I.

As a cinema of Marxism, neorealism assigned to the classical Hollywood style an ideological function via which it was supposed to legitimize capitalism.² Critics like Bazin and Zavattini saw the Hollywood screen as a space for the projection of a false consciousness, where working-class audiences went to misidentify with an image of social harmony. ‘Rags to riches,’ ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ but also ‘money isn’t everything’ and ‘romantic love’ were the vernaculars of an American studio system which filtered into fascist Italy, however improbably, in the form of ‘white telephone’ productions. These light-hearted comedies showcased the private lives of upper-middle class Italians, and they were subsequently criticized for indirectly serving the interests of Mussolini’s regime.³ Grouping “the capitalists and the fascist authorities” together, Bazin lamented the exhibition of “films that were ridiculously melodramatic and overly spectacular,” designed to distract the working class from its own concerns by subjecting it to “Hollywood’s mawkish star worship.”⁴ Then, in open confrontation with both Hollywood and Rome, neorealism asserted itself as uniquely capable of restoring to the audience (always conceived in national-popular terms) an accurate picture of itself, complete with the ongoing class struggle. In this way, what the movement proposed was not a substitution of one ideology for another, but rather a simple revelation of the real—a step outside ideology. The heart of neorealism is where the political collapses into the apolitical, where the spectator becomes a subject of history by virtue of seeing themself clearly, from a transhistorical perspective. This emancipated spectator of neorealism, freed from every immanent influence, is finally able to choose the correct course of action, which presents itself in the form of social revolution. Thus analyzed, neorealism shows its foundation of philosophical liberalism.

The neorealist camera is akin to the liberal individual’s eye: turning it on the world discloses a truth that is inherent in reality and impossible to miss or misinterpret. The camera-eye is the only tool necessary for arriving at total understanding, and its capacity to represent time and space is as scientific as a stopwatch or a yardstick. But neorealism was short lived, and by the mid-1950s, even directors like Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti had shifted their attention from ‘the everyman’ to ‘the exceptional character,’ pointing toward Fellini’s 1960s studies of personal memory and especially Antonioni’s visualization of altered subjective states. By 1966, a film like Blow-up could say that capturing the world on celluloid tells us nothing definitive about pro-filmic reality, not even that a murder has occurred. Such challenges to the assumptions of neorealism paradoxically confirm the movement’s importance. In the words of Millicent Marcus, “the entire postwar production of the Italian film industry […] has continued to acknowledge, in whatever respectful or irreverent ways, its lasting debt to neorealism.”⁵

The irreverent critique of neorealism culminated in the cinema of Dario Argento, who deconstructed the movement’s assumptions from an unlikely generic standpoint: the giallo.⁶ This is widely recognized. As Giorgio Bertellini writes, the Argento of the 1970s “emerges as an anti-Enlightenment philosopher of cinematic vision.”⁷ The claim is typically applied to the diegesis of Argento’s films, wherein an amateur sleuth witnesses a murder but is not for this reason immediately able to single out the murderer. It is sometimes extended to implicate the extradiegetic spectator who, by virtue of identifying with the sleuth, is guilty of their same misjudgment. But Argento’s audience does not simply inherit the sins of his protagonist. On the contrary, it enters the theater bearing its own prejudices, which the director exploits to narrative effect and ultimately brings from the unconscious to the conscious realm. Argento’s films are about watching Argento’s films—they are even about watching yourself watch Argento’s films. They encumber the ‘liberal’ spectator of postwar cinematic culture with a set of overdetermining ideas, showing how the act of looking is forever embedded in the political, even the ideological. I will focus my comments here on Deep Red (1975), a direct descendent of Blow-up and a film which borrows Antonioni’s lead actor David Hemmings. Deep Red addresses its spectator as the keeper of conventional notions about a whole host of topics including, most importantly, homosexuality and old age. In short, Argento’s film invests in the contemporary association of homosexuality with crime to lead the spectator-sleuth toward Carlo (who is not the murderer) while exploiting the disassociation of old age from crime to lead them away from Martha (who is the murderer).

