This will probably be my final opportunity to recommend some Blu-ray releases (along with actual screen captures) before we get into festival and awards season. Let's look at a few of the best August had to offer.
Showing posts with label Brian De Palma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian De Palma. Show all posts
Monday, August 26, 2013
August Blu-rays
by Tony Dayoub
This will probably be my final opportunity to recommend some Blu-ray releases (along with actual screen captures) before we get into festival and awards season. Let's look at a few of the best August had to offer.
This will probably be my final opportunity to recommend some Blu-ray releases (along with actual screen captures) before we get into festival and awards season. Let's look at a few of the best August had to offer.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Blu-ray Picks for March-April 2013
by Tony Dayoub
Spring Break is over. My boys are back in school. So things should get back to normal around here in the lead up to the summer blockbuster season. In the meantime, here are just a handful of Blu-rays that stood out from the ones I watched over my hiatus. (All stills are taken directly from their source Blu-ray and can be enlarged if you click on them.)
Spring Break is over. My boys are back in school. So things should get back to normal around here in the lead up to the summer blockbuster season. In the meantime, here are just a handful of Blu-rays that stood out from the ones I watched over my hiatus. (All stills are taken directly from their source Blu-ray and can be enlarged if you click on them.)
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
UPDATED: NYFF50 Review: Passion (2012)
by Tony Dayoub
Twenty years since their last collaboration, director Brian De Palma and composer Pino Donaggio reunite in their latest work, Passion. The reunion both recalls the virtuosic filmmaker's best period—the late 70s/early 80s—and revitalizes the career of a master, whose recent filmography's quality has been spotty at best. Redacted (2007) was an interesting experiment in utilizing found footage to tell a story about the Iraq war that collapsed under the weight of its propaganda-like liberal agenda (and I say this as someone who leans considerably to the left). And the postwar neo-noir, The Black Dahlia (2006), should have been a slam dunk for a director who's always shown an ease for crime stories, but instead, it felt oddly inept at delivering its admittedly sprawling, complicated plot. Not since 2002's Femme Fatale has De Palma manipulated his audience so boldly or so wittily as he does with Passion.
Twenty years since their last collaboration, director Brian De Palma and composer Pino Donaggio reunite in their latest work, Passion. The reunion both recalls the virtuosic filmmaker's best period—the late 70s/early 80s—and revitalizes the career of a master, whose recent filmography's quality has been spotty at best. Redacted (2007) was an interesting experiment in utilizing found footage to tell a story about the Iraq war that collapsed under the weight of its propaganda-like liberal agenda (and I say this as someone who leans considerably to the left). And the postwar neo-noir, The Black Dahlia (2006), should have been a slam dunk for a director who's always shown an ease for crime stories, but instead, it felt oddly inept at delivering its admittedly sprawling, complicated plot. Not since 2002's Femme Fatale has De Palma manipulated his audience so boldly or so wittily as he does with Passion.
Friday, September 30, 2011
September Blu-ray Capsule Reviews
by Tony Dayoub
My apologies for leaving this website barren for the past two weeks. After the heightened activity of the Blogathon — and before it picks up again here next week with my reviews of entries from this year's New York Film Festival — I frankly needed a break. I've still been receiving plenty of Blu-rays to review, though. Here are some capsule reviews of my favorite ones released this past month.
My apologies for leaving this website barren for the past two weeks. After the heightened activity of the Blogathon — and before it picks up again here next week with my reviews of entries from this year's New York Film Festival — I frankly needed a break. I've still been receiving plenty of Blu-rays to review, though. Here are some capsule reviews of my favorite ones released this past month.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Blu-ray Review: Criterion's Eccentric and Ignored
by Tony Dayoub
Three of April's Criterion releases feature strong central performances by actors portraying outsiders. All are directed by filmmakers with a distinct auteurial stamp (although the first one discussed wouldn't feel comfortable being categorized that way). And all are out in pristine transfers on Blu-ray (two of which are—at the time of this writing—on sale at Amazon for over 50% off; follow the links to purchase).
Three of April's Criterion releases feature strong central performances by actors portraying outsiders. All are directed by filmmakers with a distinct auteurial stamp (although the first one discussed wouldn't feel comfortable being categorized that way). And all are out in pristine transfers on Blu-ray (two of which are—at the time of this writing—on sale at Amazon for over 50% off; follow the links to purchase).
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon Postscript
My poll asking for your 3 favorite De Palma films closed last week. While not scientific, it certainly didn't surprise me too much with one notable exception.
Out of 168 respondents the films broke down like this:
- Blow Out got 65 votes as the most highly regarded film.
- Carrie got 55 votes, not surprising given Stephen King's involvement.
- Dressed to Kill got 44 votes, which I expected because it was probably De Palma at his most popular even if some snobbier critics look down on its violence.
- Carlito's Way got 41 votes. This seems to be the film that is rapidly rising up in the ranks as one of his more underrated efforts. Cahiers du Cinema recently named it the best film of the nineties, and it is my personal favorite as well.
- Body Double and Femme Fatale tied with 34 votes each. This is the biggest surprise. Many De Palma fans have a distaste for his sillier gonzo films. But I was gratified to see these both up here,and perhaps it means they are being rehabilitated in some people's minds.
- The Untouchables - 29 votes.
- Scarface - 28 votes.
- Phantom of the Paradise - 24 votes.
- Sisters - 20 votes.
- The Fury and Mission: Impossible - (tie) 16 votes.
- Casualties of War - 13 votes.
- Raising Cain - 12 votes.
- The Black Dahlia - 11 votes.
- Obsession - 10 votes.
- Hi, Mom! and Snake Eyes - 8 votes.
- Redacted - 5 votes.
- Mission to Mars - 4 votes.
- Dionysus - 2 votes.
- The Bonfire of the Vanities, Get to Know Your Rabbit, Greetings, Home Movies, and Murder à la Mod - (tie) 1 vote.
- And The Wedding Party and Wise Guys were the only ones to fail to get a single vote.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Scarface (1983) and Carlito's Way (1993)
by Tony Dayoub
...Cuba y Puerto Rico son
de un pájaro las dos alas,
reciben flores y balas
sobre el mismo corazón...
Translation:
...Cuba and Puerto Rico are
a dove's two wings,
receiving flowers or bullets
over the same heart...
-from the poem "A Cuba" by Lola Rodriguez de Tió
I find it difficult to address two of Brian De Palma's most atypical movies, Scarface and Carlito's Way, because of how closely I, a Cuban American, identify with them. Like the Puerto Rican Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) I grew up going to school in an Hispanic neighborhood in the late seventies. Miami, back then, was mostly populated by retirees and snowbirds, and the school I went to near Coral Way had a diverse group of students, some from the barrio called Little Havana. While I never faced the kind of violence Carlito experienced in his own barrio firsthand, it was not unheard of. Friends of friends belonged to the local gang, the Latin Kings. Seeing a knife pulled out in a fight was not unusual back then. And there were always rumors of someone who owned a gun.
A lot changed in 1980, with the arrival of those we called the Marielitos. My elementary school's student demographic changed overnight. The once diverse cross-section of students I was familiar with gave way to a huge new subculture of immigrant Cubans, many of them poor, and feeling dislocated. I, who grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky and Hutch, found it difficult to understand why some had never even owned a TV. And though I was fluent in Spanish (indeed, it was my first language), I could never hold, much less keep up a conversation with those that came in the Mariel boatlift. They simply spoke too fast, threw too many puzzling expressions out for me to ever get on the same wavelength. It was all a bit alienating.
Crime went up. Race riots became frequent in some of the poorer neighborhoods (not strictly Cuban ones, I should point out). Drugs became a vehicle for quick and easy monetary success in a society for proud immigrants that wanted to work, yet faced many obstacles in assimilating quickly into society. In retrospect, my school was one of the safer ones facing these problems because of its relative distance from these neighborhoods. But you still saw some of it. My seventh-grade friend Neal, was five years older than all his other peers, because he had been let out of juvie (where he was incarcerated for car theft) on the condition he attend school again. His legs were covered with scars, from dog bites and barbed wire from his attempts to escape detention... or so he told me. Who knew? I was a kid, fascinated by dangerous looking big talkers because of my own deficiencies when it came to defending myself. Neal knew I could help him get in good graces with this pretty young friend of mine, Judy, who everybody had a crush on. And even though I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get them together, he never forgot that I tried. His loyalty, his reputation, and his friendship, were like an invisible shield that helped protect me from getting bullied, and in fact, helped me get along with some of his friends in the Kings. So I've always had sympathy for people like Tony Montana (also Al Pacino) and Carlito Brigante.
You didn't see too many Puerto Ricans in Miami, though. They had immigrated much earlier to New York, where they assimilated much faster than the Cubans ever did in Miami. Nuyoricans, though, were responsible for paving the way for Cubans here in the U.S. Musicians like the Fania All-Stars supplied the soundtrack to our lives, showcasing such stars like the Cuban Celia Cruz and the Puerto Rican Hector Lavoe. Puerto Ricans shared something with us Cubans that the rest of Latin America didn't. They were from the Caribbean. They ate the same food as we did (tacos and nachos are absent in those cultures, where black beans and rice are the staple). Where most of the rest of Latin America was proud of their Native American roots, the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were the product of a culture where Spaniards had eradicated nearly all the Indians and instead integrated with their African slaves. Our music, dance, and even a religion, Santería, grew out of these African roots that were alien to the rest of Latin America. So Puerto Rico and Cuba, it can be said, are a dove's two wings.
*******************************************************
De Palma is always prone to symmetry in his work, often bookending his films with similar visual or thematic concerns: the menstrual blood at the beginning of Carrie (1976) with the pig's blood in its climax; the sexually violent shower dream that opens Dressed to Kill (1980) and the one that ends it; the way an empty gun helps Carlito escape during a shootout at the start of Carlito's Way, and seals his lawyer Kleinfeld's (Sean Penn) fate as the movie wraps up. But with the release of Carlito's Way, De Palma provided not so much an apology, as some have said—for his negative depiction of a Latin gangster in Scarface—as much as he provided a doppelganger, a symmetrical counterpoint to the earlier film that gives it some unexpected depth.
De Palma helped to create the association by surrounding Pacino with characters, situations and backdrops that serve as mirrors between the two films. Tony and Carlito each have Anglo lovers—Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), respectively—that serve to illustrate the men's cultural disconnect with the American path to success. Elvira, no innocent herself, can't understand Tony's excesses, why he stagnates when he isn't reaching for more, more, more. Gail, can't understand why Carlito is locked on his path to failure by his loyalty to a code that repeatedly betrays him.
To lend some authenticity to the film, De Palma cast real life Hispanic entertainers in the roles of Pacino's associates in each film. Steven Bauer was already well known in the Miami exile community as Rocky Echevarría, star of a locally produced "Spanglish" sitcom called ¿Que Pasa USA? before he played Manny in Scarface. Argentinian star Jorge Porcel who played Saso in Carlito's Way was also well known in Miami as the star of the bawdy variety show, A la cama con Porcel. He also brought back three actors from Scarface for cameos in Carlito's Way—Ángel Salazar, Al Israel, and Michael P. Moran (casting Steven Bauer as Lalín instead of Viggo Mortensen would have made the parallels perfect)—cementing the bond between both films.
Both films have a gripping scene of explosive violence that sets the tone for each: in Scarface, it is the "chainsaw" drug buy where his associate Angel (Pepe Serna) is executed; and in Carlito's Way, it is the drug buy where he reluctantly accompanies his cousin Guajiro (John Ortíz).
Each film has one of De Palma's trademark sets and in this case, they are both clubs. Much of the action in Scarface takes place at the mirror-walled Club Babylon which comes to represent the splintered mind of the coke-addled Tony Montana. While in Carlito's Way, a lot of it occurs in El Paraiso, the chrome-walled cruise ship-themed club that symbolizes Carlito's ever present mindfulness of his dream escape to the Caribbean and rent cars.
The most obvious of the affinities between the two movies lie in the casting of their respective protagonists. Al Pacino plays both the Cuban gangster, Tony Montana, and Puerto Rican ex-con, Carlito Brigante. A decade long gulf separates Pacino's performances and the characters. Curiously, Pacino chews the scenery as Montana at a point in time when he hadn't yet become the butt of jokes for his over-the-top histrionics. As Montana, Pacino was not only paying tribute to the operatic interpretation of his predecessor, Paul Muni, in the original Scarface (1932), he was also capturing the flashy, loudmouthed characteristics of the stereotypical Miami Cuban: proud, independent to a fault, and full of braggadocio. Montana tries to create what he deems to be the perfect life, but his overblown sense of self causes him to impose his will and his mark on everything in it, as seen in his monogrammed mansion with the oversized painting of him overlooking a fountain that has a towering globe with the words "The World is Yours" surrounding it in neon.
Pacino's Carlito is Montana ten years later, humiliated by his stint in prison yet still respectful to the code of the streets. The white-suited Tony now gives way to the haunted black-suited Carlito. And it is curious again, that in 1993, when Pacino is constantly criticized for his exaggerated turns, he underplays the doomed Carlito. This man is quiet more often than not; taking in his surroundings with his eyes; guarded without being paranoid; wise enough to realize that he won't last long if he returns to the street life so instead he chooses to pursue the most humble of dreams, to rent cars outside of the country which he was born in, but has always felt excluded from. The character of Carlito is almost but not quite the elder statesman Tony could have grown into had he outlived his impetuous youth. This knowledge contributes to the elegiac tone of Carlito's Way, aided of course by the foreknowledge that Carlito will die at the film's conclusion.
Tony Montana's death is chaotic and magnificent. Carlito Brigante's is nondescript and neat. Each death is a fitting one considering the way each man lived his life. And in this way, too, Tony and Carlito are like a dove's two wings.
...Cuba y Puerto Rico son
de un pájaro las dos alas,
reciben flores y balas
sobre el mismo corazón...
Translation:
...Cuba and Puerto Rico are
a dove's two wings,
receiving flowers or bullets
over the same heart...
-from the poem "A Cuba" by Lola Rodriguez de Tió
I find it difficult to address two of Brian De Palma's most atypical movies, Scarface and Carlito's Way, because of how closely I, a Cuban American, identify with them. Like the Puerto Rican Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) I grew up going to school in an Hispanic neighborhood in the late seventies. Miami, back then, was mostly populated by retirees and snowbirds, and the school I went to near Coral Way had a diverse group of students, some from the barrio called Little Havana. While I never faced the kind of violence Carlito experienced in his own barrio firsthand, it was not unheard of. Friends of friends belonged to the local gang, the Latin Kings. Seeing a knife pulled out in a fight was not unusual back then. And there were always rumors of someone who owned a gun.
A lot changed in 1980, with the arrival of those we called the Marielitos. My elementary school's student demographic changed overnight. The once diverse cross-section of students I was familiar with gave way to a huge new subculture of immigrant Cubans, many of them poor, and feeling dislocated. I, who grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky and Hutch, found it difficult to understand why some had never even owned a TV. And though I was fluent in Spanish (indeed, it was my first language), I could never hold, much less keep up a conversation with those that came in the Mariel boatlift. They simply spoke too fast, threw too many puzzling expressions out for me to ever get on the same wavelength. It was all a bit alienating.
