Monday, November 19, 2018

Miss Chthonic Temple: SUSPIRIA, SABRINA (Chilling Adventures of)


We're finally there, at the point in time wherein women have eclipsed men as their own worst enemy. The Apollonian phallus has crashed into the sea like a blood-caked sandcastle; from its Uranus-ish foam splashback emerges a whole new tower: the blood-soaked erect white goddess totem, Tamm-Pon!

Symbolizing birth, the shedding 
of the unfertilized eggs, Tamm-Pon!

The eclipse of the moon that recom-
mences the cycle, Tamm-Pon!

See it rise! 
Amphitrite! Kali! Asherah! 
See its bloody exit unleash!
Tamm-Pon!

Paglian chthonic floods, 
coastal regions washed off 
Gai's once pristine uterine coasts

In theaters: the SUSPIRIA remake, made by the guy who did Call Me by Your Name. Netflix is a show called THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, something that by far was America's Halloween post-trick-or-treating binge of 2018.  Earlier this year there was Hereditary. What else do you need, sister? To write your own story yourself?  Did you think men would be so naive as to let a girl write the story of a woman's magic triumph? These shows cost money, little lady. Munn--nay! Go ask your husbands for some and take a good look at it - men are on it! Menn--nah

We men haven't listed to a voice other than our own in so long, we can't really pass the talking stick of our own volition. So, sorry, but that's one phallus you'll need to actively pry from our metallic grip. It'll take more than beach erosion and asteroids to end this ceaseless filibuster we call dinosaur patriarchy!


But hey, women star and feminine sensibilities pervade, rather fearlessly in fact, relative to past witchcraft movies. I gleaned from the imagery presented, for example, a dark feminine secret: that bedknobs and broomsticks might be associated with witchcraft because they are items--always close to hand as part of her womanly 'duties'--a young girl may safely 'employ' towards her first orgasm (alone at night, or alone in the house, incorporated during the day's chores, presuming the menfolk out of moaning range). And her first orgasm never really stops once it starts, does it, grrls? It's a fire that can destroy the whole 'phallic thing' with a single 'O'. Is this not why censors of the past so feared it? 

Maybe they were right!



Several of my film geek friends love the new SUSPIRIA --and the Erich-targeted Alamo Drafthouse ads on my Facebook never shut up about how much their own geek contingent adores it, too. For my sins, I saw it, right there at the Alamo, a mere week after seeing Climax, which was a much better Suspiria remake, less plot similarity but more aesthetic similarity which is way more important. And I like that it's (Suspiria, I mean) totally boy-free: there's no romance, no sex, no pregnancies, no walks of shame, not even a throw-away glance from a pretty young houseboy like we had in the original! This new version switches from a co-ed ballet academy to an acclaimed modern dance troupe (in other words, halfway between the original's ballet and Climax's street dance troupe) and unlike the original there's actual dance performances, with audiences. But something that made the original great is lost --the lurid, nightmarish color and sense of genuine menace. Terror, bold artificial color and loudness have been replaced by body horror, Eastern European drabness, and long-winded yet still muddled psychosocial allegory. The threat now is not to the soul and the skin but the ligaments, and joints. The scharzwald Hansel and Gretel primary color and rock and roll death rattles of the original are replaced by gray rundown 1977 Berlin that already feels nostalgic for the gold grey misery of the Wall (it stands here right outside the Hene Markos Dance Academy, replete with tasteful graffiti) and idiosyncratic and wildly misguided Thom Yorke alt-wimp balladry. In order to properly justify its political ambitionz, this remake is an extra hour longer than the original, making it perhaps the longest horror film since The Shining, just with all the scary parts and cool aeshtetics tastefully extracted to make room for more strained political metaphor-whoring.

Further differences abound: the exposition-history-relating professors and psychiatrists played by Udo Kier (at his most devastatingly handsome) and Rudolf Schündler in the original are now combined into one old duffer played by Tilda Swinton in good old man make-up but an unconvincing falsetto voice. S/he spends great swaths of time reading the diagram-packed diary of a missing dance student patient (Chloë Grace Moretz --whose insane babbling in his office apartment is one of the few highlights) and wasting our time watching from on high as he putters back and forth across the Berlin wall to his country house while Yorke moans in the background, mistaking relentless melancholy for enigmatic portent. 

