Abstract
Focusing on the films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975) and Tenebrae (1982), which feature openly queer characters, this paper argues that director Dario Argento subtly disrupts ‘conventional’ and binary notions of gender without portraying transgressive identities, sexualities and bodies as sights and sites of horror. Instead, Argento imbues these characters with the same hybridity that regulates much of his worldbuilding. Turning to the body’s relationship to architecture, this paper traces the contours of a mutually constitutive relationship between the built environment and queerness. Taking the history of body and gender analogies in architectural theory as a point of departure, this paper argues that Dario Argento disrupts heteronormative coding in architecture to dazzling effects, offering instead a pluralization of sex, desire and gender normativity within the built environment of his films. Using these characters, possible avenues to configure the affects – emotional and political – of queerness are clarified in a way that can account for the malleability of boundaries, whether they be physical, sexual or architectural.
Key Words: queerness, sex, gender, architecture, hybridity, affect, transgression
Focusing on the films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975) and Tenebrae (1982), which feature openly queer characters, this paper argues that director Dario Argento subtly disrupts ‘conventional’ and binary notions of gender without portraying transgressive identities, sexualities and bodies as sights and sites of horror. Instead, Argento imbues these characters with the same hybridity that regulates much of his worldbuilding. Turning to the body’s relationship to architecture, this paper traces the contours of a mutually constitutive relationship between the built environment and queerness. Taking the history of body and gender analogies in architectural theory as a point of departure, this paper argues that Dario Argento disrupts heteronormative coding in architecture to dazzling effects, offering instead a pluralization of sex, desire and gender normativity within the built environment of his films. Using these characters, possible avenues to configure the affects – emotional and political – of queerness are clarified in a way that can account for the malleability of boundaries, whether they be physical, sexual or architectural.
Key Words: queerness, sex, gender, architecture, hybridity, affect, transgression
Mapping the impossible spaces of murder: Tenebrae (1982)
The threat of becoming, its strangeness, its unpredictability, is embodied in architecture in the cinema of Italian horror auteur Dario Argento. The act of transgression and the production of difference happens by and through the representation of architecture in his films, in which space fulfils both practical and expressive functions. Architecture combines with or sometimes adapts to characters, playing a role in the formation of identity. This condition of hybridity expands beyond the built environment to the city, ultimately revealing the entanglements of bodies and architectures as products of continual transformation and translation that perpetually undermine logics of normalcy. In his films Argento defines a queer space that is determined through the dynamic relationships between design (functionality) and use (performativity). His establishment of this queer space is most apparent in three films, representing three key moments in his career: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975) and Tenebrae (1982). All three feature openly queer characters and also, understood in relation to the sociohistorical and cultural developments in Italy, key stages in his treatment of architecture as materialisations of queerness. In other words, through and by their use of prominent queer characters, these films are most effective in defining Argento’s queer architecture.