Crime went up. Race riots became frequent in some of the poorer neighborhoods (not strictly Cuban ones, I should point out). Drugs became a vehicle for quick and easy monetary success in a society for proud immigrants that wanted to work, yet faced many obstacles in assimilating quickly into society. In retrospect, my school was one of the safer ones facing these problems because of its relative distance from these neighborhoods. But you still saw some of it. My seventh-grade friend Neal, was five years older than all his other peers, because he had been let out of juvie (where he was incarcerated for car theft) on the condition he attend school again. His legs were covered with scars, from dog bites and barbed wire from his attempts to escape detention... or so he told me. Who knew? I was a kid, fascinated by dangerous looking big talkers because of my own deficiencies when it came to defending myself. Neal knew I could help him get in good graces with this pretty young friend of mine, Judy, who everybody had a crush on. And even though I was unsuccessful in my attempts to get them together, he never forgot that I tried. His loyalty, his reputation, and his friendship, were like an invisible shield that helped protect me from getting bullied, and in fact, helped me get along with some of his friends in the Kings. So I've always had sympathy for people like Tony Montana (also Al Pacino) and Carlito Brigante.
You didn't see too many Puerto Ricans in Miami, though. They had immigrated much earlier to New York, where they assimilated much faster than the Cubans ever did in Miami. Nuyoricans, though, were responsible for paving the way for Cubans here in the U.S. Musicians like the Fania All-Stars supplied the soundtrack to our lives, showcasing such stars like the Cuban Celia Cruz and the Puerto Rican Hector Lavoe. Puerto Ricans shared something with us Cubans that the rest of Latin America didn't. They were from the Caribbean. They ate the same food as we did (tacos and nachos are absent in those cultures, where black beans and rice are the staple). Where most of the rest of Latin America was proud of their Native American roots, the Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were the product of a culture where Spaniards had eradicated nearly all the Indians and instead integrated with their African slaves. Our music, dance, and even a religion, Santería, grew out of these African roots that were alien to the rest of Latin America. So Puerto Rico and Cuba, it can be said, are a dove's two wings.
*******************************************************
De Palma is always prone to symmetry in his work, often bookending his films with similar visual or thematic concerns: the menstrual blood at the beginning of Carrie (1976) with the pig's blood in its climax; the sexually violent shower dream that opens Dressed to Kill (1980) and the one that ends it; the way an empty gun helps Carlito escape during a shootout at the start of Carlito's Way, and seals his lawyer Kleinfeld's (Sean Penn) fate as the movie wraps up. But with the release of Carlito's Way, De Palma provided not so much an apology, as some have said—for his negative depiction of a Latin gangster in Scarface—as much as he provided a doppelganger, a symmetrical counterpoint to the earlier film that gives it some unexpected depth.
De Palma helped to create the association by surrounding Pacino with characters, situations and backdrops that serve as mirrors between the two films. Tony and Carlito each have Anglo lovers—Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), respectively—that serve to illustrate the men's cultural disconnect with the American path to success. Elvira, no innocent herself, can't understand Tony's excesses, why he stagnates when he isn't reaching for more, more, more. Gail, can't understand why Carlito is locked on his path to failure by his loyalty to a code that repeatedly betrays him.
To lend some authenticity to the film, De Palma cast real life Hispanic entertainers in the roles of Pacino's associates in each film. Steven Bauer was already well known in the Miami exile community as Rocky Echevarría, star of a locally produced "Spanglish" sitcom called ¿Que Pasa USA? before he played Manny in Scarface. Argentinian star Jorge Porcel who played Saso in Carlito's Way was also well known in Miami as the star of the bawdy variety show, A la cama con Porcel. He also brought back three actors from Scarface for cameos in Carlito's Way—Ángel Salazar, Al Israel, and Michael P. Moran (casting Steven Bauer as Lalín instead of Viggo Mortensen would have made the parallels perfect)—cementing the bond between both films.
Both films have a gripping scene of explosive violence that sets the tone for each: in Scarface, it is the "chainsaw" drug buy where his associate Angel (Pepe Serna) is executed; and in Carlito's Way, it is the drug buy where he reluctantly accompanies his cousin Guajiro (John Ortíz).
Each film has one of De Palma's trademark sets and in this case, they are both clubs. Much of the action in Scarface takes place at the mirror-walled Club Babylon which comes to represent the splintered mind of the coke-addled Tony Montana. While in Carlito's Way, a lot of it occurs in El Paraiso, the chrome-walled cruise ship-themed club that symbolizes Carlito's ever present mindfulness of his dream escape to the Caribbean and rent cars.
The most obvious of the affinities between the two movies lie in the casting of their respective protagonists. Al Pacino plays both the Cuban gangster, Tony Montana, and Puerto Rican ex-con, Carlito Brigante. A decade long gulf separates Pacino's performances and the characters. Curiously, Pacino chews the scenery as Montana at a point in time when he hadn't yet become the butt of jokes for his over-the-top histrionics. As Montana, Pacino was not only paying tribute to the operatic interpretation of his predecessor, Paul Muni, in the original Scarface (1932), he was also capturing the flashy, loudmouthed characteristics of the stereotypical Miami Cuban: proud, independent to a fault, and full of braggadocio. Montana tries to create what he deems to be the perfect life, but his overblown sense of self causes him to impose his will and his mark on everything in it, as seen in his monogrammed mansion with the oversized painting of him overlooking a fountain that has a towering globe with the words "The World is Yours" surrounding it in neon.
Pacino's Carlito is Montana ten years later, humiliated by his stint in prison yet still respectful to the code of the streets. The white-suited Tony now gives way to the haunted black-suited Carlito. And it is curious again, that in 1993, when Pacino is constantly criticized for his exaggerated turns, he underplays the doomed Carlito. This man is quiet more often than not; taking in his surroundings with his eyes; guarded without being paranoid; wise enough to realize that he won't last long if he returns to the street life so instead he chooses to pursue the most humble of dreams, to rent cars outside of the country which he was born in, but has always felt excluded from. The character of Carlito is almost but not quite the elder statesman Tony could have grown into had he outlived his impetuous youth. This knowledge contributes to the elegiac tone of Carlito's Way, aided of course by the foreknowledge that Carlito will die at the film's conclusion.
Tony Montana's death is chaotic and magnificent. Carlito Brigante's is nondescript and neat. Each death is a fitting one considering the way each man lived his life. And in this way, too, Tony and Carlito are like a dove's two wings.
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Considering De Palma Elsewhere in the Blogosphere (Part 5)
Well, this is the last day of the very successful De Palma Blog-A-Thon. It's been very gratifying to have such fantastic submissions, as well as wonderful writers joining in elsewhere in the blogosphere. There will be at least one more post coming later in the day, maybe two.
But in this post we consider The Untouchables (1987), the film that not only inspired me to become a cinephile, but seems to also have inspired many others, including Bill R. at The Kind of Face You Hate: The main reason I've cooled a bit on The Untouchables, however, is that I've simply seen a whole lot more films now. I have a better handle on what I think is great, and what I think is good, and what I think is trash. And I've even seen De Palma beaten at his own game with Inglourious Basterds. I just have too much experience with the vast world of movies (though still not nearly enough) to think that The Untouchables is the masterpiece I thought it was 22 years ago. There was also a period where, outside of this film, I'd decided that I really disliked De Palma. But the experience and knowledge I've gained has shown me that De Palma is actually a weird kind of genius -- his films are inconsistent, frustrating, sometimes out-right terrible, but he's still a genius of a particular sort... Read more here.Also, here is a two-part post that gets a little too obsessive with the film's famous "Odessa Steps" sequence: And so it begins... by Randy Aitken at HiMiPoV And so it begins... (Part Two) by Randy Aitken at HiMiPoV Join us later for the results of our poll, and my own contribution to the Blog-A-Thon.
Monday, September 14, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Considering De Palma Elsewhere in the Blogosphere (Part 4)
Posts might be light today considering my better half is sick in bed, and it's fallen to me to take care of the kids, house, and so forth. Truthfully, I've been doing this since Thursday, and am a bit stressed right now, as it is proving to be an obstacle to my own contribution to this Blog-A-Thon. But if the doctor is to be believed, I should be back up to full operation tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'll leave you guys to chew on David Cairns' fascinating contribution to the Blog-A-Thon, up at his Shadowplay: ...De Palma addressed this comedic lack when he appeared at the Edinburgh Film Festival: after averring that he wasn’t afraid of anything, he admitted that he probably wouldn’t be making any more comedies anytime soon. And yet he practically began as a comedy director: that’s one word used to describe Greetings and Hi Mom! anyway, and then there’s the Tom Smothers movie and Phantom [of the Paradise]. I think maybe De Palma’s sense of humour is a little too outre for popular taste, like Polanski’s, and his technique doesn’t really lend itself to chuckles — I can recall a 360 degree pan in Wise Guys, and it didn’t really work as a gag-delivery mechanism. Plus Polanski and De Palma can’t help throw in unpleasant little details that make the laughter shrivel in your throat — here there’s a gratuitous tooth-pulling episode that leaves the Phantom with a ritzy set of steel gnashers. He doesn’t USE them, but there they are... Read more here.Just two more days, so keep those submissions/contributions coming.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: directed by Brian De Palma
compiled by Joel Bocko
[Joel Bocko, otherwise known to most of you as MovieMan0283 of The Dancing Image, contributes a unique piece to the Blog-A-Thon that comments on some of the more disturbing recurring motifs in his favorite De Palma films. Joel proves that he is as skilled at putting images together as he is doing the same with words. Be forewarned: because of some of the imagery, this piece is definitely NSFW.]
This is a video tribute to Mr. De Palma and an examination of his thematic and stylistic obsessions. It runs about seven and a half minutes, and contains footage from my three favorite De Palma films: Hi, Mom!, Carrie, and Scarface, which were released, roughly, with seven years between each film. Hope you enjoy the piece.
[Joel Bocko, otherwise known to most of you as MovieMan0283 of The Dancing Image, contributes a unique piece to the Blog-A-Thon that comments on some of the more disturbing recurring motifs in his favorite De Palma films. Joel proves that he is as skilled at putting images together as he is doing the same with words. Be forewarned: because of some of the imagery, this piece is definitely NSFW.]
This is a video tribute to Mr. De Palma and an examination of his thematic and stylistic obsessions. It runs about seven and a half minutes, and contains footage from my three favorite De Palma films: Hi, Mom!, Carrie, and Scarface, which were released, roughly, with seven years between each film. Hope you enjoy the piece.
UPDATED - De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Considering De Palma Elsewhere in the Blogosphere (Part 3)
As we start heading down the home stretch (the Blog-A-Thon wraps up on Wednesday) here are even more posts I've caught around the blogosphere.
First, Cinema Viewfinder's oldest and dearest friend (and spiritual mentor), considers one of the director's harder to find films (I'VE never seen it) at Moon in the Gutter: It’s one of the most breathtaking shots in Brian De Palma’s entire canon. Nancy Allen, at her loveliest, walks through a doorway in slow motion towards a visibly stunned Keith Gordon, who is frantically pounding away at some mashed potatoes. Pino Donnagio’s score grows more and more lush and dramatic as the luminous Allen walks straight towards the camera, as if some unseen force is inviting her. This classic De Palma moment isn’t from Dressed to Kill, or Blow Out, or any of the other classic films that he shot with his (then wife) Allen in the late seventies and early eighties. It is from the almost totally forgotten 1980 release Home Movies, and the unseen force inviting Allen to come closer is us, the audience... Read more here.As part of his contribution to the Blog-A-Thon, Neil Fulwood considers Body Double at The Agitation of the Mind:
... I know that sounds snide, but I'm absolutely serious: Body Double is a conflation of Rear Window and Vertigo. De Palma's homages to Hitchcock run through his entire filmography, and these are the two films he most frequently references. In Body Double he takes his frenzy for Hitch to its logical extreme and makes unapologetically explicit everything that Sir Alfred left elegantly implicit. There are whole screeds to be written (by someone else [...maybe Dennis Cozzalio did yesterday? -ed.]) on whether this is a good or a bad thing. All I'll say is take a look at Hitchcock's penultimate film: it contains some pretty grim and graphic material. Had the maestro lived and continued making films into the '80s, how far would he have gone with what he depicted onscreen? Read more here.In considering De Palma, Bryce Wilson brings up a popular refrain amongst De Palma fans at Things That Don't Suck:
... There are of course those who believe that De Palma is merely a director of great scenes rather then great movies and thus (oddly enough it’s his champions rather then his detractors who I usually hear go this route) I shouldn’t worry about it. Bull, the best DePalma films work almost like puzzle boxes with scenes folding out of and mirroring each other in surprising and gratifying ways (the dual screams in Blow Out, the blood at both ends of Carrie) ignoring the whole in favor of the parts does De Palma a disservice... Read more here.UPDATED: That Little Round-Headed Boy has posted a quite humorous piece on De Palma's sartorial leanings at his eponymous site:
... When we talk of the style of Brian De Palma, we often speak of the swirling camera, the Hitchcockian references, the Hermann-esque music, the slow-motion sequences. But there is one other style point that is ever-present in any discussion of the director: The safari jacket. It springs up in every interview and profile, the parenthetical phrase "said De Palma, wearing his trademark safari jacket..." But the question must be raised: Has there ever been a director who has such exquisite visual taste and yet dresses like crap in quite the way Brian De Palma does? Read more here.And Jordan Ruimy at Mind of a Suspicious Kind:
... DePalma has the tendency to overstylize everything & bring a sort of what I'd like to call 'Hitchcockian queerness' to it all. [Carrie] is one of the rare times that DePalma takes a back seat and paves the way to a towering performance. There's an abandon in the filmmaking that I don't think DePalma ever achieved again-a fearless, joyous abandon that makes you realize how talented the man truly is... Read more here.And here are more links to other De Palma related writings that have recently come to my attention. These are ones not written specifically for the Blog-A-Thon. The Black Dahlia: Interview with Brian De Palma, September 26, 2006, by Geoff Beran at De Palma a la Mod Greetings: Greetings by MovieMan0283 at The Dancing Image General Discussion: Interview with Brian De Palma, February 26, 2002, in Paris, France by Geoff Beran at De Palma a la Mod
Saturday, September 12, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Don't Look Now: Revisiting Thoughts on Brian De Palma and Body Double (1984)
by Dennis Cozzalio
[Dennis Cozzalio deserves some credit for inspiring this Blog-A-Thon. His fantastic site, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, is a reflection of his gregarious personality, and frequently cites the subject of this Blog-A-Thon, deservedly, as a master. Here is a thoughtful piece reworked, in part, from other writings on De Palma.]
In the nascent stages of what would become film history, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and undoubtedly others who have not managed to make near such an impression upon our hearts, minds and sacred texts, developed the notion of montage as a way for the audience to more than one thread or aspect of a narrative at once. In 1907 Griffith appeared as an actor in a short movie produced for Thomas A. Edison called Rescue from an Eagle’s Nest in which a baby is stolen by an eagle and must be rescued from a precarious cliff-side nest by the baby’s father (Griffith). The telling of the story of this gallant father and an apparently bloodthirsty bird employed rudimentary elements of editing and special effects which Griffith would begin immediately to improve upon with as he took up directing his own films. In 1909’s The Lonely Villa, in which Griffith would begin the kind of interweaving of narrative that would lead to the formal narrative breakthroughs of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Less than 10 years later Russian theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein would refine and perfect the notion of montage as a way for the viewer to psychologically and emotionally process colliding imagery and tension created by them with his 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin. One could argue that everything in the history of the movies that has come since, from Hitchcock’s theories and exposition of suspense, to Godard’s breakdown and reconstruction of film theory and principles, employing, for example, the jump cut to replace the reassuring flow of imagery, has been either refinement, commentary, homage or outright theft of these ideas. Filmmakers as different as Robert Siodmak, Claude Chabrol, Curtis Harrington, Curtis Hanson, Robert Mulligan and countless others have made use of concepts, ideas, themes and techniques “borrowed” from the Alfred Hitchcock playbook. Of these directors, it could also be argued that only Claude Chabrol has managed to separate his work from simple homage (or theft, the line between which is far fuzzier than it may seem) and create a worldview recognizably his own, perhaps through sheer determination, insistence and consistency over a large body of work. Themes in Chabrol’s work are recognizably consistent from his early films in the ‘60s straight through to his newest, A Girl Cut in Two (2007), a claim that might be harder to prove true over the course of Siodmak’s career, or, say, Hanson’s. (Harder, not necessarily impossible.)
