Themes
Critics have identified various major themes in Tenebrae. In interviews conducted during the film's production, the usually somewhat reticent Argento offered his candid views on its thematic content. As biographer Maitland McDonagh noted in Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, "Argento has never been more articulate and/or analytical than he was on the subject of Tenebrae." Film scholar William Hope considers the film to be devoid of classical narrative progression and states that the characters "lack a narrative function or purpose, existing only to be killed in a spectacular fashion, their death hardly moving the narrative on at all. Traditional cause and effect are seemingly forgotten or actively ignored". According to James Gracey, author of a book about Argento's work, with Tenebrae Argento "explores some of his most reoccurring themes and preoccupations, such as Freudian psychology, sexual deviancy, repressed trauma, voyeurism, audience spectatorship, and the fetishisation of violence and death." Water is often associated visually with Neal. In almost all his scenes, his appearance is followed or accompanied by a shot of water. Later, this device is used repeatedly as a clue to the ultimate killer's identity – Neal himself.
According to Thomas Rostock, "Tenebrae" is filled with rhyming imagery that relates to the film's exploration of "the dual nature of [the] two active murderers" through doubles, inversions, reflections, and "re-reflections". Every major character has at least one double, and the theme extends to objects, locations, actions, and events – major and minor. The doubling or mirroring of incidents and objects includes telephone booths, aircraft, homeless men, otherwise-meaningless public brawls in the background, car accidents, typewriters (literally side-by-side), keys, handkerchiefs, hands caught in doors, and the characters themselves. Rostock cites several scenes where characters are set up in the frame with their doppelgängers – one such is the first meeting of Peter Neal and Anne with Detectives Germani and Altieri.
McDonagh notes that Argento emphasizes the doubling between Neal and Germani: "Germani ... is made to reflect Neal even as Neal appropriates his role as investigator ... the detective/writer and the writer/detective each belittles his other half, as though by being demeaned this inverted reflection could be made to go away." McDonagh also observes that, in what is arguably the film's most potent shock, Neal at one point really does make Germani "go away", virtually replacing him on screen "in a shot that is as schematically logical as it is logically outrageous." Earlier, Neal killed a woman who – to his and the audience's surprise – was not Anne, but Altieri. Tenebrae itself is split almost exactly into two parts. The first half belongs to the murders of Berti; the second to those of Neal. The two are set up as mirrors of one another. Berti's killings with a razor are clinical, with "lingering sexualized aggressiveness", whereas Neal's (with an axe) are crimes of passion committed for personal reasons or out of necessity; they are swift and to the point.
Kevin Lyons observes, "The plot revolves around the audacious and quite unexpected transference of guilt from the maniacal killer (about whom we learn very little, itself unusual for Argento) to the eminently likeable hero, surely the film's boldest stroke." While noting that the device is "striking", McDonagh comments that this transmission of guilt occurs between two dark doubles who are severely "warped" individuals. She suggests that "Neal and Berti... act as mirrors to one another, each twisting the reflection into a warped parody of the other." Berti's obsession with Neal's fiction compels him to commit murder in homage to the writer, while Neal seems to think that his own violent acts are simply part of some kind of "elaborate fiction". When the bloody Neal is confronted by Germani immediately after having killed numerous people, Neal screams at him, "It was like a book .. a book!"
The first half of the movie transitioning into the second is punctuated by the rising score and camera pan to an ostensibly meaningless point of reflected light on an ornament. According to Rostock, the meaning behind this movement is clear: it marks the spot when Berti's spree ends and Neal's rampage begins. Argento uses the shift in focus to comment on the film's own shaping, until that moment a typical "clichéd and remote" giallo. Neal, previously passive, begins to control what happens in his own story, which is more personal with "weight and meaning". According to Rostock, this structure gives Argento equal scope to play with the narrative while commenting on it, all without deviating from the plot's progression. According to Kim Newman, the use of a sculpture as a weapon makes literal one of the themes of the film: "art that kills people". Rostock concurs, saying that as the film is a commentary on art, the only weapon that can end the narrative is art itself.
According to Gracey, many have compared Argento with the character of Peter Neal, speculating that he serves as an alter ego for the director. Gracey refers to Tenebrae as a "reflexive commentary on [the director's] earlier work." The director himself saw the film in the same light, claiming it was a reaction to accusations that "[he] was a misogynist... a criminal... a murderer." Argento resolved to include all these aspects of his previous films into Tenebrae. A scene in which the character of Tilde criticizes Neal's books as "sexist", featuring "women as victims, cyphers, male heroes [and] macho bullshit" echoes criticisms of Argento's own work. Kim Newman calls the confrontation scene "essentially autobiographical", and, refuting these accusations, Argento said that his films were instead an attempt to tackle his dark side, to "let it speak". With Tenebrae in particular, he felt he was making a joke or playing a game with his critics, creating a front or mystique about himself. Rostock also believes Argento is having fun and sending up this perception. Newman agrees that Argento used Tenebrae to address his own public image, the notion that someone who creates art as "sick and twisted" as his must himself be sick and twisted. With Tenebrae's reveal that the author is the killer, Newman argues that Argento is saying, "What if I were?"
