TV Debates And Cleaver-Wielding Maniacs
GIALLO: ITALIAN CINEMA STREAMING ON CRITERION
🧜♀️ We’ll get to the naked women soon, soon, I promise. But first, a spoonful of politics; please step over the following if you’d prefer to avoid it. And please leave an angry jeremiad in the comments, if you would like to put a stop once and for all to the tyranny of your free subscription.
I watched one of the last episodes of West Wing a few nights ago.
Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda, playing Dem and GOP candidates for President, were having a televised debate. Their dialogue was packed with an extraordinary amount of detail about American policy making, and this information was presented outside of the tribalism context that drives most of our voting patterns; the episode ought to be required viewing for any American who feels qualified to cast a vote. I don’t think most Americans really understand what our two parties supposedly stand for, and this grates on me.
The idea that the parties actually do stand for something may be a hollow and cynical facade, but damn it, it’s OUR hollow and cynical facade. If the parties are going to go to the trouble of paying lip service to a governing philosophy, we citizens ought to at least be willing to sit and watch a TV episode explaining what they used to pretend to stand for, back when they could occasionally shelve the acrimony and schoolyard rhetoric long enough to coat all their pretending with the oleaginous sheen of sincerity that all decent pretending needs, if it’s going to really glisten when it gets under the hot lights.
A serious participant in a nation’s political process ought to be able to characterize the opposition’s philosophy in a way that sounds reasonable to the opposition, and the lowly TV writers behind this episode gave us a handy cheat sheet for doing just that. Jimmy Madison couldn’t have done it better. (Please note: when I speak of this business of political philosophy, I’m referring to conservatism, not the addled populism and crackpot reactionary thinking the GOP currently pretends is acceptable in a civilized society. Some readers may conclude that my observations here are thus out of date. If you are one— or more— of those readers, I encourage you to keep it in your shorts. If my remarks cause a vein to prominently throb in your Piltdown-like forehead, please don’t hesitate to inform me via telepathy.)
If all of us could stop what we’re doing and take a minute, right now, and commit to gazing vaguely to one side while we mumble a promise to eventually watch this West Wing episode, the gazing and mumbling would show we are in good faith when we say we have concepts of plans to do something that might have a chance of improving our democracy, given the right conditions, and everything else being equal. More or less.
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Thanks for putting up with that dispiriting bit of social commentary; now let us pivot pleasantly to Italian cinema.
Criterion is currently streaming a bunch of Italian giallo films, and I’ve caught a few of them. If you’re not familiar with the giallo tradition, here’s a quick summary: these are Italian murder mysteries where an incurable neurotic finally snaffles his or her cap, dons black gloves, and starts to make brutal murder a regular feature of his or her lifestyle. Various methods of dispatching victims are used in giallo films, but blades are the most common. After a certain number of giallo films were released, directors started to feel that razors were getting a little prosaic; your self-respecting maniac was moving on from razors, and the cleaver became the instrument most likely to be wielded.
I was watching “What Have They Done To Your Daughters,” a film where the cops are trying to catch a cleaver-wielding maniac who’s been keeping busy by chopping his victims into pieces. After his latest chopping session, he leaves the scene on his motorcycle, but this time a cop jumps into a cop car and goes after him. Every police car in the city is suddenly chasing one guy on a motorcycle, and somehow he still gets away. It occurred to me— as it often does when I’m watching sleazy gratuitous low-budget films— that an important philosophical point is being made here, justifying the time I spend with these grimy denizens of cinema’s periphery. It seems to me that philosophy books would be more likely to connect with citizens if the books included more car chases and naked Italian women.
That’s just an aside, though. The larger philosophical point is that when we allow our battle against immorality, ignorance, barbarism, and the like to turn into a metaphorical car chase, we doom ourselves to failure. How often does a black-gloved maniac end a high-speed chase by pulling over and recanting his or her previous maniacal positions? It’s much more likely that your typical black-gloved maniac will keep driving up until the moment when they get into a fiery crash; it’s just not in a black-gloved maniac’s nature to give up and turn in their black gloves and cleaver.
“I want some other maniac to have this cleaver and these black gloves; it’s clear to me now that I don’t deserve them.”
Confronting people in real life amounts to a demand that they renounce their identity, and we ask a lot when we ask for that. How many people— whether they’re fully committed to the cause, or just weekend cleavers— will recognize their own pathology when cornered?
The cleaver specialty stores are filled with customers who have crossed a line, and won’t be crossing back; the black-glove boutiques tell a similarly grim tale. But I suppose we can all rejoice, a little bit, when we notice that late-stage capitalism (for all its flaws) hasn’t created a store that exclusively sells black gloves and cleavers. Not yet, anyway.
To be clear, I don’t want to see such a store spring up, between a frozen yogurt place and a cupcake retailer. But if we must have a non-cupcake establishment that caters to madmen, I hope it will be called “Glove It Or Cleave It.”
I’m a giallo fan. I’ve long been fascinated by genre, and sub-genre, and sub-sub-genre, and the giallo film is a sub-sub-sub-genre that has achieved what I consider the highest accomplishment of any genre. No, I don’t mean the fan convention, where egregious fans dress up like characters from a movie, show, comic book, boardwalk caricature, or bathroom stall Sharpie scrawl. It’s conventions of this kind that make possible a particularly indefensible example of pop-culture snobbery, I’m just coming to realize; my obsession with Italian films featuring cleaver-wielding maniacs may be hard to defend, and my pro-giallo arguments may fail to convince the typical onlooker, but at least I can honestly say I don’t literally want to dress up like these giallo characters and wait in long lines for an autograph or a falafel.
