The Rotten Wombs of Suspiria
An deep dive into the meaning of 2018’s Suspiria
“the struggle between … the past and the future over the souls of the present”
In 2018, acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino released his long awaited remake of Suspiria. The original, a 1977 cult film by the legendary Dario Argento, is a beloved staple of both horror fans and film nerds, however this ‘mirror’ version was not warmly received. Audiences expected a campy, technicolour 90 minute fever dream; instead they got an opaque, serpentine horror-melodrama that stretches over 2.5 hours. The ballet classes are swapped out for contemporary dance, and the signature vibrant red that dominates Argento’s film is muted throughout most of Guadagnino’s.
Though this new offering (“It’s a cover”, insists lead actress Tilda Swinton in multiple interviews) may take a few viewings to understand, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich were thankfully explicit about their choices and intentions. In a conversation with Collider, Kajganich explained that their story is about the struggle between “the past and the future over the souls of the present,” a kind of exploration of how Fascism works. “A lot of people stand by and let it work,” he said, “or are drawn to it because they’re emotionally invited in somehow and they don’t have to commit crimes themselves.”
While many have written off this film as yet another sub par remake/reboot, this version of Suspiria has haunted me ever since my first watch. Susie Bannion and the witches of the Markos Dance Academy planted their hooks deep in my chest, and I don’t think I’ll ever be free. There’s so much knowledge in this movie, and I feel compelled to dig in and show it to everyone. There is something very old that lies within these frames, something powerful. And that’s the catch: Suspiria is all about power. It’s about who has it, who wants it, and what it costs to get it.
“when it shines on you, it’s addictive”
The story follows a coven of witches in 1977 Berlin disguised as the Markos Dance Academy, and they are struggling to decide who will be their next leader. Our ambitious protagonist Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at the academy in a vulnerable, transitory state after leaving her religious family in rural America. Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) runs the academy and is trying to take the place of the coven’s sickly leader Mother Markos (also Tilda Swinton). Like the coven, the city of Berlin is divided. Many young people are demanding retribution for the WWII crimes of their elders, and as the Cold War rages on, a series of political assassinations and kidnappings has thrown most of the city into chaos. In the opening scene, we meet Dr. Josef Klemperer (again, Tilda Swinton), a psychoanalyst who struggles with grief, guilt and denial. When he isn’t investigating the disappearance of his patient, a Markos student, he waits for his wife to return to their East Berlin home after she went missing during WWII. All of these characters are struggling to survive. They all have generational trauma, and they all feel righteous in their pursuit of power.
Through these storylines, Suspiria explores the power structures that build within systems of oppression and repression. Kajganich explained to the New Yorker that this coven needed to create “private sources of power because they aren’t allowed to have them publicly”. And these witches do ‘blend in’ by avoiding the typical ‘witchy’ tropes — they aren’t really evil caricatures or tragic victims of zealotry. They’re grounded, resourceful and autonomous. They feel like complete human beings, and it’s only as we learn more about their history, their frustrations, and their aspirations that we understand how nefarious they really are.
Madame Blanc’s character, for example, is initially framed as someone to be revered. Sarah, a dancer at the academy, breathlessly describes her as “incredible. The way she transmits her work, her energy. When it shines on you, it’s addictive.” She then adds “she kept the company alive through the war… when the Reich just wanted women to shut off their minds and keep their uteruses open.” On the surface, this sounds noble, but there’s an ominous subtext. We never learn what Blanc had to do to keep the company alive. What allegiances did she strike? What did she give up? Blanc uses empathy to disguise her agenda, selling empowerment to the young impressionable students as she and the coven manipulate them into ultimately sacrificing their bodies. Every word that she speaks is a kind of manipulation. Her goal is to ensure the survival of her coven. At no point is she concerned with the autonomy, well-being or freedom of her students.
The witches justify their loyalty to Markos because she claims to be the reincarnation of their deity, Mother Suspiriorum. They talk of openings and rebirth, but they are only interested in maintaining the structures that already exist. In the final act, after being groomed by the coven to sacrifice her body, Susie reveals that she is actually the all mighty Suspiriorum. Markos and her followers have unintentionally unleashed a being more powerful than any of them ever imagined. Susie-now-Suspiriorum kills Markos for her heresy and punishes those that followed Markos instead of Blanc, leaving a bloody mess in her wake.
“if we talk about the great mother, we cannot deny the terrible mother”
An insurmountable amount of anticipation and excitement greeted the release of the new Suspiria, but the initial critical reception was at best confused. Even the most generous reviews conceded that the movie was too long and too abstract. For every review like Bloody Disgusting, who called it as “beautiful as it is confusing”, there were reviews like the one in NME, who wrote “the greatest horror is how average it is”, or in Exclaim, who said “it’s a horror film that’s too ridiculous to be scary.” The New Yorker skewered the movie, stating “the filmmakers shoehorn the Holocaust into the film”, and then lamented the “Wikipedic superficiality and political frivolity with which these grand historical and psychological themes are applied to the gory drama.”
