Episode 273
Suspiria (1977 & 2018) with Eleanor Johnson
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Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women
Scream With Me
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Transcript
Evan: Hello, and welcome to Left of the Projector. I'm your host, Evan,
Speaker:Evan: back again with another film discussion from the left. If you'd like to support
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Speaker:Evan: of our weekly episodes that drop every Tuesday. And now on to the show.
Speaker:Evan: This week on Left of the Projector, Spooky Season continues with not one, but two films.
Speaker:Evan: Though they go by the same name, we'll be discussing the 1977 Dario Gento film
Speaker:Evan: Suspiria and the remake, which was released in 2018 and directed by Luca Guadagino.
Speaker:Evan: With us to discuss these films is Eleanor Johnson. Eleanor is a professor of
Speaker:Evan: English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of
Speaker:Evan: several books, including Scream With Me, Horror Films, and The Rise of American Feminism.
Speaker:Evan: And the upcoming book monstrous a history of terrifying women you also have
Speaker:Evan: a sub stack called eleanor's horrors welcome to the show eleanor.
Speaker:Eleanor: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really happy to talk about these two movies.
Speaker:Evan: Of course. And I think just briefly, I think that we actually,
Speaker:Evan: I actually found out about your substack through my wife's job,
Speaker:Evan: who at her museum, they had an interview with you on their blog.
Speaker:Evan: And so then I saw your substack, read your old book, but do you want to tell
Speaker:Evan: people about, I guess, both of your books and, you know, where they can find
Speaker:Evan: them when they'll be coming out?
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, great. So my Substack, which I started, I guess, about three and a half
Speaker:Eleanor: years ago now, you know, I started my Substack because I wanted to do something,
Speaker:Eleanor: a little bit more public facing, a little bit more made for,
Speaker:Eleanor: you know, people who are interested in things rather than writing for academics,
Speaker:Eleanor: which was something I'd been doing for decades by this point.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I talked to a friend who is like a very public-facing writer,
Speaker:Eleanor: and she said, oh, you should look into developing a substack.
Speaker:Eleanor: And so I started trying to do it. And I set myself a task. I said,
Speaker:Eleanor: okay, we are living in the post-Dobbs era in the United States.
Speaker:Eleanor: Women's rights are under siege from pretty much all quarters.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I have a certain amount of training as a medievalist, as like a trained
Speaker:Eleanor: medieval historian, theologian, literature scholar, and everything like that.
Speaker:Eleanor: I have sort of some expertise I can bring to bear on what's going on now.
Speaker:Eleanor: So maybe I'll start a substack, a little small substack that's about feminism, history, and horror.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I've done horror studies for a long time. And so I started the substack
Speaker:Eleanor: and initially the people who subscribed were my students.
Speaker:Eleanor: And so I had this kind of wonderful focus group about ideas that I had about
Speaker:Eleanor: feminism, history, and horror, and how those three things intersected.
Speaker:Eleanor: And over the course of the last three and a half years, my Substack membership
Speaker:Eleanor: has grown and grown and grown, and now my students are a very small slice of
Speaker:Eleanor: my population of readers.
Speaker:Eleanor: And what I've done is I've written one 2,000-word essay every week.
Speaker:Eleanor: About feminism, history, and horror for like 150, more than that,
Speaker:Eleanor: like almost 200 weeks in a row now.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I love it. And it's really fun. And it's turned out to be a place where
Speaker:Eleanor: I can kind of beta test ideas that I just started thinking about,
Speaker:Eleanor: or where I can look at relationships between two things.
Speaker:Eleanor: And it's sort of like a soft launch for an idea. And then I get feedback from
Speaker:Eleanor: my readers, and it's really wonderful.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I started the Substack. And when I started the Substack, I had already done
Speaker:Eleanor: most of the work for my last book, Scream With Me, which is about the relationship between.
Speaker:Eleanor: The women's rights movement in the 1970s and horror films in the 1970s.
Speaker:Eleanor: And so I published a few pieces of what went on to become chapters of this book
Speaker:Eleanor: on my substack, and it sort of helped my ideas gel.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I really came to understand that in the 1968 to 80, really, so the long 1970s.
Speaker:Eleanor: Was a period when horror filmmakers were championing very important feminist
Speaker:Eleanor: causes, sometimes without totally realizing they were doing it,
Speaker:Eleanor: but in really powerful and sometimes transformative ways.
Speaker:Eleanor: And, you know, the first film that I talked about in that book is Rosemary's
Speaker:Eleanor: Baby, which I take to be, you know, reproductive horror.
Speaker:Eleanor: That's very much about the fact that in 1968, when the film released,
Speaker:Eleanor: women didn't have any reproductive rights in the United States,
Speaker:Eleanor: even in New York, where the film is set, a relatively liberal state.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I wrote this book about how horror films rolled the ball forward in conversations
Speaker:Eleanor: about women's bodily autonomy, women's sexual autonomy, women's reproductive
Speaker:Eleanor: autonomy, and also the hugely important issue of safety in the home.
Speaker:Eleanor: Because if you look in the early 1970s for historical discourse around what
Speaker:Eleanor: we would now call domestic violence, there's very, very little of it. There wasn't a robust.
Speaker:Eleanor: Critical vocabulary to talk about violence in the home until kind of midway into the 1970s.
Speaker:Eleanor: And horror films played a big role in propagating that kind of discourse because
Speaker:Eleanor: they showed, many, many horror films showed, that the place where women are
Speaker:Eleanor: the least safe is in their home.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the real monsters are already in their homes with them, their husbands,
Speaker:Eleanor: their neighbors, these demonic entities that invade their homes,
Speaker:Eleanor: right? You could probably list off half a dozen and movies in your own mind that fit that bill.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I wrote that book. I love that book.
Speaker:Eleanor: While I was finishing that book, I was still working on my sub stack.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I started to see that there was this weird pattern emerging in my sub stack
Speaker:Eleanor: that I did not kind of go looking for. I feel like it came looking for me.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the pattern was that I had a certain number of posts that I did not think
Speaker:Eleanor: of as being related, like I had written them all as one offs.
Speaker:Eleanor: But the posts had in common that they featured a monstrous female entity from
Speaker:Eleanor: many different periods in history who was dog-like, loud-mouthed,
Speaker:Eleanor: reproductively dysregulated in some way, and highly sexually aggressive.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I thought, God, that's weird. That's like a very specific set of tropes
Speaker:Eleanor: that seems to circulate together in a cluster in a lot of very unrelated periods.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I was looking at that time at ancient Greece.
Speaker:Eleanor: I was looking at the 19th century. I was looking at the early 20th century,
Speaker:Eleanor: and I was sort of faffing about in the Middle Ages, because I'm always faffing
Speaker:Eleanor: about in the Middle Ages, because it's a lot of what I teach in real life at my job.
Speaker:Eleanor: But I didn't have a sense that it was the same thing, like all the same lineage.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I just started working and digging and reading and thinking and talking to
Speaker:Eleanor: experts in fields outside of my own, you know, scholars of Roman literature
Speaker:Eleanor: and culture, scholars of Assyrian and Mesopotamian literature and culture.
Speaker:Eleanor: And eventually, I kind of inadvertently encountered this monstrous demoness,
Speaker:Eleanor: called Lamashtu from ancient Mesopotamia.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Lamashtu is the origin point for that sort of tetrad of traits,
Speaker:Eleanor: the dog-likeness, loud-mouthed, reproductively dysregulated,
Speaker:Eleanor: and sexually aggressive.
Speaker:Eleanor: And she is, for all intents and purposes, the Mesopotamian abortion and miscarriage demon.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Mesopotamian women, men, and otherwise were terrified of her,
Speaker:Eleanor: and she's all over ancient Mesopotamian
Speaker:Eleanor: culture. And her name is Lamashtu, like I said.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I realized that over time, her trope, the trope of Lamashtu,
Speaker:Eleanor: evolves, and it evolves across time and across different cultures,
Speaker:Eleanor: changing little bits at certain very specific moments, but never totally.
Speaker:Eleanor: Really significantly changing.
Speaker:Eleanor: Changing. So in the Greek period, she's no longer called Lamashtu, she's called Lamea.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then in the Roman period, the word Lamia—it's the same word,
Speaker:Eleanor: just getting a different ending— starts to be used to describe witches in general.
Speaker:Eleanor: Then I come to find out that in the medieval period, which I thought I knew
Speaker:Eleanor: well, and I do know it well, but not everything, during early witch persecution,
Speaker:Eleanor: the word Lamia starts to get used as a common noun to describe witchcraft broadly construed.
Speaker:Eleanor: So this iconography, which in its origin is Mesopotamia, and this iconography
Speaker:Eleanor: that in my book I call the monstrous bitch, because of that dog-likeness,
Speaker:Eleanor: the word bitch, I'm using it provocatively, but not for no reason.
Speaker:Eleanor: Part of the trope is that the woman is like a dog. So I learned that this trope
Speaker:Eleanor: of the monstrous bitch, which originates in Mesopotamia, kind of persists for
Speaker:Eleanor: 4,300 years thereafter, and we're living in its wake right now, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: It's no accident that women are being like pilloried politically in terms of
Speaker:Eleanor: their rights legally for being too loud, too sexually autonomous,
Speaker:Eleanor: too reproductively self-determining and bitchiness, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: That cluster of traits travels together and has for a real long time.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I pulled all the material I had on my substack out and I made it into this
Speaker:Eleanor: book and I worked on that for a few years.
Speaker:Evan: Awesome. Yeah, I've read your first book, which I really enjoyed.
Speaker:Evan: And I was just rewatching some of the movies you mentioned or that you covered
Speaker:Evan: in that one. I have usually I send a list of films to, you know,
Speaker:Evan: a guest that's going to come on.
Speaker:Evan: But in your case, you had a book that includes a lot of movies that you discuss
Speaker:Evan: in it and including these.
Speaker:Evan: So what was the, were these movies you had seen, both the original and the remake?
