Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dario Argento

Argento’s complaint lands like a horror director describing the real monster: a bureaucratic apparatus that doesn’t just cut your film, it diagnoses you. “In Italy the censor is very old” isn’t a neutral demographic note; it’s a jab at a gatekeeping culture that confuses seniority with authority and tradition with taste. The age matters because it implies an inherited moral framework, one calibrated for scandal prevention rather than artistic risk. In Argento’s world of stylized violence and erotic dread, that gap becomes lethal: the work is judged by people who weren’t built to read its language.

Then comes the sharper twist: “many judges and psychiatrists who analyse you.” He’s not only talking about formal censorship boards. He’s describing a wider Italian reflex - legalistic, moralizing, pathologizing - that treats transgressive art as evidence. Judges suggest punishment; psychiatrists suggest deviance. Put together, they imply a system that turns aesthetics into a case file. You’re not making a film; you’re submitting yourself for evaluation.

The line also hints at a specifically Italian postwar tension: Catholic-inflected respectability, state regulation, and the long shadow of political authoritarianism colliding with pop modernity. Argento’s cinema is often about surveillance, voyeurism, and accusation; this quote shows how autobiographical that atmosphere can be. He’s mocking a country where your imagination doesn’t merely offend - it gets interpreted as a symptom.