SUSPIRIA Day 15: hester

Susie's gross, horny dreams are like microcosms of the film itself–full of indelible images, violence, and art. Needless to say, there's a lot to unpack. But one intriguing moment that resonates is a hand smearing blood on a wall, eventually writing what looks like the letter "A"...while a voice loudly whispers what sure sounds like "Hester!"

Couple this shot with the scene later, back in the Ohio farmhouse, where Susie's dying mother receives blessings from the pastor and says:

"My daughter...my last one. She's my sin. She's what I smeared on the world."

Given that Susie was a rebellious, thieving–and gay, if you ask me–child who left her family and church behind, it's easy to read that quote as simply some hardcore religious disappointment. But that quote in the context of that big scarlet "A" raises the question: Does she mean "my sin" literally? Is it not accusatory, but rather an admission? Was Susie born out of wedlock?

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne has an affair and gives birth to a daughter, Pearl. Her fellow Puritan colonists force her to wear a scarlet "A" (for "adulteress") on her dress. She is also subject to further public humiliation and shaming, and spends time in a jail cell. She won't reveal the name of Pearl's father, and is largely shunned as she lives with her daughter on the outskirts of the village.

Pearl bears a striking resemblance to what we see of young Susanna: she is a "witch-child," precocious and smart, a defiant outsider. As she is shunned alongside her mother, she develops a vivid inner-life:

The unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the puppets of Pearl's witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world.

Witchcraft. I mean.

The interesting diversion is between the mother figures: Hester is publicly humiliated and shunned by the Puritans, and stops going to church. She doesn't believe that her sin is worthy of total condemnation. Susie's mother, on the other hand, is obviously deeply involved in the church and lives a strict, devout life. If Susie was the product of an affair, her mother has buried that knowledge deep, where it festers and rots.

Where something might slip in, and grow.

As she erases Klemperer's memories during the film's epilogue, Mother Suspiriorum says, "We need guilt, Doctor. And shame." A pious woman's secret guilt and shame would make for ripe feeding. And her hated daughter, a vessel–a witch-child–for unimaginable power to smear on the world.