Misunderstood

Films and Music by Asia Argento

Judith Beheading Holofernes 1611 Artemisia Gentileschi

You don't understand! If you were me you would do things I would do.
~ The Ice King, in Adventure Time

And remember, the better you look, the more you’ll see.
~ Miss Lidia's Makeover to the Stars, Liquid TV, 1991

There are people who won’t play the work of “cancelled” artists. Michael Jackson, Gary Glitter are dead to them not just literally or socially but musically.
There are others who’ll celebrate the music but take needless pains to distance themselves from the crimes, as if liking the music has made them a suspect. And for sure, the man who condemns the loudest is all too often the next to be arrested. Me, I’m sometimes fond of lost sheep, and besides, nobody’s perfect.

The daughter of great Giallo director Dario Argento and his leading lady Daria Nicolodi, Asia Argento began starring in her father’s slow-moving, hyperviolent, and utterly stylish films at the age of 16, happy to finally be noticed by him, but her own small filmography as director deserves to be better known. Fast-paced, funny, and endlessly outrageous, Scarlet Diva (2000) is her “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” memoir, best known for its scene dramatizing a sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein long before his crimes became public knowledge.
Nobody seemed to grasp or care at the time that this was a true story. It would take 22 years for Hollywood to revisit Weinstein’s crimes, weakly, in the bland press procedural She Said. And Argento, who as Scarlet Diva makes clear had already seen a lot, kept working with the producer, later describing their further relationship as “consensual but one-sided”. Transactional might be another word, as Weinstein produced her next film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), an over-the-top adaptation of JT LeRoy’s cult novel of truck-stop prostitution. But LeRoy was a fake, the book was written by Laura Albert, and when the press, and Argento, expected to meet JT LeRoy Albert asked her friend Savannah Knoop to play the part. In events covered in documentaries The Cult of JT LeRoy (2014) and Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016) and the fictionalized version JT LeRoy, Argento was attracted to the supposed author of her text, tricked, and humiliated when the substitution was exposed, shortly before the film’s release in 2006. In her third film, the childhood memoir Misunderstood (2014), this experience informs the penultimate scene. Misunderstood is, like Scarlet Diva, a film so entertainingly, outrageously watchable that one hardly notices how deeply layered it is; the layers including such predictions of her future, distortions of her parents (Dario as a superstitious actor, Daria as a pianist), and a strong musical subtext - the works of her great-grandfather, Italian modernist composer Alfredo Casella, her own childish soundtrack compositions, her character’s love of the band The Penelopes, who she’d later collaborate with for real on a cover of Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’ (2020).¹
Scarlet Diva is also a deeply musical work, its mainly Italian rock, rap and dance soundtrack has hardly dated, and is vital to the plot. In one scene, a doppelganger of Asia rolls distractingly over a piano, clutching a microphone, in the background of her conversation; in another, 80’s rapper Schooly D (who’s also on the Misunderstood soundtrack) has a cameo as her hash dealer, and there’s a dedication to “all the hard-working musicians” in the end credits.
In the act of Misunderstood that seems to prefigure the JT LeRoy episode, Aria doesn’t show her hurt for long. When the world likes to make jokes at your expense, it’s best to get in on the joke as soon as possible and make it your own. This defensive adaptation of a resilient child is the impulse at the heart of tragicomedy, but the tragedy in Asia’s story can’t always be kept in its protective comic frame.

When, in 2017, accusations against Harvey Weinstein finally overcame his lawyer’s injunctions and the #MeToo cry for justice took off, Asia was well-placed to confirm the allegations of her sisters and amplify their voices.² In May 2018, she gave a speech condemning Weinstein, and others yet to be held accountable, at the Cannes Film Festival. Argento had become romantically involved with Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef too cool to be a celebrity chef, in 2016, and Bourdain stood by her and advocated on her behalf until his self-inflicted death in Paris, 8th June 2018.³ In August that year, the New York Times published allegations that Asia Argento had sexually assaulted Jimmy Bennet, one of the actors who played JT LeRoy, her character’s son, in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, when he was 17 (and thus below the age of consent in the relevant jurisdiction). Asia denied the charges, implying blackmail and claiming that Bourdain had paid off Bennet out of sympathy for the young man, but her denials were out-of-step with the “believe all victims” climate she’d helped bring about.
The origins of the phrase “cancel culture” seem lost in the mists of time, but I once saw a tweet that claimed the alliteration was first used by Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s well-despised lawyer, after all the film projects he was greenlighting were cancelled, putting thousands of innocent people out of work and crushing the dreams of many directors hoping to make the classic Weinstein film, a comedy-with-violence with an obligatory plot twist where some unlucky rapist gets his grisly comeuppance. After the Bennet allegations, Asia was dropped as a judge from The X Factor Italy. Cancelled or not, she hasn’t directed a film in 10 years, so that, to date, this fantastic filmmaker has directed fewer feature films than even Elaine May.⁴