It’s possible that the easier it is to see the work being referenced, the less fun, and the less original the movie may seem. Would audiences have loved Charade (1963) more if they’d not had North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief so fresh in mind? The fact is they did love it, and it’s stood the test of time even though its roots are fully on display. (Less so, maybe, Arabesque?) Those who saw and remember Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather (1987) probably don’t process the influence of Hitchcock as theft because Ruben is smart enough to think up some of his own tricks, and he has an actor, Terry O’Quinn, who is so mesmerizing good that he can distract viewers from the flaws that might fray the edges of this nifty thriller. Do audiences who flocked to largely forgettable suspense efforts like The Bedroom Window (1987), or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), or more recently a clunker like Obsessed (2009), in which Beyonce Knowles and Ali Larter reheat the already warmed-over Hitchcock leavings sautéed by Adrian Lyne in Fatal Attraction (1987), care about the constant references and connections to Hitchcock and other films that made up their cinematic fast-food meal? Probably about as much as they cared about the films themselves as films, which is, I’d bet, not much. (All this, of course, is not to even mention what the Italian directors were doing with the giallo films of the ‘60s, 70s and ‘80s.)
The potentially maddening thing about the Quentin Tarantino Problem, as Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich, tongues partially placed in cheek, termed it two years ago, is that audiences are constantly made aware of those influences, not the least by the director himself, so it’s usually the influences people, especially his detractors, tend to see first. The perfectly ironic thing about the Quentin Tarantino problem is that in 1992, when Reservoir Dogs hit big, not many outside of video store geeks not unlike the director himself had seen much of Hong Kong cinema and the other influences Tarantino would blend up into his own special brew. (Of course, thanks to Tarantino and others that was all soon to change.) But by the time he unleashed Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2001), the enfant terrible was becoming more frequently shouted down by an increasingly aware audience as terrible or simply a cinematic infant, just about the time that his movie-fed vision was actually expanding, emotionally, texturally, thematically, empathetically. A friend of mine wrote m an e-mail earlier this week suggesting that though he admires Tarantino’s work, he may never reach the operatic highs of the masters—Brian De Palma, Sergio Leone—to whose heights of cinematic genre exploration, the recasting of old wine into new wineskins, he most clearly aspires, simply because of his insistence on using old movies, and particularly “low cinema” as his texts. The difference, of course, being that Leone and De Palma’s unique (that’s right, unique) visions were formed through the synthesis not only of classical movie imagery and strategies, but also awareness of what those images and designs and narrative patterns meant for people of different, and convergent, sociopolitical experience, ideologies and development. Leone brings his experience, his thinking as a man growing up in post-war Italy to bear on the iconography of John Ford and comments not only on those images but on how his experience and that of those around him, his contemporaries and his elders, cause him to process them through a different prism. And does anyone think that the shower means the same thing to De Palma as it does to Hitchcock, despite the fact that De Palma makes no effort to hide the basic visual influences of Psycho on Dressed to Kill? (De Palma confuses the issue by referencing more than just one major filmmaker in tone as much as imagery, which is a sticker issue to separate.) Whether Tarantino ever manages to develop his vision, one that I believe has begun to expand beyond simple mimicry into deeper emotional levels, beginning with Kill Bill, and to a much greater extent Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds, only the passage of time will tell, and that’s as it should be. The hill on which the real kings of cinema are perched is littered with the bodies of hundreds of young filmmakers declared masters before the pudding of the work had really set.
Which brings me to Brian De Palma, whose mastery of form is not in any way evidence of his inability to make a bad movie, as The Black Dahlia ought to prove once and for all. But even in a mess like The Black Dahlia, hobbled as it is by blunders of casting, wobbly tone, and even a director who seems to be chasing his own shadow, there are elements of his black humor, particularly in the performances of William Finley and Fiona Shaw, that should be pure gold for fans of the director’s sense of how high the ceiling really is, and disregard for where the shards of glass fall when he shatters through it. De Palma is one of those filmmakers who seem to inspire either fierce devotion or fierce hatred—there doesn't seem to be much middle ground when considering his films. (And considering his subject matter and his insinuating, exploratory, personally implicating way with the camera and story structure, should this be so surprising?)
I've always found De Palma to be a compelling filmmaker, particularly coming, as I do, from the point of view of a cinephile, even when I've found his work off-key or ill-advised. But since the release of Femme Fatale (2002), I've come to realize with just how much esteem I hold this director—he's surely one of my favorites now, perhaps one of the two or three best American directors currently working, and remember, I’ve seen The Black Dahlia and Redacted, which is not frequently mentioned in the same breath with The Hurt Locker but deserves to be. I've never felt bound to look at his work with a blindly approving eye and, indeed, there are several movies in his oeuvre besides the one I’ve already mentioned that, despite their clear thematic relationship to the rest of his work and to the history of cinema he draws upon, seem fundamentally uninspired, tired, atonal.
I'm thinking primarily of movies like Obsession (1976), and also Body Double (1984), which I revisited about four years ago after a 20-year history of distaste for it. I revised my opinion upward slightly, but still don't think much of it (and we’ll get to that in a moment). But perhaps my greatest ire is reserved for the absurdly overestimated Scarface, which Pauline Kael called "a De Palma movie for people who hate De Palma movies." (More than one reader has reminded me that the much more enjoyable The Untouchables might also be a candidate for that honor, though I find The Untouchables, if slightly impersonal, much more fascinating and fun on a pure level of craft than the sloppy, boorish Scarface.)
I also think less of The Fury (1978) than do most De Palma enthusiasts. To my eye, it's filled with images of sinuous, beautiful rage and the poetry of emotional agony, and it sports some terrific performances—John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Carol Rossen, Amy Irving. Yet at the same time it seems rather misshapen at times as a narrative, hurried and choppy in moments where it should be languid and seductive, and I think it fails to build up a true head of black steam by its conclusion, despite the memorable dispatching of Fiona Lewis and, of course, Cassavetes. It's clearly a classic De Palma in its concerns and its approach, and compared to just about any other similar effort from just about anyone else it's clearly technically superior. But compared to some of De Palma's other works from the same period I just don't think it's as perfectly crafted or consistently imagined. All that said, I still enjoy revisiting The Fury every couple of years or so.
But ask me what De Palma films I'm over the moon for, either with the kind of minor reservations I'd have for any filmmaker, or with none at all, and the list is much longer: Hi, Mom!, Sisters, Carrie (probably the greatest act of sustained empathy for a character I think I’ve ever seen),Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible and Femme Fatale, with a second tier occupied by Phantom of the Paradise, The Untouchables and Raising Cain. My own personal mission is to revisit less illustrious De Palma movies like Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, The Bonfire of the Vanities and hopefully even Wise Guys someday soon. With the possible exception of Bonfire, all of these movies have good things in them, and/or people willing to go out on a limb to support them, so I am more than willing to take another look.
It's De Palma's engagement (hugely key word) with cinema and cinema history rather than just his ability to parrot that history that, plainly enough for me, places him outside and above the class of copycats with whom he's so frequently grouped. He's using key influences (Hitchcock, of course, but Antonioni, Godard, Kubrick, and fellow “copycat” Chabrol as well) not as signposts to clue movie eggheads in as to how smart and crafty he is, but as seedlings for the progression of his vision over the course of his career, as the foundation of a structured, astringently clear-eyed, yet sometimes subtly hallucinatory way of visualizing the world through the cinema. The audiences "sees" the cinema, but De Palma also uses the cinema itself to see, to reflect back on the world, on the audience, in a meaningful and not always comforting fashion.
De Palma's movies, sometimes because of their excessive stylization, can seem uneven, to have not "aged well." There are moments in both Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, both of which in my fragile mind are masterpieces, that seem thin, less well thought out. (Is it coincidence that they seem to be those scenes that feature Dennis Franz and Nancy Allen in one-on-one situations?) But each movie, even within scenes that may not seem to be "working" for sensibilities that have moved 20-25 years down the road, relies on revelatory visual strategies and cues that can often help the viewer past the occasional lumpy exposition or weak performance by engaging him or her in the film's structural purpose. I'm thinking here of how De Palma uses the multilayered framing and levels of sound in the interrogation scene in Dressed to Kill to tickle our imaginations and stimulate our perception during an otherwise potentially banal scene—Keith Gordon eavesdropping on Franz's questioning of Allen—seen through layers of windows, and through various and subtle deep focus/split screen techniques.
I think the same thing holds true for Blow Out. De Palma absorbs the Antonioni material, all right, and I'd even suggest he goes far beyond what Antonioni was able to achieve, or maybe even what he was interested in achieving, in Blow Up by embracing the crude "plot" elements of the witnessed murder. Where Antonioni abandons this narrative line, for reasons either based in existential malaise, or perhaps a disinterest in exploring the possibilities of mere melodrama, De Palma grounds his film in it and expands the elements Antonioni abandons into a vision of political paranoia and personal responsibility that is far more potent today than are his fellow Italian's mod London mind games.
I cannot imagine sitting through the first 20 minutes of Blow Out and not being completely glued to the screen to see the rest. That's an opening 20 minutes that holds within it the gruesome, salacious comedy and fake-out gimmickry of the movie-within-a-movie; the stunning logo of the movie itself (scored with near-subliminal, prescient use of some of the most integral and agonizing sounds that will be heard later in the film); the enthralling split-screen under the opening credits, which contrasts expository information setting up the importance of the Liberty Bell Parade and the emergence of the Kennedyesque political figure with Jack (Travolta) preparing to record sound out in the field; and of course, that absolutely perfect sequence in which De Palma heightens every sound (the owl, the overheard pedestrians, the faint squeal of tires) in anticipation of the recording of the sounds of the horrific event that will kick the film's primary mystery into gear.
And it's impossible for me to see Blow Out and imagine coming away, despite the apparent influences of Antonioni and Hitchcock, thinking of it as anything but a De Palma film, a work of art that couldn't have originated from anyone else. To downgrade an artist because he acknowledges the whole of the history of his art form, and specific avenues of interest that have sparked his creativity in the creation of his work, would be to deny the manner in which artists in every medium have taken previously known works and expanded on them, turned them inside out, made a clearly new creation from well-used parts. The idea that painters never looked at other printings and “stole” ideas which were integrated into their own process is ridiculous. De Palma is a polarizing artist whose output has never taken a straight line-- he gets better with age, it seems to me, even if there are disturbing, uneven zags and zigs from film to film. And even his work for hire (Mission: Impossible, Mission to Mars), while sometimes hit and miss, is shot through with this director's fury, deftness with chronology, visual confidence and, in the case of Mars, belief in the lyricism and power of the image to overcome the occasional insufficiency of the spoken word, or the banality of a given storyline.
But what about the stuff that doesn’t work? Nearly four years ago I participated in an informal poll hosted by the website 24 Lies A Second* regarding the films of Brian De Palma in which I casually commented that Body Double was one of three Brian De Palma films for which I essentially had little use. My friend Peet Gelderblom, founder of the site and a vigorously articulate De Palma enthusiast, expressed surprise in an e-mail that I could so blithely dismiss the movie, as he has had much love for it ever since first seeing it years ago. So I wrote back inviting him to talk about it, as I had never really heard anyone mount much of a defense for this movie, much less someone who I knew would have well-formulated opinions and a good handle on his own responses to it. Peet proceeded to dropped a comment on this blog in which he took up my suggestion to elaborate upon why he holds Body Double so dear. Here’s what he said:
“I've always had a huge crush on this movie. I'm sure hormones played a part in that, since I was 13 or 14 at the time. But the film has never failed to mesmerize me since. It's one of the most hypnotic movies I know of and a masterpiece of mise-en-scene. I could marvel at that beach scene forever.
The subtext of the film is all about De Palma raising his middle finger to the critics who slaughtered him for Dressed to Kill and Scarface. He openly confronted them with the very things they accused him of (excessive violence, misogyny) and made sure to enthrall them at the same time, just to point out their hypocrisy.
Feminists who hate the film will love me agreeing on this, but I really do think Gloria Revelle - her name says it all - is strictly an object of desire. Besides a bunch of other things, Body Double is very much about male fantasy. Gloria's good looks and vulnerable attitude make her the perfect projection of male obsession. There's nothing real about her. She's an ideal, a goddess. (Mind you, the way De Palma uses a sexual archetype in order to explore the theme of male desire is hardly the same as portraying ALL women as sex objects.)
Her death scene isn't exactly devastating, but a cold shower. Because De Palma puts so much effort into the visual "foreplay", Gloria becomes our object of desire as well. When the killer breaks into her house, we are torn between two extremes: wanting to save her and wanting to have her (there's no way I'll ever accept the drill is not a symbol for penetration, no matter what De Palma has said to defend himself). Especially because we don't get to see the actual killing ourselves, the emotional result is a double anti-climax. Not Gloria but Jake is the victim here, and it's ourselves we pity. In the end, the audience is revealed to be just as voyeuristic as Jake, and that thought made a lot of people uncomfortable. If Gloria's death scene doesn't seem emotionally satisfying, well... that's the whole idea, really... It's just about the cinematic equivalent of premature ejaculation if you think about it. De Palma's death scenes are really love scenes and his love scenes are really death scenes.
Despite the likes of Armond White calling him a "weak actor," I've always thought Craig Wasson was perfectly cast in this. Yes, he totally lacks the star power that could have helped to make the film a commercial success and he doesn't exactly deliver what can be described as a powerhouse performance. But the man's playing an unemployed actor, for God's sakes--a born loser, a regular Joe longing for a little excitement in his lousy life. A charismatic star like John Travolta in the same everyman role wouldn't have been believable.
Because Craig Wasson plays Jake as such a goody two-shoes, you never really believe he's a pervert, even though he's peeking at naked women and digging up panties from trashcans. I even like the part where Jake is pretending to be a sleazy porn producer. His performance is quite impossible to take seriously and it makes perfect sense, since we're looking at the reason why the guy's unemployed to begin with...
I guess it's more the character that the actor that annoys people, because weakness isn't exactly considered a virtue. But this is the story of somebody who tries to overcome his weakness. The story of an actor trying to act. The story of a sexless nobody wishing to become a stud. The weakness is an essential element of the narrative.”
I wrote back on the comments page that I was really happy to hear his words on the subject, and I promised I would respond. A little over a week later, with some good-natured prodding from Peet himself, I have finally done so. The following article is that response. Thanks for your patience, Peet, and again in advance for enduring the length of my comments. As you know, I am nothing if not long-winded, especially absent someone to crack the whip and wield the straight razor…
(Also, I am assuming, Dear Reader, a certain level of familiarity on your part with Body Double, which is why I have eschewed ** including a synopsis of its narrative. If you’re unfamiliar with what goes on in this movie, arguably one of De Palma’s most notorious, and still feel compelled to read on, you can catch up on a brief sketch of the plot before continuing on.)
