Deep Red (Profondo rosso) is a 1975 Italian giallo horror film directed by Dario Argento, written by him and Bernardino Zapponi. It stars David Hemmings (whom you’ll recall from Blowup) and Daria Nicolodi, with Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, Clara Calamai, and Glauco Mauri.
The soundtrack was written and performed by Goblin (billed as “The Goblins”), a predominantly instrumental Italian progressive rock band who would do the music for a number of Argento movies. Three compositions by Giorgio Gaslini, Argento’s original choice for film score writer, are also in the film. These include “School At Night.”
Deep Red came out during the height o the “giallo craze” of popular Italian movies, and it was a critical and commercial success. It’s now considered one of the defining giallo movies, as well as one of Argento’s best works.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie, including the complete director’s cut (the basis of this analysis), with additional scenes spoken in Italian (with English subtitles).
During the opening credits, we hear the main theme of Deep Red, a prog rock instrumental with a theme that alternates between a bar in 7/4 time and two bars of 4/4, played mostly on keyboards. The credits and Goblin music are briefly interrupted by a scene showing a stabbing in someone’s home, with Christmas decorations in the background; there’s a scream, a bloody knife a dropped on the wooden floor, and a child’s feet are seen stepping by the knife. Lullaby music, with a child singing, is heard–sweet and innocent-sounding, a stark contrast to what we’ve seen.
The stabbing is shown only in a shadow by the far wall, so the murder is a total mystery…the central mystery of the whole story. Who did it, who was killed, and why?
The Goblin soundtrack returns, but it now features, at first, an acoustic guitar playing the 7/4 and 4/4 theme, with the keyboards soon to return, too. This gets cut off at the end of the credits, and now we have a scene with a jazz band playing some blues, with pianist/music teacher Marcus Daly (Hemmings) telling the musicians to play the music in a raunchier, less formal, pretty, and precise a fashion.
Next is a scene with people at a conference on parapsychology, hosted by Professor Giordani (Mauri) and with his special guest Helga Ullmann (Méril), a psychic medium, who will demonstrate her amazing abilities to everyone there.
In these three scenes, we are introduced to what will be the elements central to the story: a mysterious, violent murder that has traumatized a child; the enjoyment and appreciation of music as artistic expression; and the paranormal. The first and last of these are typical of a giallo film (the slasher element in particular); the second of these, I believe, suggests the motive of the killer, as I will go into in more detail later.
I suspect that the killer also has telepathic abilities, for it would explain her attendance at the conference–her curiosity about Ullmann’s abilities. It would also explain how the killer has this uncanny ability to know everywhere that Marcus is going, and everything he is doing, as he is investigating the soon-to-be murder of Ullmann. Indeed, Ullmann has such a violent reaction to the killer’s presence in the audience, it’s as if the two have a two-way psychic connection, given how vividly Ullmann can feel the killer’s bloody tendencies.
As for the killer’s motives for killing Ullmann, then her attempt on Marcus’s life, her killing of author Amanda Righetti (played by Giuliana Calandra) and of Giordani, and her attempt (not her son’s, as I’ll later explain) on the life of journalist Gianna Brezzi (Nicolodi), they on the surface would seem to be to cover up her original crime of stabbing her husband to death in that Christmas scene shown among the opening credits. Such a motive seems inadequate, though.
First of all, nothing that a psychic, of all people, could reveal in writing, nor Marcus’s ever so amateurish investigations, nor Righetti’s book about “ghosts” in the old house where the stabbing occurred, nor Giordani’s discovery of “ESTAT” (“It was…”) written by dying Righetti’s finger, nor anything Gianna could have uncovered would have been enough to implicate the killer in her original crime. Certainly none of that, put together, would have been anywhere near conclusive as evidence.
Secondly, her subsequent killings would have only raised the risk of her eventually being caught. She may have been crazy, but surely she has enough sense to know that killing those other people will have done the opposite of keeping her safe from the police.
There has to be another, deeper and stronger motive. Since…spoiler alert!…the killer is Martha Manganiello (Calamai), mother of self-destructive alcoholic professional pianist Carlo Manganiello (Lavia), and we learn from Marcus’s first meeting of her that she gave up a productive acting career to be a wife and mother, we can imagine the profound unhappiness she must have felt at such a sacrifice. She was no longer able to express herself artistically, because now she had to raise Carlo and be a kept woman. Now she envies anyone who can be expressive, and who can be independent and have a successful career. Her sadness and envy have driven her mad.