The reason it's set in 1977 soon becomes apparent: so we can overhear lots of TVs on in the background of scenes set in hotel lobbies, apartments, and bars as German terrorists try to free the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof quartet via a plane hijacking (as seen in Uli Edel's Baader-Meinhof Complex.) Shoehorn that in and surely critical acclaim--and some kind if discernible point--must follow! 

It's interesting that the film presumes there are connections to be made, yet never really makes them, as it finds out too late that there is no real link between the aetheric consumption of Suzy Bannon's youthful vigor by the evil unseen Helena Markos and the crunching up of a generation of pro-Arab anarchists (c. 1965-75) rebelling agains their parents (1945-65) who are pro-Israel as a rebellion against their own, i.e. the Nazis (1933-45). Back and forth we go, grandchildren uniting with grandparents against the middle- a tale as old as time, but one completely lost on Guadignino

Ferrara's Addiction got deeper, farther, in 1/20th as long with 1/00th the budget just from filming a trip to the 1995 NYC Holocaust exhibit; and even then it was perfectly contextualized within the the vampire grad student plot. Here, instead of actually making new connections, or even borrowing old ones, the film just hopes this old duffer's puttering around drab streets and reading diaries full of arcane markings, and cafes with terrorist TV and shots of the Wall, will somehow cohere into something profound. Like throwing a bunch of unopened ingredients into an oven and expecting to pull a cake out. Perhaps Guadignino presumes we'll one day be pausing and doing a close reading on all these hand-written open pages, to unscramble archaic clues the way those David Lynch pronoiacs do on Twin Peaks. In my case, good sir, Luca presumes in error. All I'm going to do is point and say "look, the director has no cake; the oven's not even on!" 

Thanks to the pre-show videos at the Alamo, I knew before the movie started that its screenwriter David Kajganich had done research by watching videos of and by female European modern dance choreographers from the same era, soaking up their worldly artistic views and goals, before and after the war. A lot of the choreography, credos and sociological underpinnings seem imported wholesale from those videos. The dancing in the film, the movements we do see seems legit, like they worked at it. Dakota Johnson especially gives it 100%, and there is some really excellent sound design: her every sexy breath and the whoosh of air from her movements can be felt in the collective audience's solar plexus. But the director and editor seldom trust a single dance movement, a jump or a spin, to play out in a simple medium shot, i.e. so we could actually see the whole body begin and complete a movement, as the choreographer intended. That doesn't give them nearly enough to do! So  they can add thirty crosscuts to random things like faces of those watching, strange angles, other movements by other people in other areas of the school, stranger's faces feeling the magic of the movement, occult artwork, architecture, close-ups of bending limbs, feet, hands, eyes--and then, maybe--if we're lucky--back to the dancer finishing their movement. It's the kind of thing that would probably make Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly so mad they'd put on masks, sneak into the bay and cut off the editor's fingers with a razor edged clapboard. 


That's not to say there aren't moments where this rapid-fire cutting works, just not very many. There's one sublime moment: while teaching her a movement, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) touches Suzy Banon's (Johnson's) shoulder blades, arms, and legs before she does some difficult movement in practice, injecting some matriarchal chthonic oomph into her muscles, the force of which --while invisible to the eye--is felt via clever sound design (where we feel air currents in our lower chakras--a real advantage to seeing this in the theater with a good sound system) and quick cuts to clued-in dancers and instructors all throughout the building, as some (dark) matriarchal force blows through the building like a puff of wind.  That sort of thing is eerie-sexy-cool, but then while she dances we cut to seeing the girl who tried to escape being contorted with breaking bones in linked puppet agony mirroring Suzy's movements, and back to those dancer and instructor's faces as the magic happens, and on and on until it's like beating a dead horse back to life for no reason other than to beat it to death again. 

The original Suspiria murders were grand, terrifying, artistic and disturbing, because Argento knew to keep the camera focused on the action. He didn't feel the need to crosscut to five other things. In the first murder, for example, we only cross-cut between the murder, close-ups of the knife going in, and the roommate pounding on their neighbor's doors, screaming. In the remake we'd probably also cut to the interior of every single neighbor's apartment as they debate answering or calling the cops, as well as Suzy back in her cab driving to a hotel, and the janitor out having a smoke, and the guards on the wall, until all the dread and shock was drained out, replaced by some half-assed grand statement about the Cold War, feminism, or something. 

