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Suspiria (1977 & 2018) with Eleanor Johnson · Left of the Projector

0:16
Evan: Hello, and welcome to Left of the Projector. I'm your host, Evan,
0:20
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Evan: of our weekly episodes that drop every Tuesday. And now on to the show.
0:45
Evan: This week on Left of the Projector, Spooky Season continues with not one, but two films.
0:50
Evan: Though they go by the same name, we'll be discussing the 1977 Dario Gento film
0:55
Evan: Suspiria and the remake, which was released in 2018 and directed by Luca Guadagino.
1:02
Evan: With us to discuss these films is Eleanor Johnson. Eleanor is a professor of
1:06
Evan: English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of
1:09
Evan: several books, including Scream With Me, Horror Films, and The Rise of American Feminism.
1:14
Evan: And the upcoming book monstrous a history of terrifying women you also have
1:19
Evan: a sub stack called eleanor's horrors welcome to the show eleanor.
1:23
Eleanor: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really happy to talk about these two movies.
1:27
Evan: Of course. And I think just briefly, I think that we actually,
1:33
Evan: I actually found out about your substack through my wife's job,
1:36
Evan: who at her museum, they had an interview with you on their blog.
1:42
Evan: And so then I saw your substack, read your old book, but do you want to tell
1:46
Evan: people about, I guess, both of your books and, you know, where they can find
1:51
Evan: them when they'll be coming out?
1:52
Eleanor: Yeah, great. So my Substack, which I started, I guess, about three and a half
1:56
Eleanor: years ago now, you know, I started my Substack because I wanted to do something,
2:01
Eleanor: a little bit more public facing, a little bit more made for,
2:05
Eleanor: you know, people who are interested in things rather than writing for academics,
2:08
Eleanor: which was something I'd been doing for decades by this point.
2:12
Eleanor: And I talked to a friend who is like a very public-facing writer,
2:15
Eleanor: and she said, oh, you should look into developing a substack.
2:17
Eleanor: And so I started trying to do it. And I set myself a task. I said,
2:20
Eleanor: okay, we are living in the post-Dobbs era in the United States.
2:25
Eleanor: Women's rights are under siege from pretty much all quarters.
2:29
Eleanor: And I have a certain amount of training as a medievalist, as like a trained
2:33
Eleanor: medieval historian, theologian, literature scholar, and everything like that.
2:38
Eleanor: I have sort of some expertise I can bring to bear on what's going on now.
2:42
Eleanor: So maybe I'll start a substack, a little small substack that's about feminism, history, and horror.
2:48
Eleanor: And I've done horror studies for a long time. And so I started the substack
2:51
Eleanor: and initially the people who subscribed were my students.
2:54
Eleanor: And so I had this kind of wonderful focus group about ideas that I had about
3:00
Eleanor: feminism, history, and horror, and how those three things intersected.
3:04
Eleanor: And over the course of the last three and a half years, my Substack membership
3:08
Eleanor: has grown and grown and grown, and now my students are a very small slice of
3:12
Eleanor: my population of readers.
3:14
Eleanor: And what I've done is I've written one 2,000-word essay every week.
3:19
Eleanor: About feminism, history, and horror for like 150, more than that,
3:24
Eleanor: like almost 200 weeks in a row now.
3:26
Eleanor: And I love it. And it's really fun. And it's turned out to be a place where
3:29
Eleanor: I can kind of beta test ideas that I just started thinking about,
3:34
Eleanor: or where I can look at relationships between two things.
3:37
Eleanor: And it's sort of like a soft launch for an idea. And then I get feedback from
3:40
Eleanor: my readers, and it's really wonderful.
3:42
Eleanor: So I started the Substack. And when I started the Substack, I had already done
3:48
Eleanor: most of the work for my last book, Scream With Me, which is about the relationship between.
3:53
Eleanor: The women's rights movement in the 1970s and horror films in the 1970s.
3:57
Eleanor: And so I published a few pieces of what went on to become chapters of this book
4:03
Eleanor: on my substack, and it sort of helped my ideas gel.
4:06
Eleanor: And I really came to understand that in the 1968 to 80, really, so the long 1970s.
4:12
Eleanor: Was a period when horror filmmakers were championing very important feminist
4:18
Eleanor: causes, sometimes without totally realizing they were doing it,
4:22
Eleanor: but in really powerful and sometimes transformative ways.
4:25
Eleanor: And, you know, the first film that I talked about in that book is Rosemary's
4:28
Eleanor: Baby, which I take to be, you know, reproductive horror.
4:31
Eleanor: That's very much about the fact that in 1968, when the film released,
4:34
Eleanor: women didn't have any reproductive rights in the United States,
4:37
Eleanor: even in New York, where the film is set, a relatively liberal state.
4:40
Eleanor: So I wrote this book about how horror films rolled the ball forward in conversations
4:45
Eleanor: about women's bodily autonomy, women's sexual autonomy, women's reproductive
4:49
Eleanor: autonomy, and also the hugely important issue of safety in the home.
4:54
Eleanor: Because if you look in the early 1970s for historical discourse around what
4:59
Eleanor: we would now call domestic violence, there's very, very little of it. There wasn't a robust.
5:05
Eleanor: Critical vocabulary to talk about violence in the home until kind of midway into the 1970s.
5:11
Eleanor: And horror films played a big role in propagating that kind of discourse because
5:16
Eleanor: they showed, many, many horror films showed, that the place where women are
5:20
Eleanor: the least safe is in their home.
5:23
Eleanor: And the real monsters are already in their homes with them, their husbands,
5:26
Eleanor: their neighbors, these demonic entities that invade their homes,
5:29
Eleanor: right? You could probably list off half a dozen and movies in your own mind that fit that bill.
5:33
Eleanor: So I wrote that book. I love that book.
5:36
Eleanor: While I was finishing that book, I was still working on my sub stack.
5:39
Eleanor: And I started to see that there was this weird pattern emerging in my sub stack
5:43
Eleanor: that I did not kind of go looking for. I feel like it came looking for me.
5:48
Eleanor: And the pattern was that I had a certain number of posts that I did not think
5:52
Eleanor: of as being related, like I had written them all as one offs.
5:56
Eleanor: But the posts had in common that they featured a monstrous female entity from
6:01
Eleanor: many different periods in history who was dog-like, loud-mouthed,
6:06
Eleanor: reproductively dysregulated in some way, and highly sexually aggressive.
6:11
Eleanor: And I thought, God, that's weird. That's like a very specific set of tropes
6:15
Eleanor: that seems to circulate together in a cluster in a lot of very unrelated periods.
6:20
Eleanor: So I was looking at that time at ancient Greece.
6:23
Eleanor: I was looking at the 19th century. I was looking at the early 20th century,
6:27
Eleanor: and I was sort of faffing about in the Middle Ages, because I'm always faffing
6:30
Eleanor: about in the Middle Ages, because it's a lot of what I teach in real life at my job.
6:35
Eleanor: But I didn't have a sense that it was the same thing, like all the same lineage.
6:38
Eleanor: So I just started working and digging and reading and thinking and talking to
6:42
Eleanor: experts in fields outside of my own, you know, scholars of Roman literature
6:46
Eleanor: and culture, scholars of Assyrian and Mesopotamian literature and culture.
6:50
Eleanor: And eventually, I kind of inadvertently encountered this monstrous demoness,
6:56
Eleanor: called Lamashtu from ancient Mesopotamia.
6:59
Eleanor: And Lamashtu is the origin point for that sort of tetrad of traits,
7:03
Eleanor: the dog-likeness, loud-mouthed, reproductively dysregulated,
7:08
Eleanor: and sexually aggressive.
7:09
Eleanor: And she is, for all intents and purposes, the Mesopotamian abortion and miscarriage demon.
7:14
Eleanor: And Mesopotamian women, men, and otherwise were terrified of her,
7:17
Eleanor: and she's all over ancient Mesopotamian
7:20
Eleanor: culture. And her name is Lamashtu, like I said.
7:24
Eleanor: And I realized that over time, her trope, the trope of Lamashtu,
7:28
Eleanor: evolves, and it evolves across time and across different cultures,
7:32
Eleanor: changing little bits at certain very specific moments, but never totally.
7:37
Eleanor: Really significantly changing.
7:40
Eleanor: Changing. So in the Greek period, she's no longer called Lamashtu, she's called Lamea.
7:45
Eleanor: And then in the Roman period, the word Lamia—it's the same word,
7:48
Eleanor: just getting a different ending— starts to be used to describe witches in general.
7:53
Eleanor: Then I come to find out that in the medieval period, which I thought I knew
7:56
Eleanor: well, and I do know it well, but not everything, during early witch persecution,
8:00
Eleanor: the word Lamia starts to get used as a common noun to describe witchcraft broadly construed.
8:07
Eleanor: So this iconography, which in its origin is Mesopotamia, and this iconography
8:12
Eleanor: that in my book I call the monstrous bitch, because of that dog-likeness,
8:15
Eleanor: the word bitch, I'm using it provocatively, but not for no reason.
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Eleanor: Part of the trope is that the woman is like a dog. So I learned that this trope
8:24
Eleanor: of the monstrous bitch, which originates in Mesopotamia, kind of persists for
8:29
Eleanor: 4,300 years thereafter, and we're living in its wake right now, right?
8:33
Eleanor: It's no accident that women are being like pilloried politically in terms of
8:37
Eleanor: their rights legally for being too loud, too sexually autonomous,
8:41
Eleanor: too reproductively self-determining and bitchiness, right?
8:45
Eleanor: That cluster of traits travels together and has for a real long time.
8:50
Eleanor: So I pulled all the material I had on my substack out and I made it into this
8:54
Eleanor: book and I worked on that for a few years.
8:57
Evan: Awesome. Yeah, I've read your first book, which I really enjoyed.
9:02
Evan: And I was just rewatching some of the movies you mentioned or that you covered
9:06
Evan: in that one. I have usually I send a list of films to, you know,
9:09
Evan: a guest that's going to come on.
9:11
Evan: But in your case, you had a book that includes a lot of movies that you discuss
9:15
Evan: in it and including these.
