00:01:22.600I love it when we put out a new episode and then I get to read the comments from people like giving us feedback and talking about what the episode reminded them of.
00:01:32.960It like really warms my heart every time.
00:01:35.200And that goes twice over, of course, for our Discord in Discord with the Right, which likewise is incredible conversations happening there.
00:01:42.300So that's another perk that comes with a certain tier of Patreon patronage.
00:01:47.580Another bit of like clanging our tin cup and saying, please, sir, may I have some more is like you guys should come to our live show, which is November 20th.
00:01:57.220It's coming up here in San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall.
00:02:02.980We're going to be joined by Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity and Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, probably like two of the biggest, coolest podcasts in my rotation.
00:02:12.460And I'm really, really excited for it.
00:02:14.220I think we're going to have a great time.
00:02:15.220Yeah, I ran into Matt Bernstein this week, in fact.
00:02:18.440Yeah, you guys were hanging out without me.
00:02:50.220So last time we talked about The Wicker Man and Carrie, two films that I would say put gendered horror really at the front end, right?
00:03:00.860The Wicker Man is about a man who lives a very particular kind of Victorian and Christian masculinity freaking the fuck out with a slightly more sort of gender fluid coded pagan society that he encounters on a Scottish island.
00:03:15.900And it turns out that he's at the butt of the joke because of his sort of both his masculine need to judge.
00:03:22.920He's constantly judging and constantly trying to understand what's right and what's wrong.
00:04:04.520Like, Carrie is Stephen King's sort of parable of women's liberation and of men's fears of women's liberation.
00:04:14.080So you have like Carrie White, who is a sort of psychically powerful or gifted, repressed young woman who is caught between her extremely like punitive, anti-sex, regressive Christian home life with her mother and the sort of like, you know, sexually promiscuous culture of the students at her school.
00:04:39.300And it's sort of like failing to meet both of these standards and explodes into rage out of her sense of like loneliness, really.
00:04:52.340You both sort of feel justified for Carrie.
00:04:55.020You feel like her anger is, you know, legitimate.
00:04:57.360And also you feel like she is a stand in for this terrifying power of the liberated woman who who might not actually be quite a fit for the world in which she is now entered.
00:05:08.520Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of 70s movies,
00:05:11.820how it's hard not to feel a little sympathy for almost all the parties involved.
00:05:16.800And at the same time, it's also hard not to feel some kind of fear
00:05:21.780and some kind of glee at the fate of just about everyone.
00:05:25.200Like, you're supposed to hate everyone and love everyone a little bit on screen.
00:05:27.960I think that's true in The Wicker Man, too,
00:05:29.240that you're supposed to be horrified that this guy gets, you know,
00:05:31.880burned inside a wicker man, but it's also kind of funny.
00:05:34.420And you're supposed to kind of root for the villagers and also, like,
00:08:00.580They're both kind of fairytale movies, just with a lot more razor blades in them and acid blood.
00:08:06.980At least in Suspiria, the person that we see first entering the dance academy is the person who's going to persevere at the end.
00:08:15.040Like, it really does feel like, you know, it's Red Riding Hood going into the forest.
00:08:18.660She's going to encounter some monsters, but in the end, she is the one who will emerge bloodied but victorious.
00:08:25.420So it's true that there's very little sense of reversal and reverse identification in Argento's film.
00:08:33.160Should we start by maybe laying this film out for people?
00:08:35.940People probably know Suspiria, but it might be worth kind of getting the who, what, where, when, how established.
00:08:42.620Yeah, so Suspiria was remade in 2018 by Luca Guadagnino.
00:08:49.480We're not going to talk about that version of the movie.
00:08:52.480We're talking about the original 1977 Dario Argento Italian film.
00:08:59.020It's a surrealist horror fairy tale about a young girl who travels to a foreign land, encounters a mysterious evil that she has to sort of decode and then outwit and then flees out.
