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I don't really buy the misogyny angle, at least not 'Cannibal Holocaust' or 'Rambo: First Blood II' levels of misogyny. 'Suspiria', as has been pointed out, is populated mostly with women, so percentage-wise, that's who's involved in everything, including the dying.
It's a horror film, bad, one might even say 'horrible', things are going to happen. I don't get people who subject themselves to a horror film and are then revolted by the stuff that scared or distressed them. You might promise yourself, never again, but for that one time... you set yourself up. It's like watching a comedy and then being upset when the jokes are really funny.
The 'punished for deviant sexuality' thing, seems to me partly Argento, but primarily an audience-interpretation thing, since, from my perspective, the killers are always far more terminally fucked up than any of the victims. These are almost always all damaged people. Nobody's particularly blissful in an Argento film, just like the architecture, the atmosphere and even light, itself, is unhealthy and warped in his movies.
He does not, thankfully, fall right into the trap of having the slasher kill always during or just-post sex, which is the standard. The sex-punishment thing isn't particularly Argento's, so much as the invitational sex-death, or sex-revoltion, kick, similar to, say, 'Terror Firmer' or 'Psycho'. We're not being moralized or preached at, in that way only someone with real anger/frustration/hate issues can preach (and this makes up the bulk of the very misogynistic horror film field), but lured in, invited and taunted to belong, to accept, or to even try and make a pretense of not feeling the attractiveness. That's the pull of the feverdream panic, the big, colorful, whole hog delusional loveliness, which establishes his films as recognizable and creates enough of an ambient, an atmospheric, that we could, ostensibly, move in.
Dario Argento and Takashi Miike should direct a film each, from the same script, just once, purely for my personal entertainment. Something with a set-up resembling 'Antoine and Colette' perhaps. |
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