Among the various concepts bequeathed the study of cinema by Cahiers du Cinema's is the "film maudit", literally "cursed film". The nature of this 'curse' could, according to critic André Labarthe, take two forms: A film maudit might be utterly in advance of the audience, an avant-garde work that pointed towards the future. Or it could reach its contemporary audience and be appreciated by them, but be fundamentally misunderstood through the misapplication of pre-existing analytic frameworks.
This paper wishes to explore the critical reception given Italian filmmaker Dario Argento's 1993 American-made film Trauma. Focussing in particular on the deployment of notions of 'originality' and 'authenticity' in a close, scene-by-scene discussion of the film, it will argue the case for Trauma's status as a more or less classic example of film maudit.
Retrospectively Trauma can be identified as having inaugurated a new phase in Argento's cinema, with a new-found emphasis on 'realism' that the director has continued to explore in films such as The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and The Card Player (2004). It will be argued this 'realist' impulse perhaps lies at the heart of the film's poor reception, many of the arguments against it as an inauthentic, compromised and above all Americanised film failing to hold up to close scrutiny. Rather, Trauma will emerge as authentically and distinctively the work of its auteur as any other Argento film.
It is, however, impossible to deny that Argento wanted a US hit. A major figure within Italian cinema, he is better known as a cult figure internationally, only his 1977 horror-fantasy Suspiria reaching a wider audience[ 1 ]. In 1989 Argento sought to improve his international visibility by co-ordinating a four-part anthology film based upon the works of Edgar Allan Poe, with segments to be directed by George A. Romero, Wes Craven and John Carpenter in addition to himself. In the event, however, only Romero came on board the project, Two Evil Eyes (1990). Working on post-production on the film in the US, Argento chanced upon the sight of a young woman being sick by the roadside, ignored by passers-by. This sparked his imagination and he produced an outline for a murder-mystery with an anorectic protagonist, Aura's Enigma. Back home in Italy, screenwriters Gianni Rommoli and Franco Ferrini fleshed out Argento's treatment, culminating in a script that effectively re-imagined the director's classic Profondo Rosso/Deep Red (1975) "for a new generation".
Though it is unclear whether Argento had always intended to make the film in the US or only reached this decision late in pre-production, the Italian writers' script was then handed on to American T. E. D. Klein to retool. Removing some of the more excessive aspects of the Italian script that would likely have run into difficulties with the MPAA classification board, Klein also introduced some new ideas, most notably an inquisitive child, Gabriel, reminiscent of the character played by Macaulay Culkin in the then-popular Home Alone films.
Shooting began in Minneapolis St Paul in August 1992 with Argento's teenage daughter Asia controversially cast in the role of Aura. While the shoot wrapped on schedule, a longer than anticipated post-production period then ensued as the perfectionist filmmaker endeavoured to produce a cut that would satisfy his American production partners. Trauma thus missed its intended Italian release date. Worse, it did poor business, the director's core horror/thriller audience perhaps put off by the general certificate awarded it by the Italian ratings board. In the US, meanwhile, the film failed to obtain the theatrical release that might have brought Argento to the wider audience he sought, only appearing on less-than-ideal home formats for the cognoscenti to seek out.
Fan and critical reaction was decidedly muted. Predictably, Asia's casting drew accusations of nepotism and exploitation. More importantly the film was dismissed as bland and anonymous, less "a Deeper Red" than its American epigoni. Or, as long-term Argento Alan Jones enthusiast put it in what may be taken as broadly representative responses here, that it was a "rather soulless, off-hand attempt to recapture former glory… Deep Red… at half speed."[ 2 ] There were dissenting minority reports, such as that of Peter Blumenstock, who saw Trauma as up to the director's usual standards:
Trauma was a magnificent film, though regrettably it was not generally regarded as such. Perhaps in twenty years or so it will be reassessed. European critics dismissed it as a sell-out to America… Even Argento's self-proclaimed standard-bearers seemed to think that the time had finally come to slaughter their holy cow. Argento-bashing was in fashion.[ 3 ]
Though he does not refer to the notion of film maudit here, it is hard not to see the sense of a misunderstood work, ahead of its time, here.