AN INDIFFERENT STYLE AS SUBSTANCE
I agree wholeheartedly with the contention of your latest 24 Lies a Second essay that style can often be substance, especially in “the strange case of Brian De Palma”—and maybe this assertion is at the root of my own indifference toward the movie, because his visual style here seems wildly inconsistent. Body Double showcases, to my mind, one thrilling set piece—the porno production number which doubles as a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video— but the movie seems more heavily weighted and mixed up with riffs on past, more successful efforts. To look at actor Craig Wasson as Jake Scully peering across the canyon at a woman dancing in her apartment, and then ultimately being stalked and attacked by an “Indian,” is to revisit a similar situation that was much more cleverly and fruitfully staged in Sisters; Wasson following Deborah Shelton through the maze of Beverly Hills shops and stealing her discarded panties is a warmed-over, and not nearly so heart-stopping, rehash of Angie Dickinson’s museum encounter in Dressed to Kill; the fetishized seduction at the beach tunnel recalls the florid theatrics of Obsession.
Most damning, though, is the indifference with which De Palma stages the many expository scenes required to get the little engine of the plot cooking. For the first time in his career, the director comes across as being bored—most of the conversations between Wasson and actors Gregg Henry and Melanie Griffith are comprised of flat-out uninspired, routine two-shot/medium close-up visual designs that have seemingly little going on in them other than their function to clunkily advance the narrative. All you have to do is look at the staging of the conversation between Griffith and Wasson in which she describes what she won’t do in a porno film up next to comparable scenes between, say, Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon in Dressed to Kill (the Psycho parody, for example, in which Allen explains transsexuals to Gordon and is overheard by some horrified diners), or sound man John Travolta describing his increasing paranoia to Allen, framed by the technological tools of his trade and shot by a probing, gliding camera, in Blow Out, to see how detached De Palma’s style seems in Body Double. Ironically, I find myself agreeing with almost all the observations you make about the movie and still feeling like it’s a half-baked project because of this tendency I perceive in the director to rush through the setups to get to what he must have, at the time, looked at as “the good stuff,” the stuff that would rile his detractors in the wake of Scarface’s initial M.P.A.A. reception. Body Double seems at times so detached from the hot red blood running through most of the rest of De Palma’s films that it almost feels like it was made by a De Palma imitator.
POWER TOOLS
The director’s “fuck you” to the ratings board turns out to be more of a threat, in retrospect, than a reality though because, despite its setting in the sleazy underbelly of the Hollywood entertainment industry (and De Palma takes swift satiric aim at the idea of the legitimate movie business and the porn industry being two sides of the same coin), nothing in Body Double is nearly as graphically violent or as grotesquely, comically over-scaled as what could be seen even in the expurgated version of Scarface. That drill murder can’t hold a candle to the chainsaw sequence in Scarface, even if it was cut down, in terms of bloodshed or emotional intensity, and some of your observations about what’s going on in that drill sequence—the idea of Gloria being simply, and unapologetically, an object of desire, and the audience being torn being wanting to save her and simply wanting her, and then of course being made implicit in that fatal penetration—touch upon why.
I think you’re essentially right about that infamous scene. The drill clearly is a none-too-subtle visual metaphor for penetration, or more accurately, I think, rape. But is metaphor even the right term here? It’s such an explicit image, and the use to which it is put so closely resembles a savage sexually violent act, right down to the way the scene is framed, and the way the actual murder is alluded to—the drill emerging from the ceiling above Scully’s head—that to imagine it having even the slightest level of ambiguity that an assignation as metaphor might imply seems patently silly. De Palma going on the defensive to deny that this was his intention is either an instance of uncharacteristic submission to the general outrage of responses to the scene or, more likely, I think, a perverse way of continuing to goad his detractors and call attention to the elements that were being focused on in the press at the time. (Do you remember in what context his comments were made?)
SEXUAL OBJECTIFICATION AND THE MYTH OF MISOGYNY
I do agree with you that Gloria can really only be seen and taken seriously as an object, a projection of fantasy; I might even describe her as an abstraction. But given that this is how we are encouraged to see her—as Scully does—I think in sharing, as you describe, Scully’s indecision about wanting to save her and wanting to have her, we end up coming down fairly squarely on the more conventional side of saving her. Had Gloria been conceived in a more fleshed-out manner, had she been a real character (on the order of Dressed to Kill’s Kate Miller, say) rather than a relatively simple erotic abstraction, I think those of us who find Body Double a hollow experience might have found this scene as compelling and ambivalently disturbing as your description of it. We might have found Scully’s (and our) implication in her fate far more haunting in the way I’m sure De Palma intended. And given this “if,” perhaps even the charges of misogyny that seem to focus most intensely and insistently on this scene in De Palma’s oeuvre would have been at least partially defused—it’s harder to imagine, at least in my mind, a director being perceived as expressing a blanket attitude toward a gender (or an ethnicity, or a sexual orientation) if he’s taken the time to make the character who takes the brunt of his alleged violation a “real” person. In her mannequin-like beauty, actress Deborah Shelton comes across as an inexpressive actress in a straitjacketed role—therefore there’s no character to distract from the far more simplistic reading of her as simply an empty receptacle in which to contain the director’s supposed feelings of hatred and disgust for women.
In fact, one of the major revelations for me upon this viewing of Body Double was how little water those time-honored and quite tired accusations of misogyny seem to be able to hold. I’ve never felt that the charges made much sense in regards to De Palma anyway. Films like Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, Dressed to Kill and Femme Fatale are erotically charged, to be sure, and it would be silly to insist that De Palma hasn’t an appreciation of the sensual quality of many of the women in those films. But, as SLIFR reader Blaaagh has observed, De Palma’s films have always featured interesting women, women who have been subjected to as great a variety of directorial attitudes as one would expect they would encounter in the real world, a quality they share with the male characters in his films. Not many film artists working in the suspense genre, perhaps not even Hitchcock, have approached a variety female characters as rich as Carrie White, Margaret White (Carrie), Daniele Breton/Dominique Blanchion (Sisters), Kate Miller (Dressed to Kill), Sally (Blow Out) or Laure Ash (Femme Fatale). To say that De Palma is a misogynist, or even a sadist, because some of these characters meet horrific fates, or are the cause of horrific violence, or are the victims of some fairly sardonic jokes orchestrated by the director, is to dismiss all the other levels on which these women operate dramatically and emotionally, and quite satisfactorily so.
I think you could add Melanie Griffith’s Holly Body to this list too—she seems to literally hot-wire the second half with sexual impertinence and confidence, she’s very funny and likable and, whether credit is due to her leather bustier or her magnetism as an actress, Griffith and her comic turn are the elements that have made for my strongest associations with Body Double over the years. Shelton’s Gloria Revelle, of course, cannot exist on the same plane with these women because, as you point out, she’s explicitly a fantasy, as opposed to Holly, who embodies fantasy but is clearly a woman with her own thought processes and desires. She is insistent that she not be perceived as anyone’s pawn, though it will be revealed to her that she has, in fact, been used exactly this way in the villain’s plot. Gloria Revelle, on the other hand, amounts only to a pawn to get Scully, and the audience, in the right place at the right time. It’s a miscalculation to assume that she can sustain that level of visual/narrative abstraction when she’s being tortured and eventually cored out by a three-foot drill brandished by a man who will turn out to be her husband. But given the fact that gender has never been a meaningful boundary when it comes to De Palma and the assignation of dire fate to his characters—can John Cassavetes and Andrew Stevens in The Fury, or Lisle Wilson in Sisters, or Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill be said to be any luckier than Deborah Shelton?—it seems absurd to label this confrontational director, who has never courted easy responses to either his characters or his scenarios, as a misogynist based largely upon his treatment of one of the most plasticized characters, female or male, in his entire body of work.
INNOCENT SLEAZE
At the same time, I don’t think I’m buying that De Palma’s strategy was to rub the audience’s collective noses in the more extreme elements of his narrative, and then make sure to enthrall them at the same time, in order “to point out their hypocrisy.” There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence, in box-office numbers—the movie was a financial disappointment—or anecdotal ruminations on the film from those who did pay to see it, that the audience was sufficiently enthralled. (Peet, you’re perhaps the first person I’ve known who has clearly loved the movie, had it speak to you in a profound way, and been able/willing to articulate why these things were so.) And you’re right—it would be an act of supreme hypocrisy to rail against the violence and perceived misogyny of Body Double, then slink to the nearest multiplex, submit to the spell it might cast, enjoy (openly or not) those aspects of the movie that were once the focus of your ire, and then come out claiming to have been disgusted by what you saw on the screen. But I honestly don’t think many people approached or experienced the movie this way. Those who saw and loved it clearly are comfortable with the elements of the film that De Palma escalated in order to assault the sensibilities of those who would be offended at the mere announcement that he was making such a film. Those who saw it and were dissatisfied with it (like me) are obviously capable of holding the movie accountable for perceived insufficiencies that have less to do with the size of Gregg Henry’s drill and what he does with it than with De Palma’s script and direction of the entire film. And those who were shocked and horrified when they heard what De Palma intended to do probably stayed away, which may account, in some part anyway, for the movie’s tepid ticket sales in the U.S.
Of course, De Palma does takes advantage of the setting of the movie’s second half for some pretty explicit talk, particularly when Melanie Griffith’s Holly Body rattles off that very funny laundry list of porno “don’ts” to Craig Wasson’s Scully, whom she believes to be an adult film producer. Griffith, back when she was a recognizably unaltered beauty has a budding starlet’s excitability, piquancy and ripely funny sexuality (her body is only one consonant removed from holy) that really wakes the movie up from listless pacing through its overly familiar, and far less interesting, suspense motifs. But one of the most striking things to me about revisiting Body Double 20 years later is how relatively innocent it seems vis-à-vis its own sleaze factor, and I think this might be a direct result of De Palma, all anger and frustration aside, discovering, in the process of either writing the story or making the film, that that anger was giving way to his sharper satirical instincts. The second half of Body Double seems to perk up considerably, not just because of the luscious presence of a pre-plasticized, robustly curvy Griffith in a leather bustier and spiky dye job, but because De Palma puts his own shaky suspense story into lower gear in order to lounge around in this MTV-friendly porn universe for a while and have some fun with his characters, particularly Scully and his desire for role-playing in roles for which he is entirely and obviously inadequate as an actor (desirable stud, slicked-back porn entrepreneur, and finally, heroic savior).
HOLLY'S BODY: BODY DOUBLE'S EROTIC COMEDY
I think Body Double is much more of a success, and much more fundamentally interesting in the light of the rest of the De Palma canon, as a satirical jab at the movie business, especially in the way it indulges in a somewhat playful compare-and-contrast between the trials and tribulations of a underemployed actor and the comic undertones of the porn business. The Frankie Goes to Hollywood sequence is terrific, both as a parody of the ridiculous plotting of porn films (an excess which has all but disappeared in the video age) and a parody of music videos at a time when the phenomenon was still in its white-hot infancy. (Is it my feeble imagination, or did De Palma actually direct a video for “Relax” incorporating elements of this scene which actually played on MTV?) It’s also a terrific stylistic sequence that serves to reflect Scully’s heady disorientation at being plunged into this world and at the same time dismantle what it is we’re seeing as it is happening—the surprise of seeing the film crew at one point reflected in a mirror is shocking and funny and emphasizes the artifice of the situation even as Scully finds himself responding to Holly sexually during the scene (a big porno no-no?) and remembering/superimposing his earlier moment with Gloria on the beach upon the on-set encounter. Finally, the end credit sequence of Body Double, which visualizes and parodies what we imagine were the behind-the-scenes action during the shooting of Dressed to Kill’s opening shower scene, must have had Angie Dickinson rolling in the aisles. It’s a premier example of the director’s multileveled design that works as comedy, as titillation, as an exposure of the utter absence of eroticism on a movie set (the blotchy-faced body double instructs Jake, holding stiff for the camera in full vampire regalia while she gets into position in the shower, to go easy on her nipples—they’re extremely sore due to her having just started her period) and as a means of encouraging the audience to tally up the ways in which a real situation sheds light on elements of their fantasies. The movie’s final image is a close-up of blood overflowing from the vampire’s arterial feast and trickling down the chest, over and between the painfully sensitive, but nonetheless lovely breasts, of the body double, and it’s funnier, more exciting and alive and provocative than almost anything else in the movie. It’s here that Body Double reveals its true place in De Palma’s work less as a pastiche of themes utilized more effectively in previous films than as a fitfully vital kissing cousin (with bared fangs) to the satirical sensibility displayed in films like Hi, Mom! and Phantom of the Paradise.
CRAIG WASSON, LEADING MAN
Finally, your comments have managed to shed light on one of the elements of Body Double that has always been problematic for me—the casting and performance of lead actor Craig Wasson. Over the past 20 years, whenever I’ve thought about it, I’ve always marveled that such a nondescript talent had, for a brief period in the early to mid ‘80s, such a run of work, and his appearance in the De Palma film always seemed to me the apotheosis of his white-bread “appeal.” But your argument is a very convincing one:
“I've always thought Craig Wasson was perfectly cast in this. Yes, he totally lacks the star power that could have helped to make the film a commercial success and he doesn't exactly deliver what can be described as a powerhouse performance. But the man's playing an unemployed actor, for God's sakes--a born loser, a regular Joe longing for a little excitement in his lousy life. A charismatic star like John Travolta in the same everyman role wouldn't have been believable. This is the story of somebody who tries to overcome his weakness. The story of an actor trying to act. The story of a sexless nobody wishing to become a stud. The weakness is an essential element of the narrative.”
It makes sense to me that De Palma would have an understanding that Wasson is no Jimmy Stewart everyman here—he’s investigating a very specific backstage world of which not many people outside of Hollywood (all efforts of Entertainment Weekly to the contrary) have any real understanding—and it would be silly to think that’s what he had in mind. Nor does it seem much of a stretch at all to imagine a formally experimental film artist as De Palma playing with expectations to such a degree that he wouldn’t hesitate to cast a “regular-Joe” actor as a “regular-Joe” actor. So to that end I can accept that Wasson’s casting could be, in the terms laid out by the film, a success. And I can also accept that weakness can be, and perhaps is here, an essential part of the narrative. But again, to invoke Vertigo, Jake Scully is no Scottie Ferguson—Hitchcock uses Scottie’s weakness to infuse his film with a creeping malaise and undercurrent of dread, to allude to the ever-present shadow of curdling obsession. But it seems De Palma embraces Jake’s weakness to such a degree that the film is less an illumination of that weakness as a subject than a victim of it as it is manifested in De Palma’s own relatively by-the-numbers approach. The weakness may truly be essential to the conception of Jake Scully as a character, but in Body Double it is also a symptom of a director momentarily spinning his creative wheels, looking to pump fresh blood into concepts he perhaps felt compelled to revisit for essentially compromised reasons.