Within the ever–expanding scholarship dedicated to Argento, gendered and sexual transgressions have remained a central object of study, often through engagements rooted in questions of violence, spectatorship and the gaze. Adam Knee remarks that Argento’s film ‘often forcefully confounds many of the generalizations about relations of gender, power, and spectatorship in the horror genre put forth in film studies’. [1] The gendered dynamics and transgressions in Argento’s cinema unfold on both a narrative level and through architecture. Moving away from heteronormative understandings of the built environment, a queer theory of architecture offers a renewed entry point into Argento’s films. When queerness and its representations are discussed, it is often to highlight the problematic nature of these representations, from their caricatural nature to their association with mental illness. Yet scholars such as Colette Balmain, [2] Xavier Mendik, [3] Adam Knee [4] and Marcia Landy, [5] among others, have opened up new avenues of reflection on the director’s cult cinema. Indeed, while Argento’s queer characters do occasionally fall victim to tropes and stereotypes, the director’s commitment to include these characters in his films and to present them as a matter of fact during a time in which explicit queer representation was rare, especially in a conservative country like Italy, is worthy of attention and in-depth consideration. As Knee suggests,
Within the ever–expanding scholarship dedicated to Argento, gendered and sexual transgressions have remained a central object of study, often through engagements rooted in questions of violence, spectatorship and the gaze. Adam Knee remarks that Argento’s film ‘often forcefully confounds many of the generalizations about relations of gender, power, and spectatorship in the horror genre put forth in film studies’. [1] The gendered dynamics and transgressions in Argento’s cinema unfold on both a narrative level and through architecture. Moving away from heteronormative understandings of the built environment, a queer theory of architecture offers a renewed entry point into Argento’s films. When queerness and its representations are discussed, it is often to highlight the problematic nature of these representations, from their caricatural nature to their association with mental illness. Yet scholars such as Colette Balmain, [2] Xavier Mendik, [3] Adam Knee [4] and Marcia Landy, [5] among others, have opened up new avenues of reflection on the director’s cult cinema. Indeed, while Argento’s queer characters do occasionally fall victim to tropes and stereotypes, the director’s commitment to include these characters in his films and to present them as a matter of fact during a time in which explicit queer representation was rare, especially in a conservative country like Italy, is worthy of attention and in-depth consideration. As Knee suggests,
Indeed, in historical, cinematic, and generic contexts hardly known for their acceptance of homosexuality and transsexuality, Argento offers us many images of sexual and gender variation which, even when not especially positive, are nevertheless surprisingly neutral; as a result, he establishes a framework within which mainstream assumptions may be thrown into doubt. [6]
These characters clarify possible avenues to configure the affects – emotional and political – of queerness in a way that can account for the malleability of boundaries, whether they be physical, sexual or architectural.
Queerness as a concept is purposely expansive and pliable, allowing it to be perpetually unfolding, rooted in becoming rather than being. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, queer refers to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’. [7] To think of queerness and architecture is to return to the latter’s purest expression through the former’s critical interrogation of normative conventions and expectations. A denaturalising project, to think of queer architecture is to think not of a ‘natural given’ but rather ‘a historical construct’, to repurpose Michel Foucault’s writing on sexuality. [8] In its opposition to the normative and the binary, queerness embraces hybridity and transgression. For Judith Butler,
If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes. [9]
A queer body, be it human or non-human, is a body in perpetual dialogue with the world. As such, queerness can be conceived of as a hybrid condition, albeit one rooted in a material and historical reality that at times contradicts its nature.
The tension between the inside and outside, inner and outer life, used to dazzling effect in the cinema of Argento, can be traced back to the inception of modern architectural theory in the Renaissance. In Western architectural history, starting from the first–century Roman architect Vitruvius and continued through the Renaissance into Modernity, the body constitutes an essential object and a source of ideal measure and proportion. Anthony Vidler defines architecture as a ‘living organism’ that, from Vitruvius to the present, has been understood as a body endowed with bodily or organic characteristics, sometimes both. [10] As architectural theorist Gerard Rey A. Lico points out, ‘a transhistorical research [survey] on the history of architecture will reveal the presence of the body as an omnipresent canon and the image of the male body as the perfect earthly creation, the natural microcosm of universal harmonies’. [11] Yet it must be stressed that the body used as the basis for this lineage of body-architecture metaphors is distinctly male. Raluca Livia Niculae highlights the fact that, against as assumption of neutrality, the male body becomes the foundational ‘form, through orders, hierarchies, symmetry, and proportion rules’ of Western architectural systems. [12] Going through the richest symbolic and classic stages of the body-architecture analogies’ history, one can assume that male anthropomorphism stems from and is deeply rooted in the Western canon in which ‘the woman’s figure is repressed and her unique qualities including motherhood are projected onto and substituted by the man’s figure’. [13] In line with Judith Butler’s ideas that binary relationships of gender and sex cannot automatically be assumed, stressing through her term performativity a conception of the body as hybrid, disrupting this male-centric body-system of architecture requires a queering not just of the body but also of the space, both its design and usage. This is the basis for the gendered performance of architecture that we see in Argento’s cinema. This body of architecture, under the new regime of modernity, ‘no longer serves to center, to fix, or to stabilize’. Vidler continues,
Rather, its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morselated, the broken. [14]
Argento embraces these qualities, putting forth a cinema that is both formalist and experimental, embracing excess in a way that is both reflective and reflexive of Italy’s socio-cultural and historical structures. He establishes an uncanny correspondence between his characters and their urban environments, translating the crises of modernity on screen.