9:17
Evan: So what was the, were these movies you had seen, both the original and the remake?
9:24
Evan: I call it remake, but it's because kind of like sort of a reimagining in some ways.
9:27
Eleanor: Totally.
9:28
Evan: Suspiria. Like, how did you do you have a history with watching them?
9:32
Evan: And I'm also curious, Ward, did you see these both two for the first time, Ward? You did, right?
9:36
Track 4: Yeah, this is my this is my first time watching them.
9:38
Eleanor: Well, congrats you, Dolan.
9:40
Evan: You know, well, I'm first curious, Eleanor, how you know, how these movies are,
9:45
Evan: how they fit into the book.
9:47
Evan: I mean, for anyone who's watched them probably can already have an idea in their
9:50
Evan: head, given what you just described with this entity and witches and all of
9:54
Evan: that. But how do they kind of fit into the narrative here?
9:58
Eleanor: Yeah, so witches are a very significant part of the argument that I make and
10:03
Eleanor: what I draw out about cultural history, Western patriarchal cultural history,
10:07
Eleanor: in the book Monstrous Bitch.
10:08
Eleanor: Because basically after Rome took the idea of the Lamia and made it like a category
10:13
Eleanor: noun that could be applied to witches—.
10:16
Eleanor: Then when Christianity kind of burst onto the scene, Christian theologians and
10:20
Eleanor: philosophers were like, hmm, by the logic of Christianity, there can really
10:24
Eleanor: only be one evil thing in the universe, and it has to be Satan.
10:26
Eleanor: Like, that's how Christianity is structured.
10:29
Eleanor: But we don't want to totally dispense with these evil women because they're
10:32
Eleanor: useful to the patriarchy. So what are we going to do?
10:35
Eleanor: And what Christian philosophers about witchcraft and magic did was they basically said that women,
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Eleanor: could become witches if they willingly kind of signed their name in the book
10:44
Eleanor: of the devil, literally, like signed a contract with Satan to work for him and with him,
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Eleanor: and then they could effectively borrow his power and create havoc in the world
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Eleanor: by being loudmouthed, dog-like, sexually dysregulated, and reproductively self-determining
10:58
Eleanor: or reproductively hostile to other women.
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Eleanor: So that mythos gets Christianized and associated with diabolical stuff,
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Eleanor: associated with Satanism, essentially, and it's that logic that propagated witch
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Eleanor: persecution throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.
11:14
Eleanor: And this is important to me, and should be important to everyone,
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Eleanor: because in world history, there have been very few more effective and more lethal
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Eleanor: mechanisms for executing human women in particular
11:28
Eleanor: than that logic, right? And some men were executed as witches too.
11:32
Eleanor: It's a very small proportion of the total. So women were systematically taken
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Eleanor: out for being basically loud, sexy, reproductively self-determining,
11:41
Eleanor: and bitchy, right? So again, we're living out the legacy of that time now.
11:47
Eleanor: And so Suspiria is a film that I talk about late in Monstrous Bitch,
11:51
Eleanor: because most of Monstrous Bitch, to be honest, is a depressing story.
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Eleanor: It's a story about how patriarchy gloms onto this idea of the monstrous bitch
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Eleanor: and keeps recycling it and reinventing it in little local ways to make its own
12:03
Eleanor: power, patriarchy's own power, more gelled, more coalesced, more incontestable.
12:09
Eleanor: But when I finally got to the era of cinema, I started to feel like I could
12:13
Eleanor: take heart because it turns out that going back a pretty long way, actually,
12:17
Eleanor: in horror cinema in particular, you get this kind of like lightly feminist or
12:23
Eleanor: proto-feminist cinematic revisionism to the idea of the monstrous bitch.
12:29
Eleanor: And Suspiria, particularly the 2018 Suspiria, but both of the Suspirias,
12:34
Eleanor: are doing some work in that direction.
12:37
Eleanor: So your question, like, when did I first encounter Suspiria?
12:39
Eleanor: It was many years ago, way before I was thinking about these questions.
12:43
Eleanor: And I saw the 2018 Suspiria, maybe like in 2019, very soon after it had come
12:48
Eleanor: out. And I watched it and I found it really hard to get through because it has
12:52
Eleanor: so much body horror to the women involved.
12:56
Eleanor: Watching women's bones break and snap through their skin, that does not sit well with me.
13:01
Eleanor: I find it a lot. It's a lot to watch. I never assign this film because it's
13:06
Eleanor: a lot to ask my students to tolerate in terms of robust sadism against the female body.
13:11
Eleanor: So I saw it, and I was like, wow, that was a lot. I'm not sure what I got out
13:15
Eleanor: of it, but I'm going to put it in my back folder for later thought,
13:18
Eleanor: which I do with many things in my life.
13:20
Eleanor: So a couple of years roll on, and somebody mentioned to me that that was actually,
13:26
Eleanor: in principle, a remake, although I think you're right, Evan,
13:29
Eleanor: that a reimagining is a much better term for what Luca Guadagnino did in 2018.
13:34
Eleanor: And then I went and I watched the Dario D'Argento movie, and I thought,
13:37
Eleanor: like, wow, this movie's really weird.
13:40
Eleanor: And I put it in my back file also. Once I learned about this history of witches
13:45
Eleanor: and witchcraft and Lamashtu and Lamia and the Lamiai and the persecution of
13:49
Eleanor: women, I thought to myself, wait a minute, what was that movie about?
13:54
Eleanor: And what was the precedent movie also about? Like, let me go and rewatch them.
13:58
Eleanor: So I rewatched them in reverse chronological order. So I rewatched the Guadagnino
14:02
Eleanor: movie before I watched the movie from the seventies.
14:05
Eleanor: And I watched it with the idea of the monstrous bitch already pretty elaborated in my mind.
14:10
Eleanor: And I had a totally different response to it.
14:13
Eleanor: And I thought, oh my God, this is a film that's taking the trope of the witch,
14:18
Eleanor: which is a product of patriarchy.
14:21
Eleanor: The whole idea of witchcraft is a product of patriarchy.
14:25
Eleanor: It's a narrative that patriarchal cultures energized in order to persecute,
14:29
Eleanor: prosecute, and literally execute innocent human women.
14:33
Eleanor: That's what the ideology of witchcraft was. This film is taking that and it's
14:36
Eleanor: radically reimagining witchcraft, first of all, as matrilinear, matriarchal,
14:43
Eleanor: all about women and how women negotiate power and how women negotiate power
14:47
Eleanor: both in a kind of a supernatural realm and in a familial realm.
14:51
Eleanor: Right? Susie Banyan's character has this very, very bad relationship with her mother.
14:57
Eleanor: Bad is maybe too simple a word, very abusive relationship with her mother.
15:00
Eleanor: And that's kind of on deck for us to think about too. And the long and short
15:04
Eleanor: of it is that where the film lands us, the later film, the Guadagnino film,
15:09
Eleanor: is in this reclamatory move where the Susie Banyan character, the main character,
15:15
Eleanor: becomes the new Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, the kind of witch of
15:20
Eleanor: which is the head of the coven.
15:22
Eleanor: And her power is that she is both very, very violent.
15:28
Eleanor: And very, very vengeful, and merciful, nurturing, and gentle.
15:33
Eleanor: So the film is deliberately spooling out a kind of new theory of what it is
15:38
Eleanor: to be a witch that is not patriarchal.
15:40
Eleanor: In fact, it's like orthogonal to patriarchy, right? It's matriarchal and matrilinear,
15:45
Eleanor: and that is also capable of mercy, redemption, purging bad elements from a group,
15:52
Eleanor: reducing sadism, all of these kinds of things.
15:55
Eleanor: And then I thought, oh my god, I have to include this film in the chapter in
16:00
Eleanor: my book that is about horror films in the 21st century that do take the trope
16:05
Eleanor: of the monstrous bitch and do something feminist with it
16:08
Eleanor: and do something revisionist with it, something that can test the stranglehold
16:12
Eleanor: of patriarchy on the concept of the monstrous bitch.
16:14
Eleanor: So that was when I decided to include that film.
16:17
Eleanor: And it actually took me a while before I decided, oh yeah, I think I'll also
16:20
Eleanor: talk about the earlier film too because the earlier film is um it's a weirder film
16:26
Eleanor: it's a less polished film it's an oddly boring film in certain points like i
16:31
Eleanor: find it hard to get through not because it's so offensive although it is physically it's gross.
16:36
Eleanor: But also because like the plot points are so loosely construed that i like lose
16:40
Eleanor: patience before i get to the,
16:42
Eleanor: next major plot point so i wasn't going to include it but then i eventually
16:46
Eleanor: decided you know what this matters to the conversation too to kind of highlight
16:49
Eleanor: what guadagnino is doing in 2018
16:52
Eleanor: that's really new and kind of redemptive so that was sort of the order of ops
16:55
Eleanor: it came in late and it kind of came in backwards.
16:58
Evan: Yeah i think both warna had similar perspectives of the two movies in that the
17:04
Evan: original movie albeit has really good cinematography and color and sound and
17:12
Evan: music and everything it doesn't really,
17:14
Evan: not much happens really yeah and in the second one it's i actually found the
17:20
Evan: second one harder to get through only just because it's i don't say this as
17:24
Evan: a like if films are too long i'm not going to watch them but it is a longer
17:28
Evan: movie and so there's definitely.
17:29
Eleanor: A lot more happening.
17:31
Evan: So I don't know where you saw them both for the first time. So I'm wondering
17:34
Evan: what you, if you had similar reactions to both of them.
17:38
Track 4: Yeah. So like the first one, like you said, it's like visually striking the
17:41
Track 4: lighting effects and color choices of the lighting were absolutely incredible.
17:46
Track 4: It was such a spectacle to watch. It was such a, like a visual treat watching
17:50
Track 4: it the entire time, but like the plot left me lack, like wanting for more, um, at times.
17:57
Track 4: And, um, yeah, like I came at it trying to look at it from like,
18:01
Track 4: like the, my usual Marxist perspective and like with the first film,
18:05
Track 4: it was much more layered, like the political.