The double revelation of Carlo’s innocence and Martha’s guilt effects a sudden foregrounding of the spectator’s own susceptibility to the types of mental shortcuts that impinge upon vision and judgement. As it turns out, what the spectator saw, thought they saw or failed to see was filtered through a definite constellation of prejudices that were operating in the silent background and that are quite possible to map in the history of western thought. Like Brecht, Argento is concerned with an acritical process of identification, and like Brecht, he wishes to make of the spectator a more critical (and self-critical) viewer. But if for the German playwright alienation is an alternative viewing practice characteristic of eastern theater, for the Italian director it is a process of understanding one’s own vulnerability with respect to identification as such. It plays out over the course of a single film, where “everyday things are removed from the realm of the self-evident.”⁸ As Elena Past declares, Argento’s narrative craft is an “assault on deterministic thinking.”⁹ His denouement does not simply unmask the murderer—it unmasks the spectator.

II.

Martha did it. This much Deep Red announces in the first twenty minutes, though it does so in such a way that the sleuth and the spectator are prevented from realizing that the case is ready to be solved. The pianist Marc Daly has witnessed a gruesome murder in the window above his apartment, and he runs toward the crime, entering the victim’s home and wading down a long hallway of paintings when—suddenly, reflected in a mirror, we glimpse the face of the murderer. Argento is careful to show us Martha’s face for just a split second, creating for both the audience and the character what Marc later calls an “impression” whose interpretation will occupy the rest of the film. “It’s very strange,” Marc reasons, mistaking the image in the mirror for another work of art, “but when I went into [the victim’s] apartment first, I thought I saw a painting, and then, a few minutes later, it was gone—now how could that be?” When in the final scene Marc revisits this memory and is able to identify Martha, he proves that she was there, in that hallway but also in that “impression,” while finding her image required considerable mental effort. This is the core of Argento’s philosophy of vision, not only for Marc Daly the sleuth but also for the spectator of every film: what we bring to the screen, and indeed to the world, is as important as what it gives to us. As a human practice, and thus a political practice, spectatorship is overdetermined, and arriving at something called ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ involves subjective, even idiosyncratic modalities of thought.

The victim is Helga Ulmann, a Lithuanian woman who, during a parapsychology conference earlier in the evening, had used telepathy to discover the murderous desires of another attendee, thus placing herself in harm’s way. Marc too knows too much, and the murderer attempts to kill him next. But he barricades himself in his study just in time and is rewarded with a clue: the tinny sound of a children’s song reproduced on a tape recorder. Together with Professor Giordani (the organizer of the parapsychology conference), Marc reasons that the murderer must play this song each time they kill, and he pays a visit to Amanda Righetti, the author of a book about folklore that claims the song used to emanate from a mysterious house on the outskirts of town. But the murderer is one step ahead, and Righetti is dispatched before Marc can consult her. Arriving on the scene, Professor Giordani uses his wit (and lots of hot water) to reveal a message traced in condensation on the bathroom wall. When he returns home, he is killed by the murderer, who has snuck into his study. At this point, Marc goes back to the book about folklore and travels to the house associated with the children’s song. There, he finds a corpse and a crude drawing of a man being stabbed, a rendition of which he also locates in the bedroom of the housekeeper’s daughter. When pressed, she insists that she first saw the drawing in the archives of her school, so Marc races there and tracks down the original, which is signed by his friend and fellow pianist Carlo. Believing he has identified the murderer, Marc confronts Carlo, who in a moment of confusion is intercepted by a dump truck that drags his body to a horrible death. It is only now that Marc revisits his “impression” of Helga’s apartment and realizes his mistake. Walking once more down the victim’s hallway of paintings, he comes across a mirror. “What an idiot. That’s what I saw, a mirror,” he tells himself. “There never was a painting there at all. What I saw was a reflection in a mirror. I saw the face of the murderer.” Replaying the memory in his head, Marc now sees the face of Carlo’s mother, Martha. As if on cue, Martha appears and, after a short struggle, lodges her necklace in the building’s elevator shaft, setting up one last atrocious decapitation.

III.

