Euro Horror by Olney Ian;

Author:Olney, Ian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

Masculinity compromised: amateur sleuth Sam Dalmas is unmanned at the climax of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Universal Marion Corporation).

Courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger Archives

The same is true, I would argue, of Argento’s use of the female killer in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. If the director manages both to undercut the conventions of the traditional detective story and to provoke gender trouble by making his detective somewhat less than a man, he also does so by making his killer something more than a woman. From the opening sequence, in which we witness the murder of the killer’s latest victim through the killer’s eyes – a montage of point-of-view shots shows us the black-gloved killer composing a letter to the police on a typewriter, snapping voyeuristic photographs of a young woman, caressing a collection of long, phallic knives fetishistically laid out on red velvet – Argento carefully deploys the gender markers that are associated, both in horror cinema and in the criticism of it, with the male killer. In subsequent scenes, he reinforces the idea that the killer is a man by having the two male protagonists – Inspector Morosini (who early in the film puts together a lineup composed entirely of men for Dalmas to inspect) and Sam Dalmas (who suspects that Alberto Ranieri is the killer) – assume this as well. Thus when it is revealed at the conclusion of the film that the killer is a woman, Morosini, Dalmas, and the audience are forced to confront and reexamine the fact that we tend to rely upon fixed conceptions about gender that have little or no correlation to the complex and mutable reality of performed subjectivity. The mocking laughter Monica Ranieri unleashes in the face of Dalmas’s (and our) astonishment at her “true identity” – as well as the further revelation that she is a female victim reenacting the role of a male killer – denies the efficacy of such conceptions, pointing the way to a more provisional understanding of gender identity. Once again, Argento twists the conventions of the traditional detective story in order to prompt our recognition that gender is not simply a biological fact, but also a performative act.

It could be argued that the subversion of gender in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is only temporary and ultimately downplayed by the film’s final scenes, which seem to reaffirm the dominant view of gender by simultaneously invoking and repressing “the nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine” (Creed 63). This seems to be the interpretation favored by Hunt and other critics of the film. What such a reading ignores, however, are the multiple ways in which Argento draws out and emphasizes the queer tendencies of the horror film. If his “opposition of an active and aggressive feminine with a passive and helpless masculine is used to undermine the assumptions that we place onto the thriller as a genre” (Needham, “Bird” 90), it also works to undermine the assumptions we have about gender – to reveal it as fluid rather than fixed, as performed rather than received.

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