Suspiria: Comparing the Original and the Re-make

The Political and the Simulational: Comparing Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)

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Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and the later remake by Luca Guadagnino both share the same thematic foundation, yet the core of that story emerges remarkably different, as each film is significantly altered through the filter of a different lens. The original Suspiria is told through a dark fairy-tale lens, while the remake is told with a psychological/political lens. Yet the most significant difference arises from how their respective aesthetics compliments their themes— Suspiria (1997) uses exaggerated, stylistic colours and a heavy, dream-like score to detach itself from reality, while Suspiria (2018) is more drawn out, patient, and works mostly with a muted colour palette; it aims to deeply entrench itself within the political reality of Berlin and Germany. This shows how the style of each film— its form— is carefully measured to reflect and enhance its content. I aim to focus specifically on how the two films navigate the nature of the simulation— from the fantastic nightmare world of fairy-tales, to the all too real world of trauma and the aftermath of war. Suspiria (1997) utilizes its simulational quality to capture the phenomenological experience of a nightmare, while Suspiria (2018) both displays its simulation as stemming from a psychoanalytic repression and also critiques the theory of simulation and psychoanalysis as ineffectual in the face of grief, expression, art and dance.

The most salient aspect of Suspiria (1997) is how vividly drenched in colour it is; the film has a reckless abandon of naturalism and convention. It crafts an aesthetic which both delves into the perception of its characters and embodies the supernatural evil that thrives in the centre of the narrative. In his paper, “The Beautiful, the Bizarre, and the Brutal: Dario Argento’s Rhetoric of Simulational Aesthetics,” Gavin Hurley identifies a kind of “simulational aesthetics,” where “the art becomes the reality or the world, and with no representational referents the aesthetic experience does not point to anything beyond itself” (133). Such an aesthetic style plays into and emphasizes itself as artifice; it becomes hyper-real by recognizing that it is not real. In Suspiria (1977), this results in the film eschewing referents to the natural world, and instead using referents only to the reality of the world its characters inhabit. Hurley draws from Jean Baudrillard, and his text Simulacra and Simulation, saying that “Baudrillard explains that the closed systems of aesthetic simulation allow the participant to be swallowed up in the seduction of the closed system and ignore potentially oppressive power dynamics found in reality” (Hurley 136). This quote also points to the function of the simulation between the two versions of the film, since, as Hurley argues, the original distances itself from the “power dynamics” in reality, while the remake directly embraces and explores those very power dynamics.

Since both films interact directly or indirectly with the nature of simulation, it is useful to turn to Baudrillard to properly define the concept. Baudrillard’s ideas are based on semiotics and the conception of language as an interrelated system of signs, such that “a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning” (5, emphasis mine). If the signs can not be exchanged for meaning, then the system loses its attachment to reality and “the whole system becomes weightless” (5); and in other words, “not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (6). This system is hyper-real in the sense that it is above the real, or rather, it is the two poles of the real and the imaginary curved inward, to connect in a circle. Suspiria represents this closed system of referents— it does not depict the experience of our reality, but constructs an immersive reality for its own world. When Suzy first steps through the doors of the airport, and outside into the storm, she becomes a model for the viewer, taken from their known and familiar world into Suspiria’s wickedly supernatural world. The simulational aesthetics of the film defamiliarizes the viewer and engenders a sense of dread, since the viewer knows they are entering a system that is not representative of the reality they know; it has its own rules, and is therefore unknown and unpredictable.

This unfamiliar reality is invoked quite early in the film, and is used as an engine to drive fear and dread. In the beginning, the camera switches from following Suzy to showing her POV of the door ahead, and when we are in her perspective, Goblin’s dreamy and unsettling theme plays— and the sliding doors that exit the airport come to signal a threshold into a different world. Outside, a storm rages; we see close-ups of water overflowing the sewer-gate and rain that lashes the ground. It is intense, chaotic— a turbulent and enhanced symbol of nature, or a clash between the natural and the supernatural. This shows a firm rooting in the primal elements, which therefore connects the natural world to the supernatural power of the witches. The elements— wind, fire, water, earth— mark both the entry and the exit out of this strange world; the film begins in a drench of rain, and it ends in a deluge of fire.