00:09:15.060Right. And this is also a movie that asks the question that has haunted male horror directors from time immemorial, which is, is there anything scarier than a woman who isn't fuckable?0.99
00:09:31.640And Dario Argento seems to think like, kind of no.0.99
00:09:35.500Well, to be fair, she's both very scary and super non-fuckable.0.92
00:09:40.140We're not talking about the protagonist right now.0.96
00:09:43.620We're talking about sort of the villain of Suspiria, who's revealed to be this ancient witch who is sort of inhabiting and running a dance school.
00:09:55.060So the film follows a young American ballerina who's this naive, waifish brunette named Susie, who travels in the 70s to West Germany to enroll at the Tanz Academy, which is a prestigious ballet school, I believe in...
00:10:17.060In Freiburg. It's supposed to be in Freiburg.
00:10:18.500In Freiburg, yes. You're like, oh my God, don't butcher the Germans.
00:10:20.740In a Roman soundstage doubling, I guess, for the city of Freiburg, yeah.
00:10:23.460Yes, it's an Italian movie with an American protagonist set in Germany.
00:10:29.060And so she arrives at this dance school late at night in a storm and she sees a woman screaming and fleeing from the front door.
00:10:37.500And later we see that woman be murdered at the hands of this like ghostly specter after she tells a friend that something's not quite right at the academy.
00:16:52.740And one of the items in this bedchamber is a like glass statue of a peacock.0.94
00:16:59.280And Susie in her, you know, haste and terror knocks over this glass statue.
00:17:04.780And the breaking of the statue is what awakens the witch, who then turns on her and, you know, deploys invisibility and has this like zombie proxy of her friend's dead body that's out to kill her.
00:17:16.680And what Susie does is she sees that illuminated outline and stabs it with one of the broken peacock feathers. And that's what kills the witch. And she runs out of the building, like grinning and triumphant and happy as it like explodes behind her and all the teachers, you know, die.
00:17:37.700Yeah, so what's interesting about Suspiria, right, there is very little suspense in the movie in terms of its plot.
00:17:46.560The individual sequences can be nerve-threading, frankly.
00:17:49.320The thing with the dog is really scary to anyone who owns a dog.
00:17:52.600But it's always the thing that you expect to happen, right?
00:17:56.000Oh, this guy's alone on a square with his dog.
00:17:58.900Like, gee, I wonder what's going to happen.
00:18:00.700Right down to, as you mentioned, the wonderful Goblin soundtrack, where I think the soundtrack keeps, like, hissing the word, witch.
00:20:24.700You know, Argento uses this, like, jewel-tone color palette.
00:20:28.140There's a lot of, like, emeralds, a lot of pink in this movie, a lot of orange in this movie.
00:20:33.760It's very brightly colored, and it's saturated in this beautiful 70s way.
00:20:39.400And every image is like a surrealist painting.
00:20:43.200There's a lot of strangeness evoked in all the imagery and that is really what it does. It sort of takes you bodily out of the ordinary world as opposed to logically.
00:20:56.540I was trying to, like, contrast this with some other, like, thriller movies or suspense movies that have, like, a puzzle box kind of a construction where they derive their pleasure from their plots, right, where, like, each theme and character fits together into a final revelation in some, like, unexpectedly elegant way that can, like, delight you even if it doesn't surprise you, right?
00:21:23.060It's like a magic trick where the guy pulls the rabbit out of the hat at the end and you sort of retroactively understand how he did it.
00:21:29.320And that's really not what Suspiria is like at all.
00:21:32.160It's more like a vivid nightmare or a trip or a drug trip, right?
00:21:38.160And so maybe a good time to note that the movie is named after Suspiria de Profundis, which translates to Size from the Depths, which is an 1845 book of like prose poems, kind of.