18:08
Track 4: Themes and tones that were being conveyed versus the 2018 version,
18:15
Track 4: which not nearly as great to look at compared to the first one.
18:21
Track 4: But politically, there's so much more there to work with and analyze in the
18:27
Track 4: second film. And I really thoroughly enjoyed that.
18:30
Eleanor: Yeah, I agree. Guadagnino clearly studied the earlier film very carefully and
18:37
Eleanor: made a lot of conscious decisions one of which was to kind of turn down the volume on the visual,
18:43
Eleanor: surplus for most of the film so that that last like blood orgy scene down in
18:49
Eleanor: the in the shrine really pops right like you it's just like so well
18:54
Eleanor: like oh here it is here's the visual intensity that i have been lacking right
18:58
Eleanor: like even i'm always struck when i watch this film the costuming
19:02
Eleanor: is so markedly dour right these are a whole bunch of professional dancers they're
19:06
Eleanor: all very except for the actual performance scene when you've got those like
19:10
Eleanor: red yarn costumes that are so provocative,
19:14
Eleanor: in the whole rest of the movie people are wearing like,
19:16
Eleanor: dowdy brown smock dresses that's the weirdest thing.
19:21
Eleanor: And then you realize oh right he what and you know is trying to set us up to
19:25
Eleanor: have like a kind of visual flooding effect
19:28
Eleanor: only in certain scenes and it's the scene where they dance folk And the final,
19:32
Eleanor: the blood orgy scene at the end, those are the two like suddenly very visually rich scenes.
19:37
Eleanor: But otherwise, I think he very deliberately stripped that out.
19:40
Eleanor: And I think you're absolutely right, Ward, that part of what he swaps in for
19:44
Eleanor: it is a huge amount of political allegory, right?
19:47
Eleanor: The whole like German history in the 1970s element that's so important to the
19:52
Eleanor: later film is really not on deck for us at all.
19:56
Eleanor: In the 1970s film. It's a film that's almost mute on its own political content.
20:02
Eleanor: And for me, one of the other things Guadagnino did that I really,
20:06
Eleanor: really liked, although I have to admit, I didn't notice it on my first viewing.
20:09
Eleanor: I noticed it the second time, is Tilda Swinton, who's perfect in every way,
20:15
Eleanor: she's cast in multiple roles in Guadagnino's film.
20:19
Eleanor: She plays Madame Blanc, who's the sort of good witch character in the film,
20:24
Eleanor: but she also plays under very heavy makeup, Mother Marcos.
20:28
Eleanor: The evil witch who has to be executed and purged.
20:32
Eleanor: And to me, the reason that matters is that part of what I'm saying in Monstrous
20:36
Eleanor: Bitch is this trope of the Monstrous Bitch is the same here and here and here
20:42
Eleanor: and here. And we need to find a way to do a feminist reclamation of it.
20:45
Eleanor: And Guadagnino put that into the casting of the film.
20:48
Eleanor: Right there was this older mother mother marcos who's bad and evil and abusive
20:54
Eleanor: and corrupt and ridiculously ugly like very overdetermined and how ugly she
20:58
Eleanor: is her skin is like not even on her body really and she has to die and she is
21:03
Eleanor: played by the same person right literally the same soul is there
21:08
Eleanor: that's in the good character madame blanc who's kind of redemptive or sets up
21:13
Eleanor: susie banion to be the redeemer
21:15
Eleanor: so i think guadagnino made a lot basically he made a more philosophical film,
21:20
Eleanor: whereas argento made an extremely like the film could have been like a collage
21:25
Eleanor: it's so physically dense that you won't it's like less interested in the storyline
21:31
Eleanor: than it is in its visual presentation.
21:33
Evan: And i think it's even cooler the the aspect of tilda swinton playing those two
21:39
Evan: character and she also plays the the doctor who.
21:43
Eleanor: I think.
21:43
Evan: Is one of the things i know originally i was thinking do we talk about like
21:47
Evan: the first and the second i think we can just kind of talk about them as as they
21:50
Evan: come but since we're talking.
21:52
Eleanor: About the 2018.
21:53
Evan: Version the the political layering is you have the what's the political group
21:59
Evan: i'm blanking on it the raf the raf yes thank you the.
22:03
Eleanor: Raf and you sort of have the.
22:05
Evan: This interplay of that and the German government at the same time as you have
22:09
Evan: this interplay of the two good and bad versions, Madame Blanc and Mother Marcos,
22:15
Evan: kind of the playing against each other.
22:17
Evan: And then you have the doctor who was sort of introduced initially,
22:20
Evan: who is kind of digesting.
22:22
Evan: And really, the thing I noted at the beginning is she does not believe the story
22:28
Evan: of Patricia, who is trying to escape the school or,
22:35
Evan: the academy.
22:36
Evan: Because she now believes that there's witches and all this underplaying.
22:41
Evan: And so I was thinking about how that plays into your maybe your book of also
22:46
Evan: men not believing women and not trusting them.
22:49
Evan: And it really feels like even throughout the entire thing, no matter what he
22:53
Evan: sees until the very end, when he experiences that bloodbath,
22:59
Evan: he's unable to understand.
23:01
Evan: And I think a lot of this has to do with that outside the academy politics of
23:06
Evan: just the state of Germany now at the time. So I'm curious how that filled into it.
23:11
Evan: And also, Tilda Swinton playing that character was incredible, too.
23:14
Eleanor: I mean, she, whatever, I could do a whole hour-long discussion just about how
23:20
Eleanor: much I love her, but I won't.
23:21
Eleanor: Yeah, I think the casting of her as the doctor, the psychiatrist,
23:25
Eleanor: that character is really, really, really important.
23:28
Eleanor: And it's important in a whole host of ways, right? one of them is that you know he,
23:33
Eleanor: as you said he doesn't believe patricia when she first shows up and says like
23:37
Eleanor: oh my god my dance school is a coven of murderous witches and like,
23:40
Eleanor: can he really be blamed for not believing her that's quite a claim but the reason
23:45
Eleanor: that that matters so much i think in the film is that luca guadagnino has seen
23:50
Eleanor: a lot of earlier horror films about female monstrosity And I,
23:55
Eleanor: talk about this a lot in Monstrous Bitch.
23:58
Eleanor: There was a weird, very, very long trend from about 1936 until at least the
24:04
Eleanor: late 70s, like when the first Suspiria is coming out,
24:08
Eleanor: where horror films about female monstrosity would pose this question pretty
24:12
Eleanor: explicitly about whether the monstrosity in the woman is an ancient supernatural
24:19
Eleanor: force or whether it is a psychological process.
24:22
Eleanor: So the locus classicus for that is the wonderful 1936 film, Dracula's Daughter.
24:28
Eleanor: Great film. Way better, in my opinion, than a 1931 Dracula.
24:32
Eleanor: And the conceit in that film is that a woman named Maria Zaleska,
24:35
Eleanor: who's the daughter of Dracula, doesn't want to be a loudmouth,
24:39
Eleanor: hypersexual, bloodthirsty, bitchy woman anymore. She wants to get healed and
24:44
Eleanor: be like a regular person. That's her goal.
24:46
Eleanor: So what does she do? She gets psychoanalysis.
24:49
Eleanor: Problem is, it doesn't work. You can't cure vampirism through the talking cure.
24:53
Eleanor: And the film is very clear in thinking that through.
24:56
Eleanor: That idea that there's something monstrous in women,
24:59
Eleanor: that cannot be resolved by rationalist medicine or by the talking cure by psychoanalysis
25:06
Eleanor: gets played through the 40s and 50s and 60s and early 70s, including a film
25:10
Eleanor: like The Exorcist, right?
25:11
Eleanor: 1973, very classic film about female monstrosity.
25:16
Eleanor: Regan, the possessed child, is this catastrophic variant on the monstrous bitch.
25:22
Eleanor: Loudmouth, she swears a lot.
25:25
Eleanor: She's sexually violent. And of course, she's harmful to children because she
25:28
Eleanor: is a child and she commits self-harm.
25:31
Eleanor: So all of the tropes are in play with her.
25:34
Eleanor: And very famously, there's a scene where her mother, played beautifully by Ellen
25:37
Eleanor: Burstyn, is still trying to cure the daughter of what is believed to be a psychological
25:42
Eleanor: problem. We, the viewer, know she's possessed by a demon, who,
25:45
Eleanor: by the way, is a Mesopotamian demon, which is interesting.
25:49
Eleanor: But we know she's possessed by a demon. Everybody else thinks the kid's just
25:52
Eleanor: crazy. So they bring in a psychiatrist to treat her.
25:54
Eleanor: The psychiatrist hypnotizes her, and we all are like, oh, maybe this is going
25:58
Eleanor: to get us somewhere. But no, the demon within Regan literally grabs the psychiatrist
26:04
Eleanor: by the balls and slams him onto the ground.
26:08
Eleanor: And the message of that moment is to remind viewers that, again,
26:12
Eleanor: there's something monstrous in women that cannot be
26:16
Eleanor: explained away by Freudian psychoanalytic theory about things like hysteria,
26:21
Eleanor: neurosis, like all of these like sort of misogynist notions about female psychosexual
26:26
Eleanor: pathology that came online with Freud
26:28
Eleanor: and got mainlined into cinema in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
26:32
Eleanor: Horror was the genre that contested all of that and was like.
26:37
Eleanor: No, it's not the case that like a knowledgeable man can waive his degree or
26:42
Eleanor: whatever or else and magically cure monstrosity in a woman. That's not how it works.
26:47
Eleanor: Guadagnino's film from 2018 is resurrecting that trope too.
26:52
Eleanor: He puts into the film this male doctor who is interestingly in this film very
26:56
Eleanor: well-meaning, right? He wants to help Patricia.
26:59
Eleanor: He wants to figure out what's going on, but he's not able to believe her.
27:03
Eleanor: And because he's not able to believe her, he ultimately is not able to help her, right?
