BUSTING GIALLO MYTHS #1: Tilde’s Death in TENEBRAE (and the Giallo Genre in General) “Doesn’t Make Sense”

[NOTE: One of the side effects of seeing the Giallo gain increasing traction in pop culture, is seeing various unexamined myths about the genre repeated over and over. This series hopes to counteract some of those myths, while also celebrating what we fans find so compelling about the genre.]

 

Synapse’s recent Steelbook release of Dario Argento’s TENEBRAE includes, among a plethora of extras, a feature-length commentary by eminent Argento scholar Maitland McDonagh. In it, she makes a comment about Tilde’s murder that I have seen (and heard) repeated now almost to death. It’s a myth about how seriously we should take that scene—a myth that essentially rolls its eyes at the scene, by arguing that it “doesn’t make sense”. 

The tone McDonagh takes while talking about this moment signals that she clearly doesn’t take it seriously, and suggests that the film’s success—its frisson, its Stimmung—occurs in spite of these sorts of scenes:

When we get to the moment just before Tilde’s murder—at the tail end of the visual “loop” that comes courtesy of the film’s bravura, style-as-substance Louma Crane shot—the camera returns to Tilde and shows her, agitated, suddenly deciding to change her shirt. She exchanges one white shirt for another, in a sequence that too many critics have suggested exists only to show the audience a bit of the actress’ skin. McDonagh says this:

“There’s somebody in the house, a killer, who catches her [Tilde] at the moment where she’s doing what all women do when they’re really upset and have had a fight with their significant other, which is she takes off her shirt. And then puts on another shirt that [laughing] I’m not really sure what the difference is, you know, she didn’t get into her bathrobe so she can go take a nice long bath and think about her troubles. She just puts on another tight white shirt.”

Perhaps the first time I heard this criticism—implying that it was just another example of the genre’s “hairy macho bullshit,” its prerequisite (and sexist) male gaze (and that any cinematic meaning it carried could then be laughed at)—was in the commentary delivered by two other eminent Giallo scholars, Alan Jones and Kim Newman, on Arrow’s release of the film. Their assessment there sounds awfully similar to McDonagh’s:

Jones: “Now, you’re just about to be murdered, so what do you do? Yes, you decide to change your T-shirt.”

Newman: “Into another, identical outfit.”

...

Jones: “Ah, now here she goes, this is where she changes her—she’s being threatened, she now decides to change her T-shirt.”

(Jones also goes on to mistakenly claim the scene is based on one showing Edwige Fenech changing her clothes, in THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS; it is not. See below for the source.)

Again, there’s the implication that Argento, by having Tilde change her shirt at this moment, is exposing a weakness in his script. (Which itself is an example of a larger myth: That Giallo scripts, almost without exception, are poorly written. I addressed this criticism re: Argento’s OPERA in the third and fourth sections of my essay here). Or that Argento is—because of his unrepentant and sexist gaze, his subconscious desire to ogle his actresses at every turn—having Tilde change her shirt just to show a little skin. That it doesn’t, on any other level, “make sense”. 

(And, let’s be clear: Is there plenty of male-gaze ogling going on in the Giallo genre? Is it absolutely jam-packed with cheap-minded, lowest-common-denominator producers and filmmakers who want nothing but to fill their movies with sex and nudity in the hopes of generating bigger box office? Yes. And again I say “yes” … the same could be said for the Hitchcock / De Palma strain of Hollywood thrillers … and Slashers … and the German Krimi … but, just because the male gaze is an overriding element being expressed by the film, it doesn’t mean that the film isn’t *also* up to something else in those scenes. PEEPING TOM isn’t just about objectifying women is it? Isn’t it also shot in a way that implicates the audience in this destructive, objectifying gaze? Isn’t it also an exploration of the traumatic, tangled-up reasons *why* a character would or could be conditioned to act this way?)

And, what does it mean for a movie to make sense? Does a movie directed by John Cassavetes make the same kind of sense as one directed by Alfred Hitchcock? Are Jacques Rivette and Roberto Rossellini working under the same definition—on the same narrative plane—of “sense”? And is there only one kind of cinematic sense worth our time and attention?

One of the major influences on Argento—beyond German Expressionism, Film Noir, the Krimi—is (as has been affirmed by book after book on the man) the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. So ask the same question of his films:

Do the actions of the characters played by Jack Nicholson (THE PASSENGER), David Hemmings (BLOW-UP), Tomás Milián (IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN), and Lea Massari (L’AVVENTURA) make sense? Do their character arcs—their movement through fragmentary and illogical plots—make any kind of *conventional* sense? “Realistic” sense?
 