00:21:51.600specifically about drug use by the English writer Thomas De Quincey, who is the guy who wrote
00:21:57.640Confessions of an English Opium Eater, right? So this is a book about the affective experience
00:22:02.780of narcotics. And it's sort of, you know, about this kaleidoscopic sensory overload. And I think
00:22:12.120there's something about the intense music, intense visuals that are supposed to sort of impose on
00:22:17.180the viewer's body, like a kind of sense of overwhelm that they might not get from trying
00:26:40.320which might bring us nicely to Suspiria's gender politics.1.00
00:26:44.240Yeah. Oh, one quick thing about that.0.99
00:26:45.740It's also interesting that a lot of the death scenes,
00:26:48.060like it's almost unclear why the killer needs to be there, right?
00:26:52.340One of the big ones, she gets killed by falling glass.
00:26:57.380Like, I mean, obviously, like, the killer's making that happen.
00:26:59.540In another really upsetting scene, it involves razor wire.
00:27:03.940There's this kind of interesting thing where, like, on the one hand, you're right,
00:27:08.640the camera stalks the actresses, especially, like a predator would stalk prey.
00:27:14.540But then it's often the scenery itself, this incredible scenery that Argento has constructed
00:27:19.240that ends up sort of finishing the job, it seems to me.
00:27:21.560Yeah, the environment itself becomes a tool of of death. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think there's one way you can read Suspiria as sort of like a standard misogynist parable. Right. There's the virginal young heroine sort of at the precipice of sexual maturity in this place played by Jessica Harper, who is like this pale brunette with these huge like saucer eyes.
00:27:48.700She's like a very Snow White kind of look. And that young ingenue encounters this dark underbelly of female power among a group of older women who are malicious, who are corrupt and who are crucially like sort of aged past their sexual appeal.0.99
00:28:07.460right and so she uses the virtues that she embodies to defeat the corruption that they embody1.00
00:28:13.360and beauty and ugliness have these like very easy moral correlations where the beautiful women are
00:28:19.500innocent and good and the old ugly women are you know conspiring and evil right that's like kind
00:28:24.320of like the standard one and the terror in this film is really kind of everywhere not just the
00:28:31.680terror of this disembodied spectral murderer but it's also really you know on the other hand a
00:28:38.960terror of physical decay right yeah you've got the maggots you've got the harrowed breathing
00:28:45.120marking a kind of like physical decline and pain you've got the putrid decay of the witch's body
00:28:53.480which is like finally killed with a peacock feather of all things it's like symbol of0.60
00:28:58.620flamboyant sexual allure so like there's not really a ton of men in this movie yeah it's a
00:29:05.220movie in which you know the men that do appear are like more or less kind of hapless or tools
00:29:11.640of women you know their lures their marks their victims and they're like pretty quickly dispensed
00:29:18.060with like the action is something that happens between women and among women and it's about the
00:29:23.340good kind of woman the young sweet pretty one defeating the the bad old kind right and i think
00:29:30.100like when we look at the shots of this movie and particularly that scene you alluded to with like
00:29:35.180the razor wire although i think this also is very present in the initial uh murder with glass at the
00:29:40.020start of the film i think in many cases when they take on the perspective of the killer these are
00:29:45.700pretty like straightforwardly mulveyan like male gaze kinds of shots right you know the murders
00:32:10.280And as soon as you let up even a minute or even if you don't let up, like the decay will come for you anyway. Right. Age is depicted as a concern of vanity, I think, in a lot of our like understandings of women's approach to age. But it's also mortality. It's also the inevitability of death. Right. Yeah.0.99
00:32:27.440And so, you know, if you drop the enforcement of femininity, if the enforcement of femininity somehow like breaks down, you know, the school can no longer function to make these disciplined, perfect ballerinas.0.99
00:32:40.240What's left over is like more horrible still because it's this ugliness, this decay, this age, this like female decrepitude and selfishness.0.99
00:33:27.880Although it is a long-ass movie, I got to say.
00:33:29.840I was like, can we get to the horroring again?
00:33:32.000But the central twist is different from the Dario Gentra version.
00:33:37.220It's the kind of thing where you're like, oh, cool, I see what you did there for like two seconds.
00:33:42.120And you're like, wait, but now the thematics don't make any sense, right?