Speaker:Evan: I call it remake, but it's because kind of like sort of a reimagining in some ways.
Speaker:Eleanor: Totally.
Speaker:Evan: Suspiria. Like, how did you do you have a history with watching them?
Speaker:Evan: And I'm also curious, Ward, did you see these both two for the first time, Ward? You did, right?
Speaker:Track 4: Yeah, this is my this is my first time watching them.
Speaker:Eleanor: Well, congrats you, Dolan.
Speaker:Evan: You know, well, I'm first curious, Eleanor, how you know, how these movies are,
Speaker:Evan: how they fit into the book.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, for anyone who's watched them probably can already have an idea in their
Speaker:Evan: head, given what you just described with this entity and witches and all of
Speaker:Evan: that. But how do they kind of fit into the narrative here?
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, so witches are a very significant part of the argument that I make and
Speaker:Eleanor: what I draw out about cultural history, Western patriarchal cultural history,
Speaker:Eleanor: in the book Monstrous Bitch.
Speaker:Eleanor: Because basically after Rome took the idea of the Lamia and made it like a category
Speaker:Eleanor: noun that could be applied to witches—.
Speaker:Eleanor: Then when Christianity kind of burst onto the scene, Christian theologians and
Speaker:Eleanor: philosophers were like, hmm, by the logic of Christianity, there can really
Speaker:Eleanor: only be one evil thing in the universe, and it has to be Satan.
Speaker:Eleanor: Like, that's how Christianity is structured.
Speaker:Eleanor: But we don't want to totally dispense with these evil women because they're
Speaker:Eleanor: useful to the patriarchy. So what are we going to do?
Speaker:Eleanor: And what Christian philosophers about witchcraft and magic did was they basically said that women,
Speaker:Eleanor: could become witches if they willingly kind of signed their name in the book
Speaker:Eleanor: of the devil, literally, like signed a contract with Satan to work for him and with him,
Speaker:Eleanor: and then they could effectively borrow his power and create havoc in the world
Speaker:Eleanor: by being loudmouthed, dog-like, sexually dysregulated, and reproductively self-determining
Speaker:Eleanor: or reproductively hostile to other women.
Speaker:Eleanor: So that mythos gets Christianized and associated with diabolical stuff,
Speaker:Eleanor: associated with Satanism, essentially, and it's that logic that propagated witch
Speaker:Eleanor: persecution throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.
Speaker:Eleanor: And this is important to me, and should be important to everyone,
Speaker:Eleanor: because in world history, there have been very few more effective and more lethal
Speaker:Eleanor: mechanisms for executing human women in particular
Speaker:Eleanor: than that logic, right? And some men were executed as witches too.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's a very small proportion of the total. So women were systematically taken
Speaker:Eleanor: out for being basically loud, sexy, reproductively self-determining,
Speaker:Eleanor: and bitchy, right? So again, we're living out the legacy of that time now.
Speaker:Eleanor: And so Suspiria is a film that I talk about late in Monstrous Bitch,
Speaker:Eleanor: because most of Monstrous Bitch, to be honest, is a depressing story.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's a story about how patriarchy gloms onto this idea of the monstrous bitch
Speaker:Eleanor: and keeps recycling it and reinventing it in little local ways to make its own
Speaker:Eleanor: power, patriarchy's own power, more gelled, more coalesced, more incontestable.
Speaker:Eleanor: But when I finally got to the era of cinema, I started to feel like I could
Speaker:Eleanor: take heart because it turns out that going back a pretty long way, actually,
Speaker:Eleanor: in horror cinema in particular, you get this kind of like lightly feminist or
Speaker:Eleanor: proto-feminist cinematic revisionism to the idea of the monstrous bitch.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Suspiria, particularly the 2018 Suspiria, but both of the Suspirias,
Speaker:Eleanor: are doing some work in that direction.
Speaker:Eleanor: So your question, like, when did I first encounter Suspiria?
Speaker:Eleanor: It was many years ago, way before I was thinking about these questions.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I saw the 2018 Suspiria, maybe like in 2019, very soon after it had come
Speaker:Eleanor: out. And I watched it and I found it really hard to get through because it has
Speaker:Eleanor: so much body horror to the women involved.
Speaker:Eleanor: Watching women's bones break and snap through their skin, that does not sit well with me.
Speaker:Eleanor: I find it a lot. It's a lot to watch. I never assign this film because it's
Speaker:Eleanor: a lot to ask my students to tolerate in terms of robust sadism against the female body.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I saw it, and I was like, wow, that was a lot. I'm not sure what I got out
Speaker:Eleanor: of it, but I'm going to put it in my back folder for later thought,
Speaker:Eleanor: which I do with many things in my life.
Speaker:Eleanor: So a couple of years roll on, and somebody mentioned to me that that was actually,
Speaker:Eleanor: in principle, a remake, although I think you're right, Evan,
Speaker:Eleanor: that a reimagining is a much better term for what Luca Guadagnino did in 2018.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then I went and I watched the Dario D'Argento movie, and I thought,
Speaker:Eleanor: like, wow, this movie's really weird.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I put it in my back file also. Once I learned about this history of witches
Speaker:Eleanor: and witchcraft and Lamashtu and Lamia and the Lamiai and the persecution of
Speaker:Eleanor: women, I thought to myself, wait a minute, what was that movie about?
Speaker:Eleanor: And what was the precedent movie also about? Like, let me go and rewatch them.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I rewatched them in reverse chronological order. So I rewatched the Guadagnino
Speaker:Eleanor: movie before I watched the movie from the seventies.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I watched it with the idea of the monstrous bitch already pretty elaborated in my mind.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I had a totally different response to it.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I thought, oh my God, this is a film that's taking the trope of the witch,
Speaker:Eleanor: which is a product of patriarchy.
Speaker:Eleanor: The whole idea of witchcraft is a product of patriarchy.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's a narrative that patriarchal cultures energized in order to persecute,
Speaker:Eleanor: prosecute, and literally execute innocent human women.
Speaker:Eleanor: That's what the ideology of witchcraft was. This film is taking that and it's
Speaker:Eleanor: radically reimagining witchcraft, first of all, as matrilinear, matriarchal,
Speaker:Eleanor: all about women and how women negotiate power and how women negotiate power
Speaker:Eleanor: both in a kind of a supernatural realm and in a familial realm.
Speaker:Eleanor: Right? Susie Banyan's character has this very, very bad relationship with her mother.
Speaker:Eleanor: Bad is maybe too simple a word, very abusive relationship with her mother.
Speaker:Eleanor: And that's kind of on deck for us to think about too. And the long and short
Speaker:Eleanor: of it is that where the film lands us, the later film, the Guadagnino film,
Speaker:Eleanor: is in this reclamatory move where the Susie Banyan character, the main character,
Speaker:Eleanor: becomes the new Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, the kind of witch of
Speaker:Eleanor: which is the head of the coven.
Speaker:Eleanor: And her power is that she is both very, very violent.
Speaker:Eleanor: And very, very vengeful, and merciful, nurturing, and gentle.
Speaker:Eleanor: So the film is deliberately spooling out a kind of new theory of what it is
Speaker:Eleanor: to be a witch that is not patriarchal.
Speaker:Eleanor: In fact, it's like orthogonal to patriarchy, right? It's matriarchal and matrilinear,
Speaker:Eleanor: and that is also capable of mercy, redemption, purging bad elements from a group,
Speaker:Eleanor: reducing sadism, all of these kinds of things.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then I thought, oh my god, I have to include this film in the chapter in
Speaker:Eleanor: my book that is about horror films in the 21st century that do take the trope
Speaker:Eleanor: of the monstrous bitch and do something feminist with it
Speaker:Eleanor: and do something revisionist with it, something that can test the stranglehold
Speaker:Eleanor: of patriarchy on the concept of the monstrous bitch.
Speaker:Eleanor: So that was when I decided to include that film.
Speaker:Eleanor: And it actually took me a while before I decided, oh yeah, I think I'll also
Speaker:Eleanor: talk about the earlier film too because the earlier film is um it's a weirder film
Speaker:Eleanor: it's a less polished film it's an oddly boring film in certain points like i
Speaker:Eleanor: find it hard to get through not because it's so offensive although it is physically it's gross.
Speaker:Eleanor: But also because like the plot points are so loosely construed that i like lose
Speaker:Eleanor: patience before i get to the,
Speaker:Eleanor: next major plot point so i wasn't going to include it but then i eventually
Speaker:Eleanor: decided you know what this matters to the conversation too to kind of highlight
Speaker:Eleanor: what guadagnino is doing in 2018
Speaker:Eleanor: that's really new and kind of redemptive so that was sort of the order of ops
Speaker:Eleanor: it came in late and it kind of came in backwards.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah i think both warna had similar perspectives of the two movies in that the
Speaker:Evan: original movie albeit has really good cinematography and color and sound and
Speaker:Evan: music and everything it doesn't really,
Speaker:Evan: not much happens really yeah and in the second one it's i actually found the
Speaker:Evan: second one harder to get through only just because it's i don't say this as
Speaker:Evan: a like if films are too long i'm not going to watch them but it is a longer
Speaker:Evan: movie and so there's definitely.
Speaker:Eleanor: A lot more happening.
Speaker:Evan: So I don't know where you saw them both for the first time. So I'm wondering
Speaker:Evan: what you, if you had similar reactions to both of them.
Speaker:Track 4: Yeah. So like the first one, like you said, it's like visually striking the
Speaker:Track 4: lighting effects and color choices of the lighting were absolutely incredible.
Speaker:Track 4: It was such a spectacle to watch. It was such a, like a visual treat watching
Speaker:Track 4: it the entire time, but like the plot left me lack, like wanting for more, um, at times.
Speaker:Track 4: And, um, yeah, like I came at it trying to look at it from like,
Speaker:Track 4: like the, my usual Marxist perspective and like with the first film,
Speaker:Track 4: it was much more layered, like the political.