Inside out
From his first giallo, L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo / The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Argento establishes a spatial practice that actively interrogates gender and sexuality. Early in the film, American writer and flâneur Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), who lives in Rome with his girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall), witnesses an attempted murder in an art gallery. The mysterious assailant is thought to be an infamous serial killer. Sam’s entrapment within the art gallery’s glass doors reveals a narrative impotence, a moment of emasculation, that is soon revealed to be tied to Sam’s potential queerness. His ‘enforced inactivity and inability to determine the course of narrative events serves to situate him in the position of passive femininity’. [15] Queerness takes place in a literal sense both through function and performance. In this glass box, Sam is both inside and outside – a condition that recalls Jack Halberstam’s contention that gender representation in the horror film is a ‘destruction of the boundary between inside and outside’. [16] Without judgment, Argento shows Sam in relation with the world. Sam’s unease when interacting with openly queer characters, such as a gay shop owner and a cross-dressing sex worker, bring to the surface his own disembodied and ungendered qualities. In other words, Sam’s queerness is neither stable nor fixed, and it cannot be seen by other people on his body. Instead, it shows up in moments of intimacy, haunted by flashes of the architectural structure within which he was trapped. This architecture, to paraphrase Mikhail Bakhtin on the grotesque, is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, and is always transgressing its own limits. [17] Space in Argento conjures the very fear at the heart of grotesque body, which cannot be truly individuated from the rest of the world – from, most significantly, the non-human. Complicit in the violence that is unleashed, this queering enables death, but also engenders an unforeseen hybridity, one that manifests itself in the doing as much as in the being. It represents both the promise and the threat of an uncertain future – or perhaps what Mikel J. Koven has identified as an ambivalence towards modernity. [18] Within the uncanny correspondence between the architecture and the characters in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there is a clear attempt to bury or hide within interior spaces, whether they be physical and metaphorical. Operating at the level of the unconscious, such traumatic defamiliarisations are nonetheless telling, especially as they relate to concealment or purposeful obscuring of a story or history so that it might be forgotten.
The presence of explicitly queer characters is an important feature of Argento’s early Animal Trilogy, made up of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Il gatto a nove code / Cat ‘O Nine Tails (1971), and 4 mosche di velluto grigio / Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). There is a gay informant among many other transgressing characters in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and in Cat ‘O Nine Tails, we encounter a gay scientist and a murderer with an extra sex chromosome. Four Flies on Grey Velvet is the most significant in this regard, featuring a gay police inspector, Roberto, as a secondary hero, as well as an antagonist with gender dysphoria. Infused with homoerotic undertones, it features reversed gender roles that fuel the oneiric qualities of the film. Early in the film, for example, Roberto enters the building and finds himself moving through a series of thick burgundy curtains before arriving at an empty, desolate theatre littered with garland and confetti. There, he stabs his stalker – an act of penetration. From that moment on, there is a dream-like, almost alien quality to the film, which emphasises the psychoanalytic aspects of the narrative. In fact, the gay subtext is present from the beginning of the film when Roberto bids farewell to his attractive bandmate after a coy exchange; as critic Ed Gonzalez writes, the ‘longhaired Roberto’s Neapolitan looks are complimented by that of his short-haired wife’s. His relationship to Nina (Mimsy Farmer) is a relatively sexless one. Nina goes away and Roberto shares a retro-giddy tub moment with his wife’s cousin, Dalia (Francine Racette).’ [19] This ‘homocentric framework’ is heightened by the arrival of Detective Arrosio, an out homosexual man that ‘offends more than he provokes’. [20] His queerness is purposely performed, becoming, in Maitland McDonagh words, ‘a point of honour’. [21] Unapologetic and flirtatious, the detective meets his end in a public bathroom. The setting of the murder, Gonzalez points out, emphasises ‘the film’s concern for gender confusion – [as] the spectator’s eye immediately focuses on male/female drawings on the bathroom’s door’. [22] An architectural metaphor for queer space, the bathroom – not unlike the closet – has long been intertwined with non-heterosexual identity, specifically as an interiorised place of hybrid performativity.