27:08
Eleanor: And he has to be made, and this is Guadagnino's own intervention,
27:11
Eleanor: He has to be made to bear witness, and that's even the term that they use to
27:15
Eleanor: talk about his character. The witches call this old psychiatrist a witness.
27:20
Eleanor: He has to bear witness to their blood ritual and to the purgation of the coven
27:26
Eleanor: in order for the new witch leader to.
27:29
Eleanor: To come into her ascendancy as the Mater Suspiriorum, the mother of size.
27:34
Eleanor: So his character is not only a refresh of this trope of the clueless psychoanalyst
27:39
Eleanor: who can't actually undo monstrous bitchery, but he is a refresh that involves,
27:45
Eleanor: kind of absorbing this patriarchal Freudian man into the witch plot and forcing
27:51
Eleanor: him to recognize that there is something monstrous in her that vastly exceeds
27:56
Eleanor: his capacity to control or regulate.
27:59
Eleanor: So to me, I think that's one of the most powerful sort of feminist revisionist
28:03
Eleanor: moves that Guadagnino makes not only to,
28:06
Eleanor: Suspiria, which has very little of that mechanism in it at all,
28:09
Eleanor: but also to like 40 consecutive years of horror cinema
28:13
Eleanor: that recognize like there's something weird about going around saying like,
28:16
Eleanor: oh, what's monstrous in women is their psychosexual pathology,
28:19
Eleanor: sort of commenting on that and saying like, here, let's really think about it.
28:23
Eleanor: Let's really look at how that plays out.
28:25
Eleanor: And you're right. The fact that Tilda Swinton plays that character too is fabulous
28:31
Eleanor: because it suggests that like, we might want to blame Mother Marcos for being the monster.
28:35
Eleanor: We might want to blame Madame Blanc for not protecting Susie enough, for example.
28:40
Eleanor: But there's also this watching male presence that sees itself as a healer,
28:46
Eleanor: but is in fact incompetent at helping the women because it doesn't acknowledge the problem.
28:50
Evan: And you.
28:51
Eleanor: Know to say that that's a parable for our current political climate is like a pretty easy sell.
28:56
Evan: Yeah i don't know if either of you notices i only i was kind of paying attention
29:00
Evan: more obviously looking at this supposed to just kind of watching it just to
29:03
Evan: watch it in the first movie and maybe this relates to this i don't know maybe
29:08
Evan: either of you know more about this um,
29:11
Evan: is they show very clearly in the first film when when uh susie arrives at,
29:18
Evan: the academy the first day, and they zoom in on the plaque for the building that they use.
29:23
Evan: And it's mentioned, and there's a quote from Erasmus.
29:26
Evan: And I did like a very modest level looking at the kind of information around it.
29:30
Evan: Do you think that the psychoanalyst, the psychiatrist in the second one was
29:35
Evan: meant as a, like to build upon that where, I know that he wasn't a psychiatrist,
29:42
Evan: but he was more of a philosopher or kind of theologian.
29:45
Evan: But then his work became used in other areas. So I don't know how that fits in.
29:50
Eleanor: Yeah, I've never thought about that. I've never thought about that,
29:53
Eleanor: but that strikes me as very plausible, right?
29:56
Eleanor: The idea that, you know, to have this Erasmian stamp on the outside of the dance
30:01
Eleanor: academy is to foreground a tension between, I agree with you,
30:05
Eleanor: psychology is not the right term, but like humanism and the supernatural.
30:09
Eleanor: And in Guadagnino's film, that same question is being posed,
30:11
Eleanor: except it's not humanism and the supernatural. It's sort of psychoanalytic medicine
30:16
Eleanor: and the supernatural. Or maybe more broadly, like thinking about psychological
30:20
Eleanor: trauma and the supernatural. Yeah, I totally buy that.
30:24
Evan: There's also that quote that i've noted down it's more towards the end of the first movie when,
30:30
Evan: When Susie sort of is suspicious and talking to this doctor and then this author
30:36
Evan: of a book about witches, and she asks, you know, what does it mean to be a witch?
30:40
Evan: And then he says it's a mental illness. So he's definitely using it as like,
30:45
Evan: exactly what you just said.
30:46
Evan: But then the second film expands on it in a much more interesting way,
30:50
Evan: whereas the first one almost felt like they were just throwing in this little
30:53
Evan: bit to kind of just give some some context around it.
30:58
Evan: And, you know, but far more interesting in the second one.
31:02
Track 4: Yeah, I really liked hearing your like feminist analysis because I definitely came with,
31:07
Track 4: came into these movies watching from with like class perspective and class analysis
31:12
Track 4: and seeing like from the first film how it's like, oh, they prey on profits
31:16
Track 4: and torture these poor young girls,
31:20
Track 4: so that they can get more power and more money.
31:22
Track 4: And then it's more monolithic in the first one versus the second one where it's
31:26
Track 4: like, oh, there's like an internal split between the two.
31:30
Track 4: And I like it juxtaposed against the political events in the background where
31:35
Track 4: it's like, oh, this is not just an isolated structure in the society that is
31:40
Track 4: preying upon weak for profit.
31:44
Track 4: This is an extension of the system that it currently exists in.
31:48
Track 4: It's just concentrated here in this building. um but i like the internal split
31:52
Track 4: and like how you're saying like
31:54
Track 4: till this one playing both characters it's like really reminiscent like even
31:58
Track 4: our current day politics sometimes
31:59
Track 4: where it's like yeah we got two parties that we have options from but,
32:04
Track 4: they're doing a lot of the same things at time so what is really the difference
32:07
Track 4: one might say nicer things but at the end of the day,
32:11
Track 4: like in the movie the 2018 it's they both still want to continue praying,
32:15
Track 4: on the young for power and so do you want the nice face or do you want the ugly
32:21
Track 4: face with quite literally ugly face version and i yeah,
32:27
Track 4: i i thought these films were great i really enjoyed them.
32:30
Eleanor: I'm glad. And there is a lot one can say from a class perspective about them.
32:34
Eleanor: And I think you already alluded to it. But briefly speaking,
32:37
Eleanor: the 2018 film is vastly more nuanced in how it thinks about class and social
32:42
Eleanor: stratification than the film from the 70s.
32:45
Eleanor: And I mean, one very obvious place to look to think about that is in the 70s
32:48
Eleanor: film, in Argento's film, the dance school is like through a forest,
32:52
Eleanor: far away. It's sort of removed from the real. It's removed from the city.
32:56
Eleanor: The dance school in the 2018 film is in Berlin, right? And the whole city is
33:01
Eleanor: around it, and you see all this graffiti art. So there's this sense,
33:04
Eleanor: there's this awareness that's diffused across the whole film of proletarian unrest.
33:09
Eleanor: And I think Guadagnino is very interested in having that dynamic be tied in
33:14
Eleanor: to the drama that's going on with the two classes in the witchy coven.
33:18
Eleanor: So I totally agree with that. And I would also say that, like,
33:21
Eleanor: relative to the first film, Guadagnino's film is also much more interested in having...
33:26
Eleanor: The membership of the coven at the school feel like many people have power.
33:32
Eleanor: It's not just Mother Marcos.
33:34
Eleanor: There's the fight between her and Madame Blanc, but also there are other witches
33:39
Eleanor: in the coven who exercise power and have a certain amount of authority,
33:43
Eleanor: whereas in the earlier film, it's really all about the fetishization of Mother
33:47
Eleanor: Marcos as, in effect, the queen.
33:50
Eleanor: Right and so it's a much more aristocratic depiction of witchcraft
33:55
Eleanor: and what it means whereas the second film i think is absolutely thinking about
34:00
Eleanor: class struggle and governance and overthrow all of these kinds of dynamics are in the coven,
34:05
Eleanor: as well as in berlin around the coven so i think you're totally right.
34:09
Track 4: No absolutely because even in the first one like they're making fun of like
34:12
Track 4: um i can't remember his uh ethnic background now but the ugly guy with the replace
34:18
Track 4: got fake teeth like they're making fun of him to his face but then like later scenes like he's in,
34:24
Track 4: with like with them in the coven while they're enacting spells and everything
34:28
Track 4: like he's part of the circle versus the how the politics of the second one plays out absolutely there's.
34:34
Evan: There's a line early in the in the second one when i think when susie just arrives
34:39
Evan: there and she's talking about she sort of she comes from rural ohio religious
34:44
Evan: family clearly more of a farm background doesn't probably have very much money.
34:47
Evan: They, they mentioned to her that the goal of the academy is women's financial
34:52
Evan: autonomy, very specifically pointing that out. Like this is something that we
34:55
Evan: want to be separate from maybe the government and from everything that's going on.
35:00
Evan: So I think, I mean, I think he more poignantly was trying to show the politics
35:07
Evan: and what's actually happening in Germany. I think that's a good point to say
35:10
Evan: that it's takes place in downtown Berlin.
35:13
Evan: You see what's going on. You actually see the Doctor having to cross between East and West Berlin.
35:19
Evan: And it's a very, you know, his character too, beyond just his connection to the...
35:27
Evan: To the coven and the student in the academy is also pretty fascinating and you
35:31
Evan: know he has his wife is missing he doesn't know what happened to her,
35:34
Evan: and it's kind of also the the the politics of this moment in 1977 germany was
35:39
Evan: at the german autumn so it's uh just,
35:43
Evan: the second film just has so much more meat to to uh to go after totally.
35:48
Eleanor: Yeah and it helps that the acting is about a.
35:52
Eleanor: In the later film too because you believe in the characters in that film whereas
35:56
Eleanor: you know everything is so hyper stylized in the early film and all those like
36:00
Eleanor: scenes of tight focus on Susie Banyan's face where she just looks startled and
36:04
Eleanor: confused and non-idential,
36:06
Eleanor: it's it's hard to care about those characters in the same way that I at least
36:10
Eleanor: find that I care about many of the characters in the later film I care about
36:15
Eleanor: the character played by Mia Goth Sarah.
36:17
Eleanor: I care about Susie, played by Dakota Panning. Dakota Johnson? Yes.