Asia, who’s appeared in a number of rock videos, including with Placebo (‘This Picture’), Marilyn Manson (‘S’aint’) and Sean Lennon (‘Dead Meat’), has also released two albums, and while her musical output may be slight compared with her filmography, I’ve found these to be deeply interesting works.
The first, Total Entropy (2013) is a 2-LP collection of her collaborations with other artists. It opens with the gorgeous ‘Ours’, with Tim Burgess (of The Charlatans), a song with the same feel as Lana Del Rey’s ‘Dealer’, a European art-pop elegy in the same melancholy vein as some of Air’s material or Blur’s fine pastiche of the genre ‘To The End’.⁵

Next comes ‘The Ugly Ducklings’, opening with a Nico-ish wind organ, a recitative or melodrama, over a harmonically sophisticated backing by Toog, a story about childhood and motherhood that reminds me of Arnold Bennet’s reading of Hans Anderson’s tale - 'When the ugly duckling at last flew away on his strong pinions, and when he met the swans and was accepted as an equal, then I felt sorrowful, agreeably sorrowful. It seemed to me nothing could undo, atone for, the grief and humiliations of the false duckling's early youth.'

Total Entropy is tracked strangely and, for a long album, effectively, so that its slower and ambient tracks frame a set of disco pieces. Some of these, like ‘Sexodrome’ or ‘Vampy’, are one-line throwaways redeemed by their artistry - perfectly timed vocal lines, sparsely driving beats, a single cool synth sound.

Others are more ambitious - ‘Radical Bravery’, with its “loss/desire” chorus line, seems like a manifesto for acting, maybe for life, and in ‘Someone’, the best of these Eurodisco tracks, from the 2008 remix EP Archigram and Friends, Asia begins to reflect on a persona we’ll be hearing more of:

I did everything I could live by
Still managed to get it wrong
As though my death would be a favor
To all the people that I've loved

Played from beginning to end, Total Entropy has an offset charm, and an air of doomed European chic that might be called decadent. A cover of ‘Je t'aime, moi non plus’ with Brian Molko of Placebo isn’t essential, but it’s nice to hear in this context. Asia’s singing voice is minimal, and she compensates for its weakness with artistry. But Total Entropy is a curio, a compilation of collaborations made in the downtime from a hectic acting, directing and press appearance schedule. It’s the later album Music From My Bed (2021) that has the air of commitment, with revealing lyrics and a dark trap production so good it could only have been made by serious students of the art.

The lead single ‘I’m Broken’ is a catchy piece of pop electronica, with old-school scratching by DJ Gruff. Asia’s broken affirmations and vocal tone reminding me of post-1980 Yoko Ono.

I’m gonna get well (don’t wanna get well)
I’m gonna stay sad (don’t wanna stay sad)
Won’t get out of bed (demons in my head)
Wish that I was dead (can’t even drop this mess)

In ‘I’m Broken’ she describes being encouraged to work, after an accident that left her bedbound - “my friend Holly [Harley?] told me that I should make a record”. So far I’ve been able to determine that this friend is a Portuguese producer, and is responsible for the 13 backing tracks.

The next track ‘Venerdi’ (‘Friday’) is a nostalgically joyous dream-hop anthem, sung, like much of this record, in Italian.

Music From My Bed is a more eclectic trip than the average trap album, but hard beats and sinister vocal effects are never far away, and in ‘The Exterminating Angel’ Asia meets her shadow side.

Daddy soloed first, mummy got depressed
Privileged exile, too much blessed?
A life of immunity, a life of excess
Humiliation, in a couture dress

I like best what you cannot see
Perversion, vice, human oddity

Language isn’t much of a barrier. One English line (“Black Art”) in ‘Famme Male’ (‘Hurt Me’) is enough; a version of this song exists in every language, but Asia Argento as Rap Witch is an inspired piece of casting, and the industrial strength ‘Forte Come La Morte’ - “bow the fuck down!” - is cinematic in its horror film vision.

