Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds:

The Dark Dreams of Dario

Argento, Maitland McDonagh
Alexia Kannas

Maitland McDonagh,

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento

Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

ISBN 978-0-8166-5607

US$22.95 (pb)

328pp

(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Towards the end of ‘An Interview with Dario Argento’, Maitland McDonagh
suggests to the director that only he “could take the stories of Edgar Allan Poe
and make a movie that’s about murdering women in grisly ways”. Reading this
interview again at the end of the new expanded edition of McDonagh’s Broken
Mirrors/Broken Minds: the dark dreams of Dario Argento, I am struck for the
first time by something in the director’s response to this rather perfunctory
suggestion. I imagine him sitting there, small and strange, while he considers
the work of one of his greatest influences: “Edgar Allan Poe had a terrible
imagination. He drank, he took drugs, and he saw many horrible things in his
mind. Nice people don’t see such things … I think we have an image of him
almost as an angel, as someone who suffered in pursuit of his visions.” (p.
247) There is something about McDonagh’s book that works to superimpose
the figure of Argento over this romantic and melancholic image of Poe, so that
by the time you come to read this response, the Italian horror maestro seems
to be talking really, about himself. Its tracing of the director’s career sweeps
from the highs of his supernatural horror masterpiece Suspiria (Italy 1977)
and the urgent brilliance of his murder-mysteries Deep Red (Italy 1975) and
Tenebrae (Italy 1982) to the deep, foggy place from which the director
continues to practice today, disappointing fans and critics worldwide with films
like Mother of Tears (Italy/USA 2007) and Giallo (USA/UK/Spain/Italy 2009).
Nevertheless, McDonagh’s book, first published in 1991, continues to provide
the most panoramic (English-language) view into the world of Dario Argento’s
films to date—a world full of all those things that nice people don’t see.

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds is made up primarily of a film-by-film analysis of

Argento’s oeuvre. This is arranged chronologically, beginning with The Bird
with the Crystal Plumage (Italy/West Germany 1970) and finishing with
Argento’s attempt to break into the U.S. market in 1993 with Trauma
(Italy/USA 1993). McDonagh’s style fuses a number of different approaches to
the material, producing highly informed and often original discussion that pulls
out and investigates some key tropes in this under-studied director’s style.
Astute mise-en-scene criticism is contextualised through frameworks of
narrative analysis and film reception, bookended, in most cases, with
rigorously researched production details. As with previous editions, the most
insightful chapters of the book consider the films the author holds in highest
regard, and so the sections on Deep Red, Suspiria and Tenebrae are
particularly rich and illuminating. In ‘Le cinque giornate / Deep Red’,
McDonagh considers the complex web of allusions Argento sets up in his
influential giallo, specifically through discussion of the ways the films’ formal
structure is infected by the notion of the doppelganger, and its relationship to
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blowup (UK/Italy/USA), which Argento has
cited as one of its key inspirations. McDonagh’s skill in close formal analysis
is compelling, as she shows how Argento’s fascination with the process of
representation lays at the heart of every move his camera makes. This
detailed account of Argento’s formal style is extended into the chapter on his
later giallo Tenebrae, where McDonagh describes how the director’s
distinctive cinematic language produces, in this case, “an unnervingly self-
contained work” (p. 180) that simultaneously showcases the director’s
inimitable skill for disorientating the viewer with an obsessive rendering of
space.

Chapter four considers the two instalments of Argento’s ‘Three Mothers’

trilogy completed at the time of Broken Mirror’s first published edition. The
material here on Suspiria and Inferno (Italy 1980) is particularly fascinating in
the wake of the 2007 release of the trilogy’s final chapter, Mother of Tears—a
film that has, after a twenty-seven year long wait, polarized fans and critics.
McDonagh’s focus on the use of colour in Suspiria, where the director used
1950s technicolour processing to achieve its saturated, nightmare/fairytale
palette, makes for wonderful reading and her description of Argento’s baroque
stylisation recalls the wonder of experiencing this intensity on screen. There is
also considerable attention afforded to the Thomas De Quincey essay that
provided Argento with the idea for his wicked triumvirate, ‘Levana and Her
Ladies of Sorrow’ from Confessions of an English Opium Eater. With these
detailed case studies of Argento’s films, the book also serves as a useful
pedagogical tool, providing useful readings to accompany screenings of
Argento’s work in film courses and an excellent model for close analysis of
texts that have otherwise gone unnoticed in the history of film criticism.
The expanded edition of the book offers a new introduction that brings
readers up to speed with the eight films Argento has made since the 1991
publication, and it is here that McDonagh attends to Argento’s excellent 1996
film The Stendhal Syndrome (Italy). Described by the author as ‘a funhouse
reflection of Hitchock’s Vertigo (1958), the five paragraphs afforded The
Stendhal Syndrome here stress the need for a new consideration of the
relationship between Hitchcock and Argento—a comparison that has been
often made, though little considered. The new introduction also includes
material on The Third Mother, though it seems a shame to refuse the film’s
position as the conclusion to Argento’s trilogy by considering it briefly here,
rather than alongside the other two films. This, perhaps, is one of the
limitations of the book’s chronological structure, but what it does offer on
these more recent films is steeped in a peculiar tone. It is this tone and the
brevity of the material on Argento’s later work that brings me back to the
melancholy place this review began. In the material on Deep Red, Suspiria
and Tenebrae, McDonagh’s writing can tend to mimic some of the qualities of
Argento’s formal style, with its flourishes (a taste for alliteration, for example)
and assault of description. But as with so much of the sophisticated fan writing
that goes on around Dario Argento’s work, McDonagh’s academic study, in
the end, is redolent of disappointment in the director. There’s a tension here,
between maintaining the icon of the auteur in the image of the moment of his
greatest work and finding a way to absorb, into that very image, increasingly
difficult, or what McDonagh calls ‘unconvincing’, films. What this problem, and
recent critical interest in the notion of ‘bad cinema’ suggests, I think, could
actually be a way forward; this moment of disappointment could be the very
place to begin to think through Argento’s work and to find ways of allowing it
to mean beyond our initial expectations. This prompts me already to wonder
what we might make of a film like The Third Mother in ten, or in twenty years
time, after all—and as McDonagh herself notes—Argento’s masterpiece Deep
Red was considered in 1976 by Vincent Canby to be the work of a ‘director of
incomparable incompetence.’ As Argento, now seventy-one years old,
continues to make cinema that propels those nightmare visions of ‘things nice
people don’t see’ into our world, we might stop to consider the possibility that
we’ve all become a little too nice. When we’re ready, there’s more work to be
done—and McDonagh’s book is a solid and indispensable resource to help
light the way.