[film club] Her Private Hell

Our resident surrealist shares his semi-automatic thoughts on Nicolas Winding Refn's newly-minted sci-fi thriller. Is the pinnacle of Ripperology in the 21st-Century Achieved through "It Girl" Giallobrutalism?

MY PRIVATE HELLDVMP

(being a semi-automatic and sensationalizing free association immediately after seeing the movie…)

The Bladed Features of this Metal-Blve work of Pvblic Art Foretells Obscure Deaths in the Mist by Yet-Another-Ripper!

LAST GIRL OR FINAL RIPPER?

Is the pinnacle of Ripperology in the 21st-Century Achieved through (How Ironic!) It-Girl Giallobrutalism?

Dreamslog pacing and internal pain converge with caked-on Baby Jane sci-fi make-up and heavy metal jewelry.

Or maybe this film would get better ratings if they considered it not as a “sci-fi” thing or a giallo-manqué, but as a serious work of science fiction looking to challenge dullnesses, genre expectations, striving to derange the senses in a new way… “Sci-fi” fans are notoriously conservative in taste and are ironically the furthest from wanting to see actual films from the future. This one is probably going to need to stew in the vaults for a while before the public catches up to it.

As hinted this immediately brought to mind Ella Dorn’s recent blog post on “giallobrutalism.” The centred shots of glamourous “It Girls”, the overweening architectural presence of the Tower Hotel, the Italianate emphasis on fashion and photography, cool buildings and objets d’art… And of course beyond atmospheric sensibility, the pure giallo action tropes: leather gloved nigh-cryptid faceless killer, the brutal orgasmic quality of the killings, the nightmarish pinks and reds…

However it is not really a giallo, in the end, it is Science Fiction with Giallo Characteristics. But it is very literary, new wave adjacent science fiction unused to appearing on-screen. The cognitive estrangement arises not from “tech” as such… Very little tech appears (a cellphone and vague references to social media, embodied more in selfie posturing, CRT televisions in a Japanese storefront window…) Rather the leap comes about because of (not so?) strange psychospatial dynamics. The high-dynastic Oedipal positioning catches weird signals in the air: a mytho-poetic monster, strange Butoh-like feminine heralds, and a historical paradox best left to ponder in the basement of a freaky Uniform Party… All this comes together under the aegis of monumental structures, bizarre futurist sculptures in the mist, and massive conapts in which chamber dramas play out amid empty hallways, mood lighting and shrieking interior design.

Filmic science fiction usually doesn’t go this route, and almost never makes critical metapoints about the genre itself. We need to look to 70s American genre boundary-pushers to make a proper comparison to the kind of science fiction on display here. The Japanese postwar antique dealing slipstream evokes Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The imposing architecture, specifically the conapt-like megastructures (where you live and spy on your neighbours and die horribly, vertically) brings to mind the structure-sexual paratopia of Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside. (Indeed the whole film is deeply inside, including inside the mist).

What I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in film is the depiction of “genre sci-fi” from within a proper SF film. We need to go again to books, to sordid psychosexual underbelly of meta-SF that deals explicitly with the Freudian implications of genre authorship as a novum in itself. See for example the repressive wonder of Barry Malzberg’s Herovit’s World. Doubly funny here too because the “sci fi” adaptation the girls are undertaking is from a golden age comic book. Who knows if we just witnessed the ritual murder of superhero movies once and for all, at least, on the spectral plane?

Dorn’s essay makes a point of highlighting intra-temporal referentiality of the Giallobrutalist sensibility. The 70s-does-30s style markers infects the genetic code of a distinctly 21st century aggregation. What works deliciously in this film is the heretofore missing element to this equation… Isn’t the giallo genre precisely missing that time travel / slipstream mechanism to fully explain its ability to leap across the eras? As Samuel Delany argues, science fiction at the linguistic level tends to make metaphor literal. We have here a literalizing embodiment of the layered timelapse aesthetics described in the giallobrutalism essay… A convergence of some kind of multiple timelines here resulting in the on-screen mixing of literal aesthetics, fashion, outfits. Leather across the ages. Time-traveling zippo lighters. This film might actually give us a kind of SF etiology for the cinematic possibility of giallobrutalism itself.

It’s also worth mentioning that it materially refrains from the ultimate science fiction temptation, the “infodump”. There is only a single infodump in the entire film, that of The Leatherman, and it is entirely given at the level of mythopoeisis/cryptozoology. It is almost unheard of for even a classic “sci-fi” film to forego this opportunity to set the scene, let alone something made in the hyperverbose era of Netflixogenic scripting.

Also maybe it’s because a ton of the found footage VHS tapes I’ve been scanning through recently contain episode after episode of Bold and the Beautiful, but there was something distinctly TV-soap and uncinematic about the purposefully stilted acting, repetitive dialogue and suppressed overtalkative melodramatics. It added an interesting banal flavour to such a rich “cinema heavy” arthouse piece like this. Not dissimilar to giallo in that respect, although perhaps more emotionally manipulative than those tend to be. The mostly orchestral Donaggio score also gave it something of a formalist remove. This also tempered the giallo-ness a bit because there’s no techno-prog heavy Goblin murder theming, but the other pole of giallomusik, highly chromatic orchestral tone poems without distinct leitmotifs. This is probably for the best to avoid giving The Leatherman Darth Vader vibes.

Sophie Thatcher’s is an ultrasoporific, high-vampiric haunt, channeling the trve kvlt origins of cinematic aura itself in the evil-being-there of Musidora. Demonic asymmetric grin worthy of a lurid Les Blank close-up. She is the great “not-It” girl here, overlayered and burdened, hunched, gloomy, a kid from Gormenghast struggling against her inner demons to play a kitschy Barberella. It is a dark, nigh-Enochian process to suffer through.

It’s neither “near future” nor “space opera”. But somehow with its edge setting “daddy” driven plot it manages to be more mythic than anything lately involving Thor, or Odysseus, or the Skywalkers parading around like video game characters. It’s rare that something can both have that mythopoetic quality while being simultaneously pulpy and lurid. But Giallo always was good at that…