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ACF #28: Brian De Palma, Dressed To Kill
So here’s a wrap on the recent De Palma trilogy we’ve done at the ACF, dealing with young people after the various ’60s dramas in America. Carrie (1976), which is about the sexual revolution turning shame into dark magic; The Fury (1978), which is about young people caught up in the Cold War and the deep state–espionage, technology, higher ed, you name it! Now, it’s Dressed To Kill (1980), which is about the sordid life of the big city, from prostitution to transsexuality–which is why it would be canceled today and possibly, my friend John Presnall and I too!
This is related to what some people now call transgender, as gender has replaced sex, but also changed the idea of an unchangeable biological reality, of nature, with something else, more willful, individually asserted and obscure to everyone else. Who else would touch it but the master of thrillers after Hitchcock, Brian De Palma? It’s of course a kind of story that couldn’t be made now, not because it is sordid, but because it is politically & ideologically problematic, but it is ultimately problematic because it questions the liberal commitment to & understanding of love: The sexual revolution is the context of the story, and the drama is the pursuit of an identity through eroticism. It leads not to liberation or self-actualization, but to horror…
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Joseph Gelmis’ The Film Director as Superstar is a long-forgotten 1970 book of interviews, including De Palma as well as fellow rookie Robert Downey. It’s an interesting snapshot-in-time of the emergence of a Seventies sensibility, as well as the sheer difficulty of getting a career going. The younger De Palma not only didn’t have a Hollywood style, but if anything, an explicitly anti-Hollywood style; yet, within a few years, he’d be fascinated with turning the conventions of Hollywood movies inside out.
DePalma’s Hitchcock thievery was never more apparent than in Body Double, when he did the double-reverse circular pan stolen from Vertigo. And you knew he knew he could get away it with it, because the audience wouldn’t get the reference. It was so blatant you thought “okay, what’s next, swiping a bouncing baby buggy down the steps from Potemkin?”
In 1976 I was one of the reviewers at the Soho Weekly News. When I compared Obsession to Vertigo, there was mostly puzzlement, because you couldn’t see Vertigo; Hitchcock withheld it from re-release in theaters. It had two contractual telecasts on ABC, in 1966 and 1972. That was it; no art houses, no 16mm. And almost needless to say, no video cassettes either.
It was one of those time paradoxes that happen in film history; up till its official re-release in the mid-Eighties, although film fans and students were much closer in time than we are to the release of this 1958 film, it was talked about but un-see-able, and almost unknown to the general public.
If you asked someone in, say, 1960 what they thought of “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1947) chances are they’d never heard of it.
Obsession is wonderful–South v Midwest, modern America v medieval Europe, the dangers of romanticism…
I think we’re back there, Gary. The 80s through the early naughts, there was a new interest in cinema, partly because the technology allowed the retrieval & distribution, partly because cinema was running out of innovations & audiences were looking again to the past. A lot of nostalgia pictures, too, of course, & quite some interest in history…
It was also the time when directors like the Coen Bros or Tarantino or Wes Anderson came up, who share a fascination with old movies, they keep putting old images or genres in their stories. David Lynch’s Lost highway, a new version of the noir, is as typical of that attitude as the comedic version of the noir in Big Lebowsky, or, later, in P.T. Anderson’s Inherent vice.
But at some point, let’s say with the beginning of Marvel’s success with Iron man (2008), that was done. A great forgetfulness began that spreads everywhere, a part of which is the new moralistic revulsion at past cinema among wokies… A lot of that is the contemporary shift of young audiences to the iPhone, which don’t encourage the spellbinding effect of beautiful imagery. Social media replaced cinema. Another part is the fame of TV, where most of the great achievements of cinema–editing, composition, camera movement, lighting, blocking–mean nothing.