After the credits, modelled on Deep Red, and a scene-setting murder in which 'The Headhunter' decapitates another victim, Trauma's protagonists are introduced. Aura, an anorexic teenager, has escaped from the clinic where she is being treated and is about to throw herself into the river when she is saved by David. An ex-drug addict, David notices the needle marks on Aura's arm and assumes the worst. He takes her to a diner, but she is uncommunicative. Having stolen David's wallet, Aura makes her excuses, goes to the bathroom to vomit and sneaks out a side exit, only to be captured by two men from the clinic who return her to her parents Adriana and Stefan, professional mediums from Romania.
That night a ferocious storm erupts as the Petrescu's hold a seance. One of the Headhunter's victims appears to take control of Adriana as she speaks in two voices: "My head, took my head! Murdered me! A monster with a noose! I wasn't the first and I won't be the last! I know who the killer is! I'm the only one who knows! The killer is present!" A tree branch crashes through the window and a panic erupts, Adriana continuing "I see you. You cannot hide from me. I know you…" before fleeing into the grounds followed by her husband and, then, Aura. Someone strikes Stefan from behind and decapitates him, Aura arriving to see the figure, holding up the severed heads of her parents, retreating into the darkness. The police and Aura's analyst, Dr Judd, arrive but, understandably traumatised, she can tell them nothing. Wary of being taken back to the clinic, Aura flees whilst unwatched.
What Argento is doing here, then, is reconfiguring two key sequences from Deep Red. There, medium Helga Ulmann likewise detected the presence of a murderer amongst the audience at a parapsychology conference. Later Helga is murdered, her upstairs neighbour Marc Daly arriving on the scene just as the murderer, Martha, was leaving. Daly unwittingly passes Martha in the hallway and mistakes her reflection in a mirror as one of the faces in the painting opposite. Here Aura fails to see that her mother is in fact the Headhunter, and was holding up one hand above her head at the instant Aura saw her.
With these acknowledged similarities it would be easy to dismiss Trauma as unoriginal. I would argue, however, that to do so would thereby entail the dismissal of almost all genre and auteur cinema: Trauma is original insofar as, while it may be repeating key themes, ideas and motifs common to its particular genre and auteur, it is also developing and reconfiguring them. A comparison of the handling given parapsychological matters establishes the difference. In Deep Red, made at a time when Argento was moving towards fantastical subject matter, Helga's psychic abilities are apparently genuine. Here, by contrast, the stage-managed, performative aspects of the seance, complete with behind-the-scenes glances of a tape machine, are emphasised. While Adriana's abilities are not directly denied, the function of the seance is to give her the opportunity to kill her husband and stage her own death. (The convenient intervention of the tree branch is maybe a piece of artistic license, but again Adriana, knowing of the impending storm, might well have worked it into her scheme.) Much the same can be said of the murder sequences in the two films. Though subjective point-of-view camera is common to both films along with the Italian murder-mystery films or giallo generally, Deep Red's murders are invariably spectacular, excessive set pieces, a kind of aesthetic formalism of murder whereas Trauma's are restrained and matter-of-fact, comparatively grounded in 'reality'. (Argento would continue this 'return of the real' in The Stendhal Syndrome where the fetishistic black gloves and trenchcoat worn by Adriana and Martha and innumerable other giallo murderers are eschewed for anonymous, everyday/everyman attire.[ 4 ]) While both films' "monstrous feminine" killers are compelled to recreate the conditions of their respective primal scenes as precondition for murder, the forms their fetishes take are significantly different. Martha needs to hear a specific piece of music, but has a free choice of weaponry. Adriana needs there to be torrential rain and must decapitate her victims.
