One of my favourite moments in La Chimera is a quick dream flicker of bright red threads dancing against brilliant blue sky, glimpsed from the train window by Arthur, the pleasingly disheveled melancholy archaeologist-turned-grave robber played by Josh O’Connor in a perfect cream linen suit.
The unravelled red thread is one of the recurring motifs of the movie, unravelling from the crochet dress of Arthur’s lost - most likely dead - love Beniamina. Why is her thread unravelling – is she staving off suitors while she waits to be reunited with her one true love? Like Penelope on Ithaca, weaving all day long, only to rip back her tapestry every night so that it cannot be completed before Odysseus returns. The unravelled threads are all she has left to psychically stave off the ever growing band of suitors that have flocked to the palace in her husband’s absence, one of whom she must marry if the tapestry should ever be completed. Or is it the ball of red thread given to Theseus by Ariadne (one of my most favourite ancient girls) so that he may find his way out of labyrinth and avoid certain death by the jaws of the minotaur? Or is it the thread of Arachne, the divinely gifted weaver who spun tapestries so beautiful they made the goddess Athena seethe with jealousy and rage?
Time and time again in the lore of the ancients, thread comes into play in moments when feminine power is being employed to disrupt the oppressive – generally patriarchal – orders in place. In a movie so tied up in antiquity we can safely assume the same applies here: during one scene, a character called Melodie waxes lyrical on the Etruscan civilisation (whose graves are being robbed for 2000 year old treasures by Arthur and his badlad band of merry tombaroli tomb raiders.) Realising the treasure-bent men are no longer listening, she turns to face the camera, and breaking the fourth wall, addresses the viewer to tell us how she loves the Etruscans for their sensitivity, how they might have saved Italy from its machismo culture of today. This is not to say that La Chimera is necessarily a feminist movie in any kind of straightforward way; in the twist that reveals Spartaco, the black market grave-goods overlord, to be a woman, we are reminded that money’s tendency to corrupt transcends gender (or, the girlboss is just a patriarch in nicer clothes.) Later, the commune of women and children living harmoniously (squatting) in the disused train station towards the end suggests a kind of alternative matriarchal utopia, but more succinctly it seems to double-down on the critique of private property and the farcical idea of ownership which is one of the strongest currents threading through the movie. The abandoned station, we are told more than once “belongs to everyone and no-one.” The space might be temporary, Italia tells us – but so is life itself. Instead, the feminine power suggested by the threads here feels more Jungian: the persistence of a shadowed feminine other, the esoteric underworld, the alternate knowledge gleaned from dreams and from death, the mystery, everything around us that is simultaneously unknowable and yet so deeply felt.1
The esoteric form of knowledge possessed by Arthur is of course his gift for dowsing. When that forked witch-hazel switch appeared on screen for the first time I gasped and grabbed my boyfriend’s arm in excitement: finally the diviner representation on screen I’ve always longed for. My Finnish great-grandfather was a water diviner who dowsed for wells using a silver pocket watch as a pendulum, and as crazy as it sounds, the first time my grandmother confronted me with a pendulum and my ancestral divining inheritance, I knew instantly that there are things and experiences in our world so deeply beyond rational understanding. Elsewhere in the dowsing scene, the camera perspective shifts so that we see Arthur upside down the moment he comes to discover where the tomb his hidden. This basically screams the Old Norse legend of Odin who hangs himself upside down from a tree in order to gain new depths of knowledge (quite literally new ways of looking at the world) and is symbolised by the Hanged Man tarot card, the imagery of which was, as any keen-eyed tarot girl would have spotted, used in promotional materials for the movie.
