Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Once again, Mr. Beaks has taken time away from his busy life there in the Big Apple to send in his thoughts on another of these great De Palma weekends at the Museum of the Moving Image. Great work, and a joy to read as always. Now, excuse me... I have to go cue up the PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE soundtrack on my Winamp now and listen to the always-amazing songs of Winslow (ahem, Beaks, ahem) while I hurt myself laughing at Engrish.com, a site an old friend steered me to last night.
Of the many criticisms Brian De Palma has weathered throughout his nearly forty-year career, none have been quite as nagging as those of Hitchcock fetishist and brutal misogynist, and whereas many filmmakers might address such carping by consciously altering their style, De Palma has set himself apart by inviting further invective through amplification of these themes, which has served only to widen the rift between his admirers and his often vicious detractors. On the count of shameless Hitchcock emulation, it may be true that, early in his career, he was a tad too brazen in his borrowing (which will be addressed in the below piece on OBSESSION,) but the constant variation on themes Hitchcockian are now seamlessly integrated into his work. Insofar as his alleged misogynism is concerned, it was a charge initially undeserving in response to DRESSED TO KILL, but openly invited with BODY DOUBLE. Whether or not it was deserved, is a matter at which we’ll arrive in due course.
Before diving into the meatier fare from last weekend, let’s begin with the parody.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE – 1974
In De Palma’s melding of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and FAUST, the cutthroat music industry gets a supremely, and deservedly, rough working over, with an assist from songwriter Paul Williams, who also costars as the film’s villain, the scruples-free record producer Swan. It is at his club, the Paradise, where we first meet our hero, Winslow (William Finley,) a struggling, but talented, singer/songwriter cursed with a pair of bug eyes that could charitably be described as Feldman-esque. Upon hearing him perform, Swan instantly recognizes brilliance, but, understanding the importance of image, he quickly appropriates Winslow’s labor of love, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the gloriously bloated rock operas of The Who, and tailors it to fit the biggest rock star of the moment, Beef (Gerrit Graham.) Winslow, who believes only the comely siren Phoenix (Jessica Harper) can do his masterpiece justice, flies into a rage, which leads to his incarceration and subsequent disfiguring. Now, Winslow has been transformed into the titular Phantom, and will haunt the Paradise until his masterpiece is performed by Phoenix, even if his soul must be sold in the process.
As a sustained parody of the music industry, PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a scattershot affair, but, like De Palma’s counter-culture comedies, the bits that do work are often uproarious. There’s a crude, but amusing parody of PSYCHO, the inherently unsexy Paul Williams cavorting with a bed full of beautiful women, and Jessica Harper’s intentionally (at least, I hope it’s intentional) awful dancing, but outshining them all is Gerrit Graham, an underrated comedic performer (aside from his previous collaborations with De Palma, watch his work in Robert Zemeckis’ sublime USED CARS, especially the fight scene with Jack Warden,) who revels in the role of pop star prima donna. While his lisping delivery may be stock characterization by now, try to suppress laughter as he shrieks his way unintelligibly through Winslow’s libretto.
OBSESSION – 1976
Let’s be clear about one thing: OBSESSION is an unapologetic reworking of Hitchcock’s most critically beloved masterpiece. The movie begins by introducing us to Michael Courtland, a wealthy New Orleans businessman (Cliff Robertson,) and his beautiful wife Elizabeth (Genevieve Bujold,) at a party celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. During the festivities, they are joined by their young daughter, who completes their familial paradise. It is safe to say that Michael, on the verge of closing a highly lucrative land deal, appears to have everything, but this is all torn asunder when Elizabeth and his daughter are kidnapped. Though Michael could afford to pay the kidnapper’s ransom, his acquiescence would eliminate him from the deal that would make a considerably wealthy man; thus, upon meeting with a local private detective, he is convinced, perhaps too easily, that his wife and daughter can be rescued without damaging him financially. This risk, however, ultimately backfires, leading to the fiery death of his family. As a sort of penance, Michael refuses to develop the prime real estate which he now owns, choosing only to bury his wife and daughter on the property; their grave marked by an enormous tombstone serving as a monument for his own greed.
The film begins to dovetail with VERTIGO at precisely this moment. After a 360 degree pan that skillfully sets us ahead fifteen years from the time of the tragedy, a still-widowed and grieving Michael returns to Italy with his real estate partner Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow) on what is intended to be a business trip. Michael, however, feels that he must return to the church where he first met Elizabeth, and, sure enough, as he walks through the gothic structure, he comes across Sandra (Bujold again,) a young restoration assistant who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife. Spooked and, well, “obsessed,” Michael begins to follow the woman all over Venice, until he finally confronts her in the church. Eager to fill the void in his life left after the tragedy for which he holds himself responsible (when asked how his wife died, Michael answers curtly, “I killed her,”) Michael, after a brief courtship, proposes to Sandra, and returns to New Orleans with her in tow. Disturbed by this rash decision, and fearing for Michael’s sanity, Robert involves a psychiatrist, which serves to only further alienate his partner. Meanwhile, Sandra, left alone to pick through the sad events of the past, begins to explore the particulars of the tragedy, setting up a final half-hour in which De Palma and screenwriter Paul Schrader scramble to tie up the plot threads as if their contract prohibited a full two hour film.