The impossible city
In Profondo Rosso / Deep Red, female and male characters are rendered explicitly hybrid, which is also true of the environment within which they operate. Argento returns to key thematic concerns from his earlier films. The narrative structure of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage finds resonance in Deep Red, which also reflects the architectural metaphors of the city performed in the former. Deep Red follows English jazz pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings) who, while on an evening walk in Rome, witnesses the murder of his psychic neighbour, Helga Ullman (Macha Méril). Powerless at the time of the attack – an impotence that is reminiscent of Bird’s Sam Dalmas – Marc is haunted by his memory of the event, convinced that he holds the key to finding the killer. He begins to investigate the murder himself, with the help of reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi). The killer is ultimately revealed to be Martha, the mother of Marc’s friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), who happens to be a gay man. The film is permeated with gendered transgressions and hybridities, suffused by a queerness that also unfolds at the level of the spaces and places of the film. Such queer sensibilities first emerge through its characters: male and female characters do not conform to a binary understanding or performance of gender, instead embodying divergent sexualities to expansive gendered identities. Nearly every character is queer-coded in one way or another, including background actors who often appear androgynous or other-than-human altogether.
The most explicit instances of queerness in the film come from Carlo and his lover Massimo, a transvestite. Although the character of Massimo is intended to be male and read as a man who cross-dresses, wearing lace lingerie and a woman’s robe, he is portrayed by a female actor (Geraldine Hooper). Encoded in the character is an explicit transgression of the gender binary both within and outside of the diegesis. Despite a deep voice – in both the Italian and the English dubbing of the film – and a pencil moustache, Argento casts Massimo as distinctly feminine. His character purposely eludes and, in some ways explicitly resists, gendered conventions and readings. Similar to this is the hybridity and transgression embodied by the effeminate Dr. Bardi (Piero Mazzinghi) and the masculine Gianna, who not only works in a male-dominated field, but also proudly defies feminine conventions in both her style of dress and her demeanour. Less conspicuous, however, is the ways in which the film’s central character, Marc, who sees both his masculinity and heterosexuality consistently questioned throughout the film, himself performs queerness. As McDonagh points out, he is the subject of ‘a variety of implicit and explicit sexual allusions’ and is marked as Carlo’s ‘structural double’. [23] From their arm-wrestling match that Marc sorely loses to the recurring gag of Gianna’s tiny car that emasculates him, to incessant innuendos, both characters fail to appropriately perform their ‘real’ or ‘assigned’ genders, which thereby highlight their respective gendered transgressions. Tellingly, Marc and Gianna inhabit and move through their environment as outsiders, as ‘the other’. These brief and subtle moments are revelatory of the way space functions to reinforces these aspects of the film.