Ullmann can express herself through telepathy and writing (she also lives in a beautiful, luxurious apartment with no need of a husband), so she must be killed. Marcus can express himself through music and find joy in it, so he must be killed. Righetti can publish books (and, I suspect, she has telepathic abilities, too, as I’ll go into later), so she must be killed. Giordani is an esteemed professor and researcher in the kind of telepathic abilities I suspect Martha has, so he must be killed. And Gianna, like Ullmann, is an independent career woman, so she must be killed. All of these people are objects of Martha’s pathological envy.
Now as for Carlo, I suspect that he’s the one she would want dead most of all…except that he’s her son, so she would be extremely conflicted about killing him, even though it’s his very existence that has forced her to end her acting career. Note that the setting of the film is 1970s Italy, when and where the traditional sex role for married women was still largely intact. She isn’t just imprisoned in the home; she’s also imprisoned in her maternal love for Carlo.
So instead of simply hacking her son to death with a meat cleaver, as she does to Ullmann, Martha will have to kill him softly, so to speak, subtly and gradually. First, there was his childhood traumatic reaction to the sight of her stabbing his father to death while the boy is listening to the lullaby music, thus making a link in his mind between music and murder (a link reinforced with her playing a tape of that music whenever she kills, or attempts to kill, most of the other victims in the movie).
Then, there’s his learning of the piano, much of which I suspect she, also a piano player (and now her only avenue of artistic expression left to her), taught him. Finally, his self-destructive alcoholism and self-hate (in no small part from being gay as well as knowing of her guilt) are finishing him off. Indeed, Marcus warns him to stop drinking.
When we first see Marcus and Carlo together outside at night, Carlo calls himself a “proletarian of the keyboard,” while Marcus is “the bourgeois” of it; for while Marcus is doing what he loves as a musician, enjoying it as a kind of luxury, Carlo has to play the piano to live, at the local bar where his excessive drinking is putting him at risk of being fired. His mother had him express himself in a way associated with pain, playing music, which will always remind him of the trauma of seeing her kill his father while little Carlo heard that lullaby music. The pain drives him to drink–she’s killing him softly with his song, and she can thus minimize her feelings of guilt of contemplating filicide this way.
The only time Carlo is happy playing music is when he’s drunk, thus feeling an emotional detachment from it. He imagines his piano is a beautiful woman in his inebriated state, and he’s thus tickling her fanny. Since, as I find it reasonable to assume, his piano-playing housewife mother taught him at least some piano, this tickling of a woman’s fanny sounds Oedipal…though in his guilt and shame, he can only feel it when drunk.
In contrast, Marcus later tells Gianna, in jest, that his psychiatrist told him he plays piano because he hated his father and imagines himself bashing his father’s teeth in when banging the keys…the Oedipal other side of Carlo; but really, Marcus just likes music. He’s the bourgeois pianist; Carlo is the proletarian pianist. One loves playing; the other hates it.
To link the film with the paranormal again, there are a number of moments in the story that seem to me to be near-examples of what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences without external causality. I’ll start with just one example for now, then go into the others later. Just when Carlo speaks of being drunk and expanding into genius, which reminds us of his earlier ‘drunken tickling of the beautiful woman’s fanny/piano playing’ remark, we hear Ullmann scream from the window of her nearby apartment. Knowing of his mother’s murderous tendencies (and thus suspecting her already, as I in turn suspect), Carlo instead makes an infelicitous joke that it’s the scream of a rape victim. Certainly, his mother’s phallic meat cleaver is raping Ullmann’s flesh. As awful as rape is, in Carlo’s twisted, traumatized mind, rape is far less violent than being stabbed to death, and he’d rather have Marcus believe Martha had nothing to do with what’s happened to Ullmann; still, he’s symbolically giving Martha away.
It’s significant to think of her cleaver, or any of her knives, as symbolizing a phallus, for Martha is a phallic mother. Having been relegated to the home and stripped of her acting career, she can only regain power by symbolically taking on aggressive masculine traits. Carlos intuits this reality about his mother, I’d say. Stabbing people to death is symbolically raping them, as I discussed of the shower scene in Psycho.
Martha as a phallic mother links with Carlo’s choice of a transwoman for a lover, as we see in Massimo Ricci (played by Geraldine Hooper). Note that as of the 1970s, it was still common for people to call them “transvestites,” or “men” wearing women’s clothes, so this kind of preconception will colour the interpretation of this theme, for good or ill. Carlo has made an Oedipal transference onto Ricci, and in his toxic self-hatred, he calls himself by the homophobic slur of “faggot,” rather than gay, when he sees Marcus has found him out upon visiting him in Ricci’s place.
