Power in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Once Upon a Time in the West

Nina's conception of power can be understood can be understood, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms as a negative one. This concept of power is inspired by Spinoza and Nietzsche (Colebook in Parr, 2005: 215-217). From Spinoza they take the idea of power as potential and of joy the result of fulfilling this potential: “Joy, as the realisation of power, is therefore different from the moral opposition of good and evil, an opposition that impedes power by constraining it within some already given norm.” (215). In itself, this formulation might imply that Nina's murderous activities and desire for revenge are themselves neither good nor evil. Such a reading could accord with a more relativist reading of Nietzsche, insofar as the Christian virtue of forgiveness is read as a slave morality inversion of the preceding master morality of vengeance. This would also accord with the ethics of the Italian western and the vendetta, which Argento has spoken of favourably on occasion [quote from John Martin]. However, Deleuze here emphasises an equally Nietzschean distinction between active and reactive powers: “An active power maximises its potential, pushes itself to its limit and reaffirms the life of which it is but one expression. A reactive power, by contrast, turns back on itself.” (216) Cast in these terms, we may thus distinguish between the positive power of Leone, Bertolucci and Argento's avenger, Harmonica, and the one seeks vengeance upon, Frank, in Once Upon a Time in the West, and Nina and Roberto here.

Harmonica accepts that he is merely one expression of the old west, part of “an ancient race” whose role is now to helps bring into existence a new, feminine, west in which he knows and fully accepts that he has no place. Although Frank initially attempts to use his powers negatively to establish a place for himself in this coming world as a businessman like Morton, this reactive power turns back upon itself. For eventually he positively accepts of his equal obsolescence as one of the ancient race as he and Harmonica finally face off: “The future don't matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. 'Cause I know that now, you'll tell me what you're after.” Regardless of the which man wins this duel, the wider outcome, the birth of the new west, is assured. Their “large form” binominal leads to a new situation. The elegiac qualities of the film depend upon its ambiguity here, as to what this new situation represents: improvement, degeneration or an admixture of both. Cast in these terms, Harmonica and to a lesser extent Frank's becomings, like that of the west itself, are of a deterritorialising, becoming-woman type.

Nina's desire for vengeance upon her father is, by contrast, entirely reactive and negative. As we have seen, she is never positioned as looking towards the future, only the past, through the circling camera work. We get no sense of what her plans for life without her father and/or Roberto are, if any. As such, it makes sense that Nina should die rather than escape when her plans fail. Nina's becoming is of a territorialising, masculine, reactive type, one that can only turns back on itself in a destructive manner.

More work in progress...

[Four Flies on Grey Velvet]

The film's excessive approach, meanwhile, is first signalled by the elaborate proto-music video credits sequence, which cross-cuts between the band's rehearsal and Roberto's being followed around. The sequence functions as a kind of overture to some of the film's themes. For example, the fly that torments Roberto as he plays and eventually manages to squash within the halves of his hi-hat serves to indicate that Roberto is not someone who “wouldn't hurt a fly,” to paraphrase Psycho. Likewise, the overhead and slow-motion shots of drum playing, along with those from inside a guitar and from atop its neck are not just there for their own sake. In part they showcase Argento's increasing self-confidence, that he too can engage in virtuoso displays of technique if he wants to. But they also foreground the circle and the straight line, along with the theme of time itself. A drummer, Roberto is someone whose job it that of a timekeeper; he beats time. Roberto's response when asked by bandmate Mirko (Fabrizio Moroni) if his performance was bad is telling here: “You're missing your cues. You've got to follow me, that's all.”

Another important figure here is that of the cross, seen in slow-motion as Roberto crosses his drumsticks. In Argento and Cozzi's original script cruciform shapes were used as the visual fragments rather than the four flies, with Nina wearing a cross rather than a pendant containing a fly trapped in plastic. Remnants of this idea recur throughout the film, as Roberto is framed within or around cross shapes, although Nina's pendant has the thematic advantages of being circular and of conveying entrapment.

Unlike Mirko, Roberto does not miss his cues: As Mirko departs, Roberto catches sight of his stalker. The man (Calisto Calisti) is a cliché, the by 1971 familiar figure of the giallo heavy or killer. Indeed, although the man's face is visible rather than in shadow, albeit with his eyes hidden behind obscuring sunglasses, Argento has identified him as being modelled upon the killer in Blood and Black Lace. Confronted with this “sensory-motor image of the thing,” Roberto goes immediately from perception, that this is the man who has been following him for the past week, into action, in turning the tables on his stalker; a reveller's throwing confetti onto Roberto cements the two men's association, with the man having blown confetti off his sunglasses in the credits sequence.