00:33:45.020Which is that the Susie Banyan stand-in, I mean, spoiler alert, turns out to be the Mater Suspiriorum, right?
00:33:51.740Like, so she is actually the head of the coven, and you're just like, okay, but now none of it actually works.
00:33:57.720Like, Suspiria in Argento's hands is simple-minded, as you say, but, like, it has a certain resonance because it ultimately is just kind of a fairy tale story, right?
00:34:05.740Like, the same way that a fairy tale doesn't have, you know, has a moral, they used to have morals appended at the end of them, feels pretty straightforward.
00:34:12.920And Guadagnino is just mixing it up enough for that not to be the case anymore.
00:34:18.280and you're like, but I'm not sure what this means.
00:38:01.200For the 0.001% of people who haven't seen this,
00:38:04.800It is about a spaceship called the Nostromo, another literary reference in these movies that are rife with them without really doing very much with them.
00:38:13.940Not sure why it's called the Nostromo. I'm sure there's someone who can enlighten me.
00:38:17.660It's on its way back to Earth with, I believe, seven people on board who are in sort of cryostasis or whatever.
00:38:26.360They're sleeping when we first meet them.
00:38:29.740And the first shots of the interior of the spaceship really are this empty house into which these seven people will emerge because their AI computer named Mother has woken them up.
00:38:43.660And initially they sort of talk and it's a very interesting sort of beginning of the film where it's very clear they think they're being woken up by Mother because they're about to get back to Earth.
00:38:53.320Then it turns out, no, they've discovered the distress beacon. The distress beacon leads them to a very cool alien ship designed by H.R. Geiger, where I have to say the crew is far more careful than anyone else is in the sequels around all this alien goo, but still not careful enough.
00:39:16.320They bring back one of their crew, played, I believe, by William Hurt, onto the Nostromo over the objections of warrant officer Ellen Ripley, played by a wonderful Sigourney Weaver, who basically is like, we shouldn't bring this guy in because he has now, fun fact, a weird alien parasite attached to his face.
00:39:37.140In a foreshadowing for the entire franchise,
00:39:39.780they engage in some terrible decision-making, bring him in.
00:43:05.360So good. Yeah, but that's Alien, a movie that gets to its mythic and gendered aspects,0.65
00:43:11.780It's, I think, kind of late, unlike Aliens, which kind of begins with Sigourney Weaver being found drifting in space in an escape pod that she's jumped into after launching the alien into the void at the end of the first movie.
00:44:05.380But the first movie doesn't quite work that way.
00:44:07.700It's true that she's probably the most level-headed of the bunch, but none of the people on the ship seem to, except for the duplicitous android, ever sort of says anything like, oh, get out of our way, you're being too emotional.
00:44:21.200They're just like, Ripley, we want the commission.
00:44:23.440Like, we are scared that we're going to get dinged, that we're going to get docked pay if we don't do the salvage, right, which is sort of the blue-collar part of this.
00:44:31.480Like, like the truckers in a trucker movie, these people are trying to figure out how to make ends meet on this very exploitative job.
00:44:39.040And they're like, look, this is just the reality we're dealing with.
00:44:41.160So it's kind of an interesting twist on, like, it is a certain kind of masculinity, but it is kind of a desperate masculinity.
00:44:48.320It's not like, look, girl, we know better.
00:44:50.140It's, look, we need to bring some money home.
00:44:53.420It's pragmatism, which becomes, like, resourcefulness at the expense of responsibility.
00:44:58.760Yeah, there's a, you know, the responsible woman versus like pragmatic man is like a tension you'll see sort of pulling in a lot of like comedy often.
00:45:10.500Like, I just need to get this done. We need to just get on with this is the sort of like indifference to procedure and almost cowboy eyes on the prize attitude that is very endowed with masculinity.
00:45:24.000And then the sort of like hall monitor, checking the rules, being more responsible, and in the end, usually being proven right is the is the feminized position.0.51
00:45:33.200Yeah. And again, I think it's worth if people want to explore gender in the Alien films, I think that watching Alien and Aliens back to back is really instructive because Aliens is really all about kind of measured.
