Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (1982): Mrs. Berlusconi Learning how to Slash

For some Dario Argento’s best giallo and lesser known masterpiece, the modernistic, cold, and stylish Tenebrae is worth watching for many reasons: bold psycho murders, moonstruck and somnambule acting which adds to the overall delirious suspense, extensive shots of memorably unusual ankles, vivid colors with bucket loads of blue monochrome night and arterial spray, or the fantastic Goblin score. But for this article, we wanna turn our eyes on one of the many females being violently ended in the movie: the unremarkable but beautiful Veronica Lario, later to be known as Mrs. Berlusconi.

Veronica Lario met Silvio Berlusconi in 1980 in her dressing room in a Milan theater, and in 1984, 2 years after Tenebrae, she gave up her acting career for her future husband whom she married in 1990. The couple had 3 children together, and she saw her husband rise to power as the leader of the country. It is negatively fascinating how history has become a retro scenario, how we have grown into a history-forgotten, amnesiac conscience, with the amnesia being a built-in mechanism of an all-cloaking hypocrisy. For example, how quickly have we forgotten that there has been a president much, much worse and degenerate than Trump in contemporary Western history, albeit not as powerful? We inhabit societies composed of references with no referents, and with no room for nuanced meta-narratives.

Silvio Berlusconi (also called “Papi” by his many underage prostitutes) was the leader of Italy for nine years in total, making him the longest serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy. Berlusconi had far-reaching ties to the Mafia, owned half of the Italian media, and the other half he controlled as Prime Minister. Some thought that that’s a slightly problematic news monopole as leader of a country. With his private channels, Berlusconi successfully degenerated Italian TV and the minds of its viewers. First, he heavily influenced Italians by importing series such as Dallas and Dynasty, which played a crucial role in americanizing Italians and infect the nation with a greed for luxury, power and sex. These new dogmas manifested themselves especially tragically within young women, leading to a class of extra shameless, celebrity-hungry starlet types hunting for cheap fame and generous sugar daddies. Then, Berlusconi had the vision to put in half-naked young women into basically every single minute of TV broadcast, no matter the format. This led to surreal program creations like “Stripping Housewives” or “Strip The News”, where living sex-dolls with artificial smiles stripped while an anchor read the news. I remember how shocked I was back then whenever I switched to Italian cable television from Germany: it was all tutti frutti, idiotic people burping out trivialities and profanities, half-naked girls wiggling their asses in alleged family shows and all other shows. Everything was too colorful, too shrill, too loud- just a huge, pornographic clown circus, and it had nothing to do with the widely romanticized image of Italy.

Soon, the European people would learn that this new television cosmos was an accurate depiction of Berlusconi’s bizarre and debased private life. The elderly billionaire blue-pill-man was sexually much more active than a Trump, and his orgies were not as conspirative as those of the US presidents on Jeffrey Epstein’s island and “Lolita Express”. Multiple decadent parties of Berlusconi and a fellow-minded clique of Roman business-men and politicians, with tens and hundreds of showgirls from his TV channels and beauty pageants, were exposed in detail and became the material for Paolo Sorrentino’s biographical film Loro (2018). Berlusconi propelled many of these girls into Italian politics and the European parliament with no other qualification than tits and porn, basically. His supporters never achieved global fame with a coca-cola brand label like “MAGA” or “deplorables”, although they rallied up for Berlusconi in the streets with slogans like “We are the cocks” or the more clumsy “Stand with us if you’re real men who like to fuck, and no faggots” after one presidential sex scandal after the other was being exposed. Berlusconi’s comments to revelations of him paying underage prostitutes used a similar syntax: “It’s better to be fond of beautiful girls than to be gay”. It didn’t help, the case went to court and eventually ended his presidency.

In her years as First Lady, Veronica Lario acted even more distanced and detached from her husband than Melania Trump did, and successfully maintained a private life of her own. It’s actually not an unusual attitude from women who are married to wealthy and powerful polygamists that are ,unfortunately, more often than not flawed and deranged: the “main-wife” will develop a certain disgust over the years fueled by haunting and humiliating sexual memories, and jealousy will become a foreign concept since she is grateful for every courtesan who eases her burden in that regard. While their juniors earn their spurs under their fat, sweaty trophy husbands, main wives can enjoy their hard-earned wealth and luxury – enough is enough, everybody has a right to retire.

But while with the Trumps it’s not clear who’s keeping who in marital prison, since it was professional blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein who introduced Melania to Donald; Veronica had enough when her husband nominated a slate of attractive young women for the European Parliament, and went full giallo on Papi Berlusconi. She published a condemning open letter in the Corriere della Sera: “… I have watched in silence, without reacting through the media, as my person, my dignity and my marital history have been brutally besmirched,” and announced the end of her marriage after it was revealed that her then 70-year-old husband had attended the 18th birthday party of Noemi Letizia, who called the prime minister “daddy”, and that he had given her a gold and diamond necklace. Lario’s revenge was served ice-cold: “That surprised me,” she said. “Because he never attended the 18th birthday parties of his own children, even if he was invited.” Lario filed for divorce and the Milan court ruled that Silvio Berlusconi, who also owned a real-estate empire and AC Milan football club, has to pay his ex-wife Veronica Lario $4 million a month in alimonies.

What makes for a better giallo than a vigilante woman full of righteous contempt who has nothing to lose but everything to win with one of the world’s richest man as sparring partner in face of unspoken agreements on non-humiliation being broken? A woman who still has preserved enough personal dignity to stay away from the cheap medial tell-it-all circuit although it seems inevitable in her position in our age? This has a very old-fashioned, somewhat righteous appeal – I’m loving it in a state of class-crossing sisterhood.

Now, all eyes on Melania.

by Saliha Enzenauer