The hybridity of Deep Red takes place on many levels, including the built environment and urban space defined through the film. Infused with a profound sense of otherness, the film features a city that is not one – a hybrid fantasy. Despite being set in Rome, most of the landmarks witnessed in Deep Red are actually in Turin, which amplifies the film’s sense of unreality. As Alexia Kannas writes in her book on the film, ‘Argento’s goal here is not to survey the city in the spirit of the documentary form, but to evoke senses of present and past that are historically ambiguous and hauntingly unspecific’. [24] The film prominently features the Piazza Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale and its Po and Dora Fountains, which are represented by a man and a woman lying at the foundations, from which water flows. With its colonnades and two statues-fountains which symbolise the rivers of the city, the square represents a dream-like space which dwarfs the characters. Almost hinting at the reveal that is to come, Argento uses the setting for some of the most revelatory dialogues of the films at the Fontana del Po, the man, while the Fontana della Dora remains offscreen – the masculine obfuscates the feminine at both the architectural and the narrative levels. This space is where Marc meets a drunk Carlo and witnesses the murder of his neighbour. It is where the gender confusion that drives much of the narrative first materialises. Interestingly, to the real piazza Argento adds the fictional ‘Blue Bar’ based on Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks, which creates a hybridised space that exceeds the borders and boundaries of the real. ‘Deep Red’s imagining of Rome is a chaotically rendered collage of decontextualised Italian locations, post-classical and modernist architecture and interiors, and fictitious places lifted from other art forms,’ writes Kannas. [25] Fulfilling a symbolic cinematic boundary which coincides with material reality, architecture fuels the tension between Argento’s investment in realism and his resistance to it.
For McDonagh, the film is a noticeable departure from its predecessors. ‘Beginning with Deep Red,’ she writes, ‘Argento’s films become full-length nightmares whose diegeses are disturbed from the outset; whose oneiric qualities are consistent, achieved by way of subtly […] disordered compositions, colour values, and angles.’ [26] In Deep Red, architecture intensifies the disavowal of gendered boundaries and analogies. Indeed, the need for secrecy, deeply rooted in the history of queer spaces, emerges in the film as it does for queer people: it is predicated on survival, adaptability, anonymity and ephemerality. No longer only the predicament of architecture, the city similarly performs queerness in the film through its expansive, unknowable, and unfathomable identity. The trope of coming to terms with reality, with identity, that is at the core of queer mythologies becomes the source of both fear and liberation. Radical and dangerous, architecture and the city conceal as much as they reveal.
Hybridity and transgression
Tenebrae, released nearly a decade later, represents the apogee of Argento’s architectural practices and queerings. As McDonagh writes,
This spectre is raised as early as in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, when one assumes that the killer in the black slicker must be a man, only to find that it’s pretty Monica Ranieri, who has made herself over as the madman who attacked and nearly killed her as a young woman. The transvestites of the St. Peter’s club in The Cat O’Nine Tails, where homosexual Dr. Braun spends his leisure hours, evoke the same confusion. But while they’re scattered through Bird and Cat, Four Flies on Grey Velvet abounds in such references and so lays the groundwork for Deep Red and Tenebrae, whose sexual landscapes are veritable minefields. [27]
Tenebrae centres on American writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) as he arrives in an unrecognisable Rome to promote his latest novel, the bestseller Tenebrae, a murder-mystery. The city is empty and without a past, or perhaps it is haunted by it – Argento has said it is a post-atomic Rome. Peter’s novel receives a mixed critical reception, which is made clear during a press event. In a moment that recalls accusations of sexism and misogyny levied at Argento, lesbian journalist Tilde (Mirella D'Angelo) tells the writer ‘Tenebrae is a sexist novel’. She then asks him why he despises women so much. Similarly, a television program critic (John Steiner) presses him about the punitive value of violence in his novels. ‘Tenebrae is about human perversion and its effect on society,’ he laments. During these interviews, Peter receives an anonymous letter claiming that his book inspired the correspondent to go on a killing spree. Soon after Peter reads it, the police come to him in search of answers. We learn that the murderer has indeed begun to emulate the serial killer in the book. Peter becomes embroiled in the investigation when, in the presence of the chief investigator Germani (Giuliano Gemma), the murderer calls him.
