KRIMI VS. GIALLO [NOTES ON: The Question of Happy Endings; the Question of Closure]

[Note: This is a new series that I'll use to compile notes toward larger themes/ideas/arguments concerning the relationship of the Krimi to the Giallo. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

David Sanjek, in his essay “Foreign Detection: The West German Krimi and the Italian Giallo,” makes the following distinction between the narrative DNA knitting the two genres together:

“If the Krimi and Giallo resemble one another in their interpolation of established national and extranational visual and narrative codes, they differ in how their detective figures engage in a search for the truth, as well as in the ways in which the films resolve their often concatenated plots.”

In the Krimi, Sanjek argues, catching and identifying the movie's master criminal-slash-serial killer “more often than not resolves any anxieties or ambiguities that might complicate the plot. In effect, the Krimi allows the viewer to be only temporarily mystified. Faith in the dependability of the social order which the detective figure—often a police inspector—embodies remains unquestioned.”

The Giallo mold casts it differently though:

“The Gialli, on the other hand, often tend to center their mysteries on the fluctuating substance of the social contract—lovers or mates engaging in harassment or worse of their traumatized partners—or the undependable nature of human sense perception. The detective figure in a number of these films must uncover something he or she fails to see, hear, or understand, yet resolution of that epistemological conundrum fails fully to restore either the viewers' or the characters' faith in a coherent moral or perceptual universe.”

Later, in specific reference to Argento's work, he writes: “Most often Argento's Giallo narratives center around a detective figure who impotently attempts to comprehend something he has seen or heard, and they routinely deny the kind of narrative closure that typifies the Krimi.”

There's a lot of truth in what he says (a link to a PDF of his entire article is included in the post below). Watch enough Krimis (esp. starting with the earliest in the West German cycle) and you quickly lose track of how many “ingenues in distress” end the film in the smiling arms of either dashing detective Joachim Fuchsberger or dashing detective Heinz Drache.

Considering I've come to the Krimi by way of the Giallo (the wrong way around, so to speak), it's probably not a coincidence, then, that some of the ones I rate most highly deviate from the template that Sanjek describes. That they instead take a Giallo tact and resist a quick resolution for the anxieties residing in the viewers' (also: characters') worldview.

In my review of ROOM 13, I spent a fair bit of screencapping time focusing on the morale-defeating, despair-inducing final sequence, where we find that Joachim Fuchsberger's character not only doesn't get to join the rescued ingenue (Karin Dor here) in wedded, unflappable bliss, but actually has to admit that:

1. Dor's character was a hopelessly insane serial killer, and

2. his actions—his attempt to *prove* that she was a hopelessly insane killer—led directly to her death-by-suicide.

While series cornball Eddi Arent laments the damage done to his dear Emily—a mannequin that Arent has built as a stand-in girlfriend for himself—Fuchsberger's face registers the loss and hopelessness (the unfixable, irrational *wrong*) that now exists in his life, in the aftermath of Dor's suicide (at least partially, it has to be assumed, because of his role in it). The final, wordless shots of him driving away from the mansion where her body was discovered shows how clearly bereft his character is, and are nothing if not a startling counterpoint to the usually happy (or jokey) Krimi ending. (As evidenced by those smiling screencaps above.) 

PHANTOM OF SOHO is another prime example of this. There we get the female lead—not so much an ingenue, as a scrappy, self-made crime writer, whose books are bestsellers and whose love life is about to culminate in marriage to the chief of Scotland Yard—not only revealed as the mad Phantom Killer, but revealed to have been horribly, sexually attacked by not one, but multiple characters we've watched in the film. The trauma of being repeatedly raped by the rich and criminal on a "pleasure cruise" is the dreadful force driving her to kill (she was hired to work the voyage under the pretense of being a cabin steward—instead, once out to sea, she is forced to participate in what she learns is really a perverted sex cruise). Her portion of the film ends with her confessing, without apology, what she's done, and then taking her own life—out of despair, out of nothing else left to do—by biting down on a poisoned pill.

And though the “epilogue” that follows her death does offer a potentially happier ending—wherein we see one of the policemen profess his love for the dead author's sister, with the camera closing on a sweet (but also, imo, felt) shot of the two holding hands—this hopeful endorsement of "the power of love" can't help but be tainted by the fact that the author's sister, so happy in this moment, still has no idea that her sibling has committed suicide because of repeatedly being raped. Hard to have one's orderly worldview reinforced by an ending like that.

Leonard Jacobs

October, 2014