Yeah, I think De Palma was wise to avoid subtlety in this matter–simply remembering how impressive Hitchcock was as a visual storyteller is hard, partly, as Gary says, because even finding the movies was hard or impossible for most people. I can’t think of another effort quite like De Palma’s to preserve art by putting it to use again, in a different context. I think this is tied up with what Gary was saying about De Palma–he moved from anti-Hollywood to Hollywood very quickly in the early ’70s, because, I think, he found a way to be an outsider in the industry: Hitchcock, the kind of cinema he could respect, which also had a place in an industry that was often beneath contempt.
A bold man–the Potemkin scene completely reverses the Eisenstein conflict between the evil authorities & the downtrodden civilians; in America, unlike Russia, the authorities are the good guys, protectors of civilian life, including mothers, babies, & push prams. Ultimately, Untouchables is so shocking because it’s pro-Prohibition, pro-law & order, & presents America as the real democratic revolution, not Russia, by presenting Capone as a European aristocrat (the gorgeous opening scene already sets that up, Capone holding court like a celebrity before sycophantic journalists). Hard to find a better way to put all that together than just taking the Eisenstein scene & turning it upside down.
Watching De Palma, I got the idea that the reason more directors don’t reuse old scenes is because they don’t understand the fundamental conflicts cinema dramatized & don’t have that intention to dramatize human conflict themselves… They don’t know why a certain scene made sense in a certain story or how it could work for them, too…
Forty-plus years ago, casting Angie Dickinson conjured up publicity-driven memories of the Rat Pack and Las Vegas, of JFK’s Camelot era. By the late Seventies, she was doing television (Police Woman) and making the most of it. Somewhat like Elizabeth Montgomery, another classic beauty of about the same era who was determined to do real acting, Dickinson welcomed roles that didn’t pose her as an immaculate porcelain figurine. No one could say that about the shower scene in Dressed to Kill.
1984, to be exact.
That’s a great point, and if I was more enthusiastic about DePalma, I’d probably agree completely, instead of thinking that’s an entirely valid read on it.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but his use of the double-circular Vertigo move in Body Double just makes you think of the original, and how powerful and troubled it was, and how this . . . this is about a kinda nebbishy guy with a really good-looking woman who’s about ten leagues above him. Or, he thought it was a neat move, and figured 99% of the audience would never recognize it, and think it was him.
At least he didn’t swipe the Herrmann score. Still can’t forgive The Artist for that.
Stairs have been used so often that it has to be a motif by now.
I saw Battleship Potemkin a few years before Body Double came out. My professor for my Film Appreciation class screened it, as well as Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent where the Dutch diplomat gets assassinated on the steps outside the conference hall and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather where Don Barzini gets whacked on the courthouse steps. So, De Palma was lifting off of Eisenstein, Hitchcock (again), and Coppola.
I agree about the Body Double shot, it’s obviously about how deluded the protagonist is, he’s a loser, so beauty & Hollywood have gone to his head, which is not impossible to understand! De Palma also suggests the related criticism that Hollywood is really like the porn industry–that whole Frankie goes to Hollywood bit…–not a high opinion, but not entirely wrong, either. So his protagonist is caught between those two worlds represented by the two women he tries to save in the two halves of the movie, the rich & the poor, the glamorous & the vulgar, &c.
Inasmuch as it updates Vertigo, it’s for a new, much more demotic America. The realization that under the Romantic spell is a woman of no special virtue is not deadly, but in fact it helps achieve a happy end. (De Palma uses a similar distinction between women & preference for the whore in Dressed to kill, not someone who goes to museums for beauty, but someone who buys art for its market value!) Body Double has all sorts of comedic touches, it’s at times a parody of Vertigo, to bring people down from that high vision of beauty that Hitchcock & De Palma both think is a deadly deception.
A lot of the changes are dictated by dealing with the earnest, but vulgar character of a new generation–the protagonist could be a Van Halen fan, &c. But also the demand that he win, that justice be done, the bad guy punished. (In Vertigo, he gets away, of course…) Oddly enough, De Palma is more interested in stories where justice is done!
PS De Palma simply hired Hermann for Obsession (1976), to get his own Vertigo score! Also, for Sisters, in 1972! He was supposed to score Carrie (i.e. Psycho redux), too, but he died…