The Giallo

Beneath every mystery, no matter how mannered or cerebral, must throb a pulse of feeling to make the story worth the read. Imagine that you could take the lid off a mystery and gaze directly on that naked pulse of feeling. What you'd find would be a giallo.

Or, to come at it a slightly different way, imagine yourself on a mystery kick, reading one after another after another, never getting enough and always hungry for the next. Imagine, then, that after a heavy meal, all these mysteries you've read condense into a single troubled dream. All the familiar elements are there, and yet strangely unfamiliar, not least because of the hyper-vivid, surrealistic "style" in which dreams appear to us.

There are detectives, of course, but they aren't the realistic characters of an orderly narrative; they are, rather, the vaguely archetypal figures that your unconscious makes of them. They are almost more of an impression of police, or visual representations of a feeling of police, than anything else.

There is Death. There is Murder. There is Blood. There is a Killer on the loose. Potent images of sexual desire, often tinged with sadism, repeatedly bubble up, only to burst on the cruel blades of knives and razors.

Above all, there is Mystery, not as a problem to be solved or a question to be answered, but simply as a raw, unprocessed feeling--the sort that Rudolph Otto categorized among the crude, preliminary manifestations of the numinous feeling of Mysterium Tremendum.

Finally, there seems to be a story, but on awakening, you realize there's only a semblance or impression of one, in something like the way that the opening stanza of Jabberwocky only seems to be a sentence.

That dream would be a giallo.

The giallo is not a realistic genre, despite the general absence of overtly fantastic or supernatural elements. Realism of any sort belongs to the Secondary Processes that Freud described as characteristic of sensible, waking, workaday life. From our (over-)valuation of Secondary Processes derive such mainstream literary and cinematic values as the psychological complexity of characters, narrative originality and eschewing of convention, subtlety of presentation, and reality testing (a technical term for the "disbelief" that must be suspended in order to appreciate and participate in fantasy).

The giallo, by contrast, is peopled with simple, stock character types. The genre is so rigidly governed by convention and formula that all the movies seem to be mere reiterations of some primal Story. Coincidence, non sequitur, unlikelihood, and outright absurdity abound. Sex and violence, those twin explosive powers of the id, erupt spectacularly without disguise or apology, and often in disturbing combination. All of this belongs entirely to the Primary Processes that characterize childhood mental life, primitive culture, neuroses, religion, fantasy, and dreams.

At the heart of every giallo is the Killer, and here we see most clearly the stamp of Primary Process. Ostensibly, at the narrative level (what Freud would call "Secondary Elaboration"--the gossamer tissue of apparent rationality often draped over the bizarre chaos of dreams), the Killer is always human, with an identity assigned to one or more characters in the end. But the labyrinth of red herrings and genre expectations that lead to the revelation empty it of all significance; no matter who the Killer "is," it could have been anyone, and the unconscious truth of the matter is that the Killer is something more--something Totally Other--than any of the human characters.

The Killer's Total Otherness is firmly established by the conventional presentation: alternating between a shadowy, indistinct figure and vividly distinct, disembodied hands (always with a blade and typically in black gloves). These are precisely the features Charles Dickens employed in describing the Ghost of Christmas Future, an unambiguously supernatural figure, an image of Death incarnate. As Clotilde de Stosio puts it,

The Ghost of Christmas Future, on the contrary, is a totally negative figure: it is shrouded in darkness and the frightened Scrooge can only make out "one outstretched hand" pointing to nightmarish sights of death and neglect. This synecdoche is not a mere rhetorical device: the ghost's hand, like Marley's head at the beginning of the story, seems to have a life of its own and therefore stirs up horror both in the character and in the reader. We learn from Freud that truncated parts of the human body can have a particularly uncanny effect on the human psyche . . . [emphasis added]

Specifically, what Freud says is,

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff's, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned above--all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition.

In the gloved hands that are the hallmark of the giallo--so often presented visually as acting with a life of their own, and only tenuously "belonging" to the dark shrouded figure--the Killer takes on a menace that engages the Primary Processes, and beneath the threshold of our consciousness, they judge that menace to be not of this world.

To conclude, some sense (however vague and implicit) of the giallo's aesthetic orientation toward the Primary rather than the Secondary is necessary for a true appreciation, and it's an absolute prerequisite for intelligent criticism. Unfortunately, most critics not only default to mainstream standards (which derive from the Secondary and define excellence in terms of it), but they couldn't even imagine other standards if they tried. When it comes to genre entertainment, in books, movies, or whatever, we really need to set aside the received canons of criticism, and go back to basics and ask, "What does this movie aspire to be or accomplish?", "How does it aspire to that?", "Is that the wisest means to that end?", and "Does it succeed?" For many gialli, the answer to this last question is absolutely yes.