When Suzy gets in the taxi, her interaction with the driver further cements her intitial descent into the foreign world. When asked where she is headed, she replies by saying ‘Escher Strasse,’ which she has to repeat multiple times, and is only understood when she holds a scrap of paper to the window. The driver then seems to understand, saying ‘Ah, Escher Strasse,’ but in exactly the same way that Suzy had pronounced it. This shows that “Suzy’s referents are the same as the cabdriver’s referents; yet despite this, there is a new logic of interpretation. The cab driver, as a resident of the simulational world, has interpretative agency” (Hurley 139). Here we see “a world in which there is no American or German language and culture, but a transcendent reality of non-reality” (139). Yet the phrase “interpretative agency” reveals that there is something more at work here as well. Having this sense of agency gives the driver power, and takes that power from Suzy. He privileges sight and the written word over sound and the spoken word. As Pollard argues, the unstable relationship between sound and meaning becomes a source of conflict which determines the power relations within the film (59). In the taxi, “this moment signals the specific dissociation of audition and coherent meaning against which Suzy will fight through-out the film” (Pollard 57). Her journey through the film becomes, in part, a struggle to reclaim her power of interpretation. This can be seen in how, at the beginning, she can not hear (or interpret) Patricia’s warning as she flees the dance academy. By the end, Suzy has re-secured her agency over the auditory, so she can recall Patricia’s words and use them to find the secret passage; this describes Suzy’s journey to reclaim the unknown referents around her. This is also evident in the end, when “Suzy kills Markos by stabbing her in the neck when her outline is made visible by a flash of lightning … as if targeting her voice more than her body, as if specifically trying to silence her as much as kill her” (Pollard 63). Again, power is determined by auditory agency here; or the ability to create, generate and sustain referents.

This brings us back to how the film itself creates its own referents, to establish a hypnotic power over the viewer. It creates a closed system by connecting the oppositional ends of the real and the imaginary; it bridges binaries to establish its simulational aesthetics. Hurley echoes this when he says that: “Argento often merges ‘brutal’ or ‘repulsive’ images with ‘beautiful’ or ‘attractive’ images as a means to transcend ‘beyond opposites’ to another plane” (133). As Baudrillard says in regards to the simulation, “[a]ll the referentials combine their discourses in a circular, Möbian compulsion” (18); it is a system that cannot be neatly cut or divided because it is circular, meaning is dispersed across its ever-twisting surface, negating any dialectical polarity. Later on in the text, Baudrillard expands this into his concept of implosion, which signifies the “absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real” (83). In this sense, oppositions are erased because polarity can not be sustained in a system that is circular.

This is how ‘brutal’ and ‘beautiful,’ together implode and transcend opposites. As oppositional terms, they exist at each end of a linear pole, with one side signifying ‘brutal,’ and the other side signifying ‘beautiful.’ Each point on the length of the pole is part of a spectrum as one term moves closer to its opposition. However, since simulational aesthetics operate in a circle (or, more specifically, a Möbius strip), then there is no discrete point for each term like there is on a pole with two ends. Rather, the terms are diffused through the twisting circle, and so they lose their opposition. This is how Suspiria (1977) feels so much like an experience, rather than a conventional narrative— the film is designed for its referents to confuse the viewer, and so to displace the viewer from analyzing. Without having to focus on how this reality connects to ‘our’ (moral) reality, the viewer can simply absorb and experience the aesthetics of the scenes. As Hurley says: “herein lies the rhetorical power of Argento films: the simulational aesthetic allows the audience to be transported to a hyper-reality where communication can potentially flow without audience bias or real-life bias” (136), it removes a sense of an ethical dimension for the viewer to engage in. This allows Suspiria (1977) to be both a horror film and an art film; it features elaborate murder scenes, but avoids being exploitive by divesting itself of moral referents, through its closed system (and I’ll return to this notion later, when we see how the remake responds to it).

To see this in action, let’s take a look at the first death scene, which is especially elaborate in its construction. Patricia’s murder is excessive yet artful, to the point of having her beating heart stabbed, before she plummets through stained glass to hang dramatically in the lobby below. This brutality is subverted by the artistic nature of the images: her heart looks nothing like a ‘real’ heart, and the colour of her blood is brighter, a more saturated hue than ‘real’ blood. This contradiction intersects the horror of the film with its beauty; it transcends the binary to become something above either concept, or in Baudrillard’s terms, it becomes “a question of proving the real through the imaginary” (19, emphasis mine). In this way, the beautiful aesthetics of the film are not necessarily juxtaposed against the dark subject matter, but rather, the two are indelibly twisted together; intertwined. This supports how the nature of the imaginary in Suspiria is present in all of its elements; its style becomes its substance. In support of this, Hallam argues that the film “imbue[s] the mise-en-scène itself with meaning, character and narrative” (Hallam 212). Giusti echoes Hallam in arguing that “colour and set design in Suspiria also function as projections of the characters’ bodily and mental states” (Giusti 154). This shows how architecture itself also mirrors the simulational, specifically in how the arrangement of corridors borders on the illogical. What might initially be thought of as something that represents order and clarity is configured as a labyrinthine generator of confusion and paranoia.

Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) is no less deliberate in its mise-en-scène and architecture; it is only less exaggerated and more subdued. The film is set in 1977, during the dense political events of the German Autumn, and is correspondingly characterized with muted, autumnal colours— faded burgundy, weak orange, dull brown, and flat grey. Its palette is dull, held-back, and it is as if the explosion of bright colours from the original film have become repressed into dull mimicry of their former selves. In the original, it is immediately in the beginning when Suzy crosses the threshold into the world of swirling colours, yet in the remake it is not until the climax of the film when such explicit and stylistic colour makes an appearance. The film defers the full immersion into its nightmare world to its conclusion, holding back so as to bestow a greater significance to the moment when its style does erupt and break through. This deferral of apotheosis is mirrored in a conversation between Suzy and Madame Blanc, in which Suzy argues that she should stay lower to the ground in the beginning of their dance sequence, and only transition into the jumps later on, near the end. This equates the height of her jumps to the heightening of the film’s own style, and suggests that the greater difference there is between two oppositions, the more effect that they will have. For her, the jumps will be of greater impact when contrasted to how close to the floor she was at the beginning of the dance. For the audience, the bright style of the finale potentially has a greater impact because it is so jarring in comparison to the rest of the film. In this way, Suspiria (2018) attempts to stretch the poles of opposition— low/high, dull/bright, real/imaginary— as far apart as possible, to draw attention to the simmering tension between them; this stands in a marked contrast to the original Suspiria, which attempts to draw its oppositions together, uniting them in a closed circle.

Similar to Hurley’s analysis of Suspiria (1997) combining both beauty and horror, Suspiria (2018) features a scene that brings the graceful and the grotesque together, yet not within the same frame. In this way, it avoids ‘closing the circle’ and creating a system distinct from reality. When Suzy is linked to Olga in an intense inter-cutting between dance and torture, the film does not wish to dull its viscerality as the original does with the artifice of the murder scenes. The body-horror is explicit and impossible to soften or look away from; it means to represent the brutality of trauma. It even subtly critiques the original film, by pointing out how aesthetics and grace— Suzy’s dance— can sometimes distract from, or even disguise the awful terror of another situation— in this case, Olga’s torture. The sequence potentially raises an ethical concern for how Suspiria (1997) blends beauty and brutality, suggesting that to combine the two runs the risk of deflating the emotive intensity of either of them.

Near the beginning, in a pronounced difference from the original, Patricia is not killed, but visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Klemperer. After she confides in him, he writes in his journal: “simulation” and that “her delusion has deepened into panic. She feels her constructed mythology is confirmed.” Here the film explicitly references the notion of ‘simulation,’ which invites us to turn back to Baudrillard, specifically in how the simulation represents power. The nature of the simulation carries the consequence that “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real” (21). Following this, Baudrillard says “[t]his is how all the holdups, airplane hijackings, etc. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media” (21, emphasis mine). Throughout Suspiria (2018), we are fed updates on the political situation of the Lufthansa hijacking through radio and TV news. As the quote from Baudrillard shows, this brings together a confluence of four elements: terrorism, the simulation, ritual, and media. Suspiria (2018) adds a further dimension by adding dance, linking it to ritual. Baudrillard figures the media as ritualistic, in that it promotes a ritualistic process of staying tuned to an unfolding event (in this case, the airplane hijacking). On the other hand, Suspiria (2018) expresses ritual through the choreography of dance, as a series of hypnotic movements are used to sustain the witches’ power.

Dance, terrorism, simulation, ritual and media all coalesce to form a nexus governed by power— a specific sort of yearning for power which arises from the atrocities of the second world war. Baudrillard says that “power itself ends by being dismantled in this space and becoming a simulation of power” (21-22); and “when [power] has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power—a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere,” which leads to “[t]he melancholy of societies without power: this had already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning” (23). The void of real power creates a division and a desperate grasp for it, in a situation where power has already been dispersed. Markos, with “her body a prison,” decaying and diseased, represents this dissolution of power. This results in uncertainty and provokes change. As Dr. Klemperer puts it, we witness “the evolution of an organism in a crisis of leadership,” which I think applies both to the coven and to the nation as a whole. In the context of Baudrillard’s quote, this ‘crisis of leadership’ is created by the lack of power. The witches are working on finding a vessel to prolong Mother Markos’s life, to restore the lack, to preserve the past, and so to resurrect power.