This is the plot of Deep Red. But I am less concerned with how Argento splices things together than how the spectator does so. Strictly speaking, the cause-and-effect logic I will describe here is not part of the film. And yet, what I wish to prove is that the film systematically leads the spectator toward a series of ready-made conclusions about crime that implicate Carlo while excusing Martha.¹⁰

How is it possible to describe something that is not in a text if we confine our analysis to the text? It is possible because we can say that the text only works, in the way it seems to want to work, if it is met by a particular sensibility which we must posit and can therefore describe. Moreover, if we can show that such a sensibility (such prejudices, ideas, notions, associations) actually existed and were widespread in the historical context of reception, then we will strengthen our argument that the sensibility—prepared so methodically and consistently in the text—is intended to do that work.

This is the case for the association between homosexuality and crime, which Deep Red indulges.¹¹ While homosexuality as crime has a long and global history, it was in western modernity that there developed what Derek Dalton calls “the notion that male homosexuality is metonymous with and metaphorical for criminality.”¹² Already in Lombroso, we find evidence of an almost causative link between gender transgression and other forms of legal transgression: “Among nearly all arsonists, I have observed a softness of skin, an almost childlike appearance, and an abundance of thick straight hair that is almost feminine. One extremely curious example from Pesaro, known as ‘the woman,’ was truly feminine in appearance and behavior.”¹³ Elsewhere, the Italian criminologist suggests that “the crimes of rape and pederasty may be caused by sexual inversion,” using a euphemism for homosexuality that, together with the broader category of ‘perversion,’ signaled deviation from an implicitly heterosexual norm.¹⁴ Deep Red wastes no time in addressing the spectator with the language of this tradition. The first time Helga senses the murderer, at the parapsychology conference, she cries out to the shocked audience: “I can feel death, in this room. I feel a presence, a twisted mind, sending me thoughts. Perverted, murderous thoughts.” A short while later, Carlo makes his entrance with a gauche and alcohol-fueled joke about rape. When we meet back up with him, he is at the apartment of his male lover, played in Argento’s film by a cross-dressing Geraldine Hooper. Marc has come to discuss the search for the murderer, but his unannounced arrival has the awkward effect of outing Carlo. “Oh, look who’s here…” Carlo’s word choice suggests that his sexuality is not irrelevant to the investigation: “You’ve caught me red-handed.” Then, impersonating Marc, Carlo makes the accusation himself: “Good old Carlo. Well, he’s not only a drunk, but a faggot as well.” By pronouncing himself ‘guilty’ of homosexuality, Carlo is made to invite suspicion about his capacity for crime, including violent crime.

Argento insists that his representation of homosexuals is intended as a gesture of inclusion: “Film must recount life, and there are homosexuals, why should we not recount them?”¹⁵ Yet the double-coding of Carlo as homosexual and criminal hints at a much deeper engagement with popular understandings of homosexuality and its potential manifestations. This is not just about Deep Red. If we look to Argento’s other films, we find plenty of supporting evidence. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), the murder investigation commences with a round-up of four “perverts” (a fifth suspect is dismissed because they “belong with the transvestites, not the perverts”) none of whom have any connection whatsoever to the crime. In The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), the sleuth learns of a homosexual scientist and visits him at a gay bar, wading through the mass of patrons and casting dubious glares left and right before realizing that nobody there is guilty. And in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), a detective who identifies as a “fairy” jokes “I could just sit in my office and wait for the criminal to show up,” hinting incorrectly that they are one and the same. In part, this is simply a feature of the genre, for as Mauro Giori reports, “almost half of the more than 200 gialli produced featured homosexual characters.”¹⁶ But while many of those hundred odd films ‘proved’ the equation homosexual=criminal, Argento prefers to roll it out slowly, like a long carpet that will be pulled from under the spectator’s feet. His homosexuals are emphatically not criminals. They are not even homosexuals. Carlo is a caricature of a rash opinion about homosexuals, “the stereotype of a marginal masculinity” that Argento represents without endorsing.¹⁷

For his part, Marc is clearly an alpha male in crisis—a “big, strong male,” as the reporter Gianna sarcastically taunts him. Their chest-thumping back-and-forth begins when Gianna remarks that women need to be independent, to earn their own living so that they can make their own decisions. Marc’s vague response that women are different from men sounds Gianna’s alarm bells, and when she challenges him to say exactly what he means, he regrets the words coming out of his own mouth: “women are weaker—well, they’re gentler.” She promptly beats him in an arm wrestle, after which he storms out, shouting of the investigation “there are some things which you just cannot do seriously with liberated women!”