No, what impresses me about the giallo genre is the scholarship. You know a genre has whipped up some serious obsessive fandom when a book comes out that lists every example of it the author was able to find. The giallo encyclopedia on my shelf covers hundreds of films.
It’s three volumes. Cutting it down to a single volume would have meant leaving out the many lurid photos and posters (often more than one on a page) depicting naked women noticing a nearby maniac, naked women running away from the maniac, and naked women tripping and falling to allow the maniac to gain on them; giallo researchers would never have tolerated such sloppy scholarship.
Giallo films whisk together the elements of detective stories, thrillers, suspense films, and horror. A grisly murder is committed, early on, and the central character (typically, a naked woman) spends the rest of the film trying to solve the mystery. The killer wears black gloves and continues murdering more victims, until the mystery is eventually solved, and at this point the metaphorical mask is ripped off and the killer revealed. Often, the killer’s non-metaphorical head is also ripped off, because he or she is wearing a necklace that gets caught in some machinery.
I say he or she, because giallo directors often make the killer a woman, to stymie critics who were just opening their mouths to suggest that films where killers abhor women and women abhor clothing must be misogynistic.
There are so many of these films that glib assumptions about the genre don’t always pay off. Usually, of course, they do pay off. But not always, is what I’m saying. In one film from Criterion’s collection, giallo regular Edwige Fenich is cast against type, as a woman who walks upright and wears clothes. And although it’s a movie crowded with naked models, Fenich doesn’t play one. Quite the opposite, in fact; her character is a woman who photographs naked models.
So, it came as something of a surprise to me when we got into the third or fourth minute of the film, and Fenich put down her camera and announced that she had decided to change careers and go into modeling. Her male photographer colleague tried to talk her out of it, but being a strong female character, she stuck to her guns. Even when she took off every stitch of clothing, and gave him one of those “come hither” looks (unnecessarily, as he was already pretty thoroughly thither), he stood by what he’d said. They didn’t keep arguing about it, though. They’d already made their points, I guess, and the scene proceeded in another direction. Serious students of cinema will tell you that film is a visual medium, and the rest of this scene confirmed this axiom.
This particular giallo, with the somewhat on-the-nose title of Strip Nude For Your Killer, is one of many giallos where a killer is targeting naked models. I don’t know the stats on real-life murderers who focus their ire on specific professions, but Mario Bava’s classic Blood And Black Lace established the model-targeting trope early on; after that, giallo maniacs have never targeted surveyors, auctioneers, philatelists, or comptrollers. Personally, I’d like to see a film about naked comptrollers, but I fear Hollywood will drop the ball on this. I could see Netflix stepping up, maybe.
When a movie has a lot of naked women, but also a lot of subtitles, it tends to expose the reality that the viewer’s divided loyalties are not quite evenly divided. This is what economists call “revealed preference.”
People are complex. A viewer may want to know what characters are saying, but the same viewer may also want to keep track of the transitory scrum of onscreen labia.
Vaginas move fast in Italian films, it must be said; while it’s not quite true that if you blink, you’ll miss them (I blinked, and I didn’t miss any of them), you should know going into it that in some giallos, these “taxpaying citizens of Nether-Nether Land,” as it were, will be leaping and darting through the air like potamodromous salmon.
I plan to provide more specifics on more giallo films in a later post, if there is no public outcry against it. But here’s a movie to tide you over.
Dario Argento’s Deep Red is my choice for finest giallo film. It’s visually inventive, it’s got a wonderful performance by Daria Nicolodi as the smart and tough woman reporter who saves the male star’s pancetta over and over, and it was the maiden voyage for the soundtrack team who would go on to score Argento’s classic Suspiria.
Plus: it’s got a really disturbing dummy that walks around by itself, which is never explained. I love that nobody ever explains it. Nobody even brings it up. Argento was warned not to shoot this dummy scene. He didn’t listen.
I think that Criterion programs movies like these, with all their flaws, because the goal isn’t just to get people to watch art films. Criterion wants what I want— to get people to fall in love with the medium. The best art films can grab you and change you, and like all serious art their job is to slow down time for a little while. But the best trash can do that too. You can watch Antonioni’s L’Avventura, if you like, and on a day when I’ve ingested a sufficient amount of dopio espressos to stay conscious for its entire running time, I may join you. In the meantime, I consider an evening with Argento or Bava to be time well spent, especially if Daria is on board, too.
Ah, now you’re making me wish I knew what Criterion was & whether we’ll ever get it in the UK. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I shouldn’t watch & therefore I want to very much.
"Confronting people in real life amounts to a demand that they renounce their identity, and we ask a lot when we ask for that. How many people— whether they’re fully committed to the cause, or just weekend cleavers— will recognize their own pathology when cornered?" Absolutely. Brilliant summary of situation in our public dialogues. As for Gallo, I stopped at Suspiria. I suspected I should push on, but my heart wasn't in it. LOL.