36:20
Eleanor: And obviously, you know, I care a lot. Madame Blanc is like my favorite character
36:24
Eleanor: in the film, precisely because even though, as you point out,
36:28
Eleanor: Ward, like she too was prepared to make a sacrifice of an innocent young woman, she does pull back.
36:34
Eleanor: Like right before her catastrophic demise, she tries to stop everything.
36:39
Eleanor: So there's this notion that even the kind of predatory behaviors that have been
36:44
Eleanor: going on in this coven for who knows how long, they could be stopped,
36:48
Eleanor: right? There is a path forward that could be more merciful.
36:52
Eleanor: And that's the era that Susie Banyan is going to usher in as the new Mater Suspirion.
36:56
Eleanor: But even Madame Blanc got there.
36:58
Eleanor: She got to the point of being like, actually, and she says, there's this great,
37:02
Eleanor: it's a great line because it's not a fancy line.
37:05
Eleanor: She says, something doesn't feel right, right? Which is something all of us
37:08
Eleanor: have said at one you know you know you're in danger right before the bad thing happens and.
37:13
Eleanor: Now there's not always something you can do about it but madame blanc tries
37:16
Eleanor: to stop everything and i find that really powerful as a change to the paradigm
37:20
Eleanor: from the earlier film where nobody tries to save susie.
37:24
Evan: You do actually feel genuinely bad when tilda swinton's madame blanc meets her fate because,
37:32
Evan: unlike the first film where the sort of the leader that's mostly uh what is
37:36
Evan: it uh tanner uh, Miss Tanner, Miss Tanner is not.
37:40
Evan: And then also the Madame Blanc, like you don't really feel that they really
37:44
Evan: care very much about them.
37:46
Evan: We're in, in this version, uh,
37:49
Evan: There is this gentleness, and they genuinely seem to want them to succeed.
37:54
Evan: They also, unlike in the first one, they're actually producing shows for the public.
38:00
Evan: They're actually producing art for the community, which is something that doesn't
38:03
Evan: really happen in the first one.
38:05
Evan: And I think they genuinely want to do good. And yeah, it's pretty heartbreaking
38:11
Evan: in some ways. But she also was part of the group as well. She was causing harm,
38:16
Evan: even though she maybe didn't mean to.
38:19
Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, you know, watching this film,
38:22
Eleanor: I rewatched it this week in preparation for our conversation,
38:25
Eleanor: and I've probably seen it, I don't know, eight times now.
38:28
Eleanor: And I'm always struck by how important to the logic of the film Tilda Swinton's
38:34
Eleanor: like facial expressions are, because the film is very careful to highlight that
38:38
Eleanor: like when it turns out that Susie Banyan, this young,
38:42
Eleanor: like fresh from the airplane, Ohio and Mennonite girl who's like seen very little
38:47
Eleanor: of reality, when it turns out that she is somehow literally supernaturally better
38:51
Eleanor: at dancing than everybody else,
38:54
Eleanor: You get to watch Tilda Swinton, who's looking at Susie Banyan and seeing her ability.
38:59
Eleanor: You get to watch her kind of go, and she has all of this like wonder.
39:02
Eleanor: And you start to realize that even though Madame Blanc's character is in this
39:06
Eleanor: power struggle with Mother Marcos, she also retains the capacity for wonder
39:12
Eleanor: at beauty, the capacity for wonder at the transcendent, the capacity for wonder at the monstrous.
39:18
Eleanor: This is not someone for whom, like, rote, self-serving, solipsistic power grabs is a core motivation.
39:25
Eleanor: She wants the dance to work, right?
39:29
Eleanor: Her motivational structure is totally different from what we can see of Mother
39:33
Eleanor: Marcos, who's just disgusting in every possible way.
39:36
Eleanor: And Ward, I think Mother Marcos, like, begs to be read as a figure for late-stage
39:41
Eleanor: capitalism, right? Like, sort of melting and fleshy, and she's got weird extra
39:46
Eleanor: limbs on her limbs, and she's all sort of mossy and gross.
39:49
Track 4: Like that little extra hand on the arm.
39:51
Eleanor: Ugh, nasty. But she's also self-satisfied.
39:54
Track 4: It's starting to move on its own too. Oh, that's perfect.
39:58
Eleanor: It's so gross. And she has this belief that even though she's gross and repulsive
40:03
Eleanor: and nobody benefits from her, everyone will always support her.
40:07
Eleanor: That is how late-stage capitalism thinks of itself, right? So it's a very good
40:11
Eleanor: movie there. And then by contrast to that, as I say, the Madame Blanc character,
40:16
Eleanor: She's so likable, right?
40:19
Eleanor: She's gentle, she's patient, she's moderated, she's respectful,
40:23
Eleanor: she speaks like four languages, she helps Susie, she like applies healing skills.
40:29
Eleanor: Magic to susie's body and she like supercharges susie in certain ways
40:34
Eleanor: to help her along so they're two very very different models for what something
40:38
Eleanor: like a witchy mentorship process would look like the one disgusting one and the one that's like wow,
40:45
Eleanor: we could be making something beautiful here right and that's really the madame blanc stance.
40:50
Evan: Yeah since you were talking about this war too is the because it's very clearly
40:56
Evan: showing the eastern and western divide of berlin you know by the so there's also these two and then,
41:05
Evan: we sort of alluded to it that there is this other politics happening where there
41:08
Evan: is a group the raf and in partnership or in relation to this palestinian group
41:15
Evan: that hijacks an airplane and is trying to get some of their you know their prisoners released,
41:20
Evan: you also have this dichotomy of the two,
41:24
Evan: potential futures of germany and then also given when this comes out 2018 of
41:29
Evan: you know just the future in general maybe and yeah,
41:33
Evan: it makes it such a more um they don't actually say that the olga character is
41:37
Evan: soviet but i did see that that's it's listed in wikipedia i mean maybe you're
41:41
Evan: supposed to know by her accent it's not obvious but they also show her and then
41:46
Evan: what ends up happening to her is also quite disgusting.
41:49
Evan: I mean, if anything, that was one of the more disturbing scenes where she's
41:52
Evan: just being flung around, her bones snapping, brutalized in just a really horrific way. And...
42:02
Evan: I just liked, I didn't like that that happened to her, but I think that's like
42:05
Evan: a good metaphor for what the, maybe the capitalists or the capitalist class wants to see happen to,
42:14
Evan: you know, the Soviets or the, you know, alternate option, if you will.
42:19
Eleanor: Right. Yeah. And I mean, this, again, it's part of why the Berlin setting matters
42:22
Eleanor: so much. Like that city is an icon for like communism v. capitalism, a contact zone, really.
42:28
Eleanor: Right. A contact zone that's also a separation. So I think the film really is,
42:32
Eleanor: very deliberately thinking about all of those kinds of ideas.
42:36
Eleanor: And I agree with you that the sort of politics that Germany was stuck in in
42:40
Eleanor: the 70s, and in particular the RAF crisis and the Lufthansa flight and all of
42:45
Eleanor: that stuff, which it resolved well, there's a backdrop for the film that,
42:50
Eleanor: the basic social fabric is not sitting well.
42:53
Eleanor: There's like something that doesn't fit, right? That like capitalism,
42:57
Eleanor: communism, jointure is uneasy and restless and prone to violence,
43:02
Eleanor: just like the violence that erupts in the coven.
43:05
Eleanor: So it's kind of like a microcosm, macrocosm type relationship.
43:09
Track 4: Yeah, I really like the Olga scene because I was like, yes, it's disturbing, but I see it as,
43:17
Track 4: one, the commodification of art, the exploitation of that art,
43:22
Track 4: but also what it results to in working class bodies and the bodies of people.
43:29
Track 4: Just for the sake of exploitation will break down these people's bodies just
43:33
Track 4: for more profit more power at the end of the day and i really like there's a lot the,
43:39
Track 4: there's a lot of times the cinematography in the 2018 it's it's so crazy that
43:44
Track 4: it's like this could literally be shot from the 1977 one like right after,
43:50
Track 4: olga gets like tortured and disfigured as much as she does like whenever they
43:56
Track 4: start sinking the hooks into her that
43:58
Track 4: whole scene i'm like the coloring's not right but like how this is shot feels
44:03
Track 4: like it could be straight out of the first movie.
44:06
Eleanor: Totally i agree and i also that scene reminds me very much of another iconic
44:11
Eleanor: horror film scene this one from 1968,
44:15
Eleanor: which is the end of night of the living dead right when i don't know if you've
44:18
Eleanor: both seen night of living dead but when ben when ben dwayne jones's character dies
44:23
Eleanor: in the sort of aftermath of the movie they put hooks into him same thing they
44:27
Eleanor: put hooks into him and drag him off so if i see like hooks into a dead body
44:32
Eleanor: i'm immediately thinking race and i'm immediately thinking class
44:35
Eleanor: because of the 1968 romero film night of the living dead and i've got to assume
44:39
Eleanor: that that particular iconography
44:42
Eleanor: in guadagnino's film was deliberate because it's so
44:44
Eleanor: it's overdone right like you see the hook in the air and then like boosh into
44:48
Eleanor: the and it happens like four times.
44:51
Eleanor: So I think there is this notion that these abuses of capitalism have a long
44:56
Eleanor: history that runs back into not only earlier German history,
45:01
Eleanor: but earlier American cinematic history.
45:04
Eleanor: Because it's important, of course, to remember that the film Suspiria 2018 is
45:08
Eleanor: set in Germany, set in Berlin, directed by an Italian, but all spoken in English,
45:13
Eleanor: right? Except for a few scenes here or there that are like private conversations
45:16
Eleanor: held in German or French.
45:17
Eleanor: It's basically an English-language film.
45:20
Eleanor: And that means that on some level, Guadagnino, his intended audience was like
45:25
Eleanor: the Anglo-American public.
45:27
Eleanor: So I think that that hook scene is like tying into a trope that's already there also, which is about.
45:33
Eleanor: Racial oppression under situations of monstrosity and class oppression yeah.
