While Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) received general acclaim last year, one particular critique cut through the chorus of adoration and lodged in my brain. D. A. Miller’s Elio’s Education, published in the LA Review of Books, took aim at the film’s single-minded determination to be “a thing of beauty”, a resplendent account of professorly southern Italian life in which teenage boys are preternaturally well-versed in Bach and courtship is conducted over spirited conversations about Heidegger. Sex, and Elio’s queerness, Miller alleged, are sacrificed to the altar of Beautiful Things, and what some of us read as a moving coming-of-age story was rather an unintentional warning. Queer sexuality is inevitably eradicated by bourgeois heterosexual morality—we kill our gays by making them gorgeous. What Miller said resonated with me. Touched as I was by Elio’s story, I couldn’t help feeling there was something tonally off about the film, one that draws you in through a love story but leaves you hankering for a particular lifestyle: one marked by the impersonal consumptive signifiers of boundless Italian brunches with eggs boiled to fluffy perfection, impeccably designed countryside villas, and supercharged intellects who converse languidly but effortlessly about all manner of fine things.
Suspiria (2018) is not interested in sanctifying the beautiful life. It has mutilated bodies, scores of blood, vindictive mothers and places the viewer in a permanent state of unease – there are no soothing bottomless aperitivi here. Bright-eyed American Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives in West Berlin in 1977 to audition for the Markos Dance Academy, which is run by the austere Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). Like most unassuming protagonists, Susie turns out to be eerily good at her craft and is quickly admitted. Like most unassuming protagonists, she effortlessly finds herself at the centre of action on her first day, dancing the principal role in the company. The other madames of the Academy look on with hunger. Elsewhere, an elderly Jungian psychiatrist, Josef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton with the help of prosthetics), leafs through the notebook left by one of his patients, ex-Markos dancer Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz), where he finds curious scribbles about age-old dynastic struggles between witches and instructions for dance steps that double as black magic. A girl dies. Susie has nightmares about her repressive Amish upbringing in Ohio. Her fellow dancer and only friend Sara (Mia Goth) begins to have suspicions and investigates the school. In the background, a subplot about the imprisonment of the Baader-Meinhof group serves no apparent purpose other than to remind us that we’re in Cold War-era Berlin.
Hailed by some as another landmark in the continued ‘elevation’ of horror, Suspiria has been positioned as an arthouse spin on Argentino’s visually iconic but thematically sparse classic. It is an argument that confuses stylishness with subtext and empty signifiers with intellectual heft. Here, remnants of Call Me By Your Name live on. In addition to the justified smatterings of German, our transatlantic buffet gets a boost when Madame Blanc decides Susie must learn French now that she is a proper dancer. Scenes later, we see them effortlessly converse in the language. References to Jung and Lacan reassure the audience that they are watching a cultured horror film. But the dialogue between Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, despite all its pretensions, ultimately amounts to nothing (“When you jump, it’s not the height but the space beneath you that matters.”)
All of this would be tolerable, and maybe even enjoyable, if Suspiria ultimately said something. The delight of horror as a genre, after all, is that it grapples with and unsettles the nature of our reality. Yet Suspiria gestures towards potential avenues of genuine interrogation, only to pivot around before the investigation begins to bear fruit. Dance is presented as a compromised, self-denying medium, an art that demands its participants render up their bodies to the service of a higher ideal. This idea is as quickly belaboured through heavy-handed dialogue as it is then inadequately treated. German history makes an appearance through a subplot about the Baader-Meinhof group and the on-the-nose title of the Markos Academy’s landmark piece – Volk – but again these signifiers, once served up, float away into nothingness. Although the film opens by proselytising about the irreplaceability of the mother-figure – a hat tip to Dario Argento’s original ‘The Three Mothers’ trilogy and its roots in Jungian theory – Guadagnino grapples with this theme through a series of disjointed, underdeveloped scenes of Susie’s Amish mother on her deathbed accompanied by a thematically uninteresting – albeit visually iconic – bloodbath about the re-installation of the correct witchy-mother bloodline. These disparate strands are inelegantly tied up in the pointed but clumsy observation that such violence would not occur if we just stopped telling women they were deluded. The overall effect is that of an after-school special on the importance of Believing Women, padded out by some entry-level engagement with psychoanalytic theory. In one scene, Madame Blanc asks Susie to visualise the dance company as a human body, and inquires what part she hopes to represent. “The hands,” Susie replies, foreshadowing her transformation from deferential newbie in the Markos Academy to its revolutionary. It’s a response that, critics have noted, reflects Luca Guadagnino’s own visible imprint on the form of the film, as jarring as it is unsatisfying. In the absence of a narrative strong enough to drive itself, the mark of an auteur not in command of his material is everywhere.