While censorship issues unquestionably played a part in Trauma's low-key murders-why spend money on spectacular gore effects only too end up cutting them?[ 5 ]-it is again wrong to accuse Argento of 'inauthenticity' here. His command of film language and technique is such that he could have suggested everything while showing nothing. Instead, like Fritz Lang with M (1930) or Tobe Hooper with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), he chose to exercise restraint as a conscious, authentic, artistic choice. One possible reason for the 'misreading' here is that violent spectacle arguably enjoys a fundamentally different position in Italian from Hollywood cinema[ 6 ]. The set pieces of a Deep Red cannot be truly labelled gratuitous-i.e. unnecessary or unwarranted-in that they are essential parts of the work, sometimes maybe even its raison d'être. Or, as fellow filmmaker Lucio Fulci once put it, "violence is Italian art"[ 7 ]. Understanding-or misunderstanding-the context is everything.
The next major sequence reintroduces David at his place of work, the local news station, and his colleagues, an incidental comedy line as David's on-off girlfriend, newscaster Grace, goes to help the other presenter "rehearse his ad-libs" offering wry comment on the milieu's inauthenticity. No sooner has David begun a sketch[ 8 ] to accompany a news item on the Headhunter than he receives a call from Aura, who is outside. She apologises for taking his wallet and, wanting to "go home", breaks down. David tries to comfort her, but does not understand what has happened until, back at work, he recognises Aura from the news broadcast. (Something "isn't real until it's on TV", perhaps.)
David and Aura drive to her house, now cordoned off, and break in. Another seemingly throwaway line, David proclaiming he will "be right back" as he goes into the darkened basement with a flashlight, assumes greater significance in establishing the film's position in relation to the two generic traditions within which it might be situated, the aforementioned giallo and the American slasher film. Concomitant with this, we can establish a classic set of binary oppositions within critical responses to the film-Italian versus American, authentic versus inauthentic, good versus bad etc. As the sequence plays out another POV shot-a common trope of both giallo and slasher, signifying nothing either way-establishes Adriana's presence. According to the rules of the slasher film, as established by critics such as Carol J Clover and Vera Dika and latterly explored by postmodern slasher films like Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) David has probably just signed his death warrant, his chances of survival further reduced by his history of drug use, unacceptable within the slasher film's Manichean/binary universe. Yet, nothing bad happens. David finds the power switch, causing Adriana to flee.
At David's house another key sequence of this sort follows as David inadvertently happens upon Aura as she unwraps the bindings around her breasts. Rather than titillating the (implied) male spectator as would be the case in an American slasher film of Trauma's vintage-filmmakers finding female nudity a cheap and less censorship prone alternative to violence-he is made to share in David's discomfort. Again, then, the scene is 'authentic' and 'realistic'. Indeed, we might speculate that some critics reacted negatively here precisely because of this, their accusations that the director was exploiting his daughter more an 'inauthentic' response that allowed them to avoid personally engaging with their own feelings here. (In The Stendhal Syndrome Dario and Asia would push things further, Asia's character there being tortured and raped by a serial killer.[ 9 ]) On the other side, biography would also appear to play a part here, with anorexia having affected Argento's step-daughter and Asia's half-sister Anna and-albeit in an admittedly minor form-the director himself.
It is not, however, until David later finds Aura making herself sick that he realises the truth. Back at the news station his colleague Artie fills him in on the illness, offering a psychoanalytically derived interpretation of the illness worth quoting at length:
Artie: Anorexics are always secretive. They're good little girls. They hide their problems.
David: What else?
Artie: Deeply attached to an unstable mother. Upper middle class girls. Boys too, actually. Usually the brighter, artistic ones… Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, sex, how could I forget about sex?
David: What about sex?
Artie: Well, did you get in her pants?
David: Artie, she's just a kid!
Artie: Okay, did you get in her play-clothes?
David: No!
Artie: Didn't think so. Anorexics are afraid of sex. They want to get back to their childhood, before all the scary stuff started. There's something like eight million of them out there.
David: How do you know all this?
Artie: 'Cause I watch Oprah and Donahue, doesn't everybody? … Look, seriously, your friend may be in real danger. A lot of anorexics die. A lot of them commit suicide. The worst part is she won't let you help her. I mean she'll want you to help her but she won't.
