Opera may not be Dario Argento’s best film but in many ways it is the purest distillation of his vision. It also concludes his classic giallo era by present the genre as a descendant of opera. Just as opera is the quintessential Italian musical form, so giallo, Argento seems to reason, is the quintessential Italian cinema genre. Of course, Argento is also making a case for Opera as his own magnum opus, pulling out all the stops for one of the most visually extravagant films of his career. On the face of it, the plot is quite familiar from his previous work – a serial killer is stalking young women, this time in and through the architecture of an opera theatre. Yet this theatre quickly becomes Argento’s closest ever approximation to the hyperreal image economy that he posits as the domain of these serial killers. In a sense, Argento here reaches the limit of his cinematic vision in his effort to evoke an emergent world of networked images.
As in both Phenomena and Tenebrae, Argento uses animal vision as a way of approximating this new media regime that is so amenable to the gaze of the serial killer. Yet where Phenomena focused on the compound gaze of insects, Opera is more interested in avian sight. In both cases, we’re presented with an animal perception that is fused with flight and that brokers a new access to the elaborate cranes and pans that typically emanate from the serial killer’s presence in Argento’s career. However, the birds of Opera offer an even more panoptic perspective, partly because of how eerily they mirror and are mirrored by the architecture of the theatre itself. The film opens with a close-up of a crow’s eye, whose curvature reflects the curvature of the theatre, offering the eye itself as a venue for the events that are about to unfold. It turns out this crow is one of an entire flock that are being deployed during a particularly baroque staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth. Along with opera, then, the film stretches for Shakespearean grandeur in its efforts to distill giallo to its sublime apotheosis.
With camera, gaze and venue so collapsed, the film confounds any distinction between first and third person. We are never entirely dissociated from the killer’s gaze but never permitted to properly inhabit it either, instead tracing a series of complex trajectories around it that results in some of the most extravagant sequence shots of Argento’s entire career. The camera is continually tracking through space, always on the verge of taking flight, roving its way through one hyperactive exploratory avenue after another. In Argento’s earlier films, the killer nearly always wore black leather gloves or kept his trophies in containers backed by black velvet. Here, that black glossy tactility has been absorbed into the feathers of the crows, which in turn imbues the killer’s gaze, and the camera that embodies it, with a peculiarly textural intensity. At key moments throughout the narrative, Argento juxtaposes shots of a brain pulsing with the sound of a heartbeat thudding while the camera itself vibrates in sympathy. Here, we come close to the very core of giallo – a conflation of brain, gaze and touch that turns the camera into a thinking and feeling entity as much as a visual surrogate.
By this stage, there are no more vestiges of the neorealist street in Argento’s filmic vision either. Virtually all the action takes place in the theatre, or adjacent to the theatre, and on the rare occasions that we truly stray away from it, we’re immediately hypermediated back into its purview via a proliferation of recording equipment. Indeed, the theatre itself is fused with an intricate bank of televisions and staging interfaces, which are used to mediate its productions to the outside world. Since we see very little of that outside world, however, the effect is one of being caught inside a continuous feedback loop, in which mediation succeeds mediation, and images multiply into further images. Animal perception is this fused with emergent media in order to approximate the networked gaze of Argento’s serial killer muse.
Crafted in and through this escalating hypermediation, the film’s tableaux are palpably physical yet oddly virtual – a field of melting, coalescing, half-former objects that seem to position as between the eyeball and the world, or on the surface of the eye, in a space that is somehow both liquid and solid at the same time. These mise-en-scenes are mirrored in the enormous backward pans that concave space as they move away from it, as if the entire film were being sucked into the ambit of a giant omniscient eye. Increasingly, this absorbs the compound insect gazes of Phenomena too, as in a pan out from a woman working on a dress that blurs with close-ups of and through the prismatic gemstones that she is fitting in place.
Even without a serial killer narrative, this aesthetic would make for a film in which every image evoked eye trauma or eye exhilaration – an ocular sublime. Yet Opera also presents us with Argento’s most ocular killer, whose modus operandi consists of attached a pair of spiked tips to the top of singer Betty’s (Cristina Marsillach) eyebrows, meaning that if “you try to close your eyes you’ll tear them apart.” Forced to look on at his horrific tableau or lose her eyesight altogether, Betty’s trauma is condensed to her eyes, as is that of the audience, who are continually subjected to POV of the spikes along with close-ups of their metal tips right up against the curvature and tissue of the eyeball. This is the visceral centrepiece of Argento’s career, the degree zero of his fixation on the eye as both subject and venue of horror, and as such it is remarkably difficult to watch, even when it is ostensibly over. For not only does the killer repeat this torment several times but Betty can only recover with the aid of eye drops that further obscure her vision, as we realise through a fresh batch of POV shots. It is as if the killer has insinuated himself onto the very surface of her eyes – and of the audience’s eyes.
In that sense, the killer of Opera is not unlike a director – or a surrogate for Argento’s own direction. He revels in a captive audience, and particularly relishes commanding the female gaze, while ensuring the one thing that she (and we) cannot see is his own face. In contrast to this director-killer, all the other characters feel somewhat blinded, as their (and our) eyeball is getting in the way of sight, occluding perception through its blunt physicality. Betty and the other members of the opera crew therefore have to mobilise an army of animal eyeballs to combat him – the flock of crows that they unleash in the theatre. These crows propel the camera to its apex of hyper-mobility, as it circles and swoops precariously around the upper echelons of the theatre before careening down across the audience, like a POV from the falling chandelier in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. Eventually the crows identify the serial killer, or rather identify his eye, which one of them plucks out, holds in its beak, swallows and then regurgitates it at such an angle that it stares directly at the audience. Like the scene with the eye-spikes, this brings us to a visceral kernel of Argento’s oeuvre – a longing for a networked vision that is animalistic, disembodied and virtual all at the same time. It is, in that sense, the logical endpoint of his high giallo style and sensibility.
Accordingly, the epilogue of Opera plays as a kind of potted retrospective and reflection of giallo, by way of Phenomena. With the killer apparently dead, we shift to a close-up of a fly that has been caught twice – first, in a string, second, on the screen of a camera. Only after Argento pulls back do we realise this insect perception has once again been embedded in the Swiss Alps, where Betty has retreated to deal with the trauma of the opera theatre. The camera pans up the same bank of trees that back the credits of Phenomena, the serial killer emerges once again, and Betty uses his own gaze against him, pretending to be enamoured with crimes for the time it takes for help to arrive. Rather than return to the local town with her rescuers, however, she immerses herself even more fully in the world of animal perception, crawling through the grass, professing her love for insects and butterflies, and finally coming face to face with a lizard: “There my beauty, go free.” In the final moments, this gaze moves beyond lifeforms altogether, as Betty professes her love for the rain, the sky, the clouds – and this transhuman gaze is the last destination in Argento’s classic giallo period, the most extreme point of his camera’s yearning, and the very pinnacle of his amazing career.