We're finally there, at the point in time wherein women have eclipsed men as their own worst enemy and the Apollonian phallus comes crashing into the sea like a blood-caked sandcastle to be replaced by a whole new protrusion, the blood-soaked erect tam-'ahem'-pon. Symbolizing birth, the shedding of the unfertilized eggs, the eclipse of the moon that recommences the menstrual cycle, it stand tall, proud. See it rise, Amphitrite! Kali! Asherah! The Paglian chthonic floods the coastal regions like a melting ice cap blood tide. Witches are in the theater via the SUSPIRIA remake by the guy (really?) who did Call Me by Your Name, and on 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? Boil the cauldron double bubble yr trouble. Men wouldn't be so naive as to let a girl write the story of a woman's magic triumph -we'd have nothing left to be but drowned.
Bedknobs and broomsticks may--it seems--be associated with witchcraft because they are items a young girl may safely 'employ' towards her first orgasm. And her first orgasm never really stops once it starts, like a fire that may destroy the patriarchy with a single moan.
All 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. For my sins, I saw it there. What a joint. And I like that it's (Suspiria, I mean) totally boy-free: there's no romance, no sex, no pregnancy or walks of shame, not even a throw-away glance from a pretty eyelashed young houseboy like in the original - and I love that this new version switches from a co-ed ballet academy to an acclaimed modern dance troupe. But... on the other hand, the sense of real evil--the lurid yet nightmarish color and sense of menace--has been replaced by a kind of vaguely connected but deeply uncomfortable body horror. The threat now is all of the ligaments and joints and not the heart and neck, and even then, it's never clear why it's so unclear (the unclarity was crystal in the original). Now it's set in a realistic gray rundown 1977 Berlin that already feels nostalgia for the gold grey misery of the Wall (it's right outside the Hene Markos Dance Academy, replete with tasteful graffiti). In order to convey it's import it feels the needs to cram in a whole extra hour, making it perhaps the longest horror film since The Shining. The parts played by Udo Kier (at his most devastatingly handsome) and Rudolf Schündler in the original (they laid out the local Black Forest witch history in a single scene) are now combined into one old duffer (played by Tilda Swinton in good old man make-up but an unconvincing falsetto voice), who spends great gabs of moments reading the diagram-packed diary of a missing dance student patient (Chloë Grace Moretz, whose insane babbling in his apartment is an early highlight) and wasting time puttering back and forth across the Berlin wall to his country house while the idiosyncratic Thom Yorke 90s-style alt rock balladry moans in the background. There's lots of TVs on in lobbies and apartments and bars with news reports streaming as German terrorists try to free the Baader-Meinhof via a plane hijacking and so forth (this wishes it would make a good lengthy double feature with Uli Edel's 2008's Baader-Meinhof Complex.) Sinthoms and subtextual rivulets that could have been more profound, like the link between the aetheric consumption of Suzy Bannion's youthful vigor by the evil unseen Helena Markos and the crunching up of a generation by the Nazis are like afterthoughts as this old duffer putter around and read diaries full of arcane markings that, perhaps, director Luca Guadignino presumes we'll one day be pausing and reviewing up close to unscramble archaic clues the way those David Lynch pronoiacs do on Twin Peaks. In my case, good sir, he presumes in error. Not that I don't love great swathes of it, or swaths, and maybe another viewing, at home, with my too-high expectations lowered, like the bar. But in the meantime, I'll take what I can get. And I can get it all.
While there was much to savor, I confess felt it was very suspect in being written and directed by a man, even though I knew--thanks to the pre-show videos at the Alamo--screenwriter David Kajganich spent some time watching old female European modern dance choreographers and their worldly artistic views and goals, in and around Europe, before and after the war. A lot of the movement and sociological underpinnings to the performances seem imported wholesale from those videos, which, frankly is great. It makes you want to see the dances in person, where those no editor playing with all the multiple camera angles and close-ups he has to work with, enjoying himself a little too much.