David: How did she end up that way?
Artie: Trouble with her parents. It's said these girls will even have a classic dream. She'll dream her father is leaning over her about to kiss her.
Again, the seriousness with which the the subject is approaches indicates a commitment to authenticity and realism that sits ill at ease with the (stereotypical) requirements of popular genre cinema for undemanding entertainment. Likewise, if this anorexia theme could be read as saying something akin to the moral message of the slasher film-as distinct from giallo-where sex is a no-no, Trauma is again subversive. Insofar as she is sexually inactive Aura might be read as a "final girl" in Clover's formulation, but that her denial of normal, healthy adult sexuality stems from mental illness, perhaps even abuse, is hardly an endorsement of the slasher film's conservative worldview. Again, then, Trauma's sensibilities emerge as complex, nuanced and 'true to life'.
David's investigations continue, his feelings towards Aura likewise developing, though Adriana remains a step ahead. While the palimpsest of Deep Red is again apparent, Argento's command of technique-one sequence sees him film as if from a butterfly's point of view using a Louma crane, for instance-is again modulated by new-found restraint.
A jealous Grace betrays Aura to Dr Judd, who take her back to the Faraday Clinic, its name perhaps connoting Hilde Bruch's "golden cage" of anorexia and the ECT treaments that contributed to Adriana's trauma.
Judd force-feeds Aura a psychotropic berry that will, he says, help her remember what happened. A curiously intersubjective dream/hallucination ensues as Judd observes Aura's spirit dancing on the ceiling while she replays her parents' murder and imagines Judd atop her mother, the shock causing her to faint. As Aura is taken to her room another gliding steadicam shot signals Adriana's approach. Anamorphic lenses convey her warped perception, then the increasingly chaotic situation as s he murders one of the nurses while simultaneously Aura makes good her escape, using keys she had earlier lifted from the nurse.
Back home David and Aura learn of the nurse's murder. POV shots from outside suggest they are being watched, though nothing further happens that night. The investigation leads the couple to a storage facility where they find a postcard photograph of a group of doctors and nurses, including three of the Headhunter's victims. On the back is a name, Linda Quirk, address, barely a mile away, and telephone number. Meanwhile, Linda has realised she may be in danger so when David phones she takes him for the killer and flees.
David and Aura soon track Linda down and stake out the motel where she is hiding, their actions ironically paralleled by Adriana. After Linda phones her girlfriend-we can note that the handling of the lesbian relationship is low-key and realistic[ 10 ]-Adriana gets the information she needs and heads for the motel, where she knocks Linda unconscious then, having activated the sprinkler system to create ersatz rain, guillotines her. Again, David arrives a moment too late. He does, however, manage to catch the dying delivery from Linda's severed head-"Lloyd"-while her bag identifies the hospital in the picture as St Bartholomew's.
Finding that Dr Lloyd was dismissed from the hospital for stealing drugs, David tracks him down in the seedy part of town. Lloyd proves a broken wreck of a man, clearly not the killer but unable to help in any way. That night, Lloyd falls victim to the Headhunter. Interestingly, he is not decapitated by the electric guillotine, instead by a descending elevator as Adriana is forced to improvise when Lloyd's neck-chain jams her machine, the murder thereby reconfiguring another moment from Deep Red while also perhaps alluding to the slasher film's typical distrust for 'technology'.
Come morning the police arrive. The only clue is the telephone number David had given Dr Lloyd. Meanwhile, the black-gloved Judd has broken into David's with the intention of abducting Aura, though he is forced to flee as the police approach. The resulting car chase is brief-disappointingly realistic, perhaps-as Judd loses control and fatally crashes. In his trunk are the victims' heads-the Headhunter, it seems, is no more. Numbed, David returns to the house to find Aura gone, her note indicating she has "gone to join [her] mother". Finding Aura's dress outside by the lake, David wades into the water in a desperate, fruitless search, then awakens in a hospital bed.
