Suspiria: Female Relationships in a 'woke' World

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Suspiria: Motherhood and Female Relationships in a 'woke' World

Hello all, welcome back to my channel, today I am continuing my miniseries narrating my RTP from uni about women and their relationships are family and power in horror films. Specifically post horror and folk horror.

Today I'm talking about the 2018 remake of Suspiria and how Luca Guadagnino didn’t quite hit the mark where feminism is concerned. Today official title is Suspiria: motherhood and female relationships in a ‘woke’ world.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino the 2018 remake of Dario Argento's classic, Suspiria, follows a prestigious dance school in 70's Germany which is run by a coven of witches. Suzie, an American, is new to the program, and as she excels in her classes, strange things occur, and students start to go missing.

One important thing to note here is that women run the school; women are in the school; women are literally the only thing in this film, Tilda Swinton even played the one title male character. Guandagnino's feminist proposal seems misguided and confused me at first as feminism is fighting for equality, not dominion.

The film's witches are plentiful and cartoonishly deviant, middle-aged women are framed in clusters; cackling and elusive; reasonably early on they are seen mocking a nude police officer who came to investigate a missing student, the man stands as though in a daze and the women cackle and mock his genitalia, holding a wicked looking hook up to it.

As Barbara Creed states in Monstrous Feminine, witches are illustrated as 'phallic women’(Creed 1973:76), and in this case, also the castrator. The apparent imagery is made to inspire anxiety and fear in a male audience, establishing these women as bad, ensuring the audience knows who the antagonists are.

Suspiria is a film that tries to celebrate women in power yet still manages to have the majority of the characters abuse said power, especially the coven leader and matriarch Mother Markos (aka mother suspirium).

Markos is implied to be a 'typical' witch, touching Germaine Buckley's theory in her article 'Witches, 'Bitches’, or Feminist Trailblazers?' that 'female power tends to come hand in hand with a shallow desire for long life, youth and personal power’.

She drives the film's plot from a hidden position of power in the school; her name is spoken in hushed whispers, not appearing physically until the final scenes. We find that the girls that have been going missing are failed vessels for Markos and that Suzie is the chosen youthful body to serve the matriarch's desire.

The contrast between the two women is immense; Markos crone like and grotesque in her appearance, a visual spectacle for the audience compared to Suzie's youthful agility.

Guadagnino tries to promote a feminist narrative but is fundamentally flawed through his complete disregard of solidarity and equality. In her article How Lucky You Are Never to Know What It Is to Grow Old, Rikke Schubart exclaims 'Female rivalry is a motif in both fairy tales and wave feminism and interlocks with ageism and sexism'.

The film pushes this internal conflict between the women from the first act as they vote for a new coven leader; pitching the maternal caretaker of Suzie against the looming figurehead of Markos; following the same path until the end where we see Suzie, Blanc and Markos physically fight.

The final effect is a kaleidoscope of unexpected maternal moments between Suzie and Blanc and then the stalking, intimidating evil of Mother Markos, which creates a flawed, incomplete representation of matriarchies and solidarity.

It also incorporates the mother, maiden, crone imagery associated with witches. Suzie is the maiden, Blanc the mother and Markos the crone. The reflection on their characters is both stereotypical and unexpected, especially as Suzie goes through a metamorphosis to become ‘mother’ during the film.

The graduation from maiden to mother is navigated through Suzie’s sexual awakening within her own body, which is illustrated through her dancing. In the beginning of the film, she is introduced as untrained and inexperienced, following her own breath and heartbeat in a dance reminiscent of contemporary, expressionism and something almost tribal.

As she begins to dance with the other students in the group her movement becomes more sensual and hypnotic, as time passes, she wears less clothing, her hair starts off bound and ends loose and flowing. As a dancer, Suzie becomes more and more confident in her ability, her movement contorting her body and her breath becoming part of the collective.

As she embraces this carnal sensuality you also see her in less and less clothing, from the first she wears a tracksuit, to the last rehearsal where we see her in a rust-coloured leotard and shorts. Her graduation from maiden to mother is one seen through her connection to her body and to Madame Blanc, the nurturing side of their relationship cultivating the change.

Suspiria as a word translates to sigh, whisper, and breath. The choice for Suzie to become Mother Suspirium, the literal mother of sighs is an odd choice. Despite her development portrayed partially through her breath in the sound design there is no other indication of her becoming ‘other’.

By having Suzie take the mantle herself, rather than Markos using her body or having Suzie simply escape, is once again a failed attempt at feminism in a world where women are already pitted against each other. Suzie taking up the mantle makes the ‘mother’ a young woman, promoting the ideal of young taking over the old. The displacement is dropped through the film with improvisations about ‘rebirth’ and background conflict.

Where Suspiria proposes an interesting commentary on motherhood it still lacks the progressive representation that would elevate it. The recurring theme of the women in charge is predominantly abusing power, and in a world where matriarchs are feared and demonised it only further pushes negative representation.

Rhona Berenstein understands that 'woman as monster is empowering whilst also recognising that images also signal male anxiety about a powerful woman'. The male audience and production teams are less reluctant to place a powerful woman in a film as she is someone they may know personally.

Linking back to Buckley’s quote, this not only highlights an inescapable label and misogynistic ideal surrounding ‘the witch’ but also exposes age-old sexism that prevails. Mary Beard has written about how the Western ideology situates women as outsiders to power- women who are influential as presented as 'taking something that does not belong to them' (Hutton 2017:56).

This 'theft' can be easily identified in horror films like Suspiria where a matriarchy is used to deviate sympathies for a female villain. Often found to be spiteful and backwards, full of women who hate men, these matriarchs are frequently witches, situating men in humiliating and degrading roles.

It poses this one-dimensional indication that women in power must always be vindictive and have a strong hatred towards men and masculine ideals. As men primarily dominate most governments, this anxiety surrounding role reversal is interesting but unfounded. Fictional women who are villains are almost always manipulative and malicious. Snake-like, they covet their power in an almost dystopian representation of society.

This anxiety is palpable and unsubtle and can be easily exampled in both the original Suspiria in 1977 as it can in the 2018 remake.

References:

Image at 0:51 by Rich Fury [https://the-talks.com/interview/luca-...]

Suspiria. 2018. [Film] Directed by G. Luca. United States, Italy: Amazon Studios.

\Schubart, Rikke., 2019. Witch as Fourth Wave Feminist Monster in Contemporary Fantasy Film. Syddansk University, [online] Available at: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/n... [accessed 24th August 2020]

Buckley, C., 2019. Witches, 'Bitches' Or Feminist Trailblazers? Revenant Journal, [online] Available at: http://www.revenantjournal.com/conten... [Accessed 10 September 2020].

Berenstein, Rhona, ‘Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby and Mothering’, Journal of Popular Culture, Vol 24, No. 2, (Fall 1990)

Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous Feminine. New York: Routledge.