20 YEARS LATER...
Looking at Body Double 20 years later, knowing that De Palma would recover his bearings, that works as masterful and resonant and audacious as Casualties of War and Femme Fatale were laying in wait, and even that he would rediscover his commercial footing with one of the most formally adventurous of Hollywood blockbusters (Mission: Impossible), it’s easier for me to forgive some of the flaws that I still find so apparent. And it’s even easier, given the passage of time, to look at the movie with new eyes and see that it’s nowhere near the viral offense to decent sensibilities that its most vocal detractors claimed in 1985 and still do today, that it actually does have some value, even though I still value it less than almost every other De Palma film. Why, I dare say I even had a good time seeing it again. It’s nice to be reminded that even the lesser films of a genuinely gifted film artist can yield plenty to think about and connect up with other films if given the space in a viewer’s mind in which to expand. In a million years, even at my most logorrheic, I would have never imagined that I would have been able to spend this much time in consideration of Body Double so long after its initial release. Such are the delights of considering cinema closely, I suppose. Thanks, Peet, for giving me yet another good reason to do so!
* 24 Lies a Second was the excellent, though sadly now defunct, site devoted to intelligent film writing founded by Peet Gelderblom and James Moran. It was Peet and Jim who first reached out to me and asked me to contribute an article to their site, thus expediting this particular stone’s moss-gathering roll down the hill toward a satisfying experience in film blogging.
** “Eschewed”? Jesus. Why couldn’t I have just said ‘avoided”? If I had written this piece today, I would have. And I guess that’s what I’m doing right now!
(Great huge portions of this “new” piece, synthesized in a manner not at all similar to that of De Palma or Leone, originally appeared [at SLIFR], in their unaltered form, as posts entitled “The Black Rhapsodies of Brian De Palma”, “Brian De Palma: Critical Black Mass” and, most significantly, “Don’t Look Now: Revisiting Brian De Palma’s Body Double”. If you should feel so inclined as to click on any of these links and investigate the original pieces, please do follow all the way down through to the comments section on each post, which not only provided me with the opportunity to elaborate on things that needed to be elaborated on at the time, but also to host an excellent collection of insights from very smart people who chose to read my words and offer their own illumination upon them, most often leaving Your Humble Narrator in the dust.
And as this whole enterprise constitutes my participation in Tony Dayoub’s Brian De Palma Blog-A-Thon, please click the link to read sundry wonderful pieces on not just the great stuff, but also the not-so-great, which is all fair in this game of cinema love. (And belated happy birthday to Mr. De Palma too, by the way.) But also, during the Blog-A-Thon and beyond, please do not miss the opportunity to check out Tom Sutpen’s brilliant gallery of Brian De Palma images. And I would also direct you to Slant magazine’s excellent feature roundup, “Auteur Fatale: The Films of Brian De Palma”, an excellent critical overview of the director’s career that was published in 2006.)
[Dennis Cozzalio deserves some credit for inspiring this Blog-A-Thon. His fantastic site, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, is a reflection of his gregarious personality, and frequently cites the subject of this Blog-A-Thon, deservedly, as a master. Here is a thoughtful piece reworked, in part, from other writings on De Palma.]
In the nascent stages of what would become film history, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and undoubtedly others who have not managed to make near such an impression upon our hearts, minds and sacred texts, developed the notion of montage as a way for the audience to more than one thread or aspect of a narrative at once. In 1907 Griffith appeared as an actor in a short movie produced for Thomas A. Edison called Rescue from an Eagle’s Nest in which a baby is stolen by an eagle and must be rescued from a precarious cliff-side nest by the baby’s father (Griffith). The telling of the story of this gallant father and an apparently bloodthirsty bird employed rudimentary elements of editing and special effects which Griffith would begin immediately to improve upon with as he took up directing his own films. In 1909’s The Lonely Villa, in which Griffith would begin the kind of interweaving of narrative that would lead to the formal narrative breakthroughs of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Less than 10 years later Russian theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein would refine and perfect the notion of montage as a way for the viewer to psychologically and emotionally process colliding imagery and tension created by them with his 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin. One could argue that everything in the history of the movies that has come since, from Hitchcock’s theories and exposition of suspense, to Godard’s breakdown and reconstruction of film theory and principles, employing, for example, the jump cut to replace the reassuring flow of imagery, has been either refinement, commentary, homage or outright theft of these ideas. Filmmakers as different as Robert Siodmak, Claude Chabrol, Curtis Harrington, Curtis Hanson, Robert Mulligan and countless others have made use of concepts, ideas, themes and techniques “borrowed” from the Alfred Hitchcock playbook. Of these directors, it could also be argued that only Claude Chabrol has managed to separate his work from simple homage (or theft, the line between which is far fuzzier than it may seem) and create a worldview recognizably his own, perhaps through sheer determination, insistence and consistency over a large body of work. Themes in Chabrol’s work are recognizably consistent from his early films in the ‘60s straight through to his newest, A Girl Cut in Two (2007), a claim that might be harder to prove true over the course of Siodmak’s career, or, say, Hanson’s. (Harder, not necessarily impossible.)
It’s possible that the easier it is to see the work being referenced, the less fun, and the less original the movie may seem. Would audiences have loved Charade (1963) more if they’d not had North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief so fresh in mind? The fact is they did love it, and it’s stood the test of time even though its roots are fully on display. (Less so, maybe, Arabesque?) Those who saw and remember Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather (1987) probably don’t process the influence of Hitchcock as theft because Ruben is smart enough to think up some of his own tricks, and he has an actor, Terry O’Quinn, who is so mesmerizing good that he can distract viewers from the flaws that might fray the edges of this nifty thriller. Do audiences who flocked to largely forgettable suspense efforts like The Bedroom Window (1987), or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), or more recently a clunker like Obsessed (2009), in which Beyonce Knowles and Ali Larter reheat the already warmed-over Hitchcock leavings sautéed by Adrian Lyne in Fatal Attraction (1987), care about the constant references and connections to Hitchcock and other films that made up their cinematic fast-food meal? Probably about as much as they cared about the films themselves as films, which is, I’d bet, not much. (All this, of course, is not to even mention what the Italian directors were doing with the giallo films of the ‘60s, 70s and ‘80s.)
The potentially maddening thing about the Quentin Tarantino Problem, as Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich, tongues partially placed in cheek, termed it two years ago, is that audiences are constantly made aware of those influences, not the least by the director himself, so it’s usually the influences people, especially his detractors, tend to see first. The perfectly ironic thing about the Quentin Tarantino problem is that in 1992, when Reservoir Dogs hit big, not many outside of video store geeks not unlike the director himself had seen much of Hong Kong cinema and the other influences Tarantino would blend up into his own special brew. (Of course, thanks to Tarantino and others that was all soon to change.) But by the time he unleashed Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2001), the enfant terrible was becoming more frequently shouted down by an increasingly aware audience as terrible or simply a cinematic infant, just about the time that his movie-fed vision was actually expanding, emotionally, texturally, thematically, empathetically. A friend of mine wrote m an e-mail earlier this week suggesting that though he admires Tarantino’s work, he may never reach the operatic highs of the masters—Brian De Palma, Sergio Leone—to whose heights of cinematic genre exploration, the recasting of old wine into new wineskins, he most clearly aspires, simply because of his insistence on using old movies, and particularly “low cinema” as his texts. The difference, of course, being that Leone and De Palma’s unique (that’s right, unique) visions were formed through the synthesis not only of classical movie imagery and strategies, but also awareness of what those images and designs and narrative patterns meant for people of different, and convergent, sociopolitical experience, ideologies and development. Leone brings his experience, his thinking as a man growing up in post-war Italy to bear on the iconography of John Ford and comments not only on those images but on how his experience and that of those around him, his contemporaries and his elders, cause him to process them through a different prism. And does anyone think that the shower means the same thing to De Palma as it does to Hitchcock, despite the fact that De Palma makes no effort to hide the basic visual influences of Psycho on Dressed to Kill? (De Palma confuses the issue by referencing more than just one major filmmaker in tone as much as imagery, which is a sticker issue to separate.) Whether Tarantino ever manages to develop his vision, one that I believe has begun to expand beyond simple mimicry into deeper emotional levels, beginning with Kill Bill, and to a much greater extent Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds, only the passage of time will tell, and that’s as it should be. The hill on which the real kings of cinema are perched is littered with the bodies of hundreds of young filmmakers declared masters before the pudding of the work had really set.
Which brings me to Brian De Palma, whose mastery of form is not in any way evidence of his inability to make a bad movie, as The Black Dahlia ought to prove once and for all. But even in a mess like The Black Dahlia, hobbled as it is by blunders of casting, wobbly tone, and even a director who seems to be chasing his own shadow, there are elements of his black humor, particularly in the performances of William Finley and Fiona Shaw, that should be pure gold for fans of the director’s sense of how high the ceiling really is, and disregard for where the shards of glass fall when he shatters through it. De Palma is one of those filmmakers who seem to inspire either fierce devotion or fierce hatred—there doesn't seem to be much middle ground when considering his films. (And considering his subject matter and his insinuating, exploratory, personally implicating way with the camera and story structure, should this be so surprising?)
I've always found De Palma to be a compelling filmmaker, particularly coming, as I do, from the point of view of a cinephile, even when I've found his work off-key or ill-advised. But since the release of Femme Fatale (2002), I've come to realize with just how much esteem I hold this director—he's surely one of my favorites now, perhaps one of the two or three best American directors currently working, and remember, I’ve seen The Black Dahlia and Redacted, which is not frequently mentioned in the same breath with The Hurt Locker but deserves to be. I've never felt bound to look at his work with a blindly approving eye and, indeed, there are several movies in his oeuvre besides the one I’ve already mentioned that, despite their clear thematic relationship to the rest of his work and to the history of cinema he draws upon, seem fundamentally uninspired, tired, atonal.
I'm thinking primarily of movies like Obsession (1976), and also Body Double (1984), which I revisited about four years ago after a 20-year history of distaste for it. I revised my opinion upward slightly, but still don't think much of it (and we’ll get to that in a moment). But perhaps my greatest ire is reserved for the absurdly overestimated Scarface, which Pauline Kael called "a De Palma movie for people who hate De Palma movies." (More than one reader has reminded me that the much more enjoyable The Untouchables might also be a candidate for that honor, though I find The Untouchables, if slightly impersonal, much more fascinating and fun on a pure level of craft than the sloppy, boorish Scarface.)
I also think less of The Fury (1978) than do most De Palma enthusiasts. To my eye, it's filled with images of sinuous, beautiful rage and the poetry of emotional agony, and it sports some terrific performances—John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Carol Rossen, Amy Irving. Yet at the same time it seems rather misshapen at times as a narrative, hurried and choppy in moments where it should be languid and seductive, and I think it fails to build up a true head of black steam by its conclusion, despite the memorable dispatching of Fiona Lewis and, of course, Cassavetes. It's clearly a classic De Palma in its concerns and its approach, and compared to just about any other similar effort from just about anyone else it's clearly technically superior. But compared to some of De Palma's other works from the same period I just don't think it's as perfectly crafted or consistently imagined. All that said, I still enjoy revisiting The Fury every couple of years or so.
But ask me what De Palma films I'm over the moon for, either with the kind of minor reservations I'd have for any filmmaker, or with none at all, and the list is much longer: Hi, Mom!, Sisters, Carrie (probably the greatest act of sustained empathy for a character I think I’ve ever seen),Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible and Femme Fatale, with a second tier occupied by Phantom of the Paradise, The Untouchables and Raising Cain. My own personal mission is to revisit less illustrious De Palma movies like Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, The Bonfire of the Vanities and hopefully even Wise Guys someday soon. With the possible exception of Bonfire, all of these movies have good things in them, and/or people willing to go out on a limb to support them, so I am more than willing to take another look.
It's De Palma's engagement (hugely key word) with cinema and cinema history rather than just his ability to parrot that history that, plainly enough for me, places him outside and above the class of copycats with whom he's so frequently grouped. He's using key influences (Hitchcock, of course, but Antonioni, Godard, Kubrick, and fellow “copycat” Chabrol as well) not as signposts to clue movie eggheads in as to how smart and crafty he is, but as seedlings for the progression of his vision over the course of his career, as the foundation of a structured, astringently clear-eyed, yet sometimes subtly hallucinatory way of visualizing the world through the cinema. The audiences "sees" the cinema, but De Palma also uses the cinema itself to see, to reflect back on the world, on the audience, in a meaningful and not always comforting fashion.
De Palma's movies, sometimes because of their excessive stylization, can seem uneven, to have not "aged well." There are moments in both Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, both of which in my fragile mind are masterpieces, that seem thin, less well thought out. (Is it coincidence that they seem to be those scenes that feature Dennis Franz and Nancy Allen in one-on-one situations?) But each movie, even within scenes that may not seem to be "working" for sensibilities that have moved 20-25 years down the road, relies on revelatory visual strategies and cues that can often help the viewer past the occasional lumpy exposition or weak performance by engaging him or her in the film's structural purpose. I'm thinking here of how De Palma uses the multilayered framing and levels of sound in the interrogation scene in Dressed to Kill to tickle our imaginations and stimulate our perception during an otherwise potentially banal scene—Keith Gordon eavesdropping on Franz's questioning of Allen—seen through layers of windows, and through various and subtle deep focus/split screen techniques.
I think the same thing holds true for Blow Out. De Palma absorbs the Antonioni material, all right, and I'd even suggest he goes far beyond what Antonioni was able to achieve, or maybe even what he was interested in achieving, in Blow Up by embracing the crude "plot" elements of the witnessed murder. Where Antonioni abandons this narrative line, for reasons either based in existential malaise, or perhaps a disinterest in exploring the possibilities of mere melodrama, De Palma grounds his film in it and expands the elements Antonioni abandons into a vision of political paranoia and personal responsibility that is far more potent today than are his fellow Italian's mod London mind games.
I cannot imagine sitting through the first 20 minutes of Blow Out and not being completely glued to the screen to see the rest. That's an opening 20 minutes that holds within it the gruesome, salacious comedy and fake-out gimmickry of the movie-within-a-movie; the stunning logo of the movie itself (scored with near-subliminal, prescient use of some of the most integral and agonizing sounds that will be heard later in the film); the enthralling split-screen under the opening credits, which contrasts expository information setting up the importance of the Liberty Bell Parade and the emergence of the Kennedyesque political figure with Jack (Travolta) preparing to record sound out in the field; and of course, that absolutely perfect sequence in which De Palma heightens every sound (the owl, the overheard pedestrians, the faint squeal of tires) in anticipation of the recording of the sounds of the horrific event that will kick the film's primary mystery into gear.
And it's impossible for me to see Blow Out and imagine coming away, despite the apparent influences of Antonioni and Hitchcock, thinking of it as anything but a De Palma film, a work of art that couldn't have originated from anyone else. To downgrade an artist because he acknowledges the whole of the history of his art form, and specific avenues of interest that have sparked his creativity in the creation of his work, would be to deny the manner in which artists in every medium have taken previously known works and expanded on them, turned them inside out, made a clearly new creation from well-used parts. The idea that painters never looked at other printings and “stole” ideas which were integrated into their own process is ridiculous. De Palma is a polarizing artist whose output has never taken a straight line-- he gets better with age, it seems to me, even if there are disturbing, uneven zags and zigs from film to film. And even his work for hire (Mission: Impossible, Mission to Mars), while sometimes hit and miss, is shot through with this director's fury, deftness with chronology, visual confidence and, in the case of Mars, belief in the lyricism and power of the image to overcome the occasional insufficiency of the spoken word, or the banality of a given storyline.