Unable to cope with Aura's suicide, David turns back to drugs, attempting to forge a prescription obtained for him by Grace[ 11 ]. The difference between Trauma and a conventional American slasher film is again apparent, David receiving nothing worse than a punch on the jaw for his transgression. Now at rock bottom, he catches sight of a distinctive brooch Aura wore and, stung into action, sets off in pursuit only to lose sight of the figure and stop outside Gabriel's house, next to Adriana's hideout. David asks the child if he has seen a girl in a dark coat, his desperate offer to "be your best friend" imparting an unhealthy atmosphere. Gabriel has not and so David knocks on Adriana's door to ask the same question. Face hidden behind the screen she answers his questions in the negative. About to leave, the dejected and broken David catches a glimpse of Aura's reflection[ 12 ] in a puddle the, looking up, sees a figure moving away from the window, prompting him to go round the side of the house and sneak in. Ascending the stairs, David almost knocks over a vase (we could of course read this as, symbolically, a head) and enters a child's bedroom, shrouded with curtains bearing the name "Nicholas". The room also bears a crib, with a doll and a ball (another symbolic head) and the macabre play theatre glimpsed in the opening credits. Suddenly Adriana and strikes David, who comes to in the basement where he finds himself chained and caged with Aura. Aura now knows what she really saw: "In the dark it looked like two severed heads, but there was only one. My father's." Judd was not the Headhunter but, infatuated with Adriana, he conspired to cover up her crimes, just as Martha's son, Carlo, had done in Deep Red.
Meanwhile Gabriel, who had seen David enter but not leave, sneaks into the house and takes the guillotine. The loss of the weapon causes Martha to fly into a rage and stab at the boy, who has concealed himself behind a wall panel. David's cries for help distract Adriana, who goes downstairs. There is a momentary impasse: She cannot enter the cage, Aura having wrapped her chains around the door handle, but they cannot get out. In an admittedly cliché moment-does every real-life serial killer explain their motivation when asked?-Adriana tells how the delivery of her baby was bungled by Dr Lloyd and his team, the infant being accidentally decapitated. In a bid to make his wife forget, Stefan then permitted her to be subjected to experimental ECT treatment: "They thought they could make me forget, but Nicholas came to me. He ordered the deaths of those who had murdered him!" Now completely insane, Adriana advances upon the couple, who have managed to loosen a section of the ceiling but not break free. As she does so Gabriel lowers the noose around her neck from above and switches on the guillotine. The device remorselessly tightens and decapitates Adriana in a heady (sorry!) combination of live by the sword, die by the sword; deus ex machina and obvious Freudian castration. If again somewhat reminiscent of Deep Red, the emphases are also different: Whereas Deep Red concludes with Marc Daly alone, pondering his reflection in a pool of blood, here David and Aura embrace as the credits roll, their waking nightmare finally over.
The same cannot, however, be said for Argento himself. If anything, his own 'trauma'[ 13 ] was only beginning. The original aspects of his film, the surprising emphases on restraint and realism and the authentic, existential commitments underlying these were rarely recognised by commentators who, wanting nothing so much as Deep Red II, remained largely blind to Trauma's own merits, and accused it of being an American-style slasher film. As we have seen, however, Trauma either ignores this genre's conventions or actively subverts them, as in its moral sensibilities and relative seriousness of tone. Yet to read Trauma through the prism of the slasher film is perhaps to miss the point. Fundamental, it's proper reception context is as another of Argento's contributions to the ongoing development of the giallo, as a film that can be seen, retrospectively, as inaugurating a new, mature, phase in his work to be continued by The Stendhal Syndrome and The Card Player. In the end, then, Trauma points less to any nostalgia for past triumphs, of a director resting on his laurels, as one seeking out new challenges for the future. In the final analysis a film maudit, Trauma was in advance of its time and audience. But now, perhaps, we have begun to catch up with it.
Works CitedBlumenstock, Peter. "The Gallery Murders". Giallo Pages 5. 1996: 7-9.
Clover, Carol J. "Men Women and Chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film". London: BFI Publishing, 1992.
