Suspiria (2018) is an unsettling movie with moments of visceral horror, which is why many viewers may have missed Tilda Swinton dressed as a man. In addition to her role as one of the dance school's head instructors, Madame Blanc, she also plays another major character: the 82-year-old male psychoanalyst Dr. Josef Klemperer. The question is, why?
In Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), which makes a number of significant changes from the original, Dr. Josef Klemperer is a psychoanalyst who has heard disturbing and fantastical stories of witches living at the prestigious Markos Dance Academy. In the third act of the film, he encounters Anke, his wife who went missing during the war, who tells him she fled to England to escape the Nazis. They walk together, talking and happy to be reunited until Klemperer discovers he has been led to the dance school to act as a witness for a witches' sabbath. His wife disappears and the school's matrons ambush him and take him to the ceremony. After witnessing the horrible and gruesome events that occur, Susie, as Mother Suspiriorium, tells him his wife was killed in a concentration camp. She then touches him and erases his memories.
Klemperer is a character new to the Suspiria script that adds a sociopolitical spin to the movie that was not present in Argento's (who was not a fan of the remake) original. Guadagnino's film is rich with allegory, some having compared the politics of the witch coven to the rise of a fascist regime. Klemperer acts as the outsider who witnesses what is happening while being powerless to stop it. That being said, that still doesn't explain why Oscar-winning makeup artist Mark Coulier was hired to transform Tilda Swinton, who confirmed she was playing the character, for the role. On top of that, a fake IMDb profile was created for the actor who was supposed to be playing Klemperer in an attempt to throw the media off. The question remains: why go through so much trouble to dress Swinton up as a man?
Guadagnino has made it clear it was important for Suspiria's narrative to have a woman playing the only significant male role in the movie. In his own words, when asked why Swinton played a man in Suspiria, he told The Guardian, "there will always be this element of femininity at its core. Being a film about the fantastic, it was important that we did not play by the book.” In other words, Suspiria is, at its core, about female empowerment and it was important to filmmakers for male eyes not to intrude. In this way, the audience never views the story through a man's eyes.
In that case, why include the Klemperer subplot at all? After all, the original doesn't have it. In addition, why not simply make Klemperer a woman? The reason seems to be that it was important for Klemperer to be an outsider, to add this perspective to the film. It does, after all, add a sociopolitical richness not present in the original. On top of that, if Klemperer was a woman, there would always be a chance she could join the coven. By having Tilda Swinton play the role in Suspiria, the movie gains a passive witness to the atrocities, serving as an allegorical representation of this role in the rise of fascist power. However, even more interesting is the fact that the role of Mother Markos, a centuries-old witch played by someone in layers and layers of detailed prosthetics, is an uncredited one. Could Swinton have played this role as well?