Set in a not-so-distant future, the film abandons the colour palette and baroque sensibilities of earlier films such as Suspiria (1977). Instead, Argento privileges pastels and Brutalist architectures in Tenebrae. The emphasis on harsh concrete as opposed to glass represents not only an aesthetic shift, but also an ideological one. Glass, a reflective yet transparent barrier has been replaced with opaqueness. Cultural processes and gendered transactions now hurt themselves against the built environment, as does the body. Windows, doors and other transitory openings that previously populated Argento’s cinema have become gates and fences in Tenebrae. Geometrically determined and physically defined, structures are now enclosures.
Sadism, space and structures of constraint in Tenebrae
This aspect is perhaps best embodied in a breath-taking sequence at the home of Tilde and her lover Marion, a bisexual woman. After a brief but tense argument between them, Tilde makes her way to a window through which she peers nervously. The camera then begins to scale the walls of the building. Seemingly autonomous, it freely moves along the external wall of their modern home. The scene materialises a liminality embodied by the Sapphic relationship between the two characters and literalises their act of transgression. The camera surveys the boundaries between real and imagined, body and architecture. It carefully attends to its materiality with disorienting extreme close-ups that emphasise the texture of concrete. The camera enters and exits the home through windows. No longer porous, architecture shifts the meaning of transgression, which is in keeping with Tenebrae’s thematic concerns. In the film, the crimes of both killers are revealed to be sexually motivated, by the desire to eliminate sexual deviancy for one, and due to past trauma of sexual humiliation for the other. Sexuality, now concrete in its materiality, is rendered shameful, hurtful or destructive, depending on the character. The inability to confine queerness to the margins, or to eradicate it, is at the heart of the killer’s rationale to kill. The primary scene at the centre of the film plays on Argento’s desire for hybridity and transgression.
In the primal scene of Tenebrae, yet another unrecognisable space in the film – one devoid of any architecture – a woman offers herself to a group of young men on a beach. Erotically charged at first, the scene shows her on her knees, surrounded by them as another young man slowly approaches. She promptly rejects him, leading the man to strike her. This moment is followed by a chase and the woman orally raping her aggressor with the heel of her red shoe. The scene is marked by a further ambiguity: Argento cast Eva Robins (sometimes credited as Eva Robins or Robbins), a transgender woman, in the role of the temptress. Interestingly, this aspect never figures in the narrative, functioning as a non-event for Argento. Yet Robins embodies the very hybridity that regulates the world of Tenebrae. She is introduced in a natural landscape that contrasts with the alienating and artificial urban setting of the rest of the film, its present. This memory is later revealed to be Peter Neal’s motivation for murder, shown through flashbacks. Even the boundaries of time are malleable and fluctuating, they are expansive and transgressive.
Argento’s queer constructions
In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and Tenebrae, Argento creates analogies among the spaces characters occupy, the architecture of his filmic worlds, and the murders committed within them. Despite being heavily structured and regimented, the geometrical abstraction at the heart of Argento’s spatial practice finds itself troubled by illogical and fragmented spaces, with queer reality on the level of both the characters and the architectural space. Tenebrae represents the theoretical apex of Argento’s spatial practice. The Baroque and Art Nouveau architectures that featured prominently in previous films, in which queer characters played major roles, has been replaced by Brutalist, modern architecture that forces queerness to the margins, where it finds new ways to thrive. The house of the killer in Four Flies on a Grey Velvet and the ‘house of the screaming child’ from Deep Red – which both housed the respective killers and hid their secrets – each represent queer repression not only on an aesthetic level, but also through their respective anthropomorphisation. The grotesque transparency that began with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is then replaced by an architecture that swallows secret identities and traumas, ultimately culminating in a world in which time and space achieve boundlessness.
Throughout Argento’s films, architecture functions as a boundary, concrete in its materiality within the diegesis and yet one that can be transcended on the level of performativity. The ideological function of architecture in his cinema is one that articulates hybridity; it establishes the parameters for a reading of queerness in which physical surrounding reveals the instability of those within it. ‘There is no queer space,’ the historian George Chauncey writes, ‘there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use.’ [28] Yet Argento’s cinema defines a queer space that uses non-compliant bodies, suffused with queerings and queerness, to perform itself. Architecture and queerness are linked through what is expressed and repressed, which unfolds at the levels of both processes and (re)presentations, culminating in performance.