In fact, follow the ‘argument’ of Suspiria to its logical end, and you end up praying the narrative that Guadagnino and his predominantly male team crafted is as amateur as it seems. The other possibility is worse. Down at the bottom of the rabbit hole of themes – the dispossession of the body through dance, the German volk, the death drive of the mother-figure – you find yourself side by side with something like a half-baked critique of fascism. Telling a story about modern dance in 20th century Germany as politics involves tricky historical territory: an uncomfortably easy partnership existed between avant-garde contemporary choreographers and the Nazis throughout their reign.¹ For modern dance artists like Mary Wigman – whose choreographic influence informs the film – their own occult new-age ideologies about the honing the body into some collective perfect other, predicated on the desire for an absolute and uncompromised escape, found a home in the physical pseudo-science of Nazi volk ideology.²
Of course, not every film about 20th century German dance finds its way to the Nazis. But Suspiria is a story about the correction of since-waylaid witch-family bloodlines that meets a bloody end (yes, with a vaginal spin) in which bodies dance in unthinking unison to a piece called Volk. There’s even a subplot where Josef Klemperer navigates his personal demons with the Holocaust. Elsewhere, Madame Blanc makes a sly rejoinder to Josef Goebbels as she tells her dancers to “break the nose of every beautiful thing” (he had formerly asserted that dance must be “cheerful and show beautiful female bodies”). This is an ineffectual protest, in which powerlessness masquerades as strength. The film attempts to critique the history in which it is steeped, and yet when faced with the horror of the outside world, Suspiria fetishes the violent insularity of the coven. Here, the external messiness of history – here symbolised in the ongoing Baader-Meinhof subplot – is presented as minor and irrelevant. What D.A. Miller identifies in Call Me By Your Name – an authorial grip so in love with itself that it suffocates its characters – rears its head again. In Suspiria, emancipation is found in absolution, and feminine power in world-denying, chaotic insularity. When Josef Klemperer is visited by Susie at the end, she rids him of his painful memories. The one person in the film not subject to the tyranny of perfection is absolved of his sins, but the memories of torment, and – in Susie’s words – “guilt and shame”, continue to weigh heavily on the female dancers of the Markos Academy. Men like Klemperer, who walk around public squares, police stations, and academic institutions with overt confidence, digest their pain and walk on. Suspiria, ostensibly about a troupe of secretive women, ends up anchored around the rehabilitation of a man.
The problem with films best described as some sort of “art-school prank” is not knowing where the sincerity ends and shitlordery begins. This ironic effort does not find an easy partner in horror, whose success is dependent on the playful but perceptive jumbling of the eerie into the absolutely insane. Call Me by Your Name succeeded in touching an audience because no amount of cloying, self-satisfied intellectualism can distract from the universalism of a star-crossed love story. We all know what it is like to love and be hurt by love. Some of us know what it’s like to be persecuted for daring to do so on your own terms. Yet Suspiria juggles too many themes with troublingly little finesse. As the credits rolled on, I remembered a timely plea from Jacqueline Rose: “Stop offloading on mothers two utterly banal truths about being a human subject… that the world is unjust and our hearts and bodies are frail.”
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
1 As documented by Lilian Karina and Marion Kant in Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich. 2 “Community dancing was education, a tool towards a goal: a unified order in which humankind would live a harmonious life with nature and ascend from an undesired reality into an ideal, utopian, and truthful being”. Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers, p.89.
