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harveycritic
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Broken Mirrors - A Book Review
« Thread Started on Apr 28, 2010, 10:35pm »

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, by Maitland McDonagh. Reviewed by Harvey Karten

Just ask anyone at Fangoria, the best-known magazine specializing in horror films. You’ll be assured that Maitland McDonagh is a leading national authority on the genre. But wait: Maitland. Isn’t that a woman’s name? Yes indeed. If some people wonder how a red-blooded American male can go for chick flicks like “Pretty Woman,” “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Remains of the day,” those same movie fans would pigeonhole slasher pics as those made strictly for the testosterone set.

I’ve noticed, nonetheless, that gory films are patronized by large majorities of young men, so call McDonagh an exception. As one who has written about erotic films, to wit: “Movie Lust” and “The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time,” this author cannot be squeezed into a preconceived notion of gender preferences.

In her updated, newly-expanded tome on the films of Dario Argento, “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento,” McDonagh does not bother offering a clear impression of just why she became a fan of testosterone fare, but does say that “On the strength of ‘Deep Red’ I started researching and found that while there was plenty of writing about the man and his films…there was nothing academic….Argento’s films were a graduate student’s dream…seething with subtext and vibrating with visual virtuosity.” In other words, here was a director whose works she does not universally like (she agrees with me that “La terza madre” is nothing to write home about, nor is “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage”), but the film department at Columbia University requires a thesis of graduate students, and why not see if the department would accept something considered tawdry and commercial--like horror?

The book was developed out of her Master’s thesis, with McDonagh’s probably going through what I did with my own thesis when I hooked a publisher who showed some interest in my writing a book. “Just rewrite your dissertation and remove everything that’s boring,” was the advice of the Utah-based editor, which decided not to accept my “book” when it was ground down to a single page. No problem with “Broken Mirrors.” Though I have not seen McDonagh’s thesis, probably available at Columbia’s Butler library, I see that whatever it states has successfully been re-formed into a readable, often exciting piece of work.

The book is intriguing, though not targeted to the youthful fan base of of the lesser Frankenstein/Dracula/Wolfman series but rather to movie-goers who have read more than their BlackBerry messages and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. They can appreciate the way the author combines a scholarly tone with the reading ease of a solid novel. Look at this description of: “penny-dreadful narratives seething with subtext and vibrating with visual virtuosity.” Alliteration and deftly condensed verbiage abound in the paperback’s 293 pages. If these words connect with you, consider the purchase.

As for the way “Broken Mirrors” is organized, the bulk is a film by film analysis of Argento’s works, which means that the best way to tackle it is to pick up the DVDs (all of Argento’s films are available in that format) and then give yourself a few weeks. Set your player up with “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” then read the chapter—one which, by the way, compares Argento with Hitchcock. Everything about the movie that has you puzzled will be explained by the text. Ditto “Four Flies and Grey Velvet,” which to McDonagh represents “substantial advances over ‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.’”

You’ll get McDonagh’s take on whether “Suspiria” works as an extremely violent supernatural thriller, how Argento uses supernatural fantasy in “Phenomena,” what happens to a woman in “The Stendhal Syndrome” who is trapped by a serial killer in an abandoned warehouse, and lots more. There are loads of black-and-white pictures of key scenes in the films.

The book concludes with an interview with the director, who believes that “all French directors are former film critics” and why he finds the American studio system distasteful: “When you work with a studio, everyone is an artist and everybody has a suggestion for some way to change your work.” Perhaps the most resonant paragraph in the book opens with “…if commercial art is always in danger of becoming a whore, then high art is equally in danger of becoming an old maid.” This is as good a summation as any of the high-culture, low-culture schism which is discussed on and on by art-house lovers and the strictly action-gore-sweet romance sets, the two sides sometimes agreeing no more than today’s Republicans and Democrats.

« Last Edit: Apr 28, 2010, 11:01pm by harveycritic »

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