TRANSMISSION from
SATURN 7 (freq: 10909238AX1): DEEP RED
active participation guide:
Deep Red is a movie that gives what it gets; the
more thought and attention you put into it the more its entertainment value
matures. It is not a movie that plays
fiddle to expectation and is merciless on placid, dull eyed viewers. With that said here are some quick and dirty
cliff notes to introduce you young ducklings to the thought inspiring spectacle
of a well balanced, nuanced, giallo movie.
In this film
moments of revelation happen through water.
Water is the great baptizer and seems to bring out hidden truth; as in
when the identity of the killer is revealed via steam and when the psychic
throws up water while peeking into the killer’s mind. Water is symbolic in many traditions as a
purifier and harbinger of revelation and that certainly seems to be the case
here as well.
The police
detectives continuously eating is a subtext that speaks to their lackadaisical
efforts in solving the murder (they are always “stuffed” with trying to solve
other crimes), and provokes images of the stereotypical police slang
“pig”. Story wise ineffectual cops are
needed in order to place the responsibility on the viewer and protagonists to
figure out who the killer is. Argento
actually points out their absence for most of the film when the detectives meet
at the malfunctioning soda machine and they say they’ve been looking for each
other for an hour, which is exactly one hour of screen time after we’ve seen
them last.
Gender
confusion plays a heavy handed role in this film. This is purposely done to widen the gamut of
potential murder suspects, but it also is used to disorient the viewer. We have ingrained expectations of what
constitutes female and male and the blending of those lines is something
introduced into the film to both confuse and play into the other Deep Red theme of duality. Almost every scene demonstrates a duality of
some kind, like between the drunken piano player from the tavern and the
professional jazz musician, or the strong and outgoing female reporter and the
timid and withdrawn murder witness, these symbolic plays on duality also work
reveal character flaws, which are in no short order in Deep Red.
The past and
future are alluded to and are treated in much the same temporal matter. The scene shown during the movies prologue
could have taken place at any time; it is temporally displaced from the main
story of the film.
The “cobwebs in
the room” that the telepath refers to is an obvious allusion to the hidden room
later discovered in the haunted mansion.
Argento also slyly teases the viewer with lines such as “even a child
can see it” during the psychic conference scene. He’s challenging the audience to watch the
movie closely and remember that visual clues can be as important as the clues
presented by dialogue. Even with the
absence of dialogue the murder mystery can be entirely solved by closely
watching the first kill scene within the context of the actual story (not the
prologue).
Murder is
linked to child-like glee in this film.
The red headed girl that leads the jazz player to the haunted mansion
takes pleasure in impaling the lizards around her home and murder scenes are
accompanied by a haunting (or is it annoying?) children’s lullaby. Also of particular note is that the actresses
with red hair in the film are also the (SPOILER!)
red herrings that stand out the most in the story.