Indeed, in ‘Head’ this newcomer to the genre takes it on herself to diss the pretenders, the “ivy league clones” who play with her ideas.

You don’t have the vision
You don’t have the nerve
You want me to listen and see what you think I serve?
No I didn’t say what you think I said
It’s not yours you stupid bitch
It came from my head

Or, as she says in ‘Supernatural’,

Please don’t bother me with your neuroscience
My life is beyond, my life is defiance

All this is exactly what 2021 rap and trap from an embattled heroine should be, but Music From My Bed also has a couple of softer moments that are standouts.

‘My A’ is Asia’s eulogy for her lost love, Anthony Bourdain, in a delicate European pop art song arrangement.

My heart, however foolish and useless organ that it is, it keeps beating.
Wat can I say, my A? That I never loved as I loved you? That is true.
That I will never love or be loved again? Of that, I am sure.

And ‘Love Me Obscene’ is just a beautiful song, in an intricate arrangement that switches tempos and times in a druggy ebb and flow of sound. It’s a plea to be loved as one is, and a song of acceptance of every way in which love comes.

Love me twice, love me do
Love me false, and love me true
Love me for real, and in your dreams
Love me sweetly, and love me obscene

Asia’s imperfect singing voice doesn’t hold her back anywhere on Music From My Bed. In every way, it’s the album she should have made, and one of the better trap albums in its realm, but one that’s largely escaped the attention of its potential audience. The English language songs average 4,000 plays on Spotify.

The most recent Asia Argento music on Spotify is ‘Good Girl’, with one of her first collaborators, The Legendary Tigerman. Its rocker swagger doesn’t really appeal to me, but it does remind me of Willy Moon and Natalia Kills and that famous 2015 incident in Kiwi cancel culture, wherein they tried to cancel The X Factor New Zealand contestant Joe Irvine within the terms the legal department allowed, in the language that showbiz permitted, thus sacrificing their jobs on the show, and being cancelled by an outraged New Zealand public. In Kill’s words, “I was subjected to a global witchhunt I couldn’t defend myself against due to a wide-reaching legal gagging order”. Cancel culture is complicated, sometimes no-one gets out in one piece. I wondered, where are our misunderstood martyrs now?

As Teddy Sinclair, Kills is lead singer of Cruel Youth, the act she formed with husband Moon, and they’re not doing too badly, writing songs for Rihanna, Blackpink and Madonna.

Algorithmic flashbulb - Planet Paparazzi, by Elita

1. There’s a moment in Misunderstood where Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing Aria’s mother, is asked by police to confirm that her name is “Yvonne Casella”. This was the name of Asia’s great-grandmother, wife of Italian Futurist composer Alfredo Casella. It’s a tiny detail in a busy scene, but it’s there to be read in (at least) five ways, signifying the family’s long history compared to its fragile state, the importance Asia gave to her mother’s side of the family despite her father’s fame (they are equals in the film), the disruptive effect of romantic passion (Yvonne was the composer’s student, and his second wife), the Italian Jewish experience during WW2 (Yvonne was Jewish and at risk of arrest and deportation in the last years of the War), and the director’s sense of music.

2. In doing so she had to deal with her own support for Roman Polanski a few years earlier, but this is easy enough to understand - Polanski was the best filmmaker of his generation, and his fast-paced and dangerous storytelling, packed with signifying detail, is an obvious model for aspects of of Argento’s work. A product of an especially disruptive childhood as a Holocaust survivor, Polanski has also been adept at spinning his own defensive narrative in his films, interviews and books.

3. I wasn’t into cooking shows back in Bourdain’s heyday, but I watched an episode of No Reservations from 2005 a couple of years ago in which he visited Iceland. It’s great, he’s cool, interested in, and interesting about, all the right things. But he gets drunk on the local spirits, and the next morning talks us through the ideas he has for ending his hangover by hanging himself. It’s not really much of a joke.

4. As well as the three features, Asia’s filmography as director includes some short films, and documentaries about Dario Argento and Abel Ferrera.

5. The video for ‘To The End’ features French Yé-yé pop star Francoise Hardy, and references a classic work of European art cinema, Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad (1961).