Idle Hands are the Devil’s Tools: Bava, Sculpture, Shock.

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

With its flimsy veneer of high-school level Freudism, Mario Bava’s final film may on first glance seem like the usual generic stuff: the slightly indulgent meanderings of a one-time champion on his lap of honour. But Shock (1977) – also known as Beyond the Door II, the sequel to Olivio Assonitis’ 1974 mostly unrelated “original” – is if not his finest, then certainly Bava’s most conceptually brazen offering.

Shock is haunted by its own mise-en-scene: it is not simply that the formal and narrative paraphernalia of supernatural eeriness is provided, but that these elements themselves carry a non-diegetic density that far outweighs its internal symbolic function. It is a film more memorable and genuinely haunting than its narrative suggests it should be.

It follows the return of Nora (Daria Nicoladi) and her new husband Bruno (John Steiner) to the house where she once lived with her junkie ex-husband, Carlo. After his apparent suicide – and her own mental collapse – Nora recovers and agrees to try a new life with Bruno in the house with her son by Carlo, the creepy-as-all-get out, googly-eyed freak that is Marco (David Colin Jr., providing the primary connection to the first Beyond the Door despite playing a different character altogether). Things hardly go well – Marco appears to become possessed by the spirit of his dead father and, it is established, has a reason to seek revenge: Nora in fact murdered him in a drug haze after he injects her with heroin. Nora descends further and further into madness until the ultimate tragedy ensues, leaving a smiling, even more bug-eyed Marco to end the film in a tea party with his invisible ghost-dad.

While hardly a synopsis to set imaginations on fire, Shock introduces from its opening moments an aggressive campaign of unmitigated formal distraction. The film itself appears diverted from its own storyline, the camera-eye wandering back and forth, to and from action, in and out of lucidness, captivated by its own nuance. As Nora unpacks her belongings in her new-old house, her attention is drawn toward a gleaming white object jutting out from her Brunswick Street Special orange-and-brown velour 70s corner sofa. In a fascinated trance, she extracts a large white ceramic hand ornament from its crevices like a decayed tooth:

From the first moment its fingertips catch her (and our) attention, this sculpture steals every scene. Nora places it on a fetching glass-and-aluminium modular bookshelf in the living room, and we know its location, where it is in relation to us, at every second – not only when its off screen, but even when we are in a scene in a different room. The hand becomes a unit of measurement, the north to which our spectatorial compass cannot resist but to return to. As Bruno and Nora make whoopee on the couch, the camera pans from the central focus of wiggling torsos as if by a magnetic field toward the hand. The hand takes over the scene, obliterates them – they are covered, shielded, crushed. When it moves slightly on its own volition, it does nothing to break my trance. It takes more than a cheap funhouse trick to distract me from its hypnotic pull:

This hand haunts me. I try to be rational, like a child who is scared of the dark trying to reason themselves out of hysterics - it’s just a random piece of retro Euro-kitsch,  a junkyard relic imbued with overzealous symbolism. It’s probably made of Plaster of Paris. Settle down, Alex. It’s hardly Bernini:

Bernini, Gianlorenzo.
The Rape of Proserpina
(detail: Pluto’s hands).
1621-22 White marble.
Galleria Borghese, Italy.

See? Then again, I’ve never been to Rome. I’ve never seen The Rape of Proserpina outside of the 2-dimensional plane that still photographs or documentary footage allows. My personal relationship with this acclaimed work of classical sculpture and Bava’s film is, in terms of pure spectatorial mechanics, equal to my eye. I look at them the same way, on the same surface. My response to Bernini’s depiction of pinched flesh is visceral, recalling Simon Schama’s commanding observation in The Power of Art:

“His figures break free from the gravity pull of the pedestal to run, twist, whirl, pant, scream, bark or arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation. Bernini could make marble do things it had never done before. His figures charge into hectic action. Most of them are naturally yeasty, on the rise”.

The lure of Bernini is precisely the same thing that I find bewitching in the films of Bava, Lado, Fulci, Martino, Franco, Argento: the moral occult is located not within the narrative, but in form itself. I don’t need to know anything about ancient mythology to have a strong response to The Rape of Proserpina, nor do I need horror or giallo to actually make sense, to create sympathetic characters or situtations, or to be even remotely plausible. These works pivot instead around a central moral spectacle, whether it is contained within the pinching of flesh in marble, or the slashing of a throat and the perfectly framed shot of a giant ceramic hand on film.

It is this frenzy of stylistic excess, the hyperactive morality within the form itself that renders the surface “explanation” of the ghostly Carlo redundant. The film spells out the significance of the ceramic hand to the story clearly, as Nora’s flashback to her first husbands murder shows him literally entwined within the sculpture as he shoots her up:

In case we haven’t yet made the connection between the sculpture and Carlo, the point is emphasised even further: as Nora driftis into hallucinatory, guilt-driven hysteria, she has a violently erotic dream about Carlo. Large, iridescent light-white hands send her into spasms of slow-motion sensual pleasure:

Despite “knowing” what these hands “mean” – we’re offered a clear link to draw between symbol and story on a platter – it ultimately means squat. I not only don’t buy it, I don’t care. It’s not that it’s not possible, and maybe it has little more to do with the fact that the Jim Morrison/Michael Hutchinson cliché I associate with Carlo’s character type is in this instance trapped in the body of a David Spade look-alike.

Or, as I’m more inclined to believe, it’s because it’s deliberately – even forcefully – indifferent. It’s not that I’m not meant to buy it; it’s that whether or not I do or not is ultimately irrelevant. The camera wanders constantly throughout the film, alluding sometimes to Carlo’s point of view, but even that seems inconsistant and uncommited. The camera can’t keep it’s attention focused, so how can I?

No part of me for an instant accepts as coincidence the fact that the actor who played Carlo, Nicola Salerno, was the film’s assistant production designer and (apparently) worked with Bava’s son, Lamberto, as Second Unit Director. It seems only right that the figure of Carlo be somehow directly related to the tangible construction of the text itself.

The naïve romantic in me is drawn to the idea that the giant hand that dominates the film – and my imagination – is Mario Bava himself, but it doesn’t cut the mustard… surely he’d never let us off the hook so easily.

Afterword:

The always insightful Bloody Italiana Blog compares Shock to The Changeling (Medak, 1980) and Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) in a stroke of pure bloody genius.

These three films form a holy trinity of hyperactive moral spectacle, functioning on a plane somewhere quite distinct from the bulk of the already substantially high-pitched supernatural horror subgenre.