So, there’s Martha’s unhealthy way of fighting male power and the patriarchal family by stabbing her sexist husband to death, as punishment for his having–it’s safe to assume–insisted she give up on acting to keep their home and raise little Carlo. Then there’s Gianna’s far healthier way of fighting sexism by challenging male chauvinist Marcus to arm wrestling and humiliating him by beating him at it easily…twice in a row. All he can do to save face is claim that she cheated.
Since it’s typical of a giallo film to keep the identity of the killer a mystery until the end, it’s only natural that Deep Red will introduce a red herring or two; in this case, we have Carlo towards the end of the film, and Gianna almost right from when she’s first introduced.
She’s fascinated with Marcus, totally finding him charming and attractive in spite of his overt sexism, and she follows him everywhere in his investigation of Ullmann’s murder, wanting to help him. Is she the killer, waiting for the right time to strike? Of course not, but it might seem that way.
Her face and skinny build are strikingly similar to those of Ricci: could she beat him at arm-wrestling because she’s a “man” (viewers of the film in the 1970s might have had that prejudice, something the filmmakers may have wanted to exploit for the sake of their red herring), disguised differently–that is, with a different hairstyle–from Ricci? At the beginning of the arm-wrestling scene, Marcus’s putting on his shirt with Gianna there suggests the two have just had sex (though it’s far from conclusive that they did); if they did, and she’s transgender, he didn’t have a transphobic freak-out upon seeing a dick, and it’s unlikely that a ‘macho’ man like Marcus would not freak out. Still, the ambiguity about Gianna remains.
Now, Gianna as a red herring to distract us from Martha also points to how the former is a parallel to the latter in the feminist sense I referred to above. Gianna deals with sexism in a healthy way, Martha, in an unhealthy one. The message here is that women’s liberation will be attained through solidarity with men as an ally, not through nihilistic violence for its own sake, as can be allegorized in the actions and choices of these two female characters.
Gianna demonstrates how women should act: by proving Marcus wrong in his sexism (the arm wrestling); by being forward and sexually aggressive in her wooing of him, as opposed to being the traditional, passive woman who leaves him indirect signals of her interest in him and hoping he’ll pick up on them; by rescuing him from the house fire (which must have been difficult for her, to lug such a–to her–hefty man out of the building), etc. Martha, in contrast, just kills people mindlessly.
Furthermore, androgyny–as a symbol of purging society of sex roles–is a major theme in Deep Red. There’s the androgyny not only of Ricci, but also of Martha. On the one hand, she’s dressed in that dark brown raincoat and hat whenever killing, both looking so like a man that Marcus assumes it was a man he saw leaving Ullmann’s apartment after the murder, and it’s stereotypically assumed the killer must be a man; and on the other hand, Martha wears heavy eye makeup. Finally, there’s the ‘androgyny’ of Gianna as a strong career woman, as well as that of Marcus (in spite of his macho posturing) as a sensitive, jumpy, nervous artist, to appeal again to mere stereotypes. There’s also the ‘androgynous’ weakness we see in Carlo, who can only deal with problems by drinking, and who, when pointing a gun at Marcus at the climax of the movie, cannot bring himself to shoot his friend.
My point is not to use the film to reinforce sexual stereotypes, but on the contrary, to use those stereotypes, ironically, to blow them apart. The point behind all of this androgyny is to show the fluidity between what it is to be male or female, and to show that, as otherwise sexist Freud once said, “…all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.” (Freud, page 342)
But to get back to Ullmann’s murder, when Marcus is going through her home, following a trail of her blood to find the body, he passes through a long hall with walls covered in art and mirrors. Many of the pictures show ghoulish faces that, when we eventually see the desiccated corpse of Martha’s husband walled away in that big old house, should be recalled as eerily similar. (Did Ullmann psychically know about that old murder long before the paranormal congress, and did she paint the pictures?)
Marcus is later puzzled at having seen a “painting” in that hall, which is no longer there as of his talking with the investigating police. As it turns out, the “painting” was actually a mirror that had Martha’s reflection in it. It was her reflection that was no longer there as of the arrival of the police.