Speaker:Track 4: Themes and tones that were being conveyed versus the 2018 version,
Speaker:Track 4: which not nearly as great to look at compared to the first one.
Speaker:Track 4: But politically, there's so much more there to work with and analyze in the
Speaker:Track 4: second film. And I really thoroughly enjoyed that.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, I agree. Guadagnino clearly studied the earlier film very carefully and
Speaker:Eleanor: made a lot of conscious decisions one of which was to kind of turn down the volume on the visual,
Speaker:Eleanor: surplus for most of the film so that that last like blood orgy scene down in
Speaker:Eleanor: the in the shrine really pops right like you it's just like so well
Speaker:Eleanor: like oh here it is here's the visual intensity that i have been lacking right
Speaker:Eleanor: like even i'm always struck when i watch this film the costuming
Speaker:Eleanor: is so markedly dour right these are a whole bunch of professional dancers they're
Speaker:Eleanor: all very except for the actual performance scene when you've got those like
Speaker:Eleanor: red yarn costumes that are so provocative,
Speaker:Eleanor: in the whole rest of the movie people are wearing like,
Speaker:Eleanor: dowdy brown smock dresses that's the weirdest thing.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then you realize oh right he what and you know is trying to set us up to
Speaker:Eleanor: have like a kind of visual flooding effect
Speaker:Eleanor: only in certain scenes and it's the scene where they dance folk And the final,
Speaker:Eleanor: the blood orgy scene at the end, those are the two like suddenly very visually rich scenes.
Speaker:Eleanor: But otherwise, I think he very deliberately stripped that out.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think you're absolutely right, Ward, that part of what he swaps in for
Speaker:Eleanor: it is a huge amount of political allegory, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: The whole like German history in the 1970s element that's so important to the
Speaker:Eleanor: later film is really not on deck for us at all.
Speaker:Eleanor: In the 1970s film. It's a film that's almost mute on its own political content.
Speaker:Eleanor: And for me, one of the other things Guadagnino did that I really,
Speaker:Eleanor: really liked, although I have to admit, I didn't notice it on my first viewing.
Speaker:Eleanor: I noticed it the second time, is Tilda Swinton, who's perfect in every way,
Speaker:Eleanor: she's cast in multiple roles in Guadagnino's film.
Speaker:Eleanor: She plays Madame Blanc, who's the sort of good witch character in the film,
Speaker:Eleanor: but she also plays under very heavy makeup, Mother Marcos.
Speaker:Eleanor: The evil witch who has to be executed and purged.
Speaker:Eleanor: And to me, the reason that matters is that part of what I'm saying in Monstrous
Speaker:Eleanor: Bitch is this trope of the Monstrous Bitch is the same here and here and here
Speaker:Eleanor: and here. And we need to find a way to do a feminist reclamation of it.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Guadagnino put that into the casting of the film.
Speaker:Eleanor: Right there was this older mother mother marcos who's bad and evil and abusive
Speaker:Eleanor: and corrupt and ridiculously ugly like very overdetermined and how ugly she
Speaker:Eleanor: is her skin is like not even on her body really and she has to die and she is
Speaker:Eleanor: played by the same person right literally the same soul is there
Speaker:Eleanor: that's in the good character madame blanc who's kind of redemptive or sets up
Speaker:Eleanor: susie banion to be the redeemer
Speaker:Eleanor: so i think guadagnino made a lot basically he made a more philosophical film,
Speaker:Eleanor: whereas argento made an extremely like the film could have been like a collage
Speaker:Eleanor: it's so physically dense that you won't it's like less interested in the storyline
Speaker:Eleanor: than it is in its visual presentation.
Speaker:Evan: And i think it's even cooler the the aspect of tilda swinton playing those two
Speaker:Evan: character and she also plays the the doctor who.
Speaker:Eleanor: I think.
Speaker:Evan: Is one of the things i know originally i was thinking do we talk about like
Speaker:Evan: the first and the second i think we can just kind of talk about them as as they
Speaker:Evan: come but since we're talking.
Speaker:Eleanor: About the 2018.
Speaker:Evan: Version the the political layering is you have the what's the political group
Speaker:Evan: i'm blanking on it the raf the raf yes thank you the.
Speaker:Eleanor: Raf and you sort of have the.
Speaker:Evan: This interplay of that and the German government at the same time as you have
Speaker:Evan: this interplay of the two good and bad versions, Madame Blanc and Mother Marcos,
Speaker:Evan: kind of the playing against each other.
Speaker:Evan: And then you have the doctor who was sort of introduced initially,
Speaker:Evan: who is kind of digesting.
Speaker:Evan: And really, the thing I noted at the beginning is she does not believe the story
Speaker:Evan: of Patricia, who is trying to escape the school or,
Speaker:Evan: the academy.
Speaker:Evan: Because she now believes that there's witches and all this underplaying.
Speaker:Evan: And so I was thinking about how that plays into your maybe your book of also
Speaker:Evan: men not believing women and not trusting them.
Speaker:Evan: And it really feels like even throughout the entire thing, no matter what he
Speaker:Evan: sees until the very end, when he experiences that bloodbath,
Speaker:Evan: he's unable to understand.
Speaker:Evan: And I think a lot of this has to do with that outside the academy politics of
Speaker:Evan: just the state of Germany now at the time. So I'm curious how that filled into it.
Speaker:Evan: And also, Tilda Swinton playing that character was incredible, too.
Speaker:Eleanor: I mean, she, whatever, I could do a whole hour-long discussion just about how
Speaker:Eleanor: much I love her, but I won't.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, I think the casting of her as the doctor, the psychiatrist,
Speaker:Eleanor: that character is really, really, really important.
Speaker:Eleanor: And it's important in a whole host of ways, right? one of them is that you know he,
Speaker:Eleanor: as you said he doesn't believe patricia when she first shows up and says like
Speaker:Eleanor: oh my god my dance school is a coven of murderous witches and like,
Speaker:Eleanor: can he really be blamed for not believing her that's quite a claim but the reason
Speaker:Eleanor: that that matters so much i think in the film is that luca guadagnino has seen
Speaker:Eleanor: a lot of earlier horror films about female monstrosity And I,
Speaker:Eleanor: talk about this a lot in Monstrous Bitch.
Speaker:Eleanor: There was a weird, very, very long trend from about 1936 until at least the
Speaker:Eleanor: late 70s, like when the first Suspiria is coming out,
Speaker:Eleanor: where horror films about female monstrosity would pose this question pretty
Speaker:Eleanor: explicitly about whether the monstrosity in the woman is an ancient supernatural
Speaker:Eleanor: force or whether it is a psychological process.
Speaker:Eleanor: So the locus classicus for that is the wonderful 1936 film, Dracula's Daughter.
Speaker:Eleanor: Great film. Way better, in my opinion, than a 1931 Dracula.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the conceit in that film is that a woman named Maria Zaleska,
Speaker:Eleanor: who's the daughter of Dracula, doesn't want to be a loudmouth,
Speaker:Eleanor: hypersexual, bloodthirsty, bitchy woman anymore. She wants to get healed and
Speaker:Eleanor: be like a regular person. That's her goal.
Speaker:Eleanor: So what does she do? She gets psychoanalysis.
Speaker:Eleanor: Problem is, it doesn't work. You can't cure vampirism through the talking cure.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the film is very clear in thinking that through.
Speaker:Eleanor: That idea that there's something monstrous in women,
Speaker:Eleanor: that cannot be resolved by rationalist medicine or by the talking cure by psychoanalysis
Speaker:Eleanor: gets played through the 40s and 50s and 60s and early 70s, including a film
Speaker:Eleanor: like The Exorcist, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: 1973, very classic film about female monstrosity.
Speaker:Eleanor: Regan, the possessed child, is this catastrophic variant on the monstrous bitch.
Speaker:Eleanor: Loudmouth, she swears a lot.
Speaker:Eleanor: She's sexually violent. And of course, she's harmful to children because she
Speaker:Eleanor: is a child and she commits self-harm.
Speaker:Eleanor: So all of the tropes are in play with her.
Speaker:Eleanor: And very famously, there's a scene where her mother, played beautifully by Ellen
Speaker:Eleanor: Burstyn, is still trying to cure the daughter of what is believed to be a psychological
Speaker:Eleanor: problem. We, the viewer, know she's possessed by a demon, who,
Speaker:Eleanor: by the way, is a Mesopotamian demon, which is interesting.
Speaker:Eleanor: But we know she's possessed by a demon. Everybody else thinks the kid's just
Speaker:Eleanor: crazy. So they bring in a psychiatrist to treat her.
Speaker:Eleanor: The psychiatrist hypnotizes her, and we all are like, oh, maybe this is going
Speaker:Eleanor: to get us somewhere. But no, the demon within Regan literally grabs the psychiatrist
Speaker:Eleanor: by the balls and slams him onto the ground.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the message of that moment is to remind viewers that, again,
Speaker:Eleanor: there's something monstrous in women that cannot be
Speaker:Eleanor: explained away by Freudian psychoanalytic theory about things like hysteria,
Speaker:Eleanor: neurosis, like all of these like sort of misogynist notions about female psychosexual
Speaker:Eleanor: pathology that came online with Freud
Speaker:Eleanor: and got mainlined into cinema in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Speaker:Eleanor: Horror was the genre that contested all of that and was like.
Speaker:Eleanor: No, it's not the case that like a knowledgeable man can waive his degree or
Speaker:Eleanor: whatever or else and magically cure monstrosity in a woman. That's not how it works.
Speaker:Eleanor: Guadagnino's film from 2018 is resurrecting that trope too.
Speaker:Eleanor: He puts into the film this male doctor who is interestingly in this film very
Speaker:Eleanor: well-meaning, right? He wants to help Patricia.
Speaker:Eleanor: He wants to figure out what's going on, but he's not able to believe her.