The political bodies of Argento’s narratives become entangled with the sometimes porous convergent and affective built environment of the worlds he creates. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage established a set of spatial and architectural practices, transforming the giallo. Architecture is not a means to an end; it is a character that interacts with other actors. Deep Red and Tenebrae, two subsequent returns to form, solidified core aspects of Argento’s queer architectures. Subtle queerness becomes more expansive as time and space become more malleable and open to diegetic forces. Through the inclusion of openly queer characters and architectures, he subtly disrupts ‘conventional’ and binary experiences of gender without portraying transgressive identities, sexualities and bodies as inherent sights and sites of horror. Instead, Argento imbues these characters with the same hybridity that regulates much of his worldbuilding.
By understanding architecture in the cinema of Argento as a mechanism of representation, his spatial practices render visible the social, political and cultural processes that exist in his filmic worlds. Humans and their environments are mutually constitutive in and through this queer presence that reveals how the effects of characters’ hybridity – or queerness – is a material and psychical dialogue with their environment. Stated differently, the psychological terrain of characters and the physical geography of made-made constructions in which they operate are masterfully explored in and through a lineage of body-architecture metaphors and analogies. These films help undo normalised constructs of the cultural self and defamiliarise the familiar. Each film is representative of a stage in his gialli that enable an exploration of the socio-cultural and historical structures of Italy, which find themselves reflected in the crisis of identity affecting characters and the fear it engenders. Argento disrupts heteronormative coding in architecture to dazzling effects, offering instead a pluralization of sex, desire and gender normativity within the built environment of his films.
Footnotes
In the primal scene of Tenebrae, yet another unrecognisable space in the film – one devoid of any architecture – a woman offers herself to a group of young men on a beach. Erotically charged at first, the scene shows her on her knees, surrounded by them as another young man slowly approaches. She promptly rejects him, leading the man to strike her. This moment is followed by a chase and the woman orally raping her aggressor with the heel of her red shoe. The scene is marked by a further ambiguity: Argento cast Eva Robins (sometimes credited as Eva Robins or Robbins), a transgender woman, in the role of the temptress. Interestingly, this aspect never figures in the narrative, functioning as a non-event for Argento. Yet Robins embodies the very hybridity that regulates the world of Tenebrae. She is introduced in a natural landscape that contrasts with the alienating and artificial urban setting of the rest of the film, its present. This memory is later revealed to be Peter Neal’s motivation for murder, shown through flashbacks. Even the boundaries of time are malleable and fluctuating, they are expansive and transgressive.
Argento’s queer constructions
In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and Tenebrae, Argento creates analogies among the spaces characters occupy, the architecture of his filmic worlds, and the murders committed within them. Despite being heavily structured and regimented, the geometrical abstraction at the heart of Argento’s spatial practice finds itself troubled by illogical and fragmented spaces, with queer reality on the level of both the characters and the architectural space. Tenebrae represents the theoretical apex of Argento’s spatial practice. The Baroque and Art Nouveau architectures that featured prominently in previous films, in which queer characters played major roles, has been replaced by Brutalist, modern architecture that forces queerness to the margins, where it finds new ways to thrive. The house of the killer in Four Flies on a Grey Velvet and the ‘house of the screaming child’ from Deep Red – which both housed the respective killers and hid their secrets – each represent queer repression not only on an aesthetic level, but also through their respective anthropomorphisation. The grotesque transparency that began with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is then replaced by an architecture that swallows secret identities and traumas, ultimately culminating in a world in which time and space achieve boundlessness.