But what about the stuff that doesn’t work? Nearly four years ago I participated in an informal poll hosted by the website 24 Lies A Second* regarding the films of Brian De Palma in which I casually commented that Body Double was one of three Brian De Palma films for which I essentially had little use. My friend Peet Gelderblom, founder of the site and a vigorously articulate De Palma enthusiast, expressed surprise in an e-mail that I could so blithely dismiss the movie, as he has had much love for it ever since first seeing it years ago. So I wrote back inviting him to talk about it, as I had never really heard anyone mount much of a defense for this movie, much less someone who I knew would have well-formulated opinions and a good handle on his own responses to it. Peet proceeded to dropped a comment on this blog in which he took up my suggestion to elaborate upon why he holds Body Double so dear. Here’s what he said:
“I've always had a huge crush on this movie. I'm sure hormones played a part in that, since I was 13 or 14 at the time. But the film has never failed to mesmerize me since. It's one of the most hypnotic movies I know of and a masterpiece of mise-en-scene. I could marvel at that beach scene forever.
The subtext of the film is all about De Palma raising his middle finger to the critics who slaughtered him for Dressed to Kill and Scarface. He openly confronted them with the very things they accused him of (excessive violence, misogyny) and made sure to enthrall them at the same time, just to point out their hypocrisy.
Feminists who hate the film will love me agreeing on this, but I really do think Gloria Revelle - her name says it all - is strictly an object of desire. Besides a bunch of other things, Body Double is very much about male fantasy. Gloria's good looks and vulnerable attitude make her the perfect projection of male obsession. There's nothing real about her. She's an ideal, a goddess. (Mind you, the way De Palma uses a sexual archetype in order to explore the theme of male desire is hardly the same as portraying ALL women as sex objects.)
Her death scene isn't exactly devastating, but a cold shower. Because De Palma puts so much effort into the visual "foreplay", Gloria becomes our object of desire as well. When the killer breaks into her house, we are torn between two extremes: wanting to save her and wanting to have her (there's no way I'll ever accept the drill is not a symbol for penetration, no matter what De Palma has said to defend himself). Especially because we don't get to see the actual killing ourselves, the emotional result is a double anti-climax. Not Gloria but Jake is the victim here, and it's ourselves we pity. In the end, the audience is revealed to be just as voyeuristic as Jake, and that thought made a lot of people uncomfortable. If Gloria's death scene doesn't seem emotionally satisfying, well... that's the whole idea, really... It's just about the cinematic equivalent of premature ejaculation if you think about it. De Palma's death scenes are really love scenes and his love scenes are really death scenes.
Despite the likes of Armond White calling him a "weak actor," I've always thought Craig Wasson was perfectly cast in this. Yes, he totally lacks the star power that could have helped to make the film a commercial success and he doesn't exactly deliver what can be described as a powerhouse performance. But the man's playing an unemployed actor, for God's sakes--a born loser, a regular Joe longing for a little excitement in his lousy life. A charismatic star like John Travolta in the same everyman role wouldn't have been believable.
Because Craig Wasson plays Jake as such a goody two-shoes, you never really believe he's a pervert, even though he's peeking at naked women and digging up panties from trashcans. I even like the part where Jake is pretending to be a sleazy porn producer. His performance is quite impossible to take seriously and it makes perfect sense, since we're looking at the reason why the guy's unemployed to begin with...
I guess it's more the character that the actor that annoys people, because weakness isn't exactly considered a virtue. But this is the story of somebody who tries to overcome his weakness. The story of an actor trying to act. The story of a sexless nobody wishing to become a stud. The weakness is an essential element of the narrative.”
I wrote back on the comments page that I was really happy to hear his words on the subject, and I promised I would respond. A little over a week later, with some good-natured prodding from Peet himself, I have finally done so. The following article is that response. Thanks for your patience, Peet, and again in advance for enduring the length of my comments. As you know, I am nothing if not long-winded, especially absent someone to crack the whip and wield the straight razor…
(Also, I am assuming, Dear Reader, a certain level of familiarity on your part with Body Double, which is why I have eschewed ** including a synopsis of its narrative. If you’re unfamiliar with what goes on in this movie, arguably one of De Palma’s most notorious, and still feel compelled to read on, you can catch up on a brief sketch of the plot before continuing on.)
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Peet, the first thing that struck me when I revisited your comments re Body Double was that I didn’t really disagree with any of your observations per se, just maybe some of the conclusions. I never really cared much for Body Double when it was first released. Though it strikes me somewhat more mildly than it once did in terms of its subject matter, and, paradoxically, perhaps a little more potently as a whole film, I still think it’s among De Palma’s weaker efforts. (Is my tolerance/acceptance/understanding of Body Double a result of the aging process? Or is it that, in 2005, the envelope has stretched so far beyond recognition that a film so steeped in the desire to shock, to rub the audience’s nose in the supposed transgressions of its creator, seems relatively tame now compared to some of the raunchy roads traveled by R-rated films since it came out 20 years ago?)
I wrote in a review of the film in 1985 in which I expressed the opinion that one-upsmanship borne of anger was a fairly unstable foundation on which to build a film. I still feel that way. De Palma said in an Esquire interview at the time of Scarface’s release that he was so disgusted with the hypocrisy of the M.P.A.A. (the ratings board saddled the movie with an “X” until the director toned down the infamous chainsaw torture sequence) that he was really gonna let “them” (The M.P.A.A.? The paying audience? De Palma fans and supporters?) have it next time, saying, essentially, that if they want an “X,” by God, I’ll give ‘em one. The fundamental problem with Body Double, as I see it, is not that impulse of anger itself, but how it seems to have clouded the director’s normally sharp instincts for what he can get away with, narratively speaking, through his visual style, even to the point of rendering that style itself relatively muddled, indifferent, uninspired.
AN INDIFFERENT STYLE AS SUBSTANCE
I agree wholeheartedly with the contention of your latest 24 Lies a Second essay that style can often be substance, especially in “the strange case of Brian De Palma”—and maybe this assertion is at the root of my own indifference toward the movie, because his visual style here seems wildly inconsistent. Body Double showcases, to my mind, one thrilling set piece—the porno production number which doubles as a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video— but the movie seems more heavily weighted and mixed up with riffs on past, more successful efforts. To look at actor Craig Wasson as Jake Scully peering across the canyon at a woman dancing in her apartment, and then ultimately being stalked and attacked by an “Indian,” is to revisit a similar situation that was much more cleverly and fruitfully staged in Sisters; Wasson following Deborah Shelton through the maze of Beverly Hills shops and stealing her discarded panties is a warmed-over, and not nearly so heart-stopping, rehash of Angie Dickinson’s museum encounter in Dressed to Kill; the fetishized seduction at the beach tunnel recalls the florid theatrics of Obsession.
Most damning, though, is the indifference with which De Palma stages the many expository scenes required to get the little engine of the plot cooking. For the first time in his career, the director comes across as being bored—most of the conversations between Wasson and actors Gregg Henry and Melanie Griffith are comprised of flat-out uninspired, routine two-shot/medium close-up visual designs that have seemingly little going on in them other than their function to clunkily advance the narrative. All you have to do is look at the staging of the conversation between Griffith and Wasson in which she describes what she won’t do in a porno film up next to comparable scenes between, say, Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon in Dressed to Kill (the Psycho parody, for example, in which Allen explains transsexuals to Gordon and is overheard by some horrified diners), or sound man John Travolta describing his increasing paranoia to Allen, framed by the technological tools of his trade and shot by a probing, gliding camera, in Blow Out, to see how detached De Palma’s style seems in Body Double. Ironically, I find myself agreeing with almost all the observations you make about the movie and still feeling like it’s a half-baked project because of this tendency I perceive in the director to rush through the setups to get to what he must have, at the time, looked at as “the good stuff,” the stuff that would rile his detractors in the wake of Scarface’s initial M.P.A.A. reception. Body Double seems at times so detached from the hot red blood running through most of the rest of De Palma’s films that it almost feels like it was made by a De Palma imitator.
POWER TOOLS
The director’s “fuck you” to the ratings board turns out to be more of a threat, in retrospect, than a reality though because, despite its setting in the sleazy underbelly of the Hollywood entertainment industry (and De Palma takes swift satiric aim at the idea of the legitimate movie business and the porn industry being two sides of the same coin), nothing in Body Double is nearly as graphically violent or as grotesquely, comically over-scaled as what could be seen even in the expurgated version of Scarface. That drill murder can’t hold a candle to the chainsaw sequence in Scarface, even if it was cut down, in terms of bloodshed or emotional intensity, and some of your observations about what’s going on in that drill sequence—the idea of Gloria being simply, and unapologetically, an object of desire, and the audience being torn being wanting to save her and simply wanting her, and then of course being made implicit in that fatal penetration—touch upon why.
I think you’re essentially right about that infamous scene. The drill clearly is a none-too-subtle visual metaphor for penetration, or more accurately, I think, rape. But is metaphor even the right term here? It’s such an explicit image, and the use to which it is put so closely resembles a savage sexually violent act, right down to the way the scene is framed, and the way the actual murder is alluded to—the drill emerging from the ceiling above Scully’s head—that to imagine it having even the slightest level of ambiguity that an assignation as metaphor might imply seems patently silly. De Palma going on the defensive to deny that this was his intention is either an instance of uncharacteristic submission to the general outrage of responses to the scene or, more likely, I think, a perverse way of continuing to goad his detractors and call attention to the elements that were being focused on in the press at the time. (Do you remember in what context his comments were made?)
SEXUAL OBJECTIFICATION AND THE MYTH OF MISOGYNY
I do agree with you that Gloria can really only be seen and taken seriously as an object, a projection of fantasy; I might even describe her as an abstraction. But given that this is how we are encouraged to see her—as Scully does—I think in sharing, as you describe, Scully’s indecision about wanting to save her and wanting to have her, we end up coming down fairly squarely on the more conventional side of saving her. Had Gloria been conceived in a more fleshed-out manner, had she been a real character (on the order of Dressed to Kill’s Kate Miller, say) rather than a relatively simple erotic abstraction, I think those of us who find Body Double a hollow experience might have found this scene as compelling and ambivalently disturbing as your description of it. We might have found Scully’s (and our) implication in her fate far more haunting in the way I’m sure De Palma intended. And given this “if,” perhaps even the charges of misogyny that seem to focus most intensely and insistently on this scene in De Palma’s oeuvre would have been at least partially defused—it’s harder to imagine, at least in my mind, a director being perceived as expressing a blanket attitude toward a gender (or an ethnicity, or a sexual orientation) if he’s taken the time to make the character who takes the brunt of his alleged violation a “real” person. In her mannequin-like beauty, actress Deborah Shelton comes across as an inexpressive actress in a straitjacketed role—therefore there’s no character to distract from the far more simplistic reading of her as simply an empty receptacle in which to contain the director’s supposed feelings of hatred and disgust for women.
In fact, one of the major revelations for me upon this viewing of Body Double was how little water those time-honored and quite tired accusations of misogyny seem to be able to hold. I’ve never felt that the charges made much sense in regards to De Palma anyway. Films like Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, Dressed to Kill and Femme Fatale are erotically charged, to be sure, and it would be silly to insist that De Palma hasn’t an appreciation of the sensual quality of many of the women in those films. But, as SLIFR reader Blaaagh has observed, De Palma’s films have always featured interesting women, women who have been subjected to as great a variety of directorial attitudes as one would expect they would encounter in the real world, a quality they share with the male characters in his films. Not many film artists working in the suspense genre, perhaps not even Hitchcock, have approached a variety female characters as rich as Carrie White, Margaret White (Carrie), Daniele Breton/Dominique Blanchion (Sisters), Kate Miller (Dressed to Kill), Sally (Blow Out) or Laure Ash (Femme Fatale). To say that De Palma is a misogynist, or even a sadist, because some of these characters meet horrific fates, or are the cause of horrific violence, or are the victims of some fairly sardonic jokes orchestrated by the director, is to dismiss all the other levels on which these women operate dramatically and emotionally, and quite satisfactorily so.
I think you could add Melanie Griffith’s Holly Body to this list too—she seems to literally hot-wire the second half with sexual impertinence and confidence, she’s very funny and likable and, whether credit is due to her leather bustier or her magnetism as an actress, Griffith and her comic turn are the elements that have made for my strongest associations with Body Double over the years. Shelton’s Gloria Revelle, of course, cannot exist on the same plane with these women because, as you point out, she’s explicitly a fantasy, as opposed to Holly, who embodies fantasy but is clearly a woman with her own thought processes and desires. She is insistent that she not be perceived as anyone’s pawn, though it will be revealed to her that she has, in fact, been used exactly this way in the villain’s plot. Gloria Revelle, on the other hand, amounts only to a pawn to get Scully, and the audience, in the right place at the right time. It’s a miscalculation to assume that she can sustain that level of visual/narrative abstraction when she’s being tortured and eventually cored out by a three-foot drill brandished by a man who will turn out to be her husband. But given the fact that gender has never been a meaningful boundary when it comes to De Palma and the assignation of dire fate to his characters—can John Cassavetes and Andrew Stevens in The Fury, or Lisle Wilson in Sisters, or Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill be said to be any luckier than Deborah Shelton?—it seems absurd to label this confrontational director, who has never courted easy responses to either his characters or his scenarios, as a misogynist based largely upon his treatment of one of the most plasticized characters, female or male, in his entire body of work.
INNOCENT SLEAZE
At the same time, I don’t think I’m buying that De Palma’s strategy was to rub the audience’s collective noses in the more extreme elements of his narrative, and then make sure to enthrall them at the same time, in order “to point out their hypocrisy.” There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence, in box-office numbers—the movie was a financial disappointment—or anecdotal ruminations on the film from those who did pay to see it, that the audience was sufficiently enthralled. (Peet, you’re perhaps the first person I’ve known who has clearly loved the movie, had it speak to you in a profound way, and been able/willing to articulate why these things were so.) And you’re right—it would be an act of supreme hypocrisy to rail against the violence and perceived misogyny of Body Double, then slink to the nearest multiplex, submit to the spell it might cast, enjoy (openly or not) those aspects of the movie that were once the focus of your ire, and then come out claiming to have been disgusted by what you saw on the screen. But I honestly don’t think many people approached or experienced the movie this way. Those who saw and loved it clearly are comfortable with the elements of the film that De Palma escalated in order to assault the sensibilities of those who would be offended at the mere announcement that he was making such a film. Those who saw it and were dissatisfied with it (like me) are obviously capable of holding the movie accountable for perceived insufficiencies that have less to do with the size of Gregg Henry’s drill and what he does with it than with De Palma’s script and direction of the entire film. And those who were shocked and horrified when they heard what De Palma intended to do probably stayed away, which may account, in some part anyway, for the movie’s tepid ticket sales in the U.S.
Of course, De Palma does takes advantage of the setting of the movie’s second half for some pretty explicit talk, particularly when Melanie Griffith’s Holly Body rattles off that very funny laundry list of porno “don’ts” to Craig Wasson’s Scully, whom she believes to be an adult film producer. Griffith, back when she was a recognizably unaltered beauty has a budding starlet’s excitability, piquancy and ripely funny sexuality (her body is only one consonant removed from holy) that really wakes the movie up from listless pacing through its overly familiar, and far less interesting, suspense motifs. But one of the most striking things to me about revisiting Body Double 20 years later is how relatively innocent it seems vis-à-vis its own sleaze factor, and I think this might be a direct result of De Palma, all anger and frustration aside, discovering, in the process of either writing the story or making the film, that that anger was giving way to his sharper satirical instincts. The second half of Body Double seems to perk up considerably, not just because of the luscious presence of a pre-plasticized, robustly curvy Griffith in a leather bustier and spiky dye job, but because De Palma puts his own shaky suspense story into lower gear in order to lounge around in this MTV-friendly porn universe for a while and have some fun with his characters, particularly Scully and his desire for role-playing in roles for which he is entirely and obviously inadequate as an actor (desirable stud, slicked-back porn entrepreneur, and finally, heroic savior).