Instead of engaging with the themes of structural power and resistance, many critics focused on what they felt was a problematic representation of women. The Washington Post worried about sending a message that a “woman with a great amount of power is someone who should be feared”. In his review, Michael O’Sullivan writes that there’s “a thin line between indicting the male gaze, as Guadagnino claims to have intended, and revelling in it.”
In a conversation between Jezebel and Guadagnino, critic Rich Juzwiak asked whether the director saw “any irony in making a movie that is explicitly anti-patriarchy yet directed and written by men?” After several back and forths, Guadagnino referenced a book called The Great Mother as a way of explaining his approach to this story. “If we talk about the Great Mother,” he said, “we cannot deny the terrible mother. True feminism is something that doesn’t shy away from the complexity of the female identity. It’s not about sugarcoating and saying, ‘They’re good; men are bad”. He added “I feel that this movie is, in fact, about the relationship between women, mostly.”
What so many critics assumed is that because this story has a female cast, it must be about Women (and therefore must represent all women). O’Sullivan and others assume that the male gaze is present because women are onscreen, projecting power with their bodies. But the camera does not sexualize them, nor does anyone else on screen. In fact, the only time anyone mentions sexuality is in an asexual context. The lack of a male gaze may even provide a kind of relief for viewers. Here, the omnipresent threat of male violence, so common in horror films, is distant and obscure. In Guadagnino’s Suspiria, we are free to understand these women and their relationships to each other, however good or bad they may be, outside of their proximity to men.
“only space for me”
In order to stay in power, Mother Markos insists on increasingly elaborate and violent rituals. Blanc struggles to meet her demands while also trying to assume leadership of the coven - she fails to do either. Under the pressure of her dying mother figure, Blanc agrees to prepare Susie for their final ritual. Blanc explains that Susie must “empty” herself, “so that her work can live within you”. Markos repeats this sentiment when she gleefully tells Susie how the ritual will end. “There will be nothing of you left inside. Only space for me!”.
Markos and Blanc both echo the fascist propaganda that severely impacted generations of women in Germany throughout the last century. The coven, having lived through WWII, survived a government that wanted to force them to be pregnant (see the US Holocaust Museum’s article about Lebensborn homes) or classify their childless-ness as a moral flaw (see the Eugenics archive about the sterilisation and euthanasia programs). And though 1977 is long after the fall of the Nazi government, their perversions of motherhood continued to thrive.
A 2019 article in Scientific American detailed the abysmal legacy of Johanna Haarer, a pulmonologist who became a leading childcare ‘expert’ under the Nazi regime. Her abusive teachings were accepted by the state and used to initially indoctrinate over 3 million women with techniques on ‘caring for’ (read: neglecting and abusing) their babies. Her lessons were specifically designed to break the bond between children and parents in order to meet the needs of the Nazi government, who wanted young people to be “tough, unemotional and unempathetic”. The result was that many children developed severe attachment disorders, leading to multiple generations of trauma. From Scientific American:
Haarer viewed children, especially babies, as nuisances whose wills needed to be broken. “The child is to be fed, bathed, and dried off; apart from that left completely alone,” she counselled. She recommended that children be isolated for 24 hours after the birth. … “Whatever you do, do not pick the child up from his bed, carry him around, cradle him, stroke him, hold him on your lap, or even nurse him.”
There are terrible mothers all throughout Suspiria, the coven being the most obvious example. The witches survived an oppressive system that sought to co-opt their bodies, which then feeds their justification for doing the same thing to their students. Markos doesn’t just insist on loyalty from her subjects, she seeks to override their entire identities, a direct reflection of Haarer’s teachings. Blanc references rebirth and renewal when explaining her choreography/spellwork, but the forces she is trying to bring forth are old and corrupted. The longer Markos clings to power, the more unstable and violent she becomes, and the more rebellion becomes inevitable. The poison of her womb infects each new generation, and the violence escalates.
“you can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz”
Setting this version of Suspiria in 1977 Berlin was an intentional choice. Kajganich told Inverse “Luca and I decided to imagine the original [Suspiria] was a fever dream made in 1977, but wasn’t about 1977”. Guadagnino added “we thought the mirroring [of history] to whatever happens in the coven was a good way to do this movie.” They set their dance academy right outside the Berlin wall as a visual representation of the divided society, and added several references in their script to The German Autumn, anchoring the supernatural story to the real world. (An excellent 2018 Vulture article by Nate Jones provides additional context to the specific events that Suspiria references, like the kidnapping of the banker Jürgen Ponto, and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight.)