It is no surprise then that when Marc is confronted by Carlo in a dark alley, he appears uncomfortable with the strength, intimacy and physical proximity of a friend whom he has just learned is attracted to other men. Slinging his arms around Marc and pushing him gently against a marble wall, Carlo implores the amateur sleuth to give up his investigation, to leave it to the professionals. A cigarette hangs from Marc’s lips, and Carlo plucks it out, twirling it once through his fingertips before pushing it back in. This not-so-veiled threat of homosexual penetration is overlayed with Carlo’s characterization of the criminal at-large: “Can’t you see the guy’s crazy? A maniac? Anyone who would commit a crime like that is sick.” Though Carlo’s words clearly refer to Helga’s murder, they are left to linger around his erotic gesture, and the threat to Marc’s masculinity is allowed to contaminate the threat to his life. As if this were not explicit enough, Carlo delivers one last somber warning: “If I ever got the bug to try to do what you are trying to do, I would end up getting murdered myself.”

Figure 1:

Carlo inserts a cigarette into Marc’s mouth

The use of homosexuals as short-hand criminals is among the most ‘Italian’ features of Argento’s œuvre, which critics have often dismissed for dealing insufficiently with the culture of the nation. Take, for example, the debate surrounding the origins of Italian fascism. Alongside Marxist, Weberian and totalitarian explanations, there emerged a popular but also scholarly psychohistory that investigated fascism—especially in its criminal aspects—as the symptom of a repressed homosexuality which returned as an erotic investment in the body of the male leader as phallus.¹⁸ Already in 1945, a film like Rossellini’s Rome Open City indulged Nazism as homosexuality in characters like the effeminate German commander and his domineering female consort, who is attracted to an Italian actress and prostitute. The connection is hinted at in Moravia’s novel The Conformist (1951), and it is elaborated in Bertolucci’s film of the same title (1970). Other Italian productions flirt with fascism as a form of sexual transgression, including Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) and Wermüller’s Seven Beauties (1975). By the 1980s, the association between homosexuality and crime was so established on Italian and global screens that there arose a conscious resistance from within the international LGBT community, what Lance Wahlert calls a “gay and lesbian assimilationist’s demand for positive role models in film.”¹⁹ But rather than develop a set of alternative representations, the British and American New Queer Cinema of the 1990s went so far as to reappropriate the stock character of the homosexual criminal—in films like Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992)—as a romantic saboteur of all socially-constructed norms, sexual and legal alike.²⁰

Following Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), world cinema showed a renewed interest in psychoanalytic etiologies of sexuality and crime, a trope that Argento both cites and subverts. Even Freud himself had serious reservations about the ability of his method to say anything meaningful about the genesis of homosexuality, which he did not consider criminal, and his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) is peppered with cautionary clauses:

The apparent certainty of this conclusion [that inversion is acquired from childhood experience] is, however, completely countered by the reflection that many people are subjected to the same sexual influences (e.g. to seduction or mutual masturbation, which may occur in early youth) without becoming inverted or without remaining so permanently. […] The nature of inversion is explained neither by the hypothesis that it is innate nor by the alternative hypothesis that it is acquired.²¹

It is not until Leonardo Da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood (1910) that Freud confidently asserts a theory of homosexual etiology, which is drawn in part from his reading of the Tuscan polymath’s journal. In the passage in question, Da Vinci recalls that at a very young age he was visited by a bird, which inserted its tail into his mouth. This scene, which Freud interprets as an encounter with the mother’s breast, becomes the occasion for proposing a general biography of the homosexual in his earliest stages of development: “In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is […] reinforced by the small part played by the father.”²² But since the mother cannot reciprocate the child’s feelings herself, the child is forced to take on the role of the mother and to search for another male in whom to invest them.

