#covens were matriarchal groups governed by a 'mother'

[brighteuphony]

I was curious and I don't know if you've said any where, but why do you call your civillian Sakura au Coven!sakura?

It was because I wanted Sakura to go for a more witchy/healer vibe as a counterpart to the canon doctor/medic- I mentioned in an earlier post that Saeko was once part of a mermaid coven (covens being almost pregenitors of clans as we know them), but since giving away her pearl, was outed from the coven and forced to wander the earth- so I eventually had her and Sakura become a coven together (first human matriarch in ages!!!), in which they become bound by blood and chakra as family.

Being in a coven is like being in a clan, but with extra benefits (and costs)

Also because Sakura's civilian status doesn't really describe the vibes of the AU as well as Coven does (in my head). Hope that answer that! It's very convoluted and silly!!

[anhed-nia]

NOT BLOGTOBER: SUSPIRIA (2018)

(Thar be spoilers)

Luca Guadagnino's polarizing remake of the inimitable Argento classic is a beautiful mess. Technically refined and narratively disastrous, it seems to hold a mirror up to the audience, that shows you what kind of viewer you are. I've rarely seen a movie that so divides people, not only according to whether they think is good or bad, but even along lines of what they think it's about. I'm not even sure I can tell you what *I* think it's about, and I even have a hard time telling you whether or not I think it is ultimately good. But, I do think that this complicated experience has given me a better understanding of how I watch movies. I became vividly aware, for instance, that I don't have a real concept of perfection. I feel less concerned about whether a movie "works", than about what kind of job it can do for me personally. Let's say you're a plumber, and you have no idea where my pipes are supposed to go, but you produced a really beautiful set of clawfeet for my bathtub--I may go on to remember you as a pretty great plumber. Maybe you're a groundskeeper, and you absolutely murdered my lawn, but you were willing to come over and sing to my night-blooming flowers? That's a big deal for me. With this in mind, I feel a little embarrassed telling people how well SUSPIRIA 2018 worked for me, but more willing to describe why.

I hesitate to draw too many lines between the very different 1977 and 2018 editions, but I'd like to note that even though he's so often accused (inaccurately, I think) of "making no sense", Argento's SUSPIRIA is actually pretty tidy. An elite dance school is a front for a witches' coven whose administrators will kill anyone who uncovers their true identity. Witches are universally recognized as monsters, and the very fact that they'll kill to stay hidden underlines their basic evilness. No further explanation is necessary to understand the thrust of this story. Guadanigno's version, on the other hand, has lofty aspirations that would require the scope of a WORLD ON A WIRE to fully flesh out. It takes place during 1977's "German Autumn", the peak of the violence surrounding the anti-fascist Red Army Faction. The witches within the Helena Markos Tanz Akademie seem to have a similar leftwing bent--they offer free admission and boarding to their accepted students, respecting the importance of a woman's financial independence, and they denounce psychoanalysis, which has become notorious for victim-blaming in modern times. ("When women tell you the truth, you don't pity them. You tell them they have delusions!") However, these women also define themselves as mutually exclusive with the egalitarian Baader-Meinhof group whose Marxist activities protested the persisting Nazi influence within the contemporary government. The students are instructed to disown their biological mothers to fully accept the spiritual maternity of the academy, which I suppose could suggest the abuse of power by a dictator, or a revolutionary militia, or organized religion, or... There is also the power struggle within the academy itself, between its invisible, historic matriarch Helena Markos, and the younger and more directly involved Madame Blanc, but it is difficult to tell what divergent futures are represented by each woman. In any case, unbeknownst to the students, the dance taught in this institution is a form of spellcasting, in which the choreography projects the witches' will into the world--mainly violently, it seems--but their larger goals remain unclear. In the end, it turns out that the rightful heiress to the academy, the real Mater Suspiriorum, is a young Mennonite from America whose unwitting destiny has been to depose the fraudulent Helena Markos; but, how this functions metaphorically, I still cannot tell you. "This isn't vanity, this is art!" bellows the deathless old hag over an orgiastic final performance in the bowels of the school, and honestly, I find this extremely delightful...but I do not know what, in this story, constitutes vanity, and what constitutes art.

I admit that I find all this rhetoric about power teasingly interesting, even if it is ultimately diffuse and inconclusive. Fortunately, I'm the sort of viewer who is able to sift through the shifting contents of a film like this, and isolate what is most useful to me individually. I found quite a lot to like, slung over the osteoporotic bones of the narrative: It is, above all else, incredibly beautiful. (With the notable exception of Thom Yorke's intrusive pop songs, which took me out of the movie every time)  SUSPIRIA 2018 wisely avoids the Snow White-like palette of its ancestor, and the construction of architecture as its main character, focusing instead on fashion and dance. It takes the dusty brown and grey cast of 1970s Berlin and makes of it something ethereally lovely. The formal fabric of the film, composed of uneasy scenes of "realism" and excoriating surrealistic nightmares, is, pardon the term, spellbinding. What is really important for me about this movie is its physicality. Actually, the body itself is the final frontier of power dynamics--might, ethnicity, sex, age--and this is the angle from which the movie makes the most sense to me.

Most dancers will tell you that dance is one of the worst things you can do to your body. Dancers are always sick, always contorting themselves, always touching themselves in some bizarre way. Parts of their bodies are often permanently disfigured by their discipline. Dance is popularly thought of as a matter of beauty and elegance, but practitioners know it to be mortally brutal. SUSPIRIA 2018's focus on dance itself blends nicely with its extreme gore. The movie is outlandishly violent, even considering its origins, but it is important to differentiate gore from violence. Violence, regardless of whether it is in a cop drama or a slasher movie, is always about authority. It is combative, a matter of strength and weakness. Gore is a matter of vulnerability. It describes the fate of the body, the way the body betrays the will and refutes the ego. Extreme gore can reach heights of ecstasy that are conflatable with pornography, but gore carries a deep sadness due to its undeniable finality. It embarrasses the individual, reducing one to the same indeterminate matter as all other individuals in the animal kingdom--not unlike the writhing, interlocked group choreography that makes a chimera of the student body. This SUSPIRIA exposes the limiting nature of bodily identity, whether it is crumpling women up like candy wrappers, dismembering them, eviscerating them, or popping their heads like grapes. Although it is marred by occasional disconcerting camp, the film's perverted crimes against anatomy represent its greatest successes as a work of art.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Like it or not, gore is for girls. (I use "gore" as a general term for body horror here, for efficiency's sake) Women are defined by a special, involuntary relationship to our insides. A man may go a month without seeing his own blood, but not us. Many men will never welcome penetration, regardless of their sexual orientation, and men are less likely to be forced into this experience of their interiors, than are women. I hardly have to describe the business of pregnancy. So, when I think about the Grand Guignolesque excesses of SUSPIRIA, and in particular its flabbergasting finale, I can't think of this all as a self-indulgent stunt. It seems to me to be an absolute necessity of the story, and the only part of the story that makes perfect sense to me. Gore represents the defeat of vanity, and by that token, I'm happy to call it art.

(I gotta say, I wish the available internet images showed how much more anal than vaginal this goofy thing looked on the big screen, but ya can’t have everything!)