Throughout Argento’s films, architecture functions as a boundary, concrete in its materiality within the diegesis and yet one that can be transcended on the level of performativity. The ideological function of architecture in his cinema is one that articulates hybridity; it establishes the parameters for a reading of queerness in which physical surrounding reveals the instability of those within it. ‘There is no queer space,’ the historian George Chauncey writes, ‘there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use.’ [28] Yet Argento’s cinema defines a queer space that uses non-compliant bodies, suffused with queerings and queerness, to perform itself. Architecture and queerness are linked through what is expressed and repressed, which unfolds at the levels of both processes and (re)presentations, culminating in performance.
The political bodies of Argento’s narratives become entangled with the sometimes porous convergent and affective built environment of the worlds he creates. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage established a set of spatial and architectural practices, transforming the giallo. Architecture is not a means to an end; it is a character that interacts with other actors. Deep Red and Tenebrae, two subsequent returns to form, solidified core aspects of Argento’s queer architectures. Subtle queerness becomes more expansive as time and space become more malleable and open to diegetic forces. Through the inclusion of openly queer characters and architectures, he subtly disrupts ‘conventional’ and binary experiences of gender without portraying transgressive identities, sexualities and bodies as inherent sights and sites of horror. Instead, Argento imbues these characters with the same hybridity that regulates much of his worldbuilding.
By understanding architecture in the cinema of Argento as a mechanism of representation, his spatial practices render visible the social, political and cultural processes that exist in his filmic worlds. Humans and their environments are mutually constitutive in and through this queer presence that reveals how the effects of characters’ hybridity – or queerness – is a material and psychical dialogue with their environment. Stated differently, the psychological terrain of characters and the physical geography of made-made constructions in which they operate are masterfully explored in and through a lineage of body-architecture metaphors and analogies. These films help undo normalised constructs of the cultural self and defamiliarise the familiar. Each film is representative of a stage in his gialli that enable an exploration of the socio-cultural and historical structures of Italy, which find themselves reflected in the crisis of identity affecting characters and the fear it engenders. Argento disrupts heteronormative coding in architecture to dazzling effects, offering instead a pluralization of sex, desire and gender normativity within the built environment of his films.
Footnotes
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- Balmain, C. (2012) ‘The psychoanalytic trap in Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo / The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)’, Horror Studies, 3 (2), 223–242.
- Mendik, X. (1996) ‘Detection and transgression: The investigative drive of the Giallo’, Necronomicon: The Journal of Horror and Erotic Cinema: Book One, London: Creation Books, 35–54.
- Knee, 241–258.
- Landy, M. (2016) ‘The Argento syndrome: Aesthetics of horror’. In: Bachiera, S. and Hunter, R. (eds) Italian Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 93–110.
- Knee, 252–253.
- Sedgwick, E. K. (1994) Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 8.
- Foucault, M. (1990) The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 95, 105.
- Butler, J. (2014) Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 228.
- Vidler, A. (1994) The architectural uncanny: Essays in the modern unhomely. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 70.
- Lico, G. R. (2001) ‘Architecture and sexuality: The politics of gendered space’, Humanities Diliman: A Philippine Journal of Humanities 2 (1), 32.
- Niculae, R. L. (2014) ‘Gender analogies in architecture’, Journal of research in gender studies 4 (1), 476.
- Niculae, 479.
- Vidler, 70.
- Balmain, 227.
- Halberstam, J. (1995) Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 177.
- Bakhtin, M. (1968) Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 26.
- Koven, M. J. (2006) La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
- Gonzales, E. (2001) ‘Review: Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, Slant. December 4 2001. Available from: https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/four–flies–on–grey–velvet/ [accessed 30 August 2022].
- Gonzales, ‘Review’.
- McDonagh, M. (2010) Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 81.
- Gonzales, ‘Review’.
- McDonagh, 97–99.
- Kannas, A. (2018) Deep Red. New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 64.
- Kannas, 64.
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- McDonagh, 80–81.
- Chauncey, G. (2014) ‘Privacy could only be had in Public: Gay uses of the streets (1995)’. In: Gieseking, J.J. et al (eds), The People, Place, and Space Reader. New York: Routledge, 202.