That Marcus would imagine he saw a face in a painting, rather than a face reflected in a mirror, is symbolic of how he, as an artist, sees art, yet Martha, no longer an actress and therefore no longer an artist, cannot even be represented in a work of art (though the corpse of her murdered husband can be!).
Her mirror reflection in Ullmann’s home can be related to the mirror over the sink in the men’s public washroom, out of which we see a man leave after offering to help Martha when seen vomiting (I refer to the scene just after Ullmann’s violent reaction to the killer’s presence at the paranormal conference). This mirror is marred to the point where no reflection of her can be seen at all: not only does this serve the plot by keeping her identity unknown–and the other man assumes she, in her androgynous brown raincoat and hat, is a man–it also symbolizes how Martha, no longer an actress, no longer has a Lacanian ideal-I to aspire to, either.
Some might consider being a musician not to be a real job, as does the police superintendent Calcabrini (played by Eros Pagni), who offends Marcus when implying such an idea. For others, like Martha, being an artist (whether a musician or an actress) is everything. In fact, she seems to turn Calcabrini’s idea on its head, in a way, when she keeps calling Marcus an engineer and forgetting that he’s a jazz pianist and teacher.
Now, for those engineers out there who gain fulfillment and even a sense of creativity in their work, I say, more power to you; but based on my experience of engineers where I live in the Republic of China, I’d say their work in places like Hsinchu Science Park is largely about doing something just to make a lot of money. Among the oh, so pragmatic locals here, the attitude towards the arts is similar to that of the police superintendent.
Anyway, I suspect that Martha’s parapraxis about Marcus being an “engineer” is really an unconscious wish-fulfillment that he, like her, would have given up his dreams of being a musician, teacher, and composer to go instead for the practical money-making job of engineer. She wishes he were as unhappy as she is.
This wish can be tied to the timing of her attempt on his life in his apartment, during which we find him composing at the piano, playing it and writing out the notes. Since I suspect she has telepathic powers, I imagine she may have timed her attack on him with exact precision. She wants not just to stop him, but also his creativity–she’s arrived right on cue.
Her wish to have Carlo–as I suspect, against his wishes–play piano professionally, which reinforces his traumatic link of music to her murders, is, as I said above, her killing him softly. We also see this wish-fulfillment in her putting a rope on the neck of a baby doll (representing Carlo, her baby), as well as in the mechanical boy (also representing Carlo as a child) coming at Giordani, who hacks its face off before she kills him.
These representations of Carlo, as I insist they are, need to be linked to his death at the end of the film. The idea that it is an accident–his clothes being snagged by a garbage truck that drags him on the road, with him banging his head on a curb, then a car running over his head–is unseemly to me. If his death is merely bad luck, then it’s a cheap indulgence in gratuitous gore for its own sake. I prefer to believe that his death in this way has meaning–linked to the psychic abilities I believe Martha has.
A hanged baby doll in Righetti’s house (with its head coming off), along with Giordani’s hacking off of the mechanical boy’s face, can be seen to portend Carlo’s death, an unconscious wish-fulfillment of Martha’s to have her son killed ‘by accident’ without her needing to feel any guilt for having wished it. Instead, she can blame Marcus for his death at the end of the movie, then attempt ‘to avenge’ him with her cleaver.
Most of the killings involve injuries to the head of one sort or another. Ullmann’s head is smashed through her window. Righetti’s head is dunked in scalding hot bath water, leaving her face puffed out and disfigured. Giordani’s face is bashed against the corners of a shelf and a desk before Martha drives a knife down the back of his neck. These injuries to the head can be seen as displacement from the head she’d really like to destroy–her son’s. They could also be something she’s passing on psychically so it will eventually be how Carlo dies.
Note that she’s had a perfect opportunity to kill Marcus far earlier in the film, when he first meets her in her home to ask where Carlo is. He isn’t at home–he’s at Ricci’s place, so she’s alone with Marcus (it’s safe to assume there are no servants anywhere). If his refusal of a drink means she couldn’t have poisoned him, then she could have gone after him with her cleaver. Her home is a much safer place to kill him than in Ullmann’s place, the scene of the first killing. Her waiting to kill him at the end of the film must in itself have meaning, after the ‘accidental’ killing of Carlo.
So I see meaningful coincidences in the hanged doll’s head falling off, the mutilated face of the mechanical boy, the head injuries of most of the murder victims. and that tire rolling over Carlo’s head (as well as Martha’s decapitation). None of these have the coinciding of time of synchronicity proper, but the coincidences as meaningful ones are sufficient, as I see them, to warrant a belief that some kind of psychic telepathic power exists in Martha. She’s not only seemingly omnipresent in every phase of Marcus’s investigation, knowing where he’ll be before he even goes there, but she’s also successfully evaded the police, who surely have a major lead early on with the wearer of the brown raincoat.