Decades after the war, a new generation of Germans began to demand accountability from their elders, many of whom were ‘former’ nazis who faced few consequences for their crimes and continued to work as doctors, CEOs, and heads of state. After exhausting all avenues of protest, a group of people formed The Red Army Faction (RAF), a.k.a. The Baader-Meinhof group, to push back against the state. When the police murdered unarmed student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967, Gudrun Ensslin (an RAF founder) called on her followers to take up arms, saying “You know what kinds of pigs we’re up against. This is the generation of Auschwitz we’ve got against us. You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz.” By the German Autumn of 1977, the RAF was on its second generation of fighters, with the original leaders all in prison or dead. Their actions against Nazis targets caused the deaths of numerous bystanders, and their efforts became entangled with the anti-war, anti-capitalist protest from many different international groups.
The explosive force of the RAF and the German Autumn was a consequence of the old fascist guard clinging to power under the guise of propping up capitalism. And though the RAF was ultimately destroyed, the financial deregulation and rampant wealth hoarding that took off in the 1980’s has become an existential threat to all of our lives today. This same dynamic plays out within the coven. Though Markos is rotting away and the witches are running out of time, no one is willing to radically change their ways. Following a dying leader puts their own survival in jeopardy, and yet that is the path they choose. Some of them, like Blanc, do challenge Markos, but still they all fall in line, every one of them. As a consequence of their dogma, they awaken Mother Suspiriorum, which leaves the coven in shambles and sets loose a terrifying new force.
“without memory, even the most painful of memories, we are nothing”
The character of Dr Josef Klemperer is probably the most confusing (but crucial) addition to Suspiria. Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton decided she should disguise herself as a fictional German non-actor ‘psychoanalyst’ (they named him Lutz Ebersdorf) to play the doctor in the film. This way, Swinton would play Markos as the Freudian Id (infantile, needy, driven by instinctual want), Blanc as the Ego (constantly placating, rationalising, and negotiating with Markos) and Klemperer as the SuperEgo, someone who sets the moral standards for the trio. He is essentially the film’s conscience — his lived experience from the war is why he understands the forces at play within the academy. “You can give someone your delusion — that’s religion,” he offers as a rational explanation for the coven’s supernatural beliefs. “That was the Reich.”
Klemperer is driven by the hope that his wife Anke, who disappeared during the war, may still be alive. As someone who witnessed many of the war’s atrocities, he also holds guilt for having survived, for having stood by (as many, many people did) while others died. The witches hone in on this guilt and target him for their ritual. “You had years to get your wife out of Berlin,” they scream as they drag him into their basement. They force their rage onto him, force him to bear their pain and witness their power, even though his punishment could never absolve the sins of an entire generation.
Because Klemperer holds the moral compass in this film, it’s only fitting that the final scene is a confrontation between him and the new power — Mother Suspiriorum. “I regret what my daughters did to you” she whispers as he sits frozen in terror. Under the guise of divine compassion, she reveals his wife’s tragic fate, and in doing so destroys his last bit of hope. Before he can say or do anything, she erases his memories. “We need guilt, Doctor, and shame, but not yours” she says. He never asks to be relieved of his guilt, and she never gives him a chance to refuse.
In a conversation with Vulture, Guadagnino explains the ending. “You feel that something good has happened to a beloved character. But in truth, it’s a monstrous act. Without memory, even the most painful of memories, we are nothing. We are not human. So the person who wipes off the memory is really a villain.” Suspiriorum tampers with the historical record when she robs Klemperer of his identity. This is an explicit form of Holocaust denial, something the US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls Holocaust distortion, the purpose of which is to obscure the historical record and thwart the ‘never again’ lessons of the Holocaust.
If Suspiriorum’s power is infinite, so is her capability to abuse that power. Out of all the blood and horror throughout Suspiria, this final quiet scene is the most painful, violent moment in the film. We are left with the haunting question — if no one remembers our past mistakes, how can we ever prevent them from happening again?
“I thought I wanted it, I let it happen”
“I want this to be pure” says Blanc in her final moments, as if purity could ever be attained. Her sentiment is a nod to the fascist authoritarianism that runs through the entire coven. Fascism as a rule insists on defining a correct (pure) and incorrect way of existing, where the correct way is godly and divine, and the incorrect way is degenerate and evil. And though we often talk about fascism in a historical or political context (like author Jason Stanley, who writes that “we are now in fascism’s legal phase”), understanding the emotional pathway to such a violent philosophy is difficult for many to grasp. Suspiria makes that pathway explicit. In the face of trauma and scarcity, we all crave power. And if we are hungry enough, we will surrender our own autonomy to get it.