HOLLY'S BODY: BODY DOUBLE'S EROTIC COMEDY
I think Body Double is much more of a success, and much more fundamentally interesting in the light of the rest of the De Palma canon, as a satirical jab at the movie business, especially in the way it indulges in a somewhat playful compare-and-contrast between the trials and tribulations of a underemployed actor and the comic undertones of the porn business. The Frankie Goes to Hollywood sequence is terrific, both as a parody of the ridiculous plotting of porn films (an excess which has all but disappeared in the video age) and a parody of music videos at a time when the phenomenon was still in its white-hot infancy. (Is it my feeble imagination, or did De Palma actually direct a video for “Relax” incorporating elements of this scene which actually played on MTV?) It’s also a terrific stylistic sequence that serves to reflect Scully’s heady disorientation at being plunged into this world and at the same time dismantle what it is we’re seeing as it is happening—the surprise of seeing the film crew at one point reflected in a mirror is shocking and funny and emphasizes the artifice of the situation even as Scully finds himself responding to Holly sexually during the scene (a big porno no-no?) and remembering/superimposing his earlier moment with Gloria on the beach upon the on-set encounter. Finally, the end credit sequence of Body Double, which visualizes and parodies what we imagine were the behind-the-scenes action during the shooting of Dressed to Kill’s opening shower scene, must have had Angie Dickinson rolling in the aisles. It’s a premier example of the director’s multileveled design that works as comedy, as titillation, as an exposure of the utter absence of eroticism on a movie set (the blotchy-faced body double instructs Jake, holding stiff for the camera in full vampire regalia while she gets into position in the shower, to go easy on her nipples—they’re extremely sore due to her having just started her period) and as a means of encouraging the audience to tally up the ways in which a real situation sheds light on elements of their fantasies. The movie’s final image is a close-up of blood overflowing from the vampire’s arterial feast and trickling down the chest, over and between the painfully sensitive, but nonetheless lovely breasts, of the body double, and it’s funnier, more exciting and alive and provocative than almost anything else in the movie. It’s here that Body Double reveals its true place in De Palma’s work less as a pastiche of themes utilized more effectively in previous films than as a fitfully vital kissing cousin (with bared fangs) to the satirical sensibility displayed in films like Hi, Mom! and Phantom of the Paradise.
CRAIG WASSON, LEADING MAN
Finally, your comments have managed to shed light on one of the elements of Body Double that has always been problematic for me—the casting and performance of lead actor Craig Wasson. Over the past 20 years, whenever I’ve thought about it, I’ve always marveled that such a nondescript talent had, for a brief period in the early to mid ‘80s, such a run of work, and his appearance in the De Palma film always seemed to me the apotheosis of his white-bread “appeal.” But your argument is a very convincing one:
“I've always thought Craig Wasson was perfectly cast in this. Yes, he totally lacks the star power that could have helped to make the film a commercial success and he doesn't exactly deliver what can be described as a powerhouse performance. But the man's playing an unemployed actor, for God's sakes--a born loser, a regular Joe longing for a little excitement in his lousy life. A charismatic star like John Travolta in the same everyman role wouldn't have been believable. This is the story of somebody who tries to overcome his weakness. The story of an actor trying to act. The story of a sexless nobody wishing to become a stud. The weakness is an essential element of the narrative.”
It makes sense to me that De Palma would have an understanding that Wasson is no Jimmy Stewart everyman here—he’s investigating a very specific backstage world of which not many people outside of Hollywood (all efforts of Entertainment Weekly to the contrary) have any real understanding—and it would be silly to think that’s what he had in mind. Nor does it seem much of a stretch at all to imagine a formally experimental film artist as De Palma playing with expectations to such a degree that he wouldn’t hesitate to cast a “regular-Joe” actor as a “regular-Joe” actor. So to that end I can accept that Wasson’s casting could be, in the terms laid out by the film, a success. And I can also accept that weakness can be, and perhaps is here, an essential part of the narrative. But again, to invoke Vertigo, Jake Scully is no Scottie Ferguson—Hitchcock uses Scottie’s weakness to infuse his film with a creeping malaise and undercurrent of dread, to allude to the ever-present shadow of curdling obsession. But it seems De Palma embraces Jake’s weakness to such a degree that the film is less an illumination of that weakness as a subject than a victim of it as it is manifested in De Palma’s own relatively by-the-numbers approach. The weakness may truly be essential to the conception of Jake Scully as a character, but in Body Double it is also a symptom of a director momentarily spinning his creative wheels, looking to pump fresh blood into concepts he perhaps felt compelled to revisit for essentially compromised reasons.
20 YEARS LATER...
Looking at Body Double 20 years later, knowing that De Palma would recover his bearings, that works as masterful and resonant and audacious as Casualties of War and Femme Fatale were laying in wait, and even that he would rediscover his commercial footing with one of the most formally adventurous of Hollywood blockbusters (Mission: Impossible), it’s easier for me to forgive some of the flaws that I still find so apparent. And it’s even easier, given the passage of time, to look at the movie with new eyes and see that it’s nowhere near the viral offense to decent sensibilities that its most vocal detractors claimed in 1985 and still do today, that it actually does have some value, even though I still value it less than almost every other De Palma film. Why, I dare say I even had a good time seeing it again. It’s nice to be reminded that even the lesser films of a genuinely gifted film artist can yield plenty to think about and connect up with other films if given the space in a viewer’s mind in which to expand. In a million years, even at my most logorrheic, I would have never imagined that I would have been able to spend this much time in consideration of Body Double so long after its initial release. Such are the delights of considering cinema closely, I suppose. Thanks, Peet, for giving me yet another good reason to do so!
* 24 Lies a Second was the excellent, though sadly now defunct, site devoted to intelligent film writing founded by Peet Gelderblom and James Moran. It was Peet and Jim who first reached out to me and asked me to contribute an article to their site, thus expediting this particular stone’s moss-gathering roll down the hill toward a satisfying experience in film blogging.
** “Eschewed”? Jesus. Why couldn’t I have just said ‘avoided”? If I had written this piece today, I would have. And I guess that’s what I’m doing right now!
(Great huge portions of this “new” piece, synthesized in a manner not at all similar to that of De Palma or Leone, originally appeared [at SLIFR], in their unaltered form, as posts entitled “The Black Rhapsodies of Brian De Palma”, “Brian De Palma: Critical Black Mass” and, most significantly, “Don’t Look Now: Revisiting Brian De Palma’s Body Double”. If you should feel so inclined as to click on any of these links and investigate the original pieces, please do follow all the way down through to the comments section on each post, which not only provided me with the opportunity to elaborate on things that needed to be elaborated on at the time, but also to host an excellent collection of insights from very smart people who chose to read my words and offer their own illumination upon them, most often leaving Your Humble Narrator in the dust.
And as this whole enterprise constitutes my participation in Tony Dayoub’s Brian De Palma Blog-A-Thon, please click the link to read sundry wonderful pieces on not just the great stuff, but also the not-so-great, which is all fair in this game of cinema love. (And belated happy birthday to Mr. De Palma too, by the way.) But also, during the Blog-A-Thon and beyond, please do not miss the opportunity to check out Tom Sutpen’s brilliant gallery of Brian De Palma images. And I would also direct you to Slant magazine’s excellent feature roundup, “Auteur Fatale: The Films of Brian De Palma”, an excellent critical overview of the director’s career that was published in 2006.)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
by Pat Piper
[Pat Piper of the Lazy Eye Theatre brings us a look at one of Brian De Palma's more unusual offerings. Lazy Eye Theatre is a film blog that provides multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-colored commentary about the amazing film world that's all around us. For all your film needs, shop Lazy Eye Theatre!]
While it's easy to dismiss Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise or at least forget about it, I might make an argument that it's one of his purest pieces of work. Or I might not make that argument at all. We'll just have to see.
[Pat Piper of the Lazy Eye Theatre brings us a look at one of Brian De Palma's more unusual offerings. Lazy Eye Theatre is a film blog that provides multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-colored commentary about the amazing film world that's all around us. For all your film needs, shop Lazy Eye Theatre!]
While it's easy to dismiss Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise or at least forget about it, I might make an argument that it's one of his purest pieces of work. Or I might not make that argument at all. We'll just have to see.
Friday, September 11, 2009
De Palma Blog-A-Thon: Redacted (2007)
by Adam Zanzie
[Adam Zanzie defends one of De Palma's recent critical and commercial misfires. His blog is Icebox Movies, which celebrates frigid temperatures, film criticism and film history; the climate is still rather warm over there, but be patient—it's gonna get colder!]
I am never going to forget this film. Not for as long as I live. Not for as long as I hold onto the love of cinema that I have always struggled so hard to keep kindled—keep burning—through anything; through thick and thin; through the lack of interest in filmmaking circulating in the grade schools, middle schools and high schools that I passed through and graduated from; through the overwhelming political apathy that has stung the state of Missouri in which I reside. It has been a long time since a contemporary film has held up a mirror to my face and shown me the kind of thinker, viewer, and audience member that I am. I found such a film in Redacted. It was the Brian De Palma film that I had always waited for. It is still the fiery, passionate film that will haunt me, provoke me, and perhaps even influence me when my future career comes knocking.
Do you remember the last time a film made you want to stand up, shake your fist and scream? What was the film that made you want to pay more attention to the world that was dying, evolving around you? Spielberg's Munich (2005) was the first film this decade to which I had such a powerful response. De Palma's Redacted was another. These two films are quite possibly the boldest, most professional political statements of the last ten years, which is thrilling not least because Spielberg and De Palma are two of the greatest living filmmakers, both of whom descended from the most exciting cinematic decade of all time: the 1970's. Spielberg was always destined to enter maturity in his career someday, but who would have through that De Palma would ever have undergone a similar transformation? Despite the dramatic intelligence of Hi, Mom! (1970), it was largely unseen during initial release, and soon, De Palma appeared doomed to a long, bloated reputation of "rip-offs," "misogyny," and "obsessions with gore." The son of an ER surgeon who had spent his childhood watching his father slice bodies open just plain looked like he was never going to grow up.
Then came Casualties of War (1989). As he did with Greetings (1968), De Palma had analyzed the hopelessness of young American boys snagged by the draft, but unlike that film, Casualties of War dared to go where no other motion picture on Vietnam had gone before—by focusing wholly on the cruelty submitted by U.S. soldiers onto the country's innocent villagers. Suddenly, De Palma could add "traitor" to the list of name-callings flung onto his resume. Who knew that he would revisit the subject matter eighteen years later? Why tell another story about an innocent foreign girl getting molested and murdered by our troops? "It's because," as De Palma explained to Robert Wilonsky in a Higher Definition interview now on the film's DVD, "this, to me, is the great story of these two particular wars: where you send young boys into a war with no clear purpose, in a hostile environment where they can't tell the enemy from the civilians; they band together, as the only way that makes any sense... and then, you're buddy's blown up... and then, they just go berserk."
But again: when our troops need our support at all times in order to help them win in a dangerous conflict, what good is there to tell a story that is not flattering—even if it is based on an incident that really happened? Because of this, prior to the release of Redacted in late 2007, right-leaning commentators and celebrities—ranging from Bill O'Reilly to even De Palma alumnus Gary Sinise—decided not to see the film, and instead already made up their minds: that the film was probably anti-troops; that it would inspire the enemy; and that De Palma had tarnished his reputation forever. Then of course there was the scathing review of the film by Michael Medved, who proclaimed that it was "the worst film I've ever seen" (even when it ultimately didn't make the top of his Worst of 2007 list by year's end), and things didn't get much better when Armond White (often known as the supreme De Palma apologist in the critics circles) dismissed the film as "the low point of a great filmmaker’s career." Within weeks, Redacted, which had only booked fifteen theaters, was dropped. So much ugly fuss had been made over a barely seen film. Was it the anti-troops propaganda that Medved made it out to be? "It's a very sad story", De Palma admitted, but then he broke the ice by declaring of the film, "(that) you feel sorry for, obviously, the victims, but also the soldiers! Even the crazy ones! What got them that way?"
What did get them that way? De Palma pities them. That does not mean he excuses their crimes, or the crime of the war in general. Redacted is the best film made by any filmmaker on the subject of the War in Iraq. There is a reason for this: it tells the truth about the war. Or, rather, it makes a point that telling honesty from dishonesty is difficult when you look at a war such as this one. The film is outraged and in-your-face. Is it manipulative? Sure. But judging from the fact that the Bush administration manipulated the American public into buying the theory that the U.S. had to get involved in Iraq to recover weapons of mass destruction that were never even found, it is my opinion that only counter-manipulation will ever lead the public into the other direction. There are still millions of Americans who believe that our troops are fighting in Iraq in order to prevent another 9/11—as if the Iraqis ever had a hand in 9/11. How else, other than manipulation, will audiences figure this out and be enraged the way De Palma was? Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (2007), released in the same season as Redacted, is a film that means well, but unfortunately, does not fuel viewers with any new insights about the war and, in the end, looks like your stereotypical whiny liberal Hollywood statement. Critics and audiences call Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) "the first great film about the Iraq War," and to be sure, the film is excellent as a suspense thriller; but because the film is neutral and takes no stand on the war, it is hardly going to make apathetic viewers realize just what the hell is going on over there. Is De Palma the only one who is willing to hop into the fray? Why are filmmakers not making more angry political films these days? People don't care or debate as much as they used to. It's rather depressing.
[Adam Zanzie defends one of De Palma's recent critical and commercial misfires. His blog is Icebox Movies, which celebrates frigid temperatures, film criticism and film history; the climate is still rather warm over there, but be patient—it's gonna get colder!]
I am never going to forget this film. Not for as long as I live. Not for as long as I hold onto the love of cinema that I have always struggled so hard to keep kindled—keep burning—through anything; through thick and thin; through the lack of interest in filmmaking circulating in the grade schools, middle schools and high schools that I passed through and graduated from; through the overwhelming political apathy that has stung the state of Missouri in which I reside. It has been a long time since a contemporary film has held up a mirror to my face and shown me the kind of thinker, viewer, and audience member that I am. I found such a film in Redacted. It was the Brian De Palma film that I had always waited for. It is still the fiery, passionate film that will haunt me, provoke me, and perhaps even influence me when my future career comes knocking.
Do you remember the last time a film made you want to stand up, shake your fist and scream? What was the film that made you want to pay more attention to the world that was dying, evolving around you? Spielberg's Munich (2005) was the first film this decade to which I had such a powerful response. De Palma's Redacted was another. These two films are quite possibly the boldest, most professional political statements of the last ten years, which is thrilling not least because Spielberg and De Palma are two of the greatest living filmmakers, both of whom descended from the most exciting cinematic decade of all time: the 1970's. Spielberg was always destined to enter maturity in his career someday, but who would have through that De Palma would ever have undergone a similar transformation? Despite the dramatic intelligence of Hi, Mom! (1970), it was largely unseen during initial release, and soon, De Palma appeared doomed to a long, bloated reputation of "rip-offs," "misogyny," and "obsessions with gore." The son of an ER surgeon who had spent his childhood watching his father slice bodies open just plain looked like he was never going to grow up.