Excess, the theatrical and the bringing together of different image sets are then conveyed as Roberto follows the man into an empty theatre, itself strewn with streamers. To enter the auditorium, Roberto passes through no less than four curtains, three a brilliant red and the fourth a rich blue. While his passage through the first two is presented from his point of view, the angle unexpectedly reverses for the third curtain, as if to signal that he has now entered onto another's scene. This other, of course, is Nina. High up in a box, she illuminates Roberto as he unwitting assumes his designated role, responding to each pre-planned situation, S, with the appropriate action, A.

The man pulls a knife and there is a scuffle. What happens is not entirely clear, other than that the man is now lying in the orchestra pit with a bloody wound to his chest and that Roberto has the knife in his hand, with the incident having been captured by the masked photographer, Nina. The point, of course, is that the photographing of the scene and Roberto's decision to take flight without checking the man, establish the truth Nina desired: Roberto, for all practical purposes, has killed a man. Nina's virtual scenario has become actualised by Roberto, determining his future actions. There are perhaps similar situations in Hitchcock, most obviously Kim Novak's virtual Judy becoming her actual Madeline in Vertigo through Scottie's (James Stewarts's) interventions. However, underlying this there is a single truth: Judy and Madeline are the same woman. As such, the closer point of comparison here is Lang. In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), one of a number of Lang films mentioned by Deleuze (2005a: 134). In the film a writer, Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews), sets himself up as the prime suspect for a murder in order to show the problems of circumstantial evidence. Unfortunately for Garrett his friend, who was withholding the evidence that was to prove his innocence, dies in an accident, leaving Garrett sentenced to death. In Lang's film the virtual thus becomes the actual. If this perhaps does not push the time-image to its furthest, in that there at a point the circuit of the two poles chasing after one another breaks down, it is still notably developed for a Hollywood genre film of the time. Whereas Deleuze identified Hitchock's films as being about interpretation, he suggests Lang's are more perspectivist, featuring “A Protagoras-style relativism where judgement expresses the ‘best’ point of view, that is, the relation under which appearances have the best chance of being turned around to the benefit of an individual or of a humanity of higher value” (2005b: 134) Lang is thus a more Nietzschean film-maker than Hitchcock, just as the Langian Four Flies on Grey Velvet is thereby a more Nietzschean and time-image film than the more Hitchcockian and movement-image The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. This is not, however, to say that neither Hitchcock nor the movement-image are absent from Argento's third film. Rather, like its predecessors it is still a hybrid. Nina's pursuit of revenge and use of the powers of the false are juxtaposed with her reliance upon Roberto's predictable reactions and the implicit exchange of culpability and crime between him and Nina's father.

As the story develops, Nina begins her scheme to drive Roberto to the brink as a prelude to his murder. He receives the man's identity card in the mail, then finds photos apparently incriminating him planted amongst his records as they entertain guests, and is then visited for the first time by the masked figure.

The delivery of the identity card is notable for two reasons. First, because of a subtle cut. In the immediately preceding shot, Nina is outside, talking with a neighbour in the foreground as the postman (whom Roberto will later attack as his paranoia mounts) makes a delivery in the background. But when Argento cuts to the apparent reverse angle, as Roberto takes the letter, Nina is back in the house. The connection between the two shots is irrational rather than rational. Time is indeed “out of joint” in a time-image manner. Second, because of where the Tobias's live: 23 via F. Lang. Though at one level an in-joke and another example of the film's excesses, this offers further evidence of Argento's prime influence within the film. (In a similar manner, the grave marked 'Peckinpah' in Leone and Tonino Valerii's My Name in Nobody may not be just a casual reference to another filmmaker, particularly when Jack Beauregard's destruction of “the Wild Bunch” is taken into consideration. Leone, it seems, was determined to 'bury' his rival and his most famous film creation.)

And today's work in progress...

While characterising Argento's cinema in the whole as one of excess, Maitland McDonagh (1992) argues that the concept only becomes truly relevant to his films beginning from Four Flies on Grey Velvet onwards. Although the preceding analysis of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o' Nine Tails would lead me to question whether excess is truly absent from these films, I would agree with McDonagh that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is certainly more pronounced in its excesses. In particular, I will argue the following points. First, that it sees Argento's approach become still more poetic, with an increasing number of images articulating a double consciousness of character and camera. As with its predecessor, these images go beyond the violent set-pieces and centre around the protagonist and antagonist, Roberto and Nina Tobias (Michael Brandon and Mimsy Farmer). Second, that it again sees Argento pursuing his postmodernist strategy of eclectically drawing from both movement-image and time-image cinemas. This time, however, the distinction between the two types of image is more clearly gendered. The male is associated with the movement-image, the female with the time-image. Third, that through the film Argento again makes an implicit, or immanent, critique of dominant models of understanding, associated with science and masculinity in particular. Finally, that in addition to presenting increasingly familiar Argento themes and motifs, such as the irruption of a past trauma into the present; the puzzling aural or visual fragment; the acousmetre; and homosexual characters; the film also introduces some new ones, most notably theatricality.