It is certainly curious that in Deep Red the school which holds Carlo’s murderous drawing in its archives (a space of repressed but preserved memory) is named for Leonardo Da Vinci. After all, what the drawing remembers is a childhood defined by a strong mother and an absent father, which in Carlo’s case was precipitated by a crime: Martha murdering her husband. By making Carlo the artist, this scene also assigns to him the film’s opening tableau, showing a woman (now revealed to be Martha) stabbing a man (her husband), and proposes to motivate both homosexuality and crime as the imitation of violence. Argento cannot be defended from the accusation that he promotes the psychoanalytic theory of homosexual etiology, for even though he merely suggests the connection, he does nothing to problematize it within the diegesis of the film. But when it comes to the correlation of homosexuality and crime, we might describe his gesture as ‘placing the bait’ for the spectator to bite. Of course, this bait contains a hook, and when Carlo is not guilty, the spectator is guilty of mistaking their own reasoning for that of the film. At this point it is too late, for Carlo has already been punished with a horrific death, some of his last words to Marc still teasing a relation between his choice of sexual object and a capacity for violence: “I’m sorry, ‘cause I like you, but I have to kill you.” He does not succeed. He never becomes a murderer.

IV.

If Argento has tricked the spectator into indicting Carlo, then he has done so not only under the guidance of the spectator’s own biases, but also in open contradiction to the spectator’s own eyes. Carlo cannot be the murderer, for he was with Marc (and thus the spectator) at the time of Helga’s death, and when Marc looked out from the window of Helga’s apartment, he briefly saw the black-clad murderer and Carlo at opposite ends of the piazza. It is this same realization that leads Marc down his memory lane to the real murderer, Martha.

That the spectator is unlikely to accuse Martha is much less politically fraught. No doubt this is because the widespread disassociation of old age from crime—the fact that “older people are rarely perceived as perpetrators of crime”²³—has empirical support. As Edith Elisabeth Flynn notes, “age-crime curves show reliably that age is inversely related to criminal activity, with crime rates rising rapidly from the minimum age of responsibility, peaking during adolescence and then decreasing quickly with entry into adulthood.”²⁴ Rather than criminals, older people are likely to be victims of crime, especially if they “have one or more disabilities, such as a physical handicap or mental deterioration, and do not have family, friends or community agencies to provide assistance.”²⁵

Peter Kratcoski and Maximilian Edelbacher’s words are a character sketch of Martha. The first time we meet her she is home alone, sitting in perpetual boredom. Her nineteenth-century furniture is out of step with the rest of the film’s (and the genre’s) modernist design, while the black-and-white photographs that hang from her walls situate her in a nostalgic past of dubious narrative significance. Martha’s excitement to see Marc betrays the fact that visits like his are a rare and welcome event, and she does everything she can to keep him around, despite his best efforts to slip away and continue with the investigation. “Carlo’s told me all about you. You’re an engineer,” Martha offers. Marc corrects her: “No, no, I’m a pianist. I teach at the conservatory.” But Martha seems to have trouble remembering information. Not a minute goes by and she queries: “Do you like engineering?” She also admits to forgetting that Carlo had told her he was going out, then she interrupts Marc with a non sequitur: “I’m an actress. Oh, I mean I was an actress. That’s me in all those photos.” Marc’s demeanor shifts as he realizes that he cannot count on the faculty of reason. From referential, his language turns phatic as he attempts a polite departure. Martha’s final suggestion that Marc is an “engineer-pianist” does little to overturn the impression of mental deterioration, loneliness and even physical weakness attached to her character. Martha would appear to be an “easy target for criminals.”²⁶ How is it possible that this is the murderer?