Patricia, one of the dance students, lays out the entire film for Dr Klemperer in the opening scene. “At the beginning they gave me things,” she says, “but they took my hair, they took my urine, they took my eyes.” Though Klemperer tries to calm her, she’s too rattled to listen. “She wants to get inside of me,” she whispers, “I thought I wanted it. I let it happen.” There is so much heartbreak in these lines, especially knowing what lies ahead. The witches, though they may have been in opposition to the Nazis’s brand of fascism, are manipulative, militant and controlling; they are the definition of authoritarian.
Every moment in Suspiria feels haunted and oppressive. Guadagnino refuses to tell us whether a character is good or bad, which is what makes Suspiria so uncomfortable. Morality could never be categorized in such a binary way. On some level, Blanc may care for Susie. Susie herself is definitely drawn to the coven, and one could argue that maybe she chooses her fate. Of course, under the ‘guidance’ of Blanc and the influence of Suspiriorum, does Susie choose anything at all? Within systems of oppression, how much choice do any of us really have? When our survival depends on profit, the allure of power, no matter how small, or how destructive, calls to all of us. We are all fallible and corruptible, because we all grow from the same rotten womb.
Every time I watch this Suspiria, I am filled with dread. This is a story about the kind of fascism that numbs our pain while our wounds fester, the kind that warps our real world anxieties into hatred towards our friends and neighbours. And even though I know how this story will end, I still hope with every viewing that these mothers maybe aren’t that terrible. Maybe their actions come from a place of love instead of a twisted need to control. Part of me wonders — if I had the chance, would I let them numb my pain too?
I slip under their spell, every time.
BC — nov 2022 —
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- A German History Primer for the Confused Suspiria Viewer published by Nate Jones in Vulture on October 30th, 2018
- A Negative Trajectory in the Arc of Holocaust Memory published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- American is now in facsism’s legal phase published by Jason Stanley in The Guardian on December 22nd, 2021
- Baader Meinhof — In Love With Terror a 2002 BBC documentary directed by Ben Lewis and researched by Nina Bröer
- Director Luca Guadagnino on Assaulting the Senses and Indicting Patriarchy in Suspiria published by Rich Juzwiack in Jezebel on October 25th, 2018
- Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today published by Anne Kratzer in Scientific American on January 4th, 2019
- How Suspiria turns the color red into a plot point published by Aja Romano in Vox on November 8th, 2018
- Luca Guadagnino’s Cinema of Desire published by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker on October 8th, 2018
- Luca Guadagnino Reveals Dakota Johnson’s Secret Second Role in Suspiria published by Nate Jones in Vulture on October 24th, 2018
- Postwar trials and denazification part of The Holocaust Explained educational resources at The Wiener Holocaust Library
- Red Army Faction on Wikipedia
- Review: Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” Is the Cinematic Equivalent of a Designer Che T-Shirt published by Richard Brody in The New Yorker on October 30th, 2018
- Selling Motherhood: The Nazi Attempt to Increase the Master Race published by Abigail Hartley for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on January 16th, 2020
- ‘Suspiria’ film review — the Thom Yorke-scored horror remake delivers style over scares published by Greg Wetherall in NME on September 4th, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’ is a beautiful mess and stars Tilda Swinton in three roles and don’t ask us what it means published by Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post on October 31st, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’ Is a Silly Movie but a Good Thom Yorke Music Video published by Alex Hudson in Exclaim! on October 22, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’ is Its Own Beast, Casting a Hypnotic Spell That’s Sure to Divide Audiences published by Meagan Navarro in Bloody Disgusting on September 24th, 2018
- Suspiria review — dancing on the grave of a horror classic published by Mark Kermode in The Guardian on November 18th, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’ Screenwriter David Kajganich & Jessica Harper on Making Sense of the Madness published by Haleigh Foutch in Collider on November 3rd, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’ Screenwriter Explains That Wild Ending and Why Dakota Johnson Is a New Kind of Final Girl published by Jamie Righetti in Indie Wire on November 7th, 2018
- ‘Suspiria’: Why It Dropped Ballet and Became a Cold War Period Movie published by Eric Francisco in Inverse on November 2nd, 2018
- The Eugenics Archive — Germany maintained by Laura Shaw
- Upper-class traitor Chuck Collins on how “wealth hoarding” will create more Trumps published by Chauncey Devega in Salon on April 13th 2021
- What exactly is ‘Suspiria’ trying to say about witches and feminism? We break it down for you published by Sonia Rao in The Washington Post on November 2nd, 2018
- Why The ‘Suspiria’ Choreography Isn’t About The Male Gaze published by Kelsea Stahler in Bustle on November 6th, 2018
- Women in the Third Reich published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Holocaust Encyclopedia