This revitalization of an old power is also paralleled in the the film’s discussion of trauma, and how it grows stronger through repression. The theme of repression works on an individual level, but also on a larger, national level, as the ripple effects of World War II scorch the undercurrents of the film. This is especially evident when Madame Blanc says to Suzy that “There are two things that dance can never be again: beautiful and cheerful,” which points to how the film as a whole takes a greater emphasis on the role of dance than its predecessor had, and may also be a direct comment on the aesthetically beautiful style of the previous film. Not only that, but it also underscores how far Suspiria (2018) moves away from the fairy tale atmosphere. In the fairy tale model, the aesthetic was a means to create distance from reality, but in the psychological/political model, dance functions as a way to implicitly acknowledge the atrocities committed in the world war. The troupe’s signature performance is titled “Volk,” which is the German word for “people,” suggesting that their dance is an abstract expression of inter-generational trauma, which has been passed down to them, and to the nation as a whole. Dance, in a way, comes to simulate trauma. Especially with Suzy’s dance and Olga’s torture; there is a link between the two as ritual, since it is literally a witch’s ritual that has connected them. Here, the use of simulation renders dance and trauma reversible— is Suzy’s dance a representation of trauma, or is Olga’s torture a grotesque representation of dance?

The transfer of this trauma through generations creates a fissure, which charges the political power relations of the time, exaggerating them into sharp divisions. In Baudrillard’s concept of simulational power, these divisions arise under the looming force of power as “a haunting memory.” This shows how the film is “anchored firmly in the ancient atrocities that created the invisible (and visible) boundary with the East” (Kinnard), a metaphor that is embodied not only in the literally divided Berlin, but in the witches coven, divided between old tradition and new ways. Further, Madame Blanc and Suzy’s relationship exemplifies the divide between mother and daughter; instructor and protege. In this way, the large-scale political division of the country is seen to trickle down and shape the inter-personal relationships of the populace. This shows how Suspiria (2018) uses referents that connect to a system of power-relations, contrasting to the original, which uses its referents to create a system that is distanced from any sort of real power dynamic.

While Suspiria (1997) establishes a dark fairy-tale nightmare with its simulational aesthetics, Suspiria (2018) takes the thematic framework and exposes its even darker undercurrents by immersing the story within a broiling political climate. Both of the films combine beauty and brutality, yet the relationship between the two reveals that there might be something problematic in conflating these concepts. While the dream-like fairy tale functions well within its closed system of referents, a more political focus demands a stronger link to the system of societal power. This approach draws attention to the political and the simulational as two sides of the same coin, accessed through the careful and meticulous crafting of an aesthetics that complements the respective forms in each version of Suspiria. Although Baudrillard’s idea of the simulation is relatively niche and specific, its application to either Suspiria emphasizes how the distinction between style and substance is a virtually negligible one. The referents or signifiers (content) chosen for a film are already intertwined with the signifieds, or how the referants are represented (the style). So, while two films may share the same foundation of a story, a shift in focus from simulational aesthetics to simulational power creates two films with the same DNA, which end up feeling almost entirely different.

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Bibliography

Argento, Dario. Suspiria. 1997.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Giusti, Giulio L. “Expressionist use of Colour Palette and Set Design in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).” Cinergie, vol. 2, no. 4, 2013, pp. 154-165.

Guadagnino, Luca. Suspiria. 2018.

Hallam, Lindsay. “‘Why Are There Always Three?’: The Gothic Occult in Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy.” Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 211–227. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1386/jicms.5.2.211_1.

Hurley, Gavin F. “The Beautiful, the Bizarre, and the Brutal: Dario Argento’s Rhetoric of Simulational Aesthetics.” Horror Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, Apr. 2017, pp. 131–145. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1386/host.8.1.131_1.

Kinnard, J. R. (2018, Oct 30). 'Suspiria (2018)' ravishes with beauty and ugliness. PopMatters.

Pollard, Damien. "‘I’m Blind, Not Deaf!’: Hegemonic Soundscapes and Resistant Hearing in Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno." Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2019, pp. 55-73.