45:37
Track 4: Yeah no i like how i like how you're saying is definitely geared more towards
45:41
Track 4: like the western anglo audience and that's also why i enjoy the 2018 film more is that,
45:48
Track 4: it's more over with the politics that is talking about it beats you over the
45:53
Track 4: head with it more which is sadly what the western anglo american audience needs,
45:59
Track 4: because they can't understand nuance if it hit them like a truck yeah.
46:02
Evan: Well and the i was gonna say like the the the hooks
46:05
Evan: and i think my memory it's been a while i've seen not living dead i've seen
46:08
Evan: it a few times i believe in that it's supposed to be like the meat hooks that
46:12
Evan: they would use to to essentially for actual meat which would likely be a job by someone generally,
46:19
Evan: but what now we call unskilled labor or someone who's not you know able to do
46:24
Evan: something else and then in the movie they don't use meat hooks I mean it's a
46:27
Evan: little bit more they look actually much scarier I mean maybe they are they just
46:30
Evan: don't have like the handle on it,
46:32
Evan: But they, I don't know where I was going with that, is that it's,
46:36
Evan: I guess maybe it's the symbol of something more on the working class side,
46:42
Evan: something in Germany where, you know, this is what someone would use for trade work.
46:48
Evan: But in this case, it's being co-opted by witches to move a body in just the most disgusting way.
46:57
Eleanor: Totally. And I guess the only other thing I'd want to say about the Olga scene,
47:00
Eleanor: which is not my favorite scene in the film, but it is one of the hardest to
47:04
Eleanor: watch, which I think makes a very important scene in the film,
47:08
Eleanor: is that it's so ugly and so gross and so brutal.
47:13
Eleanor: I mean, down to like the drool that like hang it's she is made,
47:17
Eleanor: you know, woman, tortured woman, dying woman, animal corpse that still has oxygen in it.
47:24
Eleanor: She goes all the way down some kind of catastrophic ontological slide and we're
47:28
Eleanor: made to go along with her.
47:30
Eleanor: It's also and so it's really gross, but it's also was remembering that the torture
47:34
Eleanor: that is applied to her seems to be an artifact of the magic dance spell that.
47:41
Eleanor: That Susie Banyan is performing upstairs. What that means is that in Guadagnino's
47:46
Eleanor: imagination and his vision of this film, all of this beautiful tonsvap,
47:51
Eleanor: this dance work that's going on,
47:53
Eleanor: the shadow of it is this really horrible, ugly, brutal violence.
47:57
Eleanor: And I think this is one of the things that Guadagnino is very interested in
48:00
Eleanor: exploring in the film that's basically like an undetonated ordinance from the
48:04
Eleanor: earlier film, which is that there's some relationship between the production of beauty,
48:09
Eleanor: dance, and the creation of pain and suffering and alienation and dehumanization.
48:14
Eleanor: And in his film, it's literally like an upstairs-downstairs phenomenon,
48:17
Eleanor: where the dance that's going on here triggers this torture montage down here,
48:22
Eleanor: so much so that every move, beautiful move, and in fact, erotic move that Susie Banyan's body makes,
48:29
Eleanor: has a compensatory or a reaction that takes place in what happens to Olga's body.
48:36
Eleanor: And I think that part of what Guadagnino wants us to do in this film,
48:39
Eleanor: and this is a new, very interesting trend in horror, which is not,
48:44
Eleanor: this is not something I centrally talk about in Monstrous Bitch,
48:47
Eleanor: but I am working on a new project about it.
48:49
Eleanor: There's been this new trend in horror in really forcing horror audiences to
48:53
Eleanor: grapple with the relationship between the beautiful and the torturous,
48:57
Eleanor: or the beautiful and the ugly, or the erotic and the excruciating.
49:01
Eleanor: And this film is doing that in a very, very interesting way.
49:05
Eleanor: And part of what's interesting about it is, you know, there's no character that
49:08
Eleanor: ever comes out and says like, oh, how interesting.
49:10
Eleanor: Susie Bennion's dance moves result in Olga's disfigurations.
49:14
Eleanor: Because I don't think Guadagnino wants it to be one-to-one. He wants it to be
49:18
Eleanor: like, look, all of this beauty and transcendence, there is a cost.
49:22
Eleanor: And it's not immediate. It's not perceptible easily, but it's there.
49:27
Eleanor: And we need to think about how horror, violence, torture, murder,
49:30
Eleanor: disfiguration, et cetera, are back formations of a culture's tendency to fetishize the beautiful.
49:38
Eleanor: And a film that I would put in the same kind of conceptual terrain with this
49:43
Eleanor: is, of course, The Substance. where you've got two beautiful people.
49:46
Evan: That's what I'm thinking of.
49:47
Eleanor: Yeah, I bet, right? You've got Demi Moore, you've got Margaret Qualley, both beautiful.
49:53
Eleanor: The litigrous conceit of the film is that Demi Moore is like,
49:56
Eleanor: not hot anymore. Like, oh no, sad Demi Moore. Like, I would give my high teeth
50:02
Eleanor: to look 1% as hot as she does on any day of my life.
50:05
Eleanor: But the film wants to convince us that because she's a little bit too old,
50:10
Eleanor: her value falls to nothing.
50:12
Eleanor: And then the cost for her of getting back to a state of ungainsayable youth
50:19
Eleanor: and beauty as embodied in Margaret Qualley is that her own body collapses into this disgusting,
50:26
Eleanor: arthritic, shriveled old crone. I know people have seen the film.
50:29
Eleanor: And then in the end, the film suggests that the two have to come together.
50:34
Eleanor: And that creates this even more disgusting entity, which is the Alyssa Sue monster.
50:39
Eleanor: So that trend in feminist horror to make us really think about what is the cost of the beautiful,
50:46
Eleanor: is very important to the logic of the second Suspiria and it's important to
50:50
Eleanor: the substance and many other films down the line.
50:53
Evan: Another film that came to mind when you're thinking of that immediately i thought
50:56
Evan: of substance but i was also seeing another mia goth film the it's part of that
51:00
Evan: trilogy that ty west had done the first one though x,
51:04
Evan: where mia goth plays both like the very young pretty person and also the old,
51:09
Evan: the version which you then get to learn about in the prequel and sequel and
51:12
Evan: things but then i was also thinking
51:14
Evan: beyond that too of the upstairs and downstairs of art too is that the,
51:20
Evan: creativity of the suzy character in the second suspiria,
51:26
Evan: is you know in for many people is the background she's not very wealthy just
51:33
Evan: your experiences and art is often comes from that below place
51:38
Evan: the the the horrors that you experience in the same way that movies and horror movies come from,
51:43
Evan: these horror experiences that people have and it's a very interesting that they
51:49
Evan: use the soviet girl to be the one that's downstairs it feels very,
51:56
Evan: specific.
51:58
Eleanor: Yeah yeah i agree there's sort of like a targeting of the most vulnerable that
52:02
Eleanor: the film is interested in exploring too.
52:04
Evan: Maybe this is going back to like the witch thing and just comparing the two
52:08
Evan: when we talked about witches a number of times but how do you think I think
52:11
Evan: that the way that the coven is portrayed, maybe it's also a shortcoming of the
52:16
Evan: first movie just not being as fleshed out, and it's a little bit...
52:20
Evan: Simplistic means it sounds bad, but the plot isn't as deep.
52:25
Evan: The way that the coven is portrayed in the two movies feels very different,
52:30
Evan: which we already talked about with the politics of the second version.
52:37
Evan: It seems like they have a more collective voice, whereas in the first one,
52:41
Evan: which also, I think, might also be the fact that the first one actually takes
52:45
Evan: place in 1977. That's when it's actually made.
52:48
Evan: And so that was the kind of politics of the time where women are not taken seriously. They have to...
52:55
Evan: What you talk about in your first book of just the human rights,
52:59
Evan: women's rights being at the forefront of the 1960s and 70s.
53:04
Evan: So the first movie seems to be more of a critique of that, where in the second
53:08
Evan: one, you're talking, I think, more of the critique of modern politics.
53:12
Evan: Do you think that's true?
53:14
Eleanor: Yeah, I do. I mean, I think, you know, I think that the newer Suspiria,
53:19
Eleanor: Guadagnino's film from 2018, is pretty clearly trying to do something feminist,
53:24
Eleanor: and pretty clearly is doing something feminist, right?
53:27
Eleanor: And I'm surprised that the film didn't get a little bit more credit for that.
53:33
Eleanor: I suspect that has something to do with the fact that it was made by a male
53:36
Eleanor: director, like, and that maybe people just weren't expecting him to come out
53:40
Eleanor: with this sort of hard-charging feminist move. Yeah.
53:43
Eleanor: But it is a pretty feminist film. I think that its politics are generally left-leaning.
53:48
Eleanor: Not perfectly so, but generally so.
53:51
Eleanor: And I would say that the earlier film, Argento's film, is pretty retrograde,
53:54
Eleanor: actually, and pretty conservative, right?
53:57
Eleanor: I think it's a film that takes on board the idea of the monstrous bitch very uncritically.
54:03
Eleanor: Like, Mother Marcos is a gross, nasty, horrendous monstrous bitch,
54:06
Eleanor: and she needs to be killed, and hopefully Susie will survive and get out. Yay!
54:12
Eleanor: Right? Whereas in Guadagnino's film, it's not the case that Mother Marcos is
54:16
Eleanor: evil because she's female.
54:18
Eleanor: It's not the case that she has to die and this whole, like, matrilinear,
54:21
Eleanor: matriarchal social formation has to die with her.
54:24
Eleanor: What's the case is that she's a bad person and it's not because she's female,
54:27
Eleanor: it's because she sucks. Right?
54:30
Eleanor: She's like a selfish, rapacious, bad person. She has to get replaced, not elided.
54:35
Eleanor: There's no sense at all in Guadagnino's film that the coven is failing by the end.
54:40
Eleanor: In fact, it's very, very clear that the coven is getting reformed and resurrected through Susie Banyan.
54:47
Eleanor: So I think that the politics of the second film are very, I'll just say,
54:52
Eleanor: softly feminist, because again, it's not like, it's not a perfect,
54:56
Eleanor: very few films are perfectly feminist.