As noted earlier, Colette Balmain considers all of Argento's gialli of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, along with the filone in general, to be a time-image cinema. Her basic method is taking each film in turn and demonstrating how it incorporates time-image concepts. If I agree with Balmain's method, I obviously disagree with her positioning of Argento as a modernist, time-image film-maker. I would agree, however, with Balmain's key point about Four Flies on Grey Velvet and the time-image, namely that it is a film in which “the powers of the false” are particularly important.

Protagonist Roberto Tobias is the drummer in a rock band. As such, he might be understood as an artist of sorts, and thus the most exalted of the four figures Deleuze considers in relation to the creative powers of the false. However, Roberto's approach to the truth within the film is again a banal one, particularly when he is contrasted with his immediate predecessor, the insightful and imaginative Franco Arno. This also marks out the distinction between Argento as the film-maker-artist and the first of his characters with whom he has been compared by commentators and critics: If Roberto is something of a critical self-portrait of the director, who at the time of the production was involved in a messy separation from his wife, this portrayal relies upon an creative capacity upon Argento's part that his character/creation singularly lacks.

Roberto's predictable responses to images are evident from the ease within which he falls into his wife's trap. This, I think, also helps explain one of the criticisms levelled at the film, that it really does not work terribly well as a whodunit. For example, to David Pirie:

“Full of slick visual conceits and glossy set-pieces, this is clearly Argento's most expensive and ambitious thriller yet. It's the more surprising, therefore, to find that - apart from the ingenious idea of the retinal image which gives the film its title - the script remains as flat and predictable as that of the most meagre Italian 'B' feature. The twist at the climax must be obvious, even to non-specialists in detective fiction, after about the first ten minutes, and it's the makers' apparent unawareness of this which makes much of the action so irritating, since the repeated use of subjective shots, shadows, oblique angles and other assorted devices to cover up the killer's identity slows the proceedings down to a snail's pace. […] The climax, considering how long it has been expected, is […] surprisigly effective [...] The power of the scene confirms that Argento's thriller would have worked much better if he had abandoned his painstaking attempts to disguise the obvious, and concentrated instead on heightening the atmosphere of hysteria and menace which he is clearly quite capable of sustaining.” (1973: ??)

I would argue that Pirie fails to adequately account for the differences between our position as viewer and that of Roberto himself: We may read the clues within the mise-en-scene that Roberto cannot. We may also approach the film with some familiarity with its predecessors, particularly The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the surprise of its having a female rather than male killer. Nonetheless, it must also be re-iterated that at this point in Argento's career this trope still had a critical edge to it and has not yet degenerated into self-parody or pastiche.

Pirie perhaps also occupies a different position from that of the typical audience member, especially as he was here writing for a relatively elite audience. The Monthly Film Bulletin, in which his review appeared, at the time divided films into two categories: Those films deemed to be of especial interest to its readership and everything else. It goes without saying that European genre films were invariably placed in the latter, inferior, category. Related to this there is perhaps also here an implicit positioning of suspense above shock, or of the Hitchcockian “image of mental relations” over the alternatives employed by other directors.

What Pirie's criticisms, along with these possible responses to them, cumulatively suggest is that Four Flies on Grey Velvet pushes many of the creative tensions in Argento's cinema further than its predecessors. It short circuits the whodunit aspect that bit further. The titular fragment, this time a purely visual opsign, of the last image imprinted on the retina of one of Nina's victims, is introduced late on in the narrative. Moreover it does not appear again until the denouement, at which point Nina also explains why she has been persecuting her husband; it is vital that he know why before he dies. Roberto, it turns out, is the spitting-image of Nina's abusive father, who had wanted a son rather than a daughter and had raised her as if she were a boy. Unfortunately for Nina, her father died before she could extract her revenge. She married Roberto with the intention of accomplishing a symbolic revenge upon her father through him, beginning with his persecution and culminating in his murder.

As such, Nina can be positioned as a combination of two other figures who represent the powers of the false. These are the seeker of vengeance and the forger, both of whom we have already seen in different guises within Leone's cinema. Besides being less developed examples of the creative will to power than the artist (or indeed, the philosopher) there are other issues here: Nina's becoming, like that of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, is more negative than positive. While she may be more of a becoming-woman figure than Monica, given her early life as a boy (if we assume her revenge is not also thereby becoming-man) she is unable to go beyond an ultimately destructive need for revenge. Her line of flight, that is, is again blocked.