La Chimera is a katabasis story (a journey to the underworld) which is my favourite kind of story, the oldest enduring story humanity has – like Persephone’s descent to Hades, or Inanna, Ishtar and Ereshkigal, or Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette or Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer’s descent to the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, or every dark night of the soul in Christian theology or, or, or etc. In this case, as Alice Rohrwacher herself has suggested, it is the katabasis of Orpheus and his attempt to rescue Eurydice from the Underworld that is the most relevant. Like Arthur and Beniamina, Orpheus and Eurydice’s love was doomed; shortly after their wedding, Eurydice is bitten by a snake, dies and is taken to Hades. In his grief, Orpheus descends to the underworld, where he plays his famous lyre so heartbreakingly that even cruel Hades takes pity on him and agrees to let Orpheus take Eurydice back to the realm of the living, but under one condition: that she must follow behind him, and he must not look back. My mother told me this story when I was a child and it always frustrated me so much – why did Orpheus look back! Why did he do the one thing Hades told him not to! He looked back because he couldn’t just wait and he loses Eurydice forever! As an adult who has had to reckon with my own unrepentant death drive time and time again, I know: he looked back because he couldn’t bear not to. Because Eurydice was beautiful, because he was in love. How could anyone who has faced beauty even once, ever really bear to look away?
Arthur descends to Hades again and again throughout La Chimera, each tomb he enters is unbearably heightened by the possibility that it might contain the elusive red thread, the promise that it might bring him closer to his lost Beniamina. With each descent he returns to the land of the living with relics of the dead, but bereft of his beloved. Why does he leave the utopian matriarchal squat commune, stealing away in the night from the new beautiful (crucially, living) woman and the life she offers him there?2 Because he cannot bear not to – he must look back, one more time. “You’re not meant for human eyes” is a line repeated in the movie, most dramatically when Arthur tosses a priceless stolen goddess-head overboard from a yacht full of rabid grave-robbers and even rabid-er museum collectors, dehumanised by their own greed. La Chimera is a movie about living alongside the dead, and the ways the past irrupts out into the present and yet remains irrevocable all the same. Anyone who has ever lost anyone will know that it is simultaneously true that we must accept living with the irretrievable dead, while at the same time knowing that it’s not to be accepted; not really.
After losing Eurydice for the second time, Orpheus tried to return to the underworld but couldn’t, because a person cannot enter the realm of Hades twice while alive. He plays mourning songs on his lyre endlessly, practically begging for death: anything to reunite him with his beloved. When eventually the Maenads grant his wish they descend on him and tear him to shreds, leaving only his head perfectly intact, which is thrown in the sea – much like the pilfered goddess-head Arthur flings overboard in the act that ultimately severs him from the land of the living.
Last winter, when I was undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis – itself a kind of katabasis ritual – my analyst asked me: if descending to the underworld is inevitable, what would happen if you stopped trying to resist it? How can you make the underworld work for you? How to, like Persephone, embrace it, become a queen? This was after I told her I’d had yet another dream of the underground flat I once lived in (symbolically too on the nose: a flat underground without any windows) and where my life truly unravelled. We spend our lives so up close to the dead, and maybe sometimes we communicate – or they move through us when we point our witch-hazel rods towards the ground and hope they lead to priceless treasure – but we cannot bring them back. Sometimes I feel like getting older is essentially an endless accumulation of bewildering relics.
What can we do? I have made peace with co-existing with the dead, which is to say loss, most of the time but of course there are moments when co-existing with loss is too much and the urge to burrow underground or at least under one’s duvet is the only rational response. We look back, we must, we cannot bear not to, but some things are… not meant for human eyes!
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The head of Orpheus, by the way, washes up on the island of Lesbos – which would one day become home to Sappho, queen of the lovelorn lyre. Something about how art transcends life, something about how beauty persists beyond us (goodnight.)
I also want to add here that O’Connor’s linen suit is such an unbelievably perfect piece of tailoring that it feels almost like a character in itself and is in itself a great testament to the powers of weaving. Arachne is shaking.
I was also going to write about Josh O’Connor’s concurrent starring role as Freudian death drive sexy tennis bad boy in Challengers alongside this post but I already wrote too much here on La Chimera – basically my Hot Freud Summer is working out even better than I could have expected.