Figure 2:

Martha and Marc look at a wall of photographs form Martha’s days as an actress

For the second time, Marc has missed a key piece of information, this one linguistic: “I’m an actress.” Martha plainly tells the sleuth that she is playing a part—the part of the senile and feeble older woman. This becomes clear in the final scene, where Marc confronts a lucid Martha who is ready to do battle with a man at least thirty years her minor. Is this the same character? Only if we take her at her own word: “I’m an actress.” Lisa Dolasinski writes that often in Italian cinema “older women are silent background characters [who] satisfy two primary narrative functions […]: to arouse laughter or to create a sense of repulsion precisely because of their grotesque physical features,”²⁷ especially in comedies. Argento knows this, having written a couple comedies in the 1960s, and so does Martha, with her theatrical makeup, avant-garde blouse, shimmering pendants and feathered brooch. Her convenient ‘lapses of memory’ are the perfect foil to a series of carefully planned murders that we come to identify her with. Moreover, her obsession with engineering may hint at a karstic calling: Martha herself is ‘engineer of the plot,’ a mastermind of narrative intrigue, while some of her murders would seem to require the construction of deadly technologies, like the laughing robot that launches itself at Professor Giordani. Stretching the metaphor a bit, she is together with Argento an engineer of cinematic experience, programming the eyes of the spectator to look one way (toward Carlo) and not another (away from herself).

This is more than understandable, for if we consider each murder in turn, it will become clear that the person dressed in all black is mentally sharp, physically strong, swiftly mobile and mechanically skilled, all traits that Martha is hiding. Helga is killed with a meat cleaver, which is brandished with enough force to drive her body through an exterior glass window. Marc is the next target, and even though he is not killed, it is a close call. The murderer accesses his apartment by removing a ceiling panel, which sends plaster dust raining down onto his piano. Amanda Righetti’s death is perhaps the most elaborately staged. The murderer sneaks into her house and hangs dolls from the ceilings of multiple rooms. They then turn out the lights and lunge at the victim, using a flashlight to beat her to the floor. Moving on to the bathroom, they smash her head into a wall, then repeatedly plunge her face into a tub of scalding water. Professor Giordani is cornered by a robot which comes gliding across the floor of his study, arms swinging in rigid, horrifying fashion. He succeeds in disabling the machine, but the murderer attacks him with a long metal spear. With formidable precision, they then slam his teeth twice into the corner of his desk and thrice into the corner of his fireplace mantel before stabbing him to death with his own dagger.

Is this just another instance of the giallo’s disregard for verisimilitude? Perhaps, and if so, then it reiterates the film’s generic vocation and facilitates Argento’s manipulation of the spectator. But we should not be so quick to dismiss these murders as inconsistent or implausible. What we are witnessing is, in fact, the other side of Martha’s acting performance, what she must perpetually conceal with clichés of the elderly: “You haven’t seen my scrapbook yet” she tells Marc on the telephone. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Martha is an aging film star who uses an accumulated knowledge of typecasting to pass her lead role off as a supporting, if not an extra. As Past reasons, “her marginality reinforces our suspicion that an actress so universally acclaimed for her physical beauty must be eclipsed when that beauty is marked by the lines of age.”²⁸

The spectator is unlikely to accuse Martha as an elderly person, but are they not likely to accuse her as a woman? After all, the giallo is obsessed with female criminals, and it loves to punish them with graphic, often sexualized violence. When we compare Martha to some of Argento’s other guilty women, it becomes clear that she does not qualify to perpetuate this generic trope. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the guilty Monica is played by a 26-year-old Eva Renzi. In Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the guilty Nina is played by a 26-year-old Mimsy Farmer. Even Bava’s films condemn women in their 20s and 30s (Eva Bartok was 37 when she played Cristiana in Blood and Black Lace). By contrast, Clara Calamai was 66 years old when she played Martha in Deep Red. While from a biological perspective Martha is certainly a woman, Argento’s tricks operate at the level of the cultural, where elderly women are often degendered and rendered, quite simply, elderly people. As Catherine B Silver observes, epistemologies like psychoanalysis and second-wave feminism have systematically degendered the elderly, the former by “defin[ing] menopause as a symbolic loss of femininity” and the latter by dismissing “the female body [when it] no longer reflects reproductive abilities nor attracts ‘the gaze’ of men.”²⁹ If there is a suspicious woman in Deep Red it is the reporter Gianna (played by a 25-year old Daria Nicolodi), who ‘rescues’ Marc from the burning house on the outskirts of town (or was it she who struck him unconscious?). But Martha is, for Argento, much more elderly than she is womanly. To quote Silver again, “gender categorization becomes less salient than age as a way to self-define and as a basis to stereotype older people.”³⁰ To Martha’s engineering résumé must be added the structural modifications she makes to the house, including the design and installation of a faux wall that serves for decades as her murdered husband’s tomb. Not an engineer-pianist named Marc then, but an actress-engineer named Martha.

