[GIALLO SOURCE CODE] Twin Peaks, Enigma Rosso, and Private Crimes

[NOTE: Some NSFW screencaps below. And, as with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

The “wrapped in plastic” discovery of doomed Laura Palmer—the enigma-eyed force that drives David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS—has become a part of the tapestry of the TV mystery. Esp. in relation to the tradition of “weird mysteries,” which find their origins in the pulp work of writers from the early 20th century. The same early-20th-century pulp writers who were being translated by Mondadori for Italian audiences, creating a phenomenon of popular reading that would eventually help usher in the cinematic success of the Giallo. 

Charting both this varied history, and these mutating strains, of the Giallo—its enduring iconography, to borrow Lee Howard’s phrase—has been the job of this SOURCE CODE series.
 
Not only have I charted the passage of its imagery from the Krimi to the Giallo (here and here, for example), I’ve also charted the various visual “quotations” that’ve occurred within the confines of the Italian genre itself—e.g., the way that Carlo Vanzina’s 1985 Giallo NOTHING UNDERNEATH takes Helga Ulmann’s death-by-window from Argento’s DEEP RED and reworks it for its own ends … *and* the way that that same shot actually predates Argento’s film, first appearing in the climax of Sergio Pastore’s 1972 Giallo THE CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT (screencap comparisons here).
 
For this installment, I’ve gone outside the Giallo genre, to those iconic visuals wrapped up with the discovery of Laura’s body. In order to flag up a key mystery-thriller image that was both prefigured by the Giallo, and was later reabsorbed back into it (as the influence of US television helped rewrite the work being done on Italian small screens in the 1990s).

So: 1978’s ENIGMA ROSSO. That last entry in the “Schoolgirls in Peril” trilogy, a trilogy that engages with (some would say: wallows in) any number of the taboo and ugly scenarios surrounding the “secret life of schoolgirls”. Similar to the investigation into Laura’s hidden life in PEAKS, the trilogy spools out shocking and stomach-churning details about the secrets these well-to-do students are living. ENIGMA ROSSO posits an environment where Catholic schoolgirls—when not engaged in their studies—are engaged in dark and violent orgies with faceless, well-connected men in their community. The quite graphic flashbacks in ROSSO esp., perhaps more than any other entry in the trilogy, foreground just how disturbing these encounters are—indeed, forces the idea that these students aren’t just sexually active, but sexually active in the most dangerous and self-destructive of ways.
 
And, interestingly enough, ENIGMA ROSSO opens with one of those schoolgirls—whose involvement in state-sponsored orgies is hitherto unknown by her community—being found dead, wrapped in plastic, near water.

The opening credits play over a crawl of the camera that moves from rushing water to the body of the dead girl (a crawl that’s very similar to the one done across Palmer’s body in PEAKS). This crawl also includes detail shots of two vehicles—presumably driven by the killers—and the sudden plunging of the plastic-wrapped body, from off a cliff where the vehicles are parked, into the rushing water below.

There’s also a curious shot, after the girl’s wrapped body is dumped in the water: The camera, now underwater, presumably somehow representing the dead girl’s p.o.v., looks back up at the cliff from where she’s just been thrown and shows us a brief glimpse of her murderers as they drive away (one in a car, the other on motorcycle).

Once the body is discovered, we get more of the camera tracking along the (now exposed) body of the victim.

Post-TWIN PEAKS, it’s impossible to watch these scenes and not think of the discovery of Palmer’s body. I’m not trying to make a case that Lynch or Frost watched ENIGMA ROSSO while writing their pilot, but the narrative and visual synchronicities speak to the kind of intertextual pleasures that’re to be had, while watching yourself deep and wide into the Giallo genre—there is so much depth, so much richness of overlap, that the web of associations feels like it never ends. 

That overlap also sometimes expresses itself in the form of attempted cash-ins. Many Italian genres are shot through with very obvious examples of producers seeing and trying to mimic the global success of other films: the way, for instance, that the success of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and DIRTY HARRY shaped, re-shaped, deformed the development of the Eurocrime (Poliziottesco).

In this case, we have Giallo great Sergio Martino directing a four-part Italian TV miniseries in 1993 called PRIVATE CRIMES (aka, DELITTI PRIVATI). The story centers around the disappearance and death of a promising student in a local community. The young woman is, on her surface, a kind of ideal member of that community—incredibly talented, well-liked, hard-working. 

So, when her body is found, abandoned, near a river, the community reels not only from her death, but from the ensuing series of revelations about her “secret” life: She had potentially seamy connections to a local nightclub, to drugs, and, worse, was sleeping with a married (and much older) industrialist whose corrupt money had helped sustain the town (a fact that the locals mostly resent). 

As I’ve written elsewhere, the miniseries plays out like a much less-weird, less-compelling version of the TWIN PEAKS mystery, with a series of recognized and much-beloved genre faces—Edwige Fenech (who co-produced), Ray Lovelock, Gabriele Ferzetti, Alida Valli, Paolo Malco—populating the landscape of this secret-ravaged town.
 
Fenech plays the murdered girl’s mother and is the one who discovers the body. And though the staging here lacks most of the visual cues from PEAKS, its general melancholy and mood—coupled with the plot points and musical cues borrowed from Lynch’s series—certainly reinforce the link. And the notion that the iconography of the Giallo never goes away exactly, it just gets reborn.

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2016