blind chance sparedthem. It wasnot,primarily, the injustice ofit that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock.What disturbed him was the discoverythat in sensibly ordering his affairs hehadgot out of step, and not into step, with life. - Dashiell Hammett, The MalteseFalcon You understand Flitcraft's feeling of dislocation when you watch Dario Argento's Deep Red or Tenebrae; it's as though somebody has indeed taken off the lid and exposed the works. Horror movie fans are well aware of Argento's work, though more mainstream movie-goers aren't. Since 1970 he's written (or co-written) and directed 11 films that constitute a dense, extended meditation on certain conventions ofthe horror film and, by extension, the nature ofthe cinematic text. And those 3 Broken Mirrors I Broken Minds films are supremely weird: mannered, violent and quirky enough to catch the attention ofhardened horror movie-goers at the same time they piquethe curiosity ofthe critical viewer. Argento's colour schemes are aggressively unnatural: like stained glass - saturated yellow and deep cobalt blue - or artificially limpid, glittering pale turquoise and green. And always red, rich and clear. His 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 high-angle panoramas, hunkers down to admire the tippy-tops ofbuildings against the blue,blue sky. Unrestrained by strictly narrative concerns, the camera reflects no point-ofview save its own as it creeps across the fafade of a sharply angled building for a startling two-and-a-halfminutes orhovers over two girls in a baroque swimming pool, their pale legs floating like seaweed beneath the water's rippling surface. Argento's imagery is bizarre, almost surreal; he thrives on aggressively inappropriate juxtapositions. A lightbulb glows until its glass skin is shattered by a straight razor; a puff of smoke and then the darkness. Aman's drawn face is reflected in a pool ofblood; a black gloved hand manipulates a curious collection of fetishized objects - children's toys, knives, bits of braided yarn -in disorienting close-up; a youngwoman reaches into the shallow puddle where her keys have fallen only to see her arm vanish into water up tothe elbow. Awoman's shiny red high heel in a boy's screaming mouth, the blue sky above, the white sand below. The world ofDarioArgento is one oftwisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess; it's true 20th Century Gothicwith 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 isalternately enthralled and repelled by ripe flesh and blood-drenched fantasy. Someviewers find it all too off-putting, and indifference is rare -it seems you either pull back from Argento's films or dive in head first. First and foremost, of course, this is an auteur study: it examines the dark dreams of DarioArgento, and proceedsfrom 4 Introduction the notion that Argento is the...