As in many of Argento's films, which apparently tend to eroticize the murder of beautiful women, gender, sexuality, and power are major issues foregrounded by the film. The fictional novel within the film is described as being "about human perversion and its effects on society". Male and female sexual deviancy is a central theme, with the victims being sexually liberated women who the first killer – conservative TV presenter Cristiano Berti – refers to as "filthy, slimy perverts". The first victim is a sexually promiscuous shoplifter, and his next two are the lesbian reporter and her bisexual lover. Berti murders the comparatively normal Maria only because she inadvertently discovers his twisted compulsion. His "moral crusade" is inspired by – and in his mind given credibility by – Neal's novel. Neal's own motivations for becoming a killer are revealed in "Freudian flashbacks". As summarized by McDonagh, these flashbacks "expose how the misogyny evident in his books actually stems from being sexually humiliated by a beautiful woman in his youth." McDonagh also notes that Tenebrae expands on the themes of sexuality and transvestitism found in Argento's earlier films, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972) and Deep Red (1975), but believes that Tenebrae's "overall sensuality sets it apart from Argento's other gialli." She says that the film's sexual content and abundant nudity make it "the first of Argento's films to have an overtly erotic aspect", and further notes that "Tenebrae is fraught with free-floating anxiety that is specifically sexual in nature." Gracey notes that in several scenes the victims gaze directly into the camera, which demonstrates Argento's "preoccupation with voyeurism and spectacle".
McDonagh noted that two sexually charged flashbacks are key to understanding Tenebrae. These distinct yet strongly related memory fragments recur throughout the film, usually immediately after a murder sequence. Although the flashbacks are never fully explained, the first one reveals a beautiful young woman's sexual humiliation of a teenage boy, presumed to be Peter Neal. The young woman is mostly topless during this first sequence, and she humiliates the young man by jamming the heel of one of her shiny red shoes into his mouth while he is held down by a group of gleeful boys on a beach. The second flashback shows the vicious revenge-murder of the woman sometime later. McDonagh notes that all of the fetishistic imagery of these flashbacks, combined with the sadistic details of the murder sequences in the main narrative, "set the parameters of Tenebrae's fetishistic and fetishicized visual vocabulary, couched in terms both ritualistic and orgiastically out of control... Peter Neal indulges in sins of the flesh and Tenebrae revels in them, inviting the spectator to join in; in fact, it dares the viewer not to do so."
The protagonists in Argento's giallo films almost always suffer from some form of vision impairment. It is these characters' chronic inability to find the missing pieces of a puzzle. The puzzle is the solution of a murder (or series of murders) that generally provides much of the film's narrative thrust. Most obviously is the blind Franco Arno (Karl Malden) in The Cat o' Nine Tails, who must use his heightened aural sense in combination with visual clues supplied to him by his niece to solve a mystery. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) witnesses a murder attempt but admits to the police that something seems to be "missing"; as the film's surprise ending makes clear, he did not "miss" anything, but simply misinterpreted what happened in front of his eyes. In Deep Red, Marcus (David Hemmings) has a similar problem in both seeing and not seeing the murderer at the scene of the crime, and does not realize his mistake until it is almost too late. This recurring theme, according to Douglas E. Winter, creates "a world of danger and deception, where seeing is not believing".
Flanagan observes that in Tenebrae, Argento presents two characters with impaired vision. Gianni (Christian Borromeo) is an eyewitness to an axe murderer, but the trauma of seeing the killing causes him to disregard a vital clue. Returning to the scene of the crime, he suddenly remembers everything and is murdered before being able to tell anyone. Germani reveals that he is a big fan of the novels of Agatha Christie, Mickey Spillane, Rex Stout, and Ed McBain, but admits that he has never been able to guess the identity of the killer in any of the books. He is similarly unable to solve the real mystery until the last corpses are piled at his feet – he cannot see Peter Neal for what he really is.
In an interview that appeared in Cinefantastique, Argento noted that the film was intended as near-science fiction, taking place "about five or more years in the future ... Tenebrae occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people, with the result that the remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to make it that way, but no one remembers, or wants to remember ... It isn't exactly my Blade Runner, of course, but nevertheless a step into the world of tomorrow. If you watch the film with this perspective in mind, it will become very apparent." Argento later insisted that the film was set in an imaginary city, fifteen years in the future and that the disaster the city's inhabitants were striving to forget was an atomic bomb blast. Despite Argento's claim, Maitland McDonagh observed that this vaguely science-fictional concept "isn't apparent at all" and that no critics at the time noted the underlying futuristic theme in their reviews of the theatrical release of the film. The film critic and author Kim Newman countered that in avoiding a more recognisable Rome in favour of suburbia, Argento had succeeded in giving some parts of the film an almost futuristic sheen. Argento biographer Alan Jones agreed that Argento's intention did come across in these scenes, and Newman cites the on-screen use of a videophone as an attempt by Argento to place Tenebrae in the near future.
While rejecting this thematic concern as unrealized by Argento, McDonagh noted that the result of the director's experiment is a strange "architectural landscape" that becomes the "key element in differentiating Tenebrae from Argento's earlier gialli." Argento's use of unusual architectural space and so-called visual "hyper-realism" results in an enormously fake-looking environment. Seizing on the director's additional comment, "... I dreamed an imaginary city in which the most amazing things happen", she notes that the film's "fictive space couldn't be less 'real'", with its "vast unpopulated boulevards, piazzas that look like nothing more than suburban American malls, hard-edged Bauhaus apartment buildings, anonymous clubs, and parking garages." The EUR district of Rome, where much of Tenebrae was filmed, was built in preparation for the 1942 World's Fair and intended by then-Prime Minister of Italy Benito Mussolini to be a celebration of 20 years of fascism. Rostock believes that Argento used this location to realize his theme of an imaginary city; the district offers a glimpse of a future Rome that never was, showing the city as it might have looked had fascism not fallen.