And yet, though the dancing seems legit, like they worked at it, and Dakota Johnson especially really gives it 100%, and the excellent sound design captures her every sexy breath and the whoosh of air from her movements, the director and editor seldom trust a single arcing movement, jump, or spin, to play out on its own without adding thirty crosscuts to random things like faces of those watching, memories of past events, other movements of other people in other areas, giving it all the kind of overwrought Ashby-gone-Roeg ADD. In other words it tries too hard craft associative meanings in the editing room, and as a result lets itself get all carried away by the magic of crosscuts until you kind of wish DW Griffith had never been born!
That's not to say there aren't moments where this rapid-fire cutting works when, for example, during rehearsal, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) touches the shoulder blades, arms, and legs of Dakota Johnson, injecting some matriarchal chthonic oomph, the force of which --while invisible to the eye--is felt via clever sound design (where we feel air currents in our lower chakras) and editing that shows clued-in dancers and instructors all throughout the building sensing--if you will--a stirring in the (dark) force. But then we can't just have a dance without seeing the linked puppet agony it causes some other girl trapped below in the fuzzily circumscribed secret sanctum, and those dancer and instructor's faces, and on and on until it's like beating a dead horse that's somehow still breathing, on and on, in a way far more in tune with modern torture porn than classic Argento. For the original Suspiria murders were grand terrifying erotic and disturbing, but he kept the camera on the action, and didn't feel the need to crosscut to five other people in different parts of the building.
For another interesting double feature, this made me think most of all of the recent Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron busting some intense fighting skills. The point of that film may have been that Berlin is a fucking mess, or that James MacAvoy is a drink best served on a short leash, but it was also about how intoxicating she and Sofia Boutella look under red and blue lights, in loose-knit sweaters, kissing in a neon-drenched club bathroom foyer (left). And this Suspiria is really about how sexy Dakota is when her breathing is given a nice swooshing circular sound design and she's squirming around in modern jazz gyrations on a rehearsal space floor, even if her skin is as grey as the Berlin wall yet still doesn't match her wan fake red hair. When she moves you feel like she's conducting great swaths of air in and around herself in some shamanic ecstatic trance. When she's writhing around on the floor, her pales skin curving in all sorts of gyrating on the floor directions, her grey-white-peach accented skin making a gorgeous counterpoint to her gray gym clothes.
Her skin! Ladies and gentlemen.. her pale peach-gray skin! I can hear the blood rushing right behind its lustrous surface.
What it seems to lack, in the end, besides a better choice of hair color, is a female voice to all their female voices. The key thing that made Suspiria so indelible and rewatchable, that made 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 and how they say it in the script and vibe. 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 counterbalance. In the documentary accompanying the film (on my DVD), it's clear she brought the Jungian fairy tale weirdness, the dreamy Alice in Wonderland haunted quality to Suspiria and when she's gone from his work, it begins to fade away like a dream. In the remake we have to wait for the big climactic reveal which--upon closer examination--makes little sense. For all it's length, a lot 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.
That's not to say the sheer abundance of grand old German broads isn't a great thing, 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 wouldn't dare without a woman leading the way. Instead we see the coven carousing and swilling food and liquor at the local restaurant from afar as if small children left out by adult conversations yet unable to escape them as mom runs through her day of errands and visits with various gal pals. We don't get a load of 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 a Kindersport Spielplatz geburtstag. In the original, the presence of evil was like an ice cold razor blade run down back of our neck. We could feel it. Every shard of rain in the opening scenes of Suzy's first night arrival in Germany cut deep. It was a fear that transcended misogyny or the body or any kind of normal Michael Myers brand of fear. It was the fear of a real abstract maternal threat. Here the pain is all dancing, twisting Red Shoes-kind of prolonged misery - so over the top and abstracted it becomes numbing. It's not evil. The rain doesn't sting. Thom Yorke does not howl and rattle metal sheets and whisper "witch!" in a pursed hiss through the echo chambre. There is nothing to fear, 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 signing of 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 minute, even though the goat's already been killed... and why? Because she has some pie-eyed faux-Wahlberg chump human boyfriend named, of fall things, 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!