54:58
Eleanor: But that film is, you know, in many anyways, pretty close. And I think Argento's
55:03
Eleanor: film is pretty misogynist, right? And I hesitate to use that term when I'm talking
55:09
Eleanor: about art, because I like to give art a lot of credit for moral complexity.
55:13
Eleanor: I'm very quick to use the term misogynist when I talk about governance or law or people.
55:17
Eleanor: But that film, I think, really does qualify, because the good outcome is that many, many women die,
55:27
Eleanor: all of the bad women die, and Susie escapes from the realm of female power.
55:32
Eleanor: So that's like a bummer, right?
55:34
Eleanor: That's a message that chimes with what, for example, very, very right-wing social
55:39
Eleanor: philosophers now are saying.
55:41
Eleanor: And what they're saying to women is you better worry about these powerful, scary,
55:47
Eleanor: bitchy women there, these academic women, and women who want to complain about
55:52
Eleanor: the patriarchy because your life will get worse the closer you get to them.
55:57
Eleanor: That sort of is what that film is saying, right? It's not that Susie's gonna
56:00
Eleanor: fix the coven. She has to burn it to the ground and get away.
56:04
Eleanor: Not what Guadagnino sang in the 2018 film. On top of that, I would highlight
56:08
Eleanor: that what I alluded to before by saying that Tilda Swinton's performance of
56:12
Eleanor: Madame Blanc, when you can really see transparently her interior state, that's important.
56:19
Eleanor: Not only because it makes her character more likable and it helps us see the
56:22
Eleanor: plot in clearer terms, but also because it reminds us that all of these women
56:26
Eleanor: do have interior states, right?
56:29
Eleanor: Women have depth and character and subjectivity.
56:32
Eleanor: And in the earlier film argento's film all the characters are flat all of them
56:36
Eleanor: are flat i think that that's a choice that he made i think that argento and
56:41
Eleanor: ward again this kind of goes back to your point from earlier argento wanted
56:44
Eleanor: to make a film that's very much about surface,
56:47
Eleanor: and like color and repletion and visual acuity and not very much about depth,
56:54
Eleanor: and as a result he must have directed all the actors to play it flat because
56:58
Eleanor: if he didn't it's really uncanny that every single one of them plays their character
57:02
Eleanor: as flat as they do, but they're all flat.
57:05
Eleanor: Susie is like an illegible, inscrutable, unempathogenic,
57:09
Eleanor: noodle of a character her friend is the same way marcos is.
57:15
Eleanor: Risibly disgusting and also weirdly flat like you can never even almost actually
57:19
Eleanor: see her right and like all of the characters are caricatures which has a politics
57:26
Eleanor: to it if you have a whole film about women with like a couple of,
57:29
Eleanor: totally risible male characters thrown in also but all of the main characters
57:34
Eleanor: are female and they're all flat, that's a political statement, right?
57:38
Eleanor: And the statement is that there's not that much to think about when you think
57:41
Eleanor: about female subjectivity, right? It's a shallow question with a shallow answer.
57:46
Eleanor: Guadagnino's film, and this is true across Guadagnino's corpus,
57:49
Eleanor: Guadagnino is very, very interested in the idea that all people have depths.
57:54
Eleanor: And if anything, he's particularly interested in exploring the psychological
57:57
Eleanor: depth of character types, women, queer men, young queer men.
58:02
Eleanor: Whom the patriarchy might like to ignore the depth of, right?
58:06
Eleanor: Guadagno's like, no, let's spend time there, right?
58:09
Eleanor: So this film that he made is consistent with a lot of his other work,
58:13
Eleanor: and I think that there's a politics to that, too. The fact that, like,
58:16
Eleanor: Even the witchy women in the later film who support evil mother Marcos,
58:21
Eleanor: you kind of know a lot about them.
58:23
Eleanor: You understand their motivations, you understand what, I don't know why I'm
58:26
Eleanor: thumbs upping over here, I'm doing some gesture, but you know more about them
58:30
Eleanor: and they're more three-dimensional.
58:32
Eleanor: That is a political choice too, right? So I think that the earlier film is just,
58:37
Eleanor: it's very retrograde in a number of ways, some of which are explicit,
58:42
Eleanor: all the witches must die, and some of which are implicit, all the women are boring.
58:47
Eleanor: And as we were saying before, it's hard to slog through that film because it's
58:51
Eleanor: a long minute to get from one plot point to the next. And some of that is that
58:57
Eleanor: the actors are not carrying the burden.
59:00
Eleanor: None of them are. And that has to have been a stylistic choice.
59:03
Evan: I don't know how many I haven't seen. I can't speak. I can't say I don't want
59:07
Evan: to use this a blanket statement for Dario Argento's work. I've seen maybe three
59:12
Evan: or four of the films around the 70s era.
59:14
Evan: Deep Red is credited, which is the film before this is sort of credited as one
59:18
Evan: of the early, maybe one of the first sort of quote unquote slasher films before
59:22
Evan: they kind of became popular in America. He also has Inferno,
59:26
Evan: which is a similar vibe to this in some ways.
59:29
Evan: It is kind of how he treats women in a lot of his movies that I've seen.
59:33
Evan: And so I think to say that that's what he was going for, making the women be
59:39
Evan: very flat and that's how he wants them. I think that's...
59:42
Evan: The choice that he makes in his movies of this era i don't want to speak to
59:47
Evan: the newer films because maybe he that became a different uh method but those
59:51
Evan: early films not great yeah i.
59:54
Track 4: Mean in the first one it literally gets to the point where you're watching and
59:57
Track 4: by the end like you get to the lady that falls into the barbed wire room and
1:00:02
Track 4: you're like i have absolutely zero compassion for you at this point like,
1:00:08
Track 4: by the time she gets murdered it's like okay really this okay yeah it really
1:00:12
Track 4: makes you disconnect with the characters definitely a choice.
1:00:15
Eleanor: Yeah that's right and part of the reason we have to know that it was a choice
1:00:19
Eleanor: is that the late 70s that was like the epicenter of the moment in which horror
1:00:24
Eleanor: about women was treating the women with a lot of psychological deaths, right?
1:00:29
Eleanor: That's nine years after Rosemary's Baby.
1:00:32
Eleanor: It's four years after The Exorcist. It's two years after Stepford Wives,
1:00:37
Eleanor: one year after The Omen, two years before Alien, right, with Ellen Ripley.
1:00:41
Eleanor: This was like the era of women horror protagonists being not just three-dimensional,
1:00:47
Eleanor: but astoundingly empathogenic.
1:00:50
Eleanor: So to have a character like Susie Banyan, whose best move is fainting it's just
1:00:55
Eleanor: sad right like that's not a compelling character.
1:00:58
Evan: Yeah yeah and i actually didn't know this too this i don't know you because
1:01:03
Evan: you mentioned uh night of the living dead i didn't realize that sargio or um
1:01:07
Evan: dario argento had co-produced the sequel dawn of the dead.
1:01:11
Eleanor: Oh i didn't know that either.
1:01:13
Evan: It just i mean i don't it says that he was the editor and composer of the european
1:01:17
Evan: version of that movie which is actually an excellent sequel in in its own right
1:01:22
Evan: um but That's interesting and maybe surprising.
1:01:26
Evan: I mean, granted, that's not really his movie. That's a George A.
1:01:29
Evan: Romero movie, if anything. But I just thought I would throw it out there.
1:01:33
Evan: I was just looking at a lot of other films from that era, the ones you mentioned,
1:01:36
Evan: plus a number of other ones. And I think of Carrie, even ones that don't have
1:01:40
Evan: women, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie.
1:01:43
Evan: Um what other ones that came out that year uh and i mean like halloween yeah right like even.
1:01:49
Eleanor: Big slasher franchise i spit on your grave which i do not recommend that that
1:01:54
Eleanor: film is way over the line of too hard to watch for me having said that i've seen it and,
1:02:00
Eleanor: um you know that protagonist you know a lot about her you know a lot about her yeah.
1:02:05
Evan: There's one other question i had and maybe this is a a large a big stretch and
1:02:11
Evan: i know we've already talked about it just the only thing I know that I had left was
1:02:15
Evan: the what's a lot is to be made in the set in the 2018 version of the the sort
1:02:20
Evan: of the guilt of the German nation from
1:02:23
Evan: the conclusion of the World War Two and the Holocaust.
1:02:27
Evan: And I made a note that maybe I'm thinking of it the opposite way.
1:02:31
Evan: But the which is the the juxtaposition of the guilt of the nation and the way
1:02:38
Evan: the fact that the German government has now brought in former nazi ss officers
1:02:43
Evan: into the government which is explicitly mentioned in the film,
1:02:46
Evan: and then you have the witches and i'm trying to figure out because they have
1:02:50
Evan: their own ritualistic and controlling methods
1:02:54
Evan: which are different than the sort of occult and interest in rituals that the nazis were
1:03:00
Evan: part of and i don't know how to i don't know what i'm necessarily getting at
1:03:04
Evan: but there's these two different sides which i think is very explicit it with the marcos versus,
1:03:12
Evan: um marcos versus blanc like do you think that it is a app comparison to the
1:03:17
Evan: governments and the way that the nazis are now or sorry the german government
1:03:22
Evan: is has treated the nazis and just the
1:03:25
Evan: the mood of the government of the people at the time.
1:03:29
Eleanor: Yeah i mean i think that the film is really trying to meditate among many other things um,
1:03:35
Eleanor: on autocratic power and how we can understand autocratic power,
1:03:39
Eleanor: how we understand what it is to live under autocratic power.
1:03:42
Eleanor: And that's happening in the sort of outer layer of the film with that whole
1:03:45
Eleanor: RAF nightmare crisis situation and the way that it invokes German sort of third
1:03:51
Eleanor: and fourth quarter 20th century history.
1:03:54
Eleanor: And of course, internally, it's happening in the coven, right?
1:03:57
Eleanor: Do people just accept Mother Marcos as the ongoing head of the coven because
1:04:01
Eleanor: she's been the head of the coven, because she's an autocrat,
1:04:03
Eleanor: because she's a dictator?