While, technically, De Palma’s craft continued to mature with OBSESSION (and would truly blossom with CARRIE and THE FURY,) the plot machinations, especially in the final reel, seem forced rather than inspired, which causes the final sequence, a moment meant to be fraught with conflicting feelings of vengeance and forgiveness, to fail on an emotional level. Even as one is admiring the dizzying movement of the camera, the palpable disappointment that De Palma has failed to deliver what could have been a masterpiece is what we are ultimately left with. It’s one of the rare films in his canon that does not improve with each viewing.
DRESSED TO KILL – 1980
Following the quirky departure that was HOME MOVIES, De Palma returned once more to the suspense genre with DRESSED TO KILL, and became probably the first graduate of Sarah Lawrence College to ever be labeled a misogynist.
The film begins with a now infamous dream sequence in which Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson,) bathed in steam, Pino Donaggio’s lushly romantic score and cinematographer Ralf Bode’s soft lighting, pleasures herself in the shower while watching her husband shave with a straight razor. What first appears to be an erotic reverie, however, quickly turns horrific as another man appears behind Kate in the shower, wielding a razor in a threatening manner, and preparing to strike; thus, the nightmare concludes, and immediately we are thrust – pun fully intended – into Kate’s dreary life, where she receives passionless, selfish sex from her second husband, and tends to her son (Keith Gordon) from her first marriage, who is obsessed with his project for an upcoming science fair (giving the film a personal dimension when considering that De Palma placed highly in the National Science Fair as a high school student.) Her unhappiness is only compounded when she visits her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliot (Michael Caine,) who can only offer a ruthlessly clinical take on her sexual frustration.
Following her appointment with Dr. Elliot, Kate heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and what follows is a bravura sequence in which De Palma stages a masterfully conceived cat-and-mouse flirtation that involves a mysteriously suave, sunglass-clad stranger, a dropped glove, not one utterance of dialogue (i.e. until we are outside of the museum,) and ends with the participants having sex in the backseat of a taxicab. When Kate awakens in the stranger’s darkened apartment, she appears, at long last, satisfied, which means it’s about time for De Palma to pull the rug out from under her. In the course of the next ten minutes, we’ll be left with a new protagonist, Liz Blake (Nancy Allen;) the only witness to the murder foreshadowed in the film’s opening sequence.
By 1980, in the wake of SISTERS, OBSESSION and CARRIE, many critics had grown tired of De Palma’s overt Hitchcock fetishism, and, rather than explore how he was working variations on the Master’s films, much like classical music composers have done through the centuries, when confronted with DRESSED TO KILL, they dismissed him. Inexplicably ignoring the undeniable technical brilliance of his film, they merely began to lob empty insults, and popularized an acceptable, knee-jerk derision that has greeted every film De Palma has made since. Though DRESSED TO KILL is admittedly bound to PSYCHO by way of the early narrative hand-off between Dickinson and Allen, the cross-dressing murderer, and the wrap-up where the psychiatrist explains the murderer’s condition, this is all on the surface, and does not translate into outright theft as some critics, who most likely were fearful of meeting their deadline had they bothered to sort out the film’s complex themes, wherein De Palma’s film diverges from its inspiration in surprising ways, asserted. In the case of Andrew Sarris, who was particularly savage, it was probably enough that his rival, Pauline Kael, continued to express her unfettered adoration of De Palma from her bully pulpit at The New Yorker.
More damaging to De Palma’s reputation, however, was the charge that his brutal dispatching of Kate, and subsequent imperilling of Liz, a call girl, served as irrefutable proof not only of the director’s misogyny, but also, in a nastily hollow charge, of a predilection for necrophelia. Suddenly, the conventional wisdom was that De Palma, who had presented a strong heroine in the form of Amy Irving only two years earlier in THE FURY, hated women, and while the sensational elevator set piece was most commonly cited, the sequence that must have infuriated more than any other is Dr. Elliot’s killing, and methodical disrobing, of an improbably attractive asylum nurse, while his fellow inmates wildly hoot their approval. From an overhead angle, De Palma’s camera backs away as Elliot, in shedding the woman of her clothing, almost appears to be readying her for sex. It’s a provocative moment, and must have been the source for the necrophelia charge, even though there is no reason to suggest that Elliot would have any interest in sexually assaulting the woman. Furthermore, the scene ends up being part of a larger nightmare sequence (yes, another one of those) the dreamer of which is Liz.
Of course, such allegations are appealing due to their outrageousness, and, were De Palma more forthcoming in discussing his film’s subtext, he might have been able to put the issue to rest, but just as De Palma is more comfortable working through his obsessions in the context of his movies, his rebuttal would also arrive, four years later, in a cinematic form.
BODY DOUBLE – 1984
Here’s a thought to mull over: is it merely coincidence that De Palma’s most narrow exploration of sexual frustration happens to be shot in a flat (1.85:1) aspect ratio? I’m sure it is, but I’ll admit that the film’s limited scope, when measured against his post-SISTERS oeuvre is quite noticeable.
The story, concerning a modestly successful actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson,) who, as a result of his voyeuristic tendencies, finds himself entangled in a particularly gruesome murder, is typical De Palma in that it deposits us in a heightened reality where the truth is a frustratingly obscure and, ultimately, unknowable commodity. When we first meet Jake, playing a vampire in a trashy “B” movie, his face is frozen in a snarl as a result of his severe claustrophobia (for those looking for yet another VERTIGO parallel; yes, it’s there, but the similarities are confined largely to the surface.) Disappointed by his failure to act, Jake drives home excitedly to see his girlfriend, with whom he is madly in love. Jake‘s day is about to take yet another discouraging turn, though, as he finds his lady love in mid-coitus with another