What this remake reminded me most of, actually, was the recent Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron. The point of that film may have been that 70s Berlin was a mess, or that James MacAvoy is a drink best served on a short leash, but it was also about how intoxicating Theron and Sofia Boutella look under red and blue lights, in loose-knit sweaters, kissing in a neon-drenched club bathroom foyer (left). Similarly, this Suspiria remake's point might be that 70s Berlin was a mess but it's really about how sexy Dakota is when she's writhing around on the floor, her grey-white-peach accented skin making a warm counterpoint to her brutalist gray gym clothes, her breathing creating a nice swooshing circular sound design like she's conducting great swaths of air in and around herself in some shamanic ecstatic circuit. 

One thing that made the original, as well as Halloween and Psycho, so iconic, was the presence of a female voice behind the scenes, to correct, perhaps, countless irritants as to what women would or wouldn't say in a situation and how they would say it. Daria Nicolodi, Debra Hill, Paula Pell, Alma Reville, Gale Ann Hurd all helped make the films they worked on the classics they are. We see what happens to Argento when Daria isn't there (in his later work), he just goes in for gory murders without much style or interest in the rest. Daria supplied him with a needed Jungian counterbalance that made good films into classics. In the documentary accompanying the film (on my DVD), it's clear she brought the Jungian fairy tale weirdness, the dreamy Alice in Wonderland-esque haunted quality to Suspiria' and after they split up, that kind of magic begins to fade away from his work like a dream. In the remake there might be a lot of women in the cast, but few behind the scenes, thus we have to wait for the big climactic reveal which--upon closer examination--makes little sense--for any kind of chthonic payoff. Don't think twice, it's all over! Good lord, let's go get a drink at a bar with service faster than the Alamo's, where your refill isn't likely to come until the credits. 

For all it's length, half of the story in Suspira seems left out, things we'd have rather seen than all this 90s mope rock Mennonite funeral wandering and old man notebook reading, precinct-bothering and wall-traversing. A good woman behind the scenes could have ripped out at last 1/2 the script, and maybe added some things that actually made sense. Oh and some occasional forays into scariness would be nice. 

That's not to say the sheer abundance of grand old German broads in the cast isn't a great thing, or that the men who made this Suspiria don't love and appreciate strong women, but maybe that's the problem? A woman writer would know how and why women are both scared and scary; they'd go places a man--even a misogynist-- wouldn't dare without a woman leading the way. The male auteur voice here hems and haws around the edges, a squeamish virgin trying to work up the nerve to plunge deep into the menses pool if he wants to finally break his seal. We see the coven carousing and swilling food and liquor at the local restaurant, but from behind the window, out in the street, unable to hear what they are saying-- as if small children left out of adult conversations. We don't get to see female-empowered evil as an unknowable, strange otherworldly force but as a kind of henhouse pyramid scheme, where young women sacrifice their youth so that their elders can act like five year-olds at ein Kindergeburtstag. In the original, the presence of evil was like an ice cold razor blade, we could feel it slicing through the coiled kundalini serpent down at the base of our spine. Every shard of rain in the opening scenes of Suzy's first night arrival in Germany cut deep. It was like long thin razors were falling between the tall trees, like we were leaning over a ledge, plunging down an old elevator, or imagining being dragged along concrete. This frisson transcended misogyny or the body or any kind of normal human fear. It was the fear of a real abstract maternal threat. Here the pain is all dancing, twisting Red Shoes misery. It's so over the top and abstracted it becomes numbing. It's not evil as a malevolent force but as mere Saw-style sadism. The rain doesn't sting it just wears you down. Thom Yorke does not howl and rattle metal sheets and whisper "witch!" in a pursed hiss through the echo chambre, instead he just does Radiohead sans energy, proving without the band to goose him out of his shell, there's just a mopey little boy trying to seem as sad as Elliot Smith.

 There is nothing to fear here in this new Suspiria, only to mourn. We mourn for fear.