Women....
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 place with the presence of this lump of proletariat Jungenfleisch, an interesting en verso of all the buzzkill fiancees in films like Gunga Din. The whole show seems to want this boy gone, only Sabrina clings to him. But the evil side of things is so seductive we can't help but be on Satan's side every step of the way. 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 sensitive 'perfect' doormat of a comic book author stand-in. He doesn't even have a motorcycle! He spends his night in his bedroom drawing comic book characters. Hmmm - and this series is based on a comic book? Was the author's stand-in less of a chump in it? Wishful thinking for some dude afraid of working in the mines like his brewed-with-the-fighting-spirit older brothers? OR - are we supposed to like him?
There's an unwritten cardinal rule when writing female protagonists, something--alas--many showrunners and writers learn the hard way--no one likes the boyfriend. The only way we like him is if she meets him for the first time over the course of the show. If she starts out with a boyfriend we don't like him. This is always true, in life and in shows. Thus, this Harvey--while innocuous and sweet--is a burden, like the townie high school boyfriend who tries to hang on to a cute intelligent girl after she moves away to college, calling incessantly and coming up weekends, trying to pull her down from her limitless horizons into his same go-nowhere small town quicksand like a clinging vine, the chocolate diamond engagement ring (he went to Jared!) his last desperate tendril.
It's a very wary weird line to tread, for this Sabrina is not always sympathetic and we're regularly put in the succulent position of the completely morally neutral observer, for unless we're prudes, 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 for a horrifyingly literal combination thanksgiving and church sacramental wafer? Nada!
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 (one woman slits her own throat and is devoured by her coven during a Thanksgiving celebration, for example) while never putting on the dour self-important face of something like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. There's plenty of dark, darker than dark comedy: 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 and not suffering them to live, and so forth). In sum, this isn't Tabitha and Dick York! These bitches got a hotline to Hell, and every once in awhile in the caverns below the town, Satan himself appears 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 the 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, and should, for what they did to EC.
As with the pro-occult'dying and heroin are cool'-subtext of Twilight, Sabrina's subversive delight in her dark prowess is almost invisible for being so pronounced. Maybe other viewers' opinions will differ but what we have is the typical story of a girl who could be such a badass except she keeps hanging around a drip of a boy instead of spreading her limitless wings. I can only hope the producers intended us to have a negative reaction towards him. (2) At my house over Halloween we were shouting at the screen "Sign the damn book already!" and "Dump that idiot!" For the powers of darkness seem formidable indeed here, and as with the paltry human company in Twilight, humanity is seen as rather anemic and dull. The idea that anyone would cherish it is pathetic. We already know what it's like not to sign Satan's book: life bubbles thick and sludgy, one 'blurp' at a time. The human side is so stalled out, not even getting the non-binary Lachlan Watson an Amelia Earhart-ish ghost ancestor save them from a unenviable torpor.
And most importantly, the evil witch adult cast is sublime: Michelle Gomez (above) as Satan's evil henchwoman (above) hangs back from the action in the guise of Sabrina's (human) school counsellor, to make sure Sabrina has enough rope to hang herself. 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 Who's archetypal shadow, 'The Master' (and it's perhaps Gomez's brilliance in the role that led to the new Dr. Who himself being reconstituted as Jodi Whitaker)--and she's aces as the sexually alive deep-breathing agent of Satan on Earth. The Dark Lord is evidently keen to take 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 such a kick, luxuriating in her own evil, that we root for her wild schemes every step of the way and find Sabrina's smirky hypocrisy and sense of busybody superiority more and more insufferable.
.
Speaking of Witches (respectfully, for they are always listening), visit
Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader (Sept. 18, 2018)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon (Feb 23, 2017)