Of course they don’t. But for those who would argue that those films are successful, that the experience of watching them is a persuasive one—aesthetically persuasive, narratively persuasive, cinematically persuasive—the argument would be that they “make sense” on another, more important level. That they, for instance, follow the internal logic set up by the filmmakers, the tone and performance of the actors. That they make “artistic sense,” “poetic sense,” make sense according to “dream logic” instead of rational logic. 

So how does Tilde’s illogical change of clothes make sense? 

Because, as Newman, Jones, McDonagh (and all the rest) seem to miss, Tilde’s clothes-changing murder is nothing more or less than a visual quotation of a murder scene from cinema past—from a film whose influence can be seen across Argento’s body of work:  

Robert Siodmak’s THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946). 

Just like Argento “quotes” and restages the “girl on the beach” scenes from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959)—sourcing them for the creation of TENEBRAE’s first flashback scene—he pulls a number of images from SPIRAL STAIRCASE to use as his own “raw material”. The staging of Tilde’s death is nothing more or less than a restaging of the first murder in STAIRCASE. And thus its making sense must be considered in light of this source, this callback, this echo across screens.

In SPIRAL STAIRCASE we watch a woman as she changes her clothes. She stares out the window of her rented room; she seems tired. The camera, after watching her close the  window, wanders over to her closet. It slowly approaches the clothes hanging there—we see the clothes move, seemingly on their own, unbeknownst to her—until the camera is close enough to show us the eye of someone who is hiding behind them. The camera continues to approach, magnifying the killer’s eye until we can see in it a reflection: The reflection of the woman changing her clothes on the other side of the room.

Tilde 1.0

Another key image, nested in this first SPIRAL STAIRCASE murder, gets reused by Argento in DEEP RED—that of the killer’s eye that appears in the closet of Amanda Righetti’s home, just before she’s killed in the bath. It is also, perhaps, the single most substantive precursor to his repeated use of the “Argento eye” that became so famous in his work.

The camera’s slow creep into the first victim’s closet, the one that leads to the eye shot, also prefigures the closet scene in Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) and the brutal murder in the sex-show worker’s dressing room in Lucio Fulci’s NEW YORK RIPPER (1982).

This sense of the stylistic (and thematic) importance of reflective surfaces—esp. how they stand in, cinematically, for embedded and hidden trauma—is also a quintessential Argento concern. Think, e.g., how reflections and closeups in eyes are used in OPERA—and how their use foregrounds the voyeuristic nature of all Gialli.

While she struggles with the long sleeves of the dress—we get repeated shots of her hands and arms working and gesticulating to get the dress on—the killer strikes. (And strikes, just like in TENEBRAE, mostly off-screen.) Taking advantage of the fact that her arms are tied up in the sleeves of her dress, and that her face is blocked from seeing him attack.

That’s the description of what happens in the first murder of 1946’s SPIRAL STAIRCASE. It is also the description of what happens to Tilde’s character in TENEBRAE. In setup, in execution, in staging, we get an indisputable proto-example of TENEBRAE’s “nonsensical” murder; echo, after echo, after echo.

That Argento builds on this source material and adds a moment that has become perhaps *the* iconic moment of the film—Tilde staring, shocked, through the gash in her shirt—speaks to his skills (and intuition) as a filmmaker at the time. 

The argument that Tilde’s actions, in the moments before her death, don’t make conventional sense, logical sense, TV-movie sense, misses the point of Argento’s film entirely; misses his aesthetic, his body of work. Misunderstanding his work like this encourages an unfortunate myth—that Gialli can only be successful, “believable,” convincing pieces of cinema if they make sense in the same generic way that (say) the latest Oscar-bait drama makes sense.  

It is a myth that, if it ever managed to come true, would signal the Giallo genre as fully and truly dead. Here’s hoping it’s the myth that dies first.

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2016 

Note how Tilde throwing her head back in disgust—to expose her neck and allow her hair to fall away from her head (with closed eyes, as if she could be asleep or dead)—foreshadows the death shot of her lover that is, later in this same scene, still to come.

Also: How Tilde’s tired, head-slumping movements ape the same kind of tired-of-life body language the victim shows in the SPIRAL STAIRCASE scene capped above.

Further, note the way the hands claw and clasp in the air, like those of the victim in STAIRCASE.