On the other hand, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina now on Netflix, at least has the willingness to look under the dark rocks. The story of a young witch in a Salem-like town about to have the occult version of her blood-spattered bot-mitzvah, Sabrina builds up to her big moment of womanhood: signing Satan's book during a deep woods midnight ceremony that involves--among other things--the sacrifice of a goat. The catch? Sabrina is only half a witch. Her mom was human. And she balks at the last second, even though the goat's already been killed... and why? Because she has some pie-eyed faux-Wahlberg chump of a human boyfriend at her human high school named (dark lord have mercy), "Harvey Kinkel" (grown-Disney kid Ross Lynch) and she doesn't want to have to give him up and go to a new school. Oy! Girls can be real stupid. 

But, in a show that positions boys so far to the side they're as superfluous as wives in a war movie, we're put in a very unique spectator position.  The presence of this Harvey, this lump of proletariat Jungenfleisch, makes an interesting en verso to all the buzzkill fiancees in films like Gunga Din. The whole show seems to want this boy gone. Even his dopey name signifies what our reaction should be. He's the Ralph Bellamy to Satan's Cary Grant. Sabrina clings to him like a security blanket while the Satanic magickal side of her nature--where our interests lie-- ever beckons, luring her and therefore the show away from banal Archie-ism into something sexy and October-dark and cool.  We really don't need another show about a girl who turns her back on her own blossoming career/powers to support some half-written half-witted, 100% sincere 'perfect' big eye-lashed boy. Harvey doesn't even have a motorcycle! I mean, his dad works/worked in the local mine. How townie can you get? Gurl, he gonna knock you up and drag you down, like Lo's new husband Dick in Lolita. 

There's an unwritten cardinal rule when writing female protagonists, something--alas--many showrunners and writers only learn the hard way--no one likes the boyfriend of the heroine. The only way we like him is if she meets him for the first time when we do, i.e. over the course of the film or episode. If she starts out with a boyfriend, we don't like him. And if we like him, we don't like her. This is always true, in life and in TV/movies. Thus, this Harvey character--while innocuous and sweet--is her albatross, a sash weight affixed on a fledgling hawk so it can't escape the nest. Anyone who loved a beautiful girl in college knows him well, for her hotness makes it impossible for her to not have had a handsome stupid townie boyfriend in high school, the type who was popular in their small town, and so never bothered to grow up or apply to colleges. A major downside to dating a hot girl (or guy) is that you have to constantly stay on your A-game, as everyone will hit on them wherever you go, all the time, and some of them are bound to be better options for her, so just fighting with her at a party is an opportunity for three guys to jump in as her knight in shining armor. There's not much you can do, since if you fight or act jealous you just make it worse. The Harvey townie human boyfriend from highschool therefore, was always a good source of exploitation. He'd buy you drinks and bring back bottles to kind of ingratiate himself amidst his (semi-ex) girlfriend's new suitors. Instinctively trying to pull her down from her limitless horizons into his same go-nowhere small town quicksand he's stuck in, the last straw is the chocolate diamond engagement ring (he went to Jared!) he brings up to her one weekend, the last desperate swing. And if it works, holy shit, she really is as dumb as he is. Maybe it's destiny. 

Either way, among things Sabrina will do other than sign the book is--as the series progresses--raise Harvey's brother from the dead (just because her dear Harvey misses him) despite it being one of those "sometimes dead is better" deals-- and slit a fellow witch's throat to do so. Why? Because she doesn't want Harvey to suffer. Of course she ends up making it way worse. We're clearly meant to realize she's not nearly as perfect as she thinks she is. Those familiar with youth dystopias will surely remember Katniss running high and low like a nervous mom to protect her little Peeda in The Hunger Games. But while Lawrence invested Katniss with a kind of dour humorless resolve, at least she didn't expect us to back her up and presume she was 'right' to do so. Kiernan Shipka, on the other hand, cocks her heads and purses her lips with a kind of false pride in her own smug cutesy poo morality, as if confident she will always be judged 'adorable' by a jury of her peers; and we're regularly put in the position of morally ambivalent observer, relishing the evil around her for its style and cool, rather than rooting for Sabrina with her smarmy Sullivan's Travels/Barton Fink-style weepiness over the glory of the common man. What's not to celebrate in one of her rival's enjoying a luxurious orgy before her sacrifice at the hands of the Satanic coven as the pièce de résistance for their horrifyingly literal combination of Thanksgiving and Catholic communion? If Sabrina thinks we're going to side with her third wave feminist virtue signaling over their Nietzschean exultation, she best think again!



