The psychoanalytic trap in Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

In horror cinema, psychoanalysis remains the dominant methodology for interpreting the relationship between gender and genre, both in terms of characters within the diegesis and the extradiegetic cinematic spectator. This Oedipalization of horror cinema relies on the disturbing sight/site of female sexuality, the embodiment of male fears of dispossession and castration. However, as Donato Totaro points out, such psychoanalytical models of horror cinema rely mainly on analyses of the American cinematic tradition, rooted in a puritanical tradition; as such, they fail to account for the more liberal ‘gender-political range’ of European horror cinema. Totaro points out that,

in the European horror film there are many instances where (a) the victims are exclusively or mainly male, and (b) the male victim/hero is sexually attracted to the female killer, not repulsed, as with the monstrous-feminine, and hence there can be no disavowal of her femininity.

2002

In this article, I use Dario Argento’s directorial debut, L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), as a demonstrative paradigm of Totaro’s argument concerning the limitations of psychoanalytical models in relation to international horror cinema, where the killer is as likely to be female as male and female sexuality is not predetermined as monstrous, but rather provides a place of renegotiation of gendered norms. Specifically, I utilize Deleuze’s taxonomy of the time-image in order to explore the multiple ways in which The Bird With the Crystal problematizes not only the process of detection, but also the very possibility of detection, a process that calls into question the applicability of psychoanalysis to specific forms of horror cinema, represented here in the form of the Italian giallo.