And how did she wall off that room in the old house without the workers concerned about her husband’s body being there? I don’t think she walled the room off by herself. She must have hired men to wall off the room and used some kind of psychic power to make the men compliant and silent about what they saw. Her interest in and attendance of the parapsychology conference must have been due to her sharing of psychic abilities, as I mentioned above.
Speaking of psychic abilities, Righetti must have had them, too. When she is aware, from the hanged baby doll she finds dangling from the ceiling in her house, that the killer is lurking there, and when she hears the tape recording of the lullaby, she remembers her book on “the ghost of that house.” She is aware of the existence of spirits; and when dying, she’s pointing to a mirrored wall in her bathroom and has written “It was…” in Italian in the steam from the hot bath water there. She’s trying to tell Marcus (whom she’s never met) to link the identity of the killer with the face he saw in the mirror in Ullmann’s home, something Righetti could have known only psychically.
Martha may have followed Marcus to the library where he found Righetti’s book, but it’s unlikely that she overheard his telephone conversation with Gianna in that noisy restaurant, then managed to find out Righetti’s address from Gianna afterward. The sound of howling wind and children’s cries at the library and in Righetti’s house, apart from establishing an eerie mood, indicates not only the killer’s presence, but also seems symbolically to imply her psychic abilities.
Marcus manages to find the big old house, where Martha stabbed her husband, through whoever ordered rare plants for it as seen in the photo of the house he tore from the library book. People in the neighouring area insist that the house is haunted (presumably by the husband’s ghost). As Marcus is looking around inside the house, we hear Goblin playing a kind of blues riff in E: in the tonic, it’s E, E, E (octave higher)-D-B, D, B, A-A♯-B-C; this is heard on the guitar and bass. The riff is elongated way beyond the usual 12-bar pattern, though.
I wonder if Marcus unknowingly has psychic abilities, too, for with the most minuscule of clues, a slight dab of red showing in a hole in a wall, he has a hunch that it’s significant…and he’s right. He cuts away at the rest of that area of the wall to uncover a child’s picture of the stabbing of Martha’s husband, with a child holding up the bloody knife next to the man’s bloody corpse. It looks as though the boy killed him…though another part of the picture remains uncovered for the moment–Martha, to the far left.
As for the other red herring of the movie, Carlo is meant to be understood, for the moment, as having stabbed his father, for we learn that he’s the boy who’s drawn not just this picture, but also another one of the same crime in a school, his name signed on it. His drawings, as we’ll learn, aren’t confessions, though: they’re expressions of the trauma he suffered at having witnessed his father’s violent murder. Here is another example of artistic expression that his mother will never accept.
To get back to Martha’s uncanny way of always knowing exactly when Marcus will be in a place, it must be her who knocks him out, right on cue, when he finds the corpse of her husband in that walled-in room in the big old house. I don’t believe Carlo stabbed Gianna in the school at the climax of the film, because I simply don’t think the feckless drunk had the guts to do it; I think his mother was there, too, him accompanying her this one time and telling her he’d shoot Marcus instead, so she wouldn’t kill his friend. When about to kill Marcus in Ullman’s home at the end of the film, she says Carlo never killed anybody, and I believe her.
Indeed, in Ullmann’s home, when Marcus has realized he saw the killer’s face in the mirror reflection rather than a face in a painting, Martha appears right on cue again, ready to kill him. Such coincidences, I feel, are far too meaningful for her not to have psychic abilities to tell her exactly where he is and what he is doing.
But her stereotypical ‘male’ behaviour–wearing that ‘mannish’ brown raincoat and hat, her violence showing considerable (supernatural?) physical strength for a woman of her age–represents the wrong way to break free from the constraints of the traditional female role. Gianna’s rational way of breaking free is much better.
After wounding Marcus with the meat cleaver in Ullmann’s home, Martha’s necklace gets caught in the bars of the elevator; he activates it, and the stuck necklace cuts her head off. So in having lost her head over her unhappiness at seeing her acting career brought to an end, Martha literally loses her head at the end of the film. All that deep red trying to come out, to emerge from the deep and be expressed, finally does come out…but it’s hers, rather than Marcus’s.
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