And that's what makes this show great. Aside from the sprawling, beautiful art direction and framing which takes full use of HD's ability to clarify darker color schemes, it's unafraid to go pretty frickin' dark in its deeds, while never putting on the dour self-important face of something like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. There's plenty of dark comedy but it's all played deadpan straight. The witches here make no bones about being aligned with the Devil and it's not condemned overtly as morally wrong (since the humans are even worse - hanging witches from trees, even in their current township). In sum, this isn't Tabitha and Dick York; these bitches got a hotline to Hell. Satan himself pops up now and again to suck the soul right out of an unlucky miner. Hell is literally a place under their feet and the honesty and directness of that, evidenced in the Satanic statue adorning the foyer of Witch School, and the way Sabrina doesn't want to turn her back on evil, totally (since it's 'her heritage') is the film's great strength. The Comics Code Authority would shit themselves if they saw this back in the day, and still should. Let what they did to EC be done unto them! Hail our half-inflated Dark Lord!



As with the pro-occult 'overdosing makes you so cool'-subtext of Twilight, humanity is seen as rather anemic and dull by contrast to the supernatural. There it was the vampire trying to keep her from changing ("you don't want any part of this" as they say); here it's the reverse. Why she keeps hanging around that drip of a human boy instead of spreading her limitless wings with kids more in her league, only her writers know but hey --it keeps us watching. The idea that anyone would cherish that life (homework, sock hops) over the supernatural is absurd. We, as moral humans, don't need to be 'saved' from evil like Katniss needs to save lil Peeda. We need to be saved from the forces trying to save us. We already know what it's like not to sign Satan's book: life bubbles thick and sludgy, one 'blurp' at a time. There's nothing noble or 'decent' about it. It's why we've escaped to this show in the first place. The human side is so lame on this show that not even a non-binary Lachlan Watson as an Amelia Earhart-ish ghost ancestor of one of Sabrina's human friends can save the mortals from an unenviable torpor.


And most importantly, the evil witch adult cast is sublime: Michelle Gomez (above), as Satan's evil henchwoman, hangs back from the action in the guise of Sabrina's (human) school counsellor, to make sure Sabrina has enough rope to hang herself, and so be lured into the fold. BBC Dr. Who fans of course know how awesome Gomez is at playing characters who inhabit her body, rather than 'are' it --she was the female incarnation of the Doctor's long-time archetypal shadow, 'The Master,' and it's perhaps Gomez's brilliance in the role that led to the new Dr. Who being reconstituted--alas rather lamely in some social preachiness as Jodi Whitaker; and she's even better here, as the sexually alive deep-breathing agent of Satan. Apparently her master (she's really "Lillith"), the Dark Lord is taking the long way around to win Sabrina into signing the book, and it's this arc that constitutes the general thrust of the show. Gomez is, as Pauline Kael would say, a dirty kick, luxuriating in her own evil. We root for her wild schemes every step of the way since they're so much cooler, and find Sabrina's smirky hypocrisy and sense of busybody superiority more and more insufferable by contrast. . 


At the same time, we realize this is a topsy-turvy realm where we can almost suspect some masonic secret message encoded in the tree bark, gearing us all towards a kind of meta-Satanic paganism. The rush of evil, in other words, transcends the screen, and just as Sabrina is being systematically corrupted and morally compromised, so are we being trained to see wrong as right, up as down, darkness as light, square as round... If Sabrina cannot survive corruption, what chance have we? And why indeed, would we want to? Jack Chick pamphlets must be fluttering up from their landfills at this mainstream 'come true' conspiracy. A thousand paranoid conspiracy web sites all converging on some magical date of doom, when the evil no longer hides and wrong is officially made right. 

According to Suspiria's big climax the best we can wish for, as humans marooned outside the Satanic Coven of Cool, is either blessed forgetfulness or peaceful death. And maybe there's no difference (we can't remember).

With evil, at least, there's dancing.*




Speaking of Witches (respectfully, for they are always listening) do check these out: 

* Erich Kuersten is still getting over the bitterness he feels towards Giuliani after the brutal implementation of NYC's Cabaret Law in 1998.

1 comment:

  1. I hadn't even considered watching Sabrina until I read this. I had no idea.

    ReplyDelete

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