V.

In Brechtian fashion, Deep Red sets out to teach the spectator how to reflect on the baggage of their own viewing experience, to show for the first time a series of passively received attitudes about homosexuality and old age, as if reflected in a mirror. Sharing an etymology, the English ‘to reflect’ and the Italian ‘riflettere’ both mean to turn back light but also, metaphorically, to defamiliarize one’s own perspective via conscious mental effort. This is the slow and messy process that Deep Red allows to unfold. From the dirty, almost opaque mirror in the bathroom of the parapsychology conference to the crystal-clear mirror in Helga’s apartment, the film asks the spectator to bring themself into focus. As Giulio Giusti brilliantly points out, reflection and mirrors are everywhere in Deep Red: “all murder set-pieces, in fact, end up with the frozen image of the corpses reflected in harsh reflective surfaces, such as the glass of a window in the case of Helga, a reflecting wall in the case of Amanda and a reflecting desk in the case of Giordani.”³¹ The need for reflection and self-reflection is thus constantly cued and associated with death, as it is elsewhere in Argento’s œuvre. Think, for example, of the reflective glass box that traps Sam while Monica struggles with Alberto in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, or the central ploy of Four Flies on Grey Velvet, which involves extracting a reflection of the killer from Dalia’s retina. As regards Deep Red, certainly the most reflected (if unreflective) character is the spectator’s stand-in, Marc himself. Marc is reflected in Martha’s blood as she expires in the elevator, and he is reflected, of course, in Helga’s mirror, when he finally realizes it is not a painting. “What an idiot.” He stares deep into his own eyes. “What I saw was a reflection in a mirror.” And what he sees now is his own. It is as if he is for the first time beholding himself as an object, coming to terms with the social aspects of his subjectivity which turn it from a liberal window on the world to an embedded, even overdetermined form of spectatorship.

Figure 3:

Helga, Amanda and Professor Giordani all die on reflective surfaces. Marc is reflected in Martha’s blood

Clearly a Lacanian framework can add layers to our analysis of Deep Red. As Mariarita Martino Grisà argues, “the face of the killer reflected in one of the mirrors […] appears, like the gaze, as a spot in the line of vision, it appears as a distorted image, just an impression.”³² But if it is true that “the gaze is something that looks us back and enhances the apprehension of our unconscious,”³³ then to limit ourselves to the gaze of Martha—as Grisà does—is to pursue a purely textual question, the genre’s proverbial whodunnit? Like Lacan’s child, what Marc sees in the mirror is “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity,” a subjectivity positioned necessarily as Imaginary and thus vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the Symbolic order.³⁴ The gaze of Marc, who gazes at himself and is gazed at by himself, explodes the text and raises us to the level of meta-representation, where Argento’s politics of spectatorship finally come into view. This is not just Marc’s dilemma; it is also the spectator’s. The specchio (mirror) reveals the spettatore (spectator) as the conditioned participant in an unfinished text. It is not that there was nothing there where the spectator thought there was something (“There never was a painting there at all”), but that there was something all along, an influential subjectivity, hidden in plain sight.

Figure 4:

Marc sees himself reflected in Helga’s mirror

Author Biography

Jim Carter is Lecturer in Italian and Associate Director of Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. His publications include Italian Industrial Literature and Film (co-editor, Peter Lang Press, 2021) and Ecologia e lavoro: dialoghi interdisciplinari (co-editor, Mimesis Press, 2023). Jim is the founding editor of the Doctoral Dissertations column in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. In 2018-2019, he won the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.