00:45:47.200Like James Cameron looked at the first movie and was like, what this is, this is a story of two women.0.98
00:45:51.840One is a gooey space vagina, basically, that bursts out of people's chest.0.99
00:47:36.660The first movie doesn't quite work that way.
00:47:39.740Ripley's decision making is a little bit less clear and their collective decision making is a little bit less clearly gendered.
00:47:47.100But there is about, like, a workplace in which people sort of have to communicate across gender lines in ways that to them feel a little bit unusual.
00:47:58.960And I think that that's all about that movie being made in 1977, right?
00:48:02.420Which is that, like, yeah, if Scott's model is, like, a truck stop or a, I don't know, a coal mine or whatever, the fact that those were not particularly gender-integrated workplaces, but they were starting to be, right?
00:48:15.880there were female truckers in the late 70s, although they don't show up on film very often,
00:48:20.560right? Like, I'm not sure he's doing this on purpose, but there is an element here of like
00:48:24.600a newly unionized workplace in which people still can't quite figure out the gender politics,
00:48:29.120which is kind of cool. The beginning of Alien, to me, feels almost like a cinema verite kind
00:48:34.020of thing, except that there is a thing that's about to come out of someone's chest.
00:48:38.000So you're saying that they don't really lean in to the, like, Cassandra epistemic politics until
00:48:45.200later in the franchise, because this is what Alien is famous for, right?
00:48:49.000This is its famous, like, feminist critique is there's a woman who's right, but nobody
00:48:53.380ever listens to her and they suffer because they don't take her advice.
00:48:56.940It's kind of like a almost revenge story for, like, women's testimony.0.63
00:49:02.560But you're saying that, like, it has to grow into that.
00:49:04.720It doesn't start off with that message.
00:49:07.400I mean, I think, you know, there is an element, right, of gender politics there in the sense
00:49:11.600that, like, so I don't understand Ripley's job entirely.
00:49:15.200A warrant officer I thought was entirely a military thing, and the Nostromo appears to be a commercial vessel.
00:49:20.960But I think we're supposed to read into that the military and corporations have kind of merged, which, like, we're on our way there, I guess.
00:49:27.400But it appears to be her job to not let this guy in.
00:49:41.280It's not that she has any intuition or anything like that, right?
00:49:43.800Like, often with someone like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, what distinguishes the final girl often is her intuition, which can be, of course, quite female-coded, right?
00:49:52.940Like, I don't know, I can't explain it, but I just get a bad feeling about all this.
00:49:57.000That is not, as I remember, that scene in Alien.
00:50:00.240She really just, like, look, we have these rules for a reason, and I don't think we should be doing this, you guys.0.79
00:50:05.200There is, of course, a bigger gender politics, which is, you know, I've alluded to it a couple of times now that, like, a lot of H.R. Geiger's designs seem like if sex toys had teeth or whatever.
00:53:33.140Yeah, I'm sorry to people who voted late for Scream.
00:53:37.260Scream overtook the Wicker Man at the last minute.
00:53:41.100I think it's good for the coherence of these two episodes
00:53:44.080that they're all 1970s movies with recent remakes.
00:53:47.660At the same time, I do think watching Scream together would be super fun at some point.
00:53:52.600So fun. And it's a spoof on the genre itself. It's like a set up of horror movies.
00:53:56.840It is. It's a meta horror movie where the question is, what role does knowingness play in the gender politics of a slasher movie?
00:54:03.660If you make a slasher movie that knowingly spoofs gender conventions, are you fully exempt from those gender conventions or not?
00:54:13.640Right. There are some interesting answers in Scream. I'll just very briefly say that. Right. There is, on the one hand, like, no, the movie very often sort of tacks onto the same kind of gendered tropes of identification and victimization that Mulvey would just chafe at.0.93
00:54:31.300On the other hand, one thing that Scream doesn't have,0.98
00:54:33.880it has this final girl, but it really has a group of final girls,0.93