1:04:04
Eleanor: And the answer is yes, they voted, and the majority sided with her.
1:04:08
Eleanor: So there's this performance in the coven of the same kind of false consciousness
1:04:12
Eleanor: that produces autocracy in the first place, which is this idea that,
1:04:15
Eleanor: well, this person has had power.
1:04:16
Eleanor: Let's go ahead and let them keep power, because it seems to be the,
1:04:19
Eleanor: like, straightest path toward any kind of imaginable future.
1:04:22
Eleanor: And then, of course, within the coven, that's getting resisted by Blanc,
1:04:25
Eleanor: and Susie Banyan represents the refusal of that kind of logic.
1:04:28
Eleanor: She represents a kind of leadership, her own embodied leadership that,
1:04:33
Eleanor: as I said earlier, is both powerful and vengeful, but also nurturing and merciful.
1:04:39
Eleanor: To me, the most politically important moment in the whole film is when in the sort of,
1:04:44
Eleanor: orgiastic blood ritual at the very end, there are these three young women who
1:04:47
Eleanor: have been eviscerated by Mother Marcos and her cronies, and Susie Banyan, who is now sort of.
1:04:55
Eleanor: Emerged as the mother of size, the like highest ranking witch of the coven,
1:05:00
Eleanor: she goes to each of the three of them and she says not, she does not say,
1:05:04
Eleanor: you're obviously in pain, I'm going to end your suffering.
1:05:06
Eleanor: Instead, she asks them what they want.
1:05:08
Eleanor: She says, what do you desire? And each of them says, I want to die.
1:05:12
Eleanor: And so she holds them to her chest and she like lets them die.
1:05:15
Eleanor: So that's a very dark figuration of what political power should look like.
1:05:19
Eleanor: Hopefully we live in a world where, like, allowing people the mercy of release
1:05:24
Eleanor: from pain is, like, a last resort for governance and not, like, the starting point.
1:05:29
Eleanor: But, you know, she's coming into a hot mess here, and so her first move is this
1:05:33
Eleanor: act of soliciting the desire of the people she's in charge of and then committing
1:05:38
Eleanor: an act of violence that really is an act of mercy,
1:05:41
Eleanor: and that is seen that way by the characters upon whom it's performed.
1:05:46
Eleanor: So I think that the film, both in the external world of Germany and the internal
1:05:50
Eleanor: world of the coven, is asking questions about surrender to autocracy,
1:05:54
Eleanor: and is saying in the end, there is a different thing that we could have,
1:05:57
Eleanor: and it's an idea of governance that's about mutuality, it's about respect, and it's about mercy.
1:06:02
Eleanor: Then when she shows up later, in kind of the final major scene of the film,
1:06:07
Eleanor: Susie Banyan, as the mother of size, shows up at the doctor's house,
1:06:10
Eleanor: and he's still grappling with all this guilt he has over the death of his wife.
1:06:15
Eleanor: And the Susie Banyan's character shows up and she's basically like,
1:06:19
Eleanor: look, I've decided that you deserve to know what happened.
1:06:22
Eleanor: And she tells him what happened to his wife. And it's like a very sad scene.
1:06:26
Eleanor: But at baseline, it's about her recognition that he's a person.
1:06:30
Eleanor: And she wants to provide him with closure before then relieving him of all of
1:06:35
Eleanor: the memories that he has about this issue.
1:06:37
Eleanor: So she both honors his desire for truth and then performs the equivalent of
1:06:42
Eleanor: a mercy killing for him psychologically.
1:06:45
Eleanor: So she, as a ruler, is not about the exercise of authoritative force.
1:06:52
Eleanor: She's about, like, volition, recognition of humanity, mercy,
1:06:56
Eleanor: compassion, touching, right? She's very, like, physically tender with the people she interacts with.
1:07:03
Eleanor: So I think that's the film's final statement, really, is that there is a mode
1:07:07
Eleanor: of exercising power that has to do with the mutual recognition of humanity and
1:07:12
Eleanor: not with the idea of total suppression and the sort of exercise of dictatorial force.
1:07:18
Evan: I found that scene very—I mean, I understand the idea of giving him that mercy
1:07:25
Evan: of she touches him, he has like a little seizure and sort of just forgets what
1:07:29
Evan: happens, he no longer has his—,
1:07:31
Evan: you know, his country place anymore, sort of all kind of wiped away.
1:07:35
Evan: But in the case of these individuals, it makes sense.
1:07:40
Evan: But in some ways, for the German people collectively to forget what has happened,
1:07:46
Evan: what I think would be a mistake for them.
1:07:49
Evan: I think it's very similar to Spain and their grappling with the period of time in Italy.
1:07:56
Evan: I mean, a lot of these places was fascist uh you know periods of time and um,
1:08:02
Evan: not to say that i'm refuting you i'm just saying that it wouldn't be such the
1:08:05
Evan: wouldn't i don't know how to grapple with what they would do as a nation i guess
1:08:08
Evan: they're not really you're not really meant to this is more of the individuals of this but just yeah.
1:08:13
Eleanor: I definitely don't think that the film is trying to say that the forgetting
1:08:17
Eleanor: that happens for him should be.
1:08:19
Evan: Extended no right right of course.
1:08:21
Eleanor: Yeah but yeah i think that but But the question of how do we hold trauma at
1:08:27
Eleanor: that kind of a scale is one that the film wants us to think about.
1:08:31
Eleanor: How do you do it? What forms can it take?
1:08:34
Eleanor: How do you make the histories that we can't forget,
1:08:37
Eleanor: um things that we can live with without pushing them entirely to the side.
1:08:41
Evan: Was there anything that we between the films that we didn't get a chance to
1:08:44
Evan: to hit for you eleanor or uh.
1:08:46
Eleanor: No i mean final thoughts or anything yeah i mean i guess the the only final
1:08:50
Eleanor: thing that might be worth landing on one second time is the dancing the damien
1:08:55
Eleanor: jale's choreography in the 2018 suspiria is,
1:08:59
Eleanor: so beautiful like the work that went into making those dance scenes happen must
1:09:05
Eleanor: have been extraordinary and,
1:09:08
Eleanor: the that i think is very important to guadagnino's project the idea that you
1:09:13
Eleanor: you need to have this like core of beauty somewhere even though it's in this
1:09:17
Eleanor: tense negotiated relationship with horror and ugliness,
1:09:22
Eleanor: um and maybe he's getting that a little bit from argento's emphasis on the visual
1:09:26
Eleanor: and how visually striking his movie is.
1:09:29
Eleanor: But I think that Guadagnino really wants us to clock that that dance really
1:09:33
Eleanor: is an extraordinary choreographic work.
1:09:35
Evan: Yeah.
1:09:36
Track 4: No, I had in my notes, I was like, I don't know shit about ballet,
1:09:39
Track 4: but this dancing is incredible.
1:09:41
Eleanor: Yeah. Yeah.
1:09:43
Evan: Yeah, it's amazing. I couldn't find this, or maybe I didn't look deep enough.
1:09:47
Evan: Does Dakota Johnson do all of the dancing herself?
1:09:52
Eleanor: I'm not sure, actually.
1:09:55
Evan: I looked in the in just like in a brief surge and i know that she has some training
1:09:59
Evan: so it's possible i mean if she did and,
1:10:03
Evan: i mean any anyone who can do that is if it's impressive but being that that's
1:10:08
Evan: not necessarily her like primary yeah you know um primary thing that she's doing
1:10:13
Evan: in a lot of her movies i would be even more impressed because,
1:10:16
Evan: That last performance, too, I mean, and I think also when you see Mia Goth come
1:10:20
Evan: up and she had already broken her leg and it was sort of repaired and it comes
1:10:23
Evan: back up, which is also very disgusting. Bones, for me, generally is not a,
1:10:27
Evan: I mean, I can handle gore, but sometimes bones.
1:10:30
Evan: It's just also the trauma and the pain that can go into making art, too.
1:10:35
Eleanor: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly right. And then in the end,
1:10:40
Eleanor: when she collapses during the dance and everyone sees that she's hurt,
1:10:43
Eleanor: that makes the audience complicit.
1:10:46
Eleanor: And all of the suffering that went into making the beautiful dance.
1:10:49
Eleanor: And I think that's an important part for Guadagnino also, that we need to think
1:10:53
Eleanor: about who suffers in order to make the beautiful things that are all around us all the time.
1:10:57
Evan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in general, as my sister, when she was much younger,
1:11:02
Evan: she was very interested in ballet and trying to maybe as a career.
1:11:05
Evan: And the toll that that puts on your body is a tremendous, tremendous. Yeah.
1:11:10
Evan: And I guess before we go, where can people, we can also put a link in our,
1:11:14
Evan: in the show notes, where can people find your new book and when does it come out?
1:11:18
Eleanor: It actually came out on Tuesday. So it's out, which is very exciting. You can buy it on Amazon.
1:11:24
Eleanor: You can buy it at Princeton University Press.
1:11:28
Eleanor: But it's, it is widely available. I will be doing some, like a reading and a
1:11:34
Eleanor: film screening in Philadelphia this weekend. So, you know, or I guess probably
1:11:38
Eleanor: by the time this is up, it will have already passed. Never mind.
1:11:41
Eleanor: But you can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it at Princeton University Press.
1:11:43
Eleanor: And Scream With Me just came out in paperback. So now it is available more cheaply,
1:11:48
Eleanor: either at Simon Schuster's website or on Amazon or at your local bookseller.
1:11:53
Eleanor: And my sub stack, which is free, is eleanorshorrors.substack.com.
1:11:58
Eleanor: And you can just subscribe.
1:11:59
Evan: Excellent. Well, Eleanor, thank you for coming on and talking about these two
1:12:03
Evan: books. I almost said two books, but your two books and then these two movies. it's great to have you.
1:12:08
Track 4: It was wonderful having you thank.
1:12:09
Eleanor: You very much.
1:12:10
Evan: And yeah you can listen to uh you can subscribe to your sub stack do this podcast
1:12:15
Evan: or those links in the description and we will catch you next time okay.
1:12:20
Eleanor: Thank you thank you both.