Speaker:Eleanor: And because he's not able to believe her, he ultimately is not able to help her, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: And he has to be made, and this is Guadagnino's own intervention,
Speaker:Eleanor: He has to be made to bear witness, and that's even the term that they use to
Speaker:Eleanor: talk about his character. The witches call this old psychiatrist a witness.
Speaker:Eleanor: He has to bear witness to their blood ritual and to the purgation of the coven
Speaker:Eleanor: in order for the new witch leader to.
Speaker:Eleanor: To come into her ascendancy as the Mater Suspiriorum, the mother of size.
Speaker:Eleanor: So his character is not only a refresh of this trope of the clueless psychoanalyst
Speaker:Eleanor: who can't actually undo monstrous bitchery, but he is a refresh that involves,
Speaker:Eleanor: kind of absorbing this patriarchal Freudian man into the witch plot and forcing
Speaker:Eleanor: him to recognize that there is something monstrous in her that vastly exceeds
Speaker:Eleanor: his capacity to control or regulate.
Speaker:Eleanor: So to me, I think that's one of the most powerful sort of feminist revisionist
Speaker:Eleanor: moves that Guadagnino makes not only to,
Speaker:Eleanor: Suspiria, which has very little of that mechanism in it at all,
Speaker:Eleanor: but also to like 40 consecutive years of horror cinema
Speaker:Eleanor: that recognize like there's something weird about going around saying like,
Speaker:Eleanor: oh, what's monstrous in women is their psychosexual pathology,
Speaker:Eleanor: sort of commenting on that and saying like, here, let's really think about it.
Speaker:Eleanor: Let's really look at how that plays out.
Speaker:Eleanor: And you're right. The fact that Tilda Swinton plays that character too is fabulous
Speaker:Eleanor: because it suggests that like, we might want to blame Mother Marcos for being the monster.
Speaker:Eleanor: We might want to blame Madame Blanc for not protecting Susie enough, for example.
Speaker:Eleanor: But there's also this watching male presence that sees itself as a healer,
Speaker:Eleanor: but is in fact incompetent at helping the women because it doesn't acknowledge the problem.
Speaker:Evan: And you.
Speaker:Eleanor: Know to say that that's a parable for our current political climate is like a pretty easy sell.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah i don't know if either of you notices i only i was kind of paying attention
Speaker:Evan: more obviously looking at this supposed to just kind of watching it just to
Speaker:Evan: watch it in the first movie and maybe this relates to this i don't know maybe
Speaker:Evan: either of you know more about this um,
Speaker:Evan: is they show very clearly in the first film when when uh susie arrives at,
Speaker:Evan: the academy the first day, and they zoom in on the plaque for the building that they use.
Speaker:Evan: And it's mentioned, and there's a quote from Erasmus.
Speaker:Evan: And I did like a very modest level looking at the kind of information around it.
Speaker:Evan: Do you think that the psychoanalyst, the psychiatrist in the second one was
Speaker:Evan: meant as a, like to build upon that where, I know that he wasn't a psychiatrist,
Speaker:Evan: but he was more of a philosopher or kind of theologian.
Speaker:Evan: But then his work became used in other areas. So I don't know how that fits in.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, I've never thought about that. I've never thought about that,
Speaker:Eleanor: but that strikes me as very plausible, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: The idea that, you know, to have this Erasmian stamp on the outside of the dance
Speaker:Eleanor: academy is to foreground a tension between, I agree with you,
Speaker:Eleanor: psychology is not the right term, but like humanism and the supernatural.
Speaker:Eleanor: And in Guadagnino's film, that same question is being posed,
Speaker:Eleanor: except it's not humanism and the supernatural. It's sort of psychoanalytic medicine
Speaker:Eleanor: and the supernatural. Or maybe more broadly, like thinking about psychological
Speaker:Eleanor: trauma and the supernatural. Yeah, I totally buy that.
Speaker:Evan: There's also that quote that i've noted down it's more towards the end of the first movie when,
Speaker:Evan: When Susie sort of is suspicious and talking to this doctor and then this author
Speaker:Evan: of a book about witches, and she asks, you know, what does it mean to be a witch?
Speaker:Evan: And then he says it's a mental illness. So he's definitely using it as like,
Speaker:Evan: exactly what you just said.
Speaker:Evan: But then the second film expands on it in a much more interesting way,
Speaker:Evan: whereas the first one almost felt like they were just throwing in this little
Speaker:Evan: bit to kind of just give some some context around it.
Speaker:Evan: And, you know, but far more interesting in the second one.
Speaker:Track 4: Yeah, I really liked hearing your like feminist analysis because I definitely came with,
Speaker:Track 4: came into these movies watching from with like class perspective and class analysis
Speaker:Track 4: and seeing like from the first film how it's like, oh, they prey on profits
Speaker:Track 4: and torture these poor young girls,
Speaker:Track 4: so that they can get more power and more money.
Speaker:Track 4: And then it's more monolithic in the first one versus the second one where it's
Speaker:Track 4: like, oh, there's like an internal split between the two.
Speaker:Track 4: And I like it juxtaposed against the political events in the background where
Speaker:Track 4: it's like, oh, this is not just an isolated structure in the society that is
Speaker:Track 4: preying upon weak for profit.
Speaker:Track 4: This is an extension of the system that it currently exists in.
Speaker:Track 4: It's just concentrated here in this building. um but i like the internal split
Speaker:Track 4: and like how you're saying like
Speaker:Track 4: till this one playing both characters it's like really reminiscent like even
Speaker:Track 4: our current day politics sometimes
Speaker:Track 4: where it's like yeah we got two parties that we have options from but,
Speaker:Track 4: they're doing a lot of the same things at time so what is really the difference
Speaker:Track 4: one might say nicer things but at the end of the day,
Speaker:Track 4: like in the movie the 2018 it's they both still want to continue praying,
Speaker:Track 4: on the young for power and so do you want the nice face or do you want the ugly
Speaker:Track 4: face with quite literally ugly face version and i yeah,
Speaker:Track 4: i i thought these films were great i really enjoyed them.
Speaker:Eleanor: I'm glad. And there is a lot one can say from a class perspective about them.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think you already alluded to it. But briefly speaking,
Speaker:Eleanor: the 2018 film is vastly more nuanced in how it thinks about class and social
Speaker:Eleanor: stratification than the film from the 70s.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I mean, one very obvious place to look to think about that is in the 70s
Speaker:Eleanor: film, in Argento's film, the dance school is like through a forest,
Speaker:Eleanor: far away. It's sort of removed from the real. It's removed from the city.
Speaker:Eleanor: The dance school in the 2018 film is in Berlin, right? And the whole city is
Speaker:Eleanor: around it, and you see all this graffiti art. So there's this sense,
Speaker:Eleanor: there's this awareness that's diffused across the whole film of proletarian unrest.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think Guadagnino is very interested in having that dynamic be tied in
Speaker:Eleanor: to the drama that's going on with the two classes in the witchy coven.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I totally agree with that. And I would also say that, like,
Speaker:Eleanor: relative to the first film, Guadagnino's film is also much more interested in having...
Speaker:Eleanor: The membership of the coven at the school feel like many people have power.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's not just Mother Marcos.
Speaker:Eleanor: There's the fight between her and Madame Blanc, but also there are other witches
Speaker:Eleanor: in the coven who exercise power and have a certain amount of authority,
Speaker:Eleanor: whereas in the earlier film, it's really all about the fetishization of Mother
Speaker:Eleanor: Marcos as, in effect, the queen.
Speaker:Eleanor: Right and so it's a much more aristocratic depiction of witchcraft
Speaker:Eleanor: and what it means whereas the second film i think is absolutely thinking about
Speaker:Eleanor: class struggle and governance and overthrow all of these kinds of dynamics are in the coven,
Speaker:Eleanor: as well as in berlin around the coven so i think you're totally right.
Speaker:Track 4: No absolutely because even in the first one like they're making fun of like
Speaker:Track 4: um i can't remember his uh ethnic background now but the ugly guy with the replace
Speaker:Track 4: got fake teeth like they're making fun of him to his face but then like later scenes like he's in,
Speaker:Track 4: with like with them in the coven while they're enacting spells and everything
Speaker:Track 4: like he's part of the circle versus the how the politics of the second one plays out absolutely there's.
Speaker:Evan: There's a line early in the in the second one when i think when susie just arrives
Speaker:Evan: there and she's talking about she sort of she comes from rural ohio religious
Speaker:Evan: family clearly more of a farm background doesn't probably have very much money.
Speaker:Evan: They, they mentioned to her that the goal of the academy is women's financial
Speaker:Evan: autonomy, very specifically pointing that out. Like this is something that we
Speaker:Evan: want to be separate from maybe the government and from everything that's going on.
Speaker:Evan: So I think, I mean, I think he more poignantly was trying to show the politics
Speaker:Evan: and what's actually happening in Germany. I think that's a good point to say
Speaker:Evan: that it's takes place in downtown Berlin.
Speaker:Evan: You see what's going on. You actually see the Doctor having to cross between East and West Berlin.
Speaker:Evan: And it's a very, you know, his character too, beyond just his connection to the...
Speaker:Evan: To the coven and the student in the academy is also pretty fascinating and you
Speaker:Evan: know he has his wife is missing he doesn't know what happened to her,
Speaker:Evan: and it's kind of also the the the politics of this moment in 1977 germany was
Speaker:Evan: at the german autumn so it's uh just,
Speaker:Evan: the second film just has so much more meat to to uh to go after totally.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah and it helps that the acting is about a.
Speaker:Eleanor: In the later film too because you believe in the characters in that film whereas
Speaker:Eleanor: you know everything is so hyper stylized in the early film and all those like
Speaker:Eleanor: scenes of tight focus on Susie Banyan's face where she just looks startled and
Speaker:Eleanor: confused and non-idential,
Speaker:Eleanor: it's it's hard to care about those characters in the same way that I at least
Speaker:Eleanor: find that I care about many of the characters in the later film I care about
Speaker:Eleanor: the character played by Mia Goth Sarah.
Speaker:Eleanor: I care about Susie, played by Dakota Panning. Dakota Johnson? Yes.
Speaker:Eleanor: And obviously, you know, I care a lot. Madame Blanc is like my favorite character
Speaker:Eleanor: in the film, precisely because even though, as you point out,
Speaker:Eleanor: Ward, like she too was prepared to make a sacrifice of an innocent young woman, she does pull back.
Speaker:Eleanor: Like right before her catastrophic demise, she tries to stop everything.
Speaker:Eleanor: So there's this notion that even the kind of predatory behaviors that have been
Speaker:Eleanor: going on in this coven for who knows how long, they could be stopped,
Speaker:Eleanor: right? There is a path forward that could be more merciful.
Speaker:Eleanor: And that's the era that Susie Banyan is going to usher in as the new Mater Suspirion.
Speaker:Eleanor: But even Madame Blanc got there.
Speaker:Eleanor: She got to the point of being like, actually, and she says, there's this great,
Speaker:Eleanor: it's a great line because it's not a fancy line.
Speaker:Eleanor: She says, something doesn't feel right, right? Which is something all of us
Speaker:Eleanor: have said at one you know you know you're in danger right before the bad thing happens and.
Speaker:Eleanor: Now there's not always something you can do about it but madame blanc tries
Speaker:Eleanor: to stop everything and i find that really powerful as a change to the paradigm
Speaker:Eleanor: from the earlier film where nobody tries to save susie.
Speaker:Evan: You do actually feel genuinely bad when tilda swinton's madame blanc meets her fate because,
Speaker:Evan: unlike the first film where the sort of the leader that's mostly uh what is
Speaker:Evan: it uh tanner uh, Miss Tanner, Miss Tanner is not.
Speaker:Evan: And then also the Madame Blanc, like you don't really feel that they really
Speaker:Evan: care very much about them.
Speaker:Evan: We're in, in this version, uh,
Speaker:Evan: There is this gentleness, and they genuinely seem to want them to succeed.
Speaker:Evan: They also, unlike in the first one, they're actually producing shows for the public.
Speaker:Evan: They're actually producing art for the community, which is something that doesn't
Speaker:Evan: really happen in the first one.
Speaker:Evan: And I think they genuinely want to do good. And yeah, it's pretty heartbreaking
Speaker:Evan: in some ways. But she also was part of the group as well. She was causing harm,
Speaker:Evan: even though she maybe didn't mean to.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, you know, watching this film,
Speaker:Eleanor: I rewatched it this week in preparation for our conversation,
Speaker:Eleanor: and I've probably seen it, I don't know, eight times now.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I'm always struck by how important to the logic of the film Tilda Swinton's
Speaker:Eleanor: like facial expressions are, because the film is very careful to highlight that
Speaker:Eleanor: like when it turns out that Susie Banyan, this young,
Speaker:Eleanor: like fresh from the airplane, Ohio and Mennonite girl who's like seen very little
Speaker:Eleanor: of reality, when it turns out that she is somehow literally supernaturally better
Speaker:Eleanor: at dancing than everybody else,
Speaker:Eleanor: You get to watch Tilda Swinton, who's looking at Susie Banyan and seeing her ability.
Speaker:Eleanor: You get to watch her kind of go, and she has all of this like wonder.
Speaker:Eleanor: And you start to realize that even though Madame Blanc's character is in this
Speaker:Eleanor: power struggle with Mother Marcos, she also retains the capacity for wonder
Speaker:Eleanor: at beauty, the capacity for wonder at the transcendent, the capacity for wonder at the monstrous.
Speaker:Eleanor: This is not someone for whom, like, rote, self-serving, solipsistic power grabs is a core motivation.
Speaker:Eleanor: She wants the dance to work, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: Her motivational structure is totally different from what we can see of Mother
Speaker:Eleanor: Marcos, who's just disgusting in every possible way.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Ward, I think Mother Marcos, like, begs to be read as a figure for late-stage
Speaker:Eleanor: capitalism, right? Like, sort of melting and fleshy, and she's got weird extra
Speaker:Eleanor: limbs on her limbs, and she's all sort of mossy and gross.
Speaker:Track 4: Like that little extra hand on the arm.
Speaker:Eleanor: Ugh, nasty. But she's also self-satisfied.
Speaker:Track 4: It's starting to move on its own too. Oh, that's perfect.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's so gross. And she has this belief that even though she's gross and repulsive
Speaker:Eleanor: and nobody benefits from her, everyone will always support her.
Speaker:Eleanor: That is how late-stage capitalism thinks of itself, right? So it's a very good
Speaker:Eleanor: movie there. And then by contrast to that, as I say, the Madame Blanc character,
Speaker:Eleanor: She's so likable, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: She's gentle, she's patient, she's moderated, she's respectful,
Speaker:Eleanor: she speaks like four languages, she helps Susie, she like applies healing skills.
Speaker:Eleanor: Magic to susie's body and she like supercharges susie in certain ways
Speaker:Eleanor: to help her along so they're two very very different models for what something
Speaker:Eleanor: like a witchy mentorship process would look like the one disgusting one and the one that's like wow,
Speaker:Eleanor: we could be making something beautiful here right and that's really the madame blanc stance.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah since you were talking about this war too is the because it's very clearly
Speaker:Evan: showing the eastern and western divide of berlin you know by the so there's also these two and then,
Speaker:Evan: we sort of alluded to it that there is this other politics happening where there
Speaker:Evan: is a group the raf and in partnership or in relation to this palestinian group
Speaker:Evan: that hijacks an airplane and is trying to get some of their you know their prisoners released,
Speaker:Evan: you also have this dichotomy of the two,
Speaker:Evan: potential futures of germany and then also given when this comes out 2018 of
Speaker:Evan: you know just the future in general maybe and yeah,
Speaker:Evan: it makes it such a more um they don't actually say that the olga character is
Speaker:Evan: soviet but i did see that that's it's listed in wikipedia i mean maybe you're
Speaker:Evan: supposed to know by her accent it's not obvious but they also show her and then
Speaker:Evan: what ends up happening to her is also quite disgusting.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, if anything, that was one of the more disturbing scenes where she's
Speaker:Evan: just being flung around, her bones snapping, brutalized in just a really horrific way. And...
Speaker:Evan: I just liked, I didn't like that that happened to her, but I think that's like
Speaker:Evan: a good metaphor for what the, maybe the capitalists or the capitalist class wants to see happen to,
Speaker:Evan: you know, the Soviets or the, you know, alternate option, if you will.
Speaker:Eleanor: Right. Yeah. And I mean, this, again, it's part of why the Berlin setting matters
Speaker:Eleanor: so much. Like that city is an icon for like communism v. capitalism, a contact zone, really.
Speaker:Eleanor: Right. A contact zone that's also a separation. So I think the film really is,
Speaker:Eleanor: very deliberately thinking about all of those kinds of ideas.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I agree with you that the sort of politics that Germany was stuck in in
Speaker:Eleanor: the 70s, and in particular the RAF crisis and the Lufthansa flight and all of
Speaker:Eleanor: that stuff, which it resolved well, there's a backdrop for the film that,
Speaker:Eleanor: the basic social fabric is not sitting well.
Speaker:Eleanor: There's like something that doesn't fit, right? That like capitalism,
Speaker:Eleanor: communism, jointure is uneasy and restless and prone to violence,
Speaker:Eleanor: just like the violence that erupts in the coven.
Speaker:Eleanor: So it's kind of like a microcosm, macrocosm type relationship.
Speaker:Track 4: Yeah, I really like the Olga scene because I was like, yes, it's disturbing, but I see it as,
Speaker:Track 4: one, the commodification of art, the exploitation of that art,
Speaker:Track 4: but also what it results to in working class bodies and the bodies of people.
Speaker:Track 4: Just for the sake of exploitation will break down these people's bodies just
Speaker:Track 4: for more profit more power at the end of the day and i really like there's a lot the,
Speaker:Track 4: there's a lot of times the cinematography in the 2018 it's it's so crazy that
Speaker:Track 4: it's like this could literally be shot from the 1977 one like right after,
Speaker:Track 4: olga gets like tortured and disfigured as much as she does like whenever they
Speaker:Track 4: start sinking the hooks into her that
Speaker:Track 4: whole scene i'm like the coloring's not right but like how this is shot feels
Speaker:Track 4: like it could be straight out of the first movie.
Speaker:Eleanor: Totally i agree and i also that scene reminds me very much of another iconic
Speaker:Eleanor: horror film scene this one from 1968,
Speaker:Eleanor: which is the end of night of the living dead right when i don't know if you've
Speaker:Eleanor: both seen night of living dead but when ben when ben dwayne jones's character dies
Speaker:Eleanor: in the sort of aftermath of the movie they put hooks into him same thing they
Speaker:Eleanor: put hooks into him and drag him off so if i see like hooks into a dead body
Speaker:Eleanor: i'm immediately thinking race and i'm immediately thinking class
Speaker:Eleanor: because of the 1968 romero film night of the living dead and i've got to assume
Speaker:Eleanor: that that particular iconography
Speaker:Eleanor: in guadagnino's film was deliberate because it's so
Speaker:Eleanor: it's overdone right like you see the hook in the air and then like boosh into
Speaker:Eleanor: the and it happens like four times.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I think there is this notion that these abuses of capitalism have a long
Speaker:Eleanor: history that runs back into not only earlier German history,
Speaker:Eleanor: but earlier American cinematic history.
Speaker:Eleanor: Because it's important, of course, to remember that the film Suspiria 2018 is
Speaker:Eleanor: set in Germany, set in Berlin, directed by an Italian, but all spoken in English,
Speaker:Eleanor: right? Except for a few scenes here or there that are like private conversations
Speaker:Eleanor: held in German or French.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's basically an English-language film.