Dika, Vera. "Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the films of the stalker cycle". London: Associated University Presses, 1990
Hutchings, Peter. "The Argento Effect". Mark Jancovich et al (eds.) Defining Cult Movies: The cultural politics of oppositional taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003: 127-141.
Jones, Alan. "Profondo Argento". Godalming: FAB Press, 2004.
Labarthe, Andre S. "Pagnol". Hillier, Jim (ed.) Cahiers du Cinéma: the 1960s. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 1992: 95-99.
Maiello, Fabio. "Intervista a Dario Argento". Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996.
Needham, Gary. "Playing with genre: defining the Italian giallo". Schneider, Stephen Jay (ed.) Fear Without Frontiers: horror cinema across the globe. Godalming: FAB Press, 2003: 135-144.
Palmerini, Luca M. and Mistressa, Gaetano. "Spaghetti Nightmares". Key West: Fantasma, 1996.
Smith, Adrian Luther. "Trauma". Gallant, Chris (ed.) Art of Darkness: the cinema of Dario Argento. Guilford: FAB Press, 2000: 119-228.
Totaro, Donato. "The Italian zombie film: from derivation to innovation". Schneider op cit. 161-173.
Notes[ 1 ] For an analysis of Argento's cult status, especially in a British context, and an outline of the international distribution given his films see Peter Hutchings "The Argento Effect" in Mark Jancovich et al. (eds.) Defining Cult Movies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003: 127-141.
[ 2 ] Quotes taken from a 1993 review originally published in Starburst magazine, later reprinted in Profondo Argento. Godalming: FAB Press, 2004: 222.
[ 3 ] Quotes taken from a 1995 article published in Giallo Pages 5. 1996: 7-9
[ 4 ] For a discussion of the shift from fashion to fetish here see Gary Needham Playing with genre: defining the Italian giallo" in Stephen Jay Schneider (ed.) Fear Without Frontiers: horror cinema across the globe. Godalming: FAB Press, 2003: 135-144.
[ 5 ] Argento: "I'm really tired of making scenes which people couldn't watch or which got cut out anyway." – Quoted from an interview in Luca Palmerini and Gaetano Mistressa, Spaghetti Nightmares. Key West: Fantasma, 1996: 19.
[ 6 ] On the role of the set piece in Italian fantasy/horror cinema see Donato Totoro's "The Italian zombie film: from derivation to innovation" in Schneider op cit. 161-173.
[ 7 ] This may seem a glib remark, the kind of thing to be expected of a man who justified a gory scene in Paura nella città dei morti viventi / City of the Living Dead (1980) where a retarded man is drilled through the head by a redneck type as "a cry against a certain sort of fascism". Yet, to dismiss it tout court would be to neglect that Fulci's favourite among his own films was his 1969 adaptation of the story of Beatrice Cenci-an all too real, historical, instance of horror.
[ 8 ] Artistic protagonists are a common feature of Argento's cinema.
[ 9 ] It can, however, be noted that fellow Italian filmmaker Enzo G. Castellari had done the same with his daughter Stefania in his 1976 crime film The Big Racket without seeming to attract much attention or controversy.
[ 10 ] See in particular Adrian Luther-Smith's comments in his essay on the film, a retrospective re-evaluation that again points to the film's growing reputation, in Chris Gallant (ed.) Art of Darkness: the cinema of Dario Argento. Guilford: FAB Press, 2000: 119-228.
[ 11 ] The immediate trigger, in the form of a reproduction of John Everett-Millais's famous painting of Ophelia, is significant insofar as Argento's sensitive artistic protagonists are frequently overwhelmed by something they see, hear or experience. Indeed, as its title suggests, this idea is crucial to The Stendhal Syndrome as a whole.
[ 12 ] Again, the image revisits Deep Red, with its pivotal picture/mirror confusion and final shot of protagonist Marc Daly reflected as he gazes into a pool of blood, while also foregrounding the importance of water imagery and motifs within Trauma as elsewhere in Argento's oeuvre.
[ 13 ] Ironically at one point the film was going to be titled 'Dario Argento's Trauma'.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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