Then came Casualties of War (1989). As he did with Greetings (1968), De Palma had analyzed the hopelessness of young American boys snagged by the draft, but unlike that film, Casualties of War dared to go where no other motion picture on Vietnam had gone before—by focusing wholly on the cruelty submitted by U.S. soldiers onto the country's innocent villagers. Suddenly, De Palma could add "traitor" to the list of name-callings flung onto his resume. Who knew that he would revisit the subject matter eighteen years later? Why tell another story about an innocent foreign girl getting molested and murdered by our troops? "It's because," as De Palma explained to Robert Wilonsky in a Higher Definition interview now on the film's DVD, "this, to me, is the great story of these two particular wars: where you send young boys into a war with no clear purpose, in a hostile environment where they can't tell the enemy from the civilians; they band together, as the only way that makes any sense... and then, you're buddy's blown up... and then, they just go berserk."
But again: when our troops need our support at all times in order to help them win in a dangerous conflict, what good is there to tell a story that is not flattering—even if it is based on an incident that really happened? Because of this, prior to the release of Redacted in late 2007, right-leaning commentators and celebrities—ranging from Bill O'Reilly to even De Palma alumnus Gary Sinise—decided not to see the film, and instead already made up their minds: that the film was probably anti-troops; that it would inspire the enemy; and that De Palma had tarnished his reputation forever. Then of course there was the scathing review of the film by Michael Medved, who proclaimed that it was "the worst film I've ever seen" (even when it ultimately didn't make the top of his Worst of 2007 list by year's end), and things didn't get much better when Armond White (often known as the supreme De Palma apologist in the critics circles) dismissed the film as "the low point of a great filmmaker’s career." Within weeks, Redacted, which had only booked fifteen theaters, was dropped. So much ugly fuss had been made over a barely seen film. Was it the anti-troops propaganda that Medved made it out to be? "It's a very sad story", De Palma admitted, but then he broke the ice by declaring of the film, "(that) you feel sorry for, obviously, the victims, but also the soldiers! Even the crazy ones! What got them that way?"
What did get them that way? De Palma pities them. That does not mean he excuses their crimes, or the crime of the war in general. Redacted is the best film made by any filmmaker on the subject of the War in Iraq. There is a reason for this: it tells the truth about the war. Or, rather, it makes a point that telling honesty from dishonesty is difficult when you look at a war such as this one. The film is outraged and in-your-face. Is it manipulative? Sure. But judging from the fact that the Bush administration manipulated the American public into buying the theory that the U.S. had to get involved in Iraq to recover weapons of mass destruction that were never even found, it is my opinion that only counter-manipulation will ever lead the public into the other direction. There are still millions of Americans who believe that our troops are fighting in Iraq in order to prevent another 9/11—as if the Iraqis ever had a hand in 9/11. How else, other than manipulation, will audiences figure this out and be enraged the way De Palma was? Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (2007), released in the same season as Redacted, is a film that means well, but unfortunately, does not fuel viewers with any new insights about the war and, in the end, looks like your stereotypical whiny liberal Hollywood statement. Critics and audiences call Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) "the first great film about the Iraq War," and to be sure, the film is excellent as a suspense thriller; but because the film is neutral and takes no stand on the war, it is hardly going to make apathetic viewers realize just what the hell is going on over there. Is De Palma the only one who is willing to hop into the fray? Why are filmmakers not making more angry political films these days? People don't care or debate as much as they used to. It's rather depressing.Working from a screenplay written by himself—his first original screenplay since Femme Fatale (2002)—De Palma tells the story of a U.S. Army unit whose main daily objective is to stand guard at the hot, sweltering traffic checkpoints in the city. This is quite possibly the worst job anyone could have in the Army; the object is to stand at your post, look around for insurgents, and wave cars safely and efficiently through the checkpoints, waiting and sometimes yearning for something interesting to happen. The problem is that most of the Iraqi population is illiterate, and therefore, drivers sometimes do not understand either the signs made by soldiers or by visual aids posted at the side of the road. Throughout the film, the story of the soldiers will be told via a fascinating set of mediums, including: handheld camera footage; a French documentary entitled Barrage; a Middle Eastern news program hosted by a persistent female reporter (Sahar Alloul); Internet videos by soldier's wives and Al-Qaeda terrorists; Skype messages; and hidden cameras. De Palma wields all of these mediums with splendid multitasking. Whatever your overall opinion on Redacted by the time it's over, there's no denying that you've never seen anything like it. Of the soldiers, there are about five substantial characters. Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) is nice, respectful, and sums up the film's message when he asks his fellow comrades what "the first casualty of this war" is going to be. "Do you know what it's gonna be?" he asks them with an odd wisdom. "It's gonna be the truth!" Similar to McCoy in friendliness is Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), the intellectual of the unit, who would rather relax on his bed and read passages from the John O'Hara novel Appointment in Samarra than have to face the grueling atmosphere at the checkpoints outside. Then there is B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman), the foul, obese grouch who is growing dangerously bored with the lack of sex in Iraq (Medved had a theory in his review that the character was modeled after Rush Limbaugh); and Rush's attitudes are shared by the mean, nasty Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), named after the gambling city, who at one point reminisces about his equally violent brother Vegas, a "wild card". Finally, there is Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who records most of the handheld camerawork we see in the film. Salazar is the one who first takes us into the film's world, which he dubs "the oven", and he is also in some ways a stand-in for De Palma—he is shooting a documentary entitled "Tell Me No Lies", and he hopes to use all of the footage, after he returns from the war, to get into film school. The inside joke here is that "Angel Salazar" is in fact the real name of a comedian who had appeared in two De Palma flicks: Scarface (1983) and Carlito's Way (1993). Most people don't catch this. Along with that, De Palma finds more time to put his tongue in his cheek by parodying the works of his Hollywood contemporaries- including Scorsese (Flake mutters that "it only takes one fucking rat to bring the whole house down," in reference to The Departed), Spielberg (in the same scene, Flake proclaims a fallen comrade to be "our very own Private Ryan"), Rob Reiner (Flake complains that when "you prosecute guys like us, you're just aiding the terrorists", reminding one of Nicholson's speech in A Few Good Men), even Kevin Smith (Rush compares his boredom to that of the Clerks characters). De Palma references himself only once, when Rush hisses about how certain things need to "stay in Vegas," a line that De Palma also used in Casualties of War. During the checkpoint scenes, De Palma plays Handel's "Sarabande" on the soundtrack, which Kubrick famously used to bookend Barry Lyndon (1975) to fit with the film's lush, classical style. But De Palma uses "Sarabande" for a different reason entirely. The main tunes of the piece are repetitive, and De Palma plays it twice on the soundtrack. It gets irritating having to listen to the same notes over and over again—as it should be: we grow as impatient as the checkpoint soldiers, who are waiting to explode. As noted by Ray Bennett in his review, the use of Handel's piece is "a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again." At first, the soldiers appear to be one happy family, but the fabric breaks in no time. When the inexperienced Flake commits his first combat kill, the casualty turns out to be a teenage girl in labor who had the misfortune to be passenger in a speeding car; McCoy argues that Flake needs to "show remorse," but he refuses and an argument erupts. From this point on, the morale of the unit members begins to blur, only worsening their impatience at the checkpoints; and when Master Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones) is blown up in a freak explosion, Rush and Flake, unable to control their taste for blood, finally begin to devise a plan of sweet vengeance: raid on the house of the innocent fifteen-year old Iraqi girl Farrah (Zahra Zubaidi, in a brave performance that reminds us of Thuy Thu Le in Casualties of War), rape her, and then kill her. But Rush and Flake make the mistake of announcing their plan to the other three soldiers at a nighttime poker game. Watch this scene carefully. De Palma has Salazar's camera encircle the soldiers at the table as they salivate over the naked women on the cards which they freely hold up to the lens. Then, when Flake begins announcing plans for the rape, he angrily directs Salazar to shut his camera off. Salazar merely puts it off the side, secretly leaving it on. Notice how Salazar, now sitting at the table with the other guys, keeps nervously looking over his shoulder at the camera. Am I seriously recording this conversation? he must be thinking. Should I save this for evidence? Is this what I'm going to use to get into film school? Then comes the rape scene itself. It is the most terrifying De Palma sequence since the "Be Black, Baby" segment in Hi, Mom, and shot in an uncannily reminiscent manner; as with the "Be Black, Baby" sequence, De Palma uses a handheld camera with blinding night vision, capturing every moment of the yelling, the screaming, and the absolute brutality that certainly must have occurred in the true incident. Rush and Flake turn into monsters, becoming every bit as savage as De Niro's "cop" hired by the whiteface African Americans to beat up the blackfaced white civilians; and Sean Penn and Don Harvey's rapist soldiers in Casualties of War. McCoy, like Michael J. Fox in that film, is outspoken in his attempts to stop the rape and subsequent massacre, and soon he is taking orders from Flake, an inferior officer—a private—who threatens him with a gun in his face to repel him out the door. Salazar, meanwhile, catches it all on tape—tape that may or may not come in handy. The deaths of Farah and her family members all take place off-camera because, as De Palma himself said about the central murder of The Black Dahlia (2006), it would be too much to show the audience. But that doesn't lessen its impact. So much unravels after this sequence, but unlike Casualties of War, Redacted has a strong last half hour. The rest of the film is not simply devoted to attempts to bring the crime to justice, as the earlier film was. De Palma finds even more to say about history and cultural perceptions of the war. When a character is kidnapped and then decapitated by Al-Qaeda terrorists in a video leaked on the Internet, one senses that De Palma is remembering the Nick Berg tragedy of 2003. When the rape crime is finally revealed to a shocked public, a high school goth-girl (Abigail Savage) posts a video on YouTube in which she records herself in an obscene rant against the soldiers who committed the crime, fantasizing about them getting tortured to death by the dead girl's remaining family members. One might incorrectly assume that this is De Palma's idea of justice, but it is not: De Palma is making fun of the ignorant online trolls who spew out death threats and fantasies while using profane language at the same time—as if that's somehow going to boost their image or make their "message" more agreeable. People like these, De Palma is saying, just don't listen to reason. That reminds me of the acting in the film itself. Medved called the acting "atrocious" in his review, while A. O. Scott, a liberal, wrote, "... most of the actors, many of them appearing for the first time in a feature film, lack either the skill or the directorial guidance to endow their characters with a full range of credible motives and responses." Both of these criticisms completely miss the point of De Palma's method, which is to prove that people who talk in front of home video cameras don't always act the way they might in real life; Roger Ebert correctly noted in his review (one of the better reviews of the film), that, because the acting of the film is less than flawless, it seems more real. In another positive review, Scott Foundas (who even went so far as to hail Redacted as one of the ten best films of the year) wrote, "...it is the entire point of Redacted that we are observing crude, found video objects, and that their subjects, aware of the camera that's recording them, assume the awkwardly self-conscious stances of people in vacation pictures and birthday-party videos." As for the film's entertainment value, Armond White complained, "...De Palma fails to let movie lore become surreal and take viewers into a clarifying moral dream state like Femme Fatale..." but then listen to Foundas, who states that De Palma "...wants to rankle audiences, especially those who may enter the theater anticipating some genteel, hand-wringing, good-little-liberal lament about the physical and emotional scars of wartime. Redacted is unapologetically angry and direct, and De Palma does very little to ease you into the movie..." It would have been impossible for De Palma to make Redacted into an experience as "surreal" as Femme Fatale when the film had to be shot on HD. Surrealism is not the key here; debate and immediacy are. There are, however, moments when the acting in Redacted shines, and these moments almost always stem from the performance of Rob Devaney as McCoy. Those who say that Redacted is anti-troops obviously don't pay much attention to the McCoy character, who cannot hold back the guilt of witnessing and doing nothing to stop the rape, and finally decides that justice must be done. We are there with him every step of the way. As with Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War, we are rooting for him, and we sympathize with his guilt. But Casualties of War ended with an awkward scene on a train in which Fox talks to a girl who reminds him of the dead Vietnamese girl, somehow resolving his guilt; though the conversation with the girl on the train leaves him at peace, it doesn't satisfy the audience. De Palma corrects this error with one of the last scenes in Redacted, in which McCoy has finally returned home to his family for celebration in a bar. "Tell us a war story!" exclaims a friend behind the camera (obviously it's De Palma himself). McCoy consents, and talks about how proud he was to serve in Afghanistan, so as to hamper the threats that came from 9/11. But Redacted is not a film about Afghanistan, and so McCoy then segues into a monologue on what he experienced in the other country: "I get over to Iraq, and it's just a totally different story. You grow up really, really fast over there because everything you see—everywhere you look—is just death, and it's suffering. And the killing that I did do? It made me sick to my stomach. And what was I doing there? What was I doing in a country that has done nothing to me? Just following orders?" Devaney's performance in this scene is phenomenal. Everything he says, we believe. I have only one complaint about the film, and it is over the closing montage of real photographs taken from the War in Iraq. My beef is not with De Palma, but with the film's executive producer, Mark Cuban, who, disturbed by the photos and worried that the identities of the victims in them would be found out and thus result in lawsuits, decided to have final artistic control on the film and have the photos "redacted"- with the eyes and mouths of the victims blacked out. De Palma was furious over this, since the photos had already been available on the Internet (un-redacted) for quite some time; and claimed that Cuban wouldn't return his phone calls offering to buy up all the rights to the film so as to have artistic say. Cuban and the executives and Magnolia insist that redacting the photo montage works for two reasons: a) it prevents lawsuits, and b) it proves the film's point about how the war itself has been constantly redacted, denying the public the truth that is supposed to come out. But I have to side with De Palma: the only way the public is going to find out the truth about the war is if the pictures come out. By censoring the photographs, Cuban and the executives made themselves out to be just as treacherous as the Bush administration, artistic irony or not. If De Palma should be faulted for anything, it is including fake photographs of some of the film's actors amidst the montage. The last photograph we see before the film ends is that of Zahra Zubaidi lying on the ground in a pool of blood, and although it relates to the film's message of the blur between lies and the truth, it doesn't help succeed in showing us De Palma's original reasons for including the montage: to show us horrors that have come out of the War in Iraq. Therefore, the final montage is rendered a bit useless. "Redacted deals with very moving material in a very new form," expressed De Palma in an interview with Simon Hattenstone, "and it may take a while for people to adjust to it. In time, they will come to accept it because all the information the Bush administration has been suppressing will come out, and we'll learn the terrible stories that they've been hiding from us for so long. Whether it finds it this year or in years to come, I just think the movie will find its audience." Will it really? I think so. Because our troops are still stationed in Iraq, it may be hard for some to appreciate the film when our reasons for occupying the country are still vastly unknown. But I also think Redacted will be admired, in time, because it is almost as if De Palma's career was preparing itself every step of the way for this film. When all the other directors chickened out, he responded by making a film that took U.S. occupation in Iraq head-on, no matter how many it troubled or offended. He was also willing to live with the painful consequences of what the characters—those of whom are still alive at the end—have survived. "I went on a raid in Samarra", confesses McCoy, now breaking down, "and two men from my unit raped and killed a fifteen-year old girl; and burned her body... and I didn't do anything to stop it." McCoy may have been unsuccessful, but De Palma found something else. He made Redacted, and with that, made one of the most perfectly constructed masterpieces of his career. For over forty years, Brian De Palma has been recognized as the modern Hitchcock and as a survivor of the Movie Brat era. In two years, he will be recognized as the filmmaker who ended the war.
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