Speaker:Eleanor: And that means that on some level, Guadagnino, his intended audience was like
Speaker:Eleanor: the Anglo-American public.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I think that that hook scene is like tying into a trope that's already there also, which is about.
Speaker:Eleanor: Racial oppression under situations of monstrosity and class oppression yeah.
Speaker:Track 4: Yeah no i like how i like how you're saying is definitely geared more towards
Speaker:Track 4: like the western anglo audience and that's also why i enjoy the 2018 film more is that,
Speaker:Track 4: it's more over with the politics that is talking about it beats you over the
Speaker:Track 4: head with it more which is sadly what the western anglo american audience needs,
Speaker:Track 4: because they can't understand nuance if it hit them like a truck yeah.
Speaker:Evan: Well and the i was gonna say like the the the hooks
Speaker:Evan: and i think my memory it's been a while i've seen not living dead i've seen
Speaker:Evan: it a few times i believe in that it's supposed to be like the meat hooks that
Speaker:Evan: they would use to to essentially for actual meat which would likely be a job by someone generally,
Speaker:Evan: but what now we call unskilled labor or someone who's not you know able to do
Speaker:Evan: something else and then in the movie they don't use meat hooks I mean it's a
Speaker:Evan: little bit more they look actually much scarier I mean maybe they are they just
Speaker:Evan: don't have like the handle on it,
Speaker:Evan: But they, I don't know where I was going with that, is that it's,
Speaker:Evan: I guess maybe it's the symbol of something more on the working class side,
Speaker:Evan: something in Germany where, you know, this is what someone would use for trade work.
Speaker:Evan: But in this case, it's being co-opted by witches to move a body in just the most disgusting way.
Speaker:Eleanor: Totally. And I guess the only other thing I'd want to say about the Olga scene,
Speaker:Eleanor: which is not my favorite scene in the film, but it is one of the hardest to
Speaker:Eleanor: watch, which I think makes a very important scene in the film,
Speaker:Eleanor: is that it's so ugly and so gross and so brutal.
Speaker:Eleanor: I mean, down to like the drool that like hang it's she is made,
Speaker:Eleanor: you know, woman, tortured woman, dying woman, animal corpse that still has oxygen in it.
Speaker:Eleanor: She goes all the way down some kind of catastrophic ontological slide and we're
Speaker:Eleanor: made to go along with her.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's also and so it's really gross, but it's also was remembering that the torture
Speaker:Eleanor: that is applied to her seems to be an artifact of the magic dance spell that.
Speaker:Eleanor: That Susie Banyan is performing upstairs. What that means is that in Guadagnino's
Speaker:Eleanor: imagination and his vision of this film, all of this beautiful tonsvap,
Speaker:Eleanor: this dance work that's going on,
Speaker:Eleanor: the shadow of it is this really horrible, ugly, brutal violence.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think this is one of the things that Guadagnino is very interested in
Speaker:Eleanor: exploring in the film that's basically like an undetonated ordinance from the
Speaker:Eleanor: earlier film, which is that there's some relationship between the production of beauty,
Speaker:Eleanor: dance, and the creation of pain and suffering and alienation and dehumanization.
Speaker:Eleanor: And in his film, it's literally like an upstairs-downstairs phenomenon,
Speaker:Eleanor: where the dance that's going on here triggers this torture montage down here,
Speaker:Eleanor: so much so that every move, beautiful move, and in fact, erotic move that Susie Banyan's body makes,
Speaker:Eleanor: has a compensatory or a reaction that takes place in what happens to Olga's body.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think that part of what Guadagnino wants us to do in this film,
Speaker:Eleanor: and this is a new, very interesting trend in horror, which is not,
Speaker:Eleanor: this is not something I centrally talk about in Monstrous Bitch,
Speaker:Eleanor: but I am working on a new project about it.
Speaker:Eleanor: There's been this new trend in horror in really forcing horror audiences to
Speaker:Eleanor: grapple with the relationship between the beautiful and the torturous,
Speaker:Eleanor: or the beautiful and the ugly, or the erotic and the excruciating.
Speaker:Eleanor: And this film is doing that in a very, very interesting way.
Speaker:Eleanor: And part of what's interesting about it is, you know, there's no character that
Speaker:Eleanor: ever comes out and says like, oh, how interesting.
Speaker:Eleanor: Susie Bennion's dance moves result in Olga's disfigurations.
Speaker:Eleanor: Because I don't think Guadagnino wants it to be one-to-one. He wants it to be
Speaker:Eleanor: like, look, all of this beauty and transcendence, there is a cost.
Speaker:Eleanor: And it's not immediate. It's not perceptible easily, but it's there.
Speaker:Eleanor: And we need to think about how horror, violence, torture, murder,
Speaker:Eleanor: disfiguration, et cetera, are back formations of a culture's tendency to fetishize the beautiful.
Speaker:Eleanor: And a film that I would put in the same kind of conceptual terrain with this
Speaker:Eleanor: is, of course, The Substance. where you've got two beautiful people.
Speaker:Evan: That's what I'm thinking of.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, I bet, right? You've got Demi Moore, you've got Margaret Qualley, both beautiful.
Speaker:Eleanor: The litigrous conceit of the film is that Demi Moore is like,
Speaker:Eleanor: not hot anymore. Like, oh no, sad Demi Moore. Like, I would give my high teeth
Speaker:Eleanor: to look 1% as hot as she does on any day of my life.
Speaker:Eleanor: But the film wants to convince us that because she's a little bit too old,
Speaker:Eleanor: her value falls to nothing.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then the cost for her of getting back to a state of ungainsayable youth
Speaker:Eleanor: and beauty as embodied in Margaret Qualley is that her own body collapses into this disgusting,
Speaker:Eleanor: arthritic, shriveled old crone. I know people have seen the film.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then in the end, the film suggests that the two have to come together.
Speaker:Eleanor: And that creates this even more disgusting entity, which is the Alyssa Sue monster.
Speaker:Eleanor: So that trend in feminist horror to make us really think about what is the cost of the beautiful,
Speaker:Eleanor: is very important to the logic of the second Suspiria and it's important to
Speaker:Eleanor: the substance and many other films down the line.
Speaker:Evan: Another film that came to mind when you're thinking of that immediately i thought
Speaker:Evan: of substance but i was also seeing another mia goth film the it's part of that
Speaker:Evan: trilogy that ty west had done the first one though x,
Speaker:Evan: where mia goth plays both like the very young pretty person and also the old,
Speaker:Evan: the version which you then get to learn about in the prequel and sequel and
Speaker:Evan: things but then i was also thinking
Speaker:Evan: beyond that too of the upstairs and downstairs of art too is that the,
Speaker:Evan: creativity of the suzy character in the second suspiria,
Speaker:Evan: is you know in for many people is the background she's not very wealthy just
Speaker:Evan: your experiences and art is often comes from that below place
Speaker:Evan: the the the horrors that you experience in the same way that movies and horror movies come from,
Speaker:Evan: these horror experiences that people have and it's a very interesting that they
Speaker:Evan: use the soviet girl to be the one that's downstairs it feels very,
Speaker:Evan: specific.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah yeah i agree there's sort of like a targeting of the most vulnerable that
Speaker:Eleanor: the film is interested in exploring too.
Speaker:Evan: Maybe this is going back to like the witch thing and just comparing the two
Speaker:Evan: when we talked about witches a number of times but how do you think I think
Speaker:Evan: that the way that the coven is portrayed, maybe it's also a shortcoming of the
Speaker:Evan: first movie just not being as fleshed out, and it's a little bit...
Speaker:Evan: Simplistic means it sounds bad, but the plot isn't as deep.
Speaker:Evan: The way that the coven is portrayed in the two movies feels very different,
Speaker:Evan: which we already talked about with the politics of the second version.
Speaker:Evan: It seems like they have a more collective voice, whereas in the first one,
Speaker:Evan: which also, I think, might also be the fact that the first one actually takes
Speaker:Evan: place in 1977. That's when it's actually made.
Speaker:Evan: And so that was the kind of politics of the time where women are not taken seriously. They have to...
Speaker:Evan: What you talk about in your first book of just the human rights,
Speaker:Evan: women's rights being at the forefront of the 1960s and 70s.
Speaker:Evan: So the first movie seems to be more of a critique of that, where in the second
Speaker:Evan: one, you're talking, I think, more of the critique of modern politics.
Speaker:Evan: Do you think that's true?
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah, I do. I mean, I think, you know, I think that the newer Suspiria,
Speaker:Eleanor: Guadagnino's film from 2018, is pretty clearly trying to do something feminist,
Speaker:Eleanor: and pretty clearly is doing something feminist, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: And I'm surprised that the film didn't get a little bit more credit for that.
Speaker:Eleanor: I suspect that has something to do with the fact that it was made by a male
Speaker:Eleanor: director, like, and that maybe people just weren't expecting him to come out
Speaker:Eleanor: with this sort of hard-charging feminist move. Yeah.
Speaker:Eleanor: But it is a pretty feminist film. I think that its politics are generally left-leaning.
Speaker:Eleanor: Not perfectly so, but generally so.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I would say that the earlier film, Argento's film, is pretty retrograde,
Speaker:Eleanor: actually, and pretty conservative, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: I think it's a film that takes on board the idea of the monstrous bitch very uncritically.
Speaker:Eleanor: Like, Mother Marcos is a gross, nasty, horrendous monstrous bitch,
Speaker:Eleanor: and she needs to be killed, and hopefully Susie will survive and get out. Yay!
Speaker:Eleanor: Right? Whereas in Guadagnino's film, it's not the case that Mother Marcos is
Speaker:Eleanor: evil because she's female.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's not the case that she has to die and this whole, like, matrilinear,
Speaker:Eleanor: matriarchal social formation has to die with her.
Speaker:Eleanor: What's the case is that she's a bad person and it's not because she's female,
Speaker:Eleanor: it's because she sucks. Right?
Speaker:Eleanor: She's like a selfish, rapacious, bad person. She has to get replaced, not elided.
Speaker:Eleanor: There's no sense at all in Guadagnino's film that the coven is failing by the end.
Speaker:Eleanor: In fact, it's very, very clear that the coven is getting reformed and resurrected through Susie Banyan.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I think that the politics of the second film are very, I'll just say,
Speaker:Eleanor: softly feminist, because again, it's not like, it's not a perfect,
Speaker:Eleanor: very few films are perfectly feminist.
Speaker:Eleanor: But that film is, you know, in many anyways, pretty close. And I think Argento's
Speaker:Eleanor: film is pretty misogynist, right? And I hesitate to use that term when I'm talking
Speaker:Eleanor: about art, because I like to give art a lot of credit for moral complexity.
Speaker:Eleanor: I'm very quick to use the term misogynist when I talk about governance or law or people.
Speaker:Eleanor: But that film, I think, really does qualify, because the good outcome is that many, many women die,
Speaker:Eleanor: all of the bad women die, and Susie escapes from the realm of female power.
Speaker:Eleanor: So that's like a bummer, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: That's a message that chimes with what, for example, very, very right-wing social
Speaker:Eleanor: philosophers now are saying.
Speaker:Eleanor: And what they're saying to women is you better worry about these powerful, scary,
Speaker:Eleanor: bitchy women there, these academic women, and women who want to complain about
Speaker:Eleanor: the patriarchy because your life will get worse the closer you get to them.
Speaker:Eleanor: That sort of is what that film is saying, right? It's not that Susie's gonna
Speaker:Eleanor: fix the coven. She has to burn it to the ground and get away.
Speaker:Eleanor: Not what Guadagnino sang in the 2018 film. On top of that, I would highlight
Speaker:Eleanor: that what I alluded to before by saying that Tilda Swinton's performance of
Speaker:Eleanor: Madame Blanc, when you can really see transparently her interior state, that's important.
Speaker:Eleanor: Not only because it makes her character more likable and it helps us see the
Speaker:Eleanor: plot in clearer terms, but also because it reminds us that all of these women
Speaker:Eleanor: do have interior states, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: Women have depth and character and subjectivity.
Speaker:Eleanor: And in the earlier film argento's film all the characters are flat all of them
Speaker:Eleanor: are flat i think that that's a choice that he made i think that argento and
Speaker:Eleanor: ward again this kind of goes back to your point from earlier argento wanted
Speaker:Eleanor: to make a film that's very much about surface,
Speaker:Eleanor: and like color and repletion and visual acuity and not very much about depth,
Speaker:Eleanor: and as a result he must have directed all the actors to play it flat because
Speaker:Eleanor: if he didn't it's really uncanny that every single one of them plays their character
Speaker:Eleanor: as flat as they do, but they're all flat.
Speaker:Eleanor: Susie is like an illegible, inscrutable, unempathogenic,
Speaker:Eleanor: noodle of a character her friend is the same way marcos is.
Speaker:Eleanor: Risibly disgusting and also weirdly flat like you can never even almost actually
Speaker:Eleanor: see her right and like all of the characters are caricatures which has a politics
Speaker:Eleanor: to it if you have a whole film about women with like a couple of,
Speaker:Eleanor: totally risible male characters thrown in also but all of the main characters
Speaker:Eleanor: are female and they're all flat, that's a political statement, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: And the statement is that there's not that much to think about when you think
Speaker:Eleanor: about female subjectivity, right? It's a shallow question with a shallow answer.
Speaker:Eleanor: Guadagnino's film, and this is true across Guadagnino's corpus,
Speaker:Eleanor: Guadagnino is very, very interested in the idea that all people have depths.
Speaker:Eleanor: And if anything, he's particularly interested in exploring the psychological
Speaker:Eleanor: depth of character types, women, queer men, young queer men.
Speaker:Eleanor: Whom the patriarchy might like to ignore the depth of, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: Guadagno's like, no, let's spend time there, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: So this film that he made is consistent with a lot of his other work,
Speaker:Eleanor: and I think that there's a politics to that, too. The fact that, like,
Speaker:Eleanor: Even the witchy women in the later film who support evil mother Marcos,
Speaker:Eleanor: you kind of know a lot about them.
Speaker:Eleanor: You understand their motivations, you understand what, I don't know why I'm
Speaker:Eleanor: thumbs upping over here, I'm doing some gesture, but you know more about them
Speaker:Eleanor: and they're more three-dimensional.
Speaker:Eleanor: That is a political choice too, right? So I think that the earlier film is just,
Speaker:Eleanor: it's very retrograde in a number of ways, some of which are explicit,
Speaker:Eleanor: all the witches must die, and some of which are implicit, all the women are boring.
Speaker:Eleanor: And as we were saying before, it's hard to slog through that film because it's
Speaker:Eleanor: a long minute to get from one plot point to the next. And some of that is that
Speaker:Eleanor: the actors are not carrying the burden.
Speaker:Eleanor: None of them are. And that has to have been a stylistic choice.
Speaker:Evan: I don't know how many I haven't seen. I can't speak. I can't say I don't want
Speaker:Evan: to use this a blanket statement for Dario Argento's work. I've seen maybe three
Speaker:Evan: or four of the films around the 70s era.
Speaker:Evan: Deep Red is credited, which is the film before this is sort of credited as one
Speaker:Evan: of the early, maybe one of the first sort of quote unquote slasher films before
Speaker:Evan: they kind of became popular in America. He also has Inferno,
Speaker:Evan: which is a similar vibe to this in some ways.
Speaker:Evan: It is kind of how he treats women in a lot of his movies that I've seen.
Speaker:Evan: And so I think to say that that's what he was going for, making the women be
Speaker:Evan: very flat and that's how he wants them. I think that's...
Speaker:Evan: The choice that he makes in his movies of this era i don't want to speak to
Speaker:Evan: the newer films because maybe he that became a different uh method but those
Speaker:Evan: early films not great yeah i.
Speaker:Track 4: Mean in the first one it literally gets to the point where you're watching and
Speaker:Track 4: by the end like you get to the lady that falls into the barbed wire room and
Speaker:Track 4: you're like i have absolutely zero compassion for you at this point like,
Speaker:Track 4: by the time she gets murdered it's like okay really this okay yeah it really
Speaker:Track 4: makes you disconnect with the characters definitely a choice.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah that's right and part of the reason we have to know that it was a choice
Speaker:Eleanor: is that the late 70s that was like the epicenter of the moment in which horror
Speaker:Eleanor: about women was treating the women with a lot of psychological deaths, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: That's nine years after Rosemary's Baby.
Speaker:Eleanor: It's four years after The Exorcist. It's two years after Stepford Wives,
Speaker:Eleanor: one year after The Omen, two years before Alien, right, with Ellen Ripley.
Speaker:Eleanor: This was like the era of women horror protagonists being not just three-dimensional,
Speaker:Eleanor: but astoundingly empathogenic.
Speaker:Eleanor: So to have a character like Susie Banyan, whose best move is fainting it's just
Speaker:Eleanor: sad right like that's not a compelling character.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah yeah and i actually didn't know this too this i don't know you because
Speaker:Evan: you mentioned uh night of the living dead i didn't realize that sargio or um
Speaker:Evan: dario argento had co-produced the sequel dawn of the dead.
Speaker:Eleanor: Oh i didn't know that either.
Speaker:Evan: It just i mean i don't it says that he was the editor and composer of the european
Speaker:Evan: version of that movie which is actually an excellent sequel in in its own right
Speaker:Evan: um but That's interesting and maybe surprising.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, granted, that's not really his movie. That's a George A.
Speaker:Evan: Romero movie, if anything. But I just thought I would throw it out there.
Speaker:Evan: I was just looking at a lot of other films from that era, the ones you mentioned,
Speaker:Evan: plus a number of other ones. And I think of Carrie, even ones that don't have
Speaker:Evan: women, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.
Speaker:Evan: Um what other ones that came out that year uh and i mean like halloween yeah right like even.
Speaker:Eleanor: Big slasher franchise i spit on your grave which i do not recommend that that
Speaker:Eleanor: film is way over the line of too hard to watch for me having said that i've seen it and,
Speaker:Eleanor: um you know that protagonist you know a lot about her you know a lot about her yeah.
Speaker:Evan: There's one other question i had and maybe this is a a large a big stretch and
Speaker:Evan: i know we've already talked about it just the only thing I know that I had left was
Speaker:Evan: the what's a lot is to be made in the set in the 2018 version of the the sort
Speaker:Evan: of the guilt of the German nation from
Speaker:Evan: the conclusion of the World War Two and the Holocaust.
Speaker:Evan: And I made a note that maybe I'm thinking of it the opposite way.
Speaker:Evan: But the which is the the juxtaposition of the guilt of the nation and the way
Speaker:Evan: the fact that the German government has now brought in former nazi ss officers
Speaker:Evan: into the government which is explicitly mentioned in the film,
Speaker:Evan: and then you have the witches and i'm trying to figure out because they have
Speaker:Evan: their own ritualistic and controlling methods
Speaker:Evan: which are different than the sort of occult and interest in rituals that the nazis were
Speaker:Evan: part of and i don't know how to i don't know what i'm necessarily getting at
Speaker:Evan: but there's these two different sides which i think is very explicit it with the marcos versus,
Speaker:Evan: um marcos versus blanc like do you think that it is a app comparison to the
Speaker:Evan: governments and the way that the nazis are now or sorry the german government
Speaker:Evan: is has treated the nazis and just the
Speaker:Evan: the mood of the government of the people at the time.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah i mean i think that the film is really trying to meditate among many other things um,
Speaker:Eleanor: on autocratic power and how we can understand autocratic power,
Speaker:Eleanor: how we understand what it is to live under autocratic power.
Speaker:Eleanor: And that's happening in the sort of outer layer of the film with that whole
Speaker:Eleanor: RAF nightmare crisis situation and the way that it invokes German sort of third
Speaker:Eleanor: and fourth quarter 20th century history.
Speaker:Eleanor: And of course, internally, it's happening in the coven, right?
Speaker:Eleanor: Do people just accept Mother Marcos as the ongoing head of the coven because
Speaker:Eleanor: she's been the head of the coven, because she's an autocrat,
Speaker:Eleanor: because she's a dictator?
Speaker:Eleanor: And the answer is yes, they voted, and the majority sided with her.
Speaker:Eleanor: So there's this performance in the coven of the same kind of false consciousness
Speaker:Eleanor: that produces autocracy in the first place, which is this idea that,
Speaker:Eleanor: well, this person has had power.
Speaker:Eleanor: Let's go ahead and let them keep power, because it seems to be the,
Speaker:Eleanor: like, straightest path toward any kind of imaginable future.
Speaker:Eleanor: And then, of course, within the coven, that's getting resisted by Blanc,
Speaker:Eleanor: and Susie Banyan represents the refusal of that kind of logic.
Speaker:Eleanor: She represents a kind of leadership, her own embodied leadership that,
Speaker:Eleanor: as I said earlier, is both powerful and vengeful, but also nurturing and merciful.
Speaker:Eleanor: To me, the most politically important moment in the whole film is when in the sort of,
Speaker:Eleanor: orgiastic blood ritual at the very end, there are these three young women who
Speaker:Eleanor: have been eviscerated by Mother Marcos and her cronies, and Susie Banyan, who is now sort of.
Speaker:Eleanor: Emerged as the mother of size, the like highest ranking witch of the coven,
Speaker:Eleanor: she goes to each of the three of them and she says not, she does not say,
Speaker:Eleanor: you're obviously in pain, I'm going to end your suffering.
Speaker:Eleanor: Instead, she asks them what they want.
Speaker:Eleanor: She says, what do you desire? And each of them says, I want to die.
Speaker:Eleanor: And so she holds them to her chest and she like lets them die.
Speaker:Eleanor: So that's a very dark figuration of what political power should look like.
Speaker:Eleanor: Hopefully we live in a world where, like, allowing people the mercy of release
Speaker:Eleanor: from pain is, like, a last resort for governance and not, like, the starting point.
Speaker:Eleanor: But, you know, she's coming into a hot mess here, and so her first move is this
Speaker:Eleanor: act of soliciting the desire of the people she's in charge of and then committing
Speaker:Eleanor: an act of violence that really is an act of mercy,
Speaker:Eleanor: and that is seen that way by the characters upon whom it's performed.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I think that the film, both in the external world of Germany and the internal
Speaker:Eleanor: world of the coven, is asking questions about surrender to autocracy,
Speaker:Eleanor: and is saying in the end, there is a different thing that we could have,
Speaker:Eleanor: and it's an idea of governance that's about mutuality, it's about respect, and it's about mercy.
Speaker:Eleanor: Then when she shows up later, in kind of the final major scene of the film,
Speaker:Eleanor: Susie Banyan, as the mother of size, shows up at the doctor's house,
Speaker:Eleanor: and he's still grappling with all this guilt he has over the death of his wife.
Speaker:Eleanor: And the Susie Banyan's character shows up and she's basically like,
Speaker:Eleanor: look, I've decided that you deserve to know what happened.
Speaker:Eleanor: And she tells him what happened to his wife. And it's like a very sad scene.
Speaker:Eleanor: But at baseline, it's about her recognition that he's a person.
Speaker:Eleanor: And she wants to provide him with closure before then relieving him of all of
Speaker:Eleanor: the memories that he has about this issue.
Speaker:Eleanor: So she both honors his desire for truth and then performs the equivalent of
Speaker:Eleanor: a mercy killing for him psychologically.
Speaker:Eleanor: So she, as a ruler, is not about the exercise of authoritative force.
Speaker:Eleanor: She's about, like, volition, recognition of humanity, mercy,
Speaker:Eleanor: compassion, touching, right? She's very, like, physically tender with the people she interacts with.
Speaker:Eleanor: So I think that's the film's final statement, really, is that there is a mode
Speaker:Eleanor: of exercising power that has to do with the mutual recognition of humanity and
Speaker:Eleanor: not with the idea of total suppression and the sort of exercise of dictatorial force.
Speaker:Evan: I found that scene very—I mean, I understand the idea of giving him that mercy
Speaker:Evan: of she touches him, he has like a little seizure and sort of just forgets what
Speaker:Evan: happens, he no longer has his—,
Speaker:Evan: you know, his country place anymore, sort of all kind of wiped away.
Speaker:Evan: But in the case of these individuals, it makes sense.
Speaker:Evan: But in some ways, for the German people collectively to forget what has happened,
Speaker:Evan: what I think would be a mistake for them.
Speaker:Evan: I think it's very similar to Spain and their grappling with the period of time in Italy.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, a lot of these places was fascist uh you know periods of time and um,
Speaker:Evan: not to say that i'm refuting you i'm just saying that it wouldn't be such the
Speaker:Evan: wouldn't i don't know how to grapple with what they would do as a nation i guess
Speaker:Evan: they're not really you're not really meant to this is more of the individuals of this but just yeah.
Speaker:Eleanor: I definitely don't think that the film is trying to say that the forgetting
Speaker:Eleanor: that happens for him should be.
Speaker:Evan: Extended no right right of course.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah but yeah i think that but But the question of how do we hold trauma at
Speaker:Eleanor: that kind of a scale is one that the film wants us to think about.
Speaker:Eleanor: How do you do it? What forms can it take?
Speaker:Eleanor: How do you make the histories that we can't forget,
Speaker:Eleanor: um things that we can live with without pushing them entirely to the side.
Speaker:Evan: Was there anything that we between the films that we didn't get a chance to
Speaker:Evan: to hit for you eleanor or uh.
Speaker:Eleanor: No i mean final thoughts or anything yeah i mean i guess the the only final
Speaker:Eleanor: thing that might be worth landing on one second time is the dancing the damien
Speaker:Eleanor: jale's choreography in the 2018 suspiria is,
Speaker:Eleanor: so beautiful like the work that went into making those dance scenes happen must
Speaker:Eleanor: have been extraordinary and,
Speaker:Eleanor: the that i think is very important to guadagnino's project the idea that you
Speaker:Eleanor: you need to have this like core of beauty somewhere even though it's in this
Speaker:Eleanor: tense negotiated relationship with horror and ugliness,
Speaker:Eleanor: um and maybe he's getting that a little bit from argento's emphasis on the visual
Speaker:Eleanor: and how visually striking his movie is.
Speaker:Eleanor: But I think that Guadagnino really wants us to clock that that dance really
Speaker:Eleanor: is an extraordinary choreographic work.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah.
Speaker:Track 4: No, I had in my notes, I was like, I don't know shit about ballet,
Speaker:Track 4: but this dancing is incredible.
Speaker:Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah, it's amazing. I couldn't find this, or maybe I didn't look deep enough.
Speaker:Evan: Does Dakota Johnson do all of the dancing herself?
Speaker:Eleanor: I'm not sure, actually.
Speaker:Evan: I looked in the in just like in a brief surge and i know that she has some training
Speaker:Evan: so it's possible i mean if she did and,
Speaker:Evan: i mean any anyone who can do that is if it's impressive but being that that's
Speaker:Evan: not necessarily her like primary yeah you know um primary thing that she's doing
Speaker:Evan: in a lot of her movies i would be even more impressed because,
Speaker:Evan: That last performance, too, I mean, and I think also when you see Mia Goth come
Speaker:Evan: up and she had already broken her leg and it was sort of repaired and it comes
Speaker:Evan: back up, which is also very disgusting. Bones, for me, generally is not a,
Speaker:Evan: I mean, I can handle gore, but sometimes bones.
Speaker:Evan: It's just also the trauma and the pain that can go into making art, too.
Speaker:Eleanor: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly right. And then in the end,
Speaker:Eleanor: when she collapses during the dance and everyone sees that she's hurt,
Speaker:Eleanor: that makes the audience complicit.
Speaker:Eleanor: And all of the suffering that went into making the beautiful dance.
Speaker:Eleanor: And I think that's an important part for Guadagnino also, that we need to think
Speaker:Eleanor: about who suffers in order to make the beautiful things that are all around us all the time.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in general, as my sister, when she was much younger,
Speaker:Evan: she was very interested in ballet and trying to maybe as a career.
Speaker:Evan: And the toll that that puts on your body is a tremendous, tremendous. Yeah.
Speaker:Evan: And I guess before we go, where can people, we can also put a link in our,
Speaker:Evan: in the show notes, where can people find your new book and when does it come out?
Speaker:Eleanor: It actually came out on Tuesday. So it's out, which is very exciting. You can buy it on Amazon.
Speaker:Eleanor: You can buy it at Princeton University Press.
Speaker:Eleanor: But it's, it is widely available. I will be doing some, like a reading and a
Speaker:Eleanor: film screening in Philadelphia this weekend. So, you know, or I guess probably
Speaker:Eleanor: by the time this is up, it will have already passed. Never mind.
Speaker:Eleanor: But you can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it at Princeton University Press.
Speaker:Eleanor: And Scream With Me just came out in paperback. So now it is available more cheaply,
Speaker:Eleanor: either at Simon Schuster's website or on Amazon or at your local bookseller.
Speaker:Eleanor: And my sub stack, which is free, is eleanorshorrors.substack.com.
Speaker:Eleanor: And you can just subscribe.
Speaker:Evan: Excellent. Well, Eleanor, thank you for coming on and talking about these two
Speaker:Evan: books. I almost said two books, but your two books and then these two movies. it's great to have you.
Speaker:Track 4: It was wonderful having you thank.
Speaker:Eleanor: You very much.
Speaker:Evan: And yeah you can listen to uh you can subscribe to your sub stack do this podcast
Speaker:Evan: or those links in the description and we will catch you next time okay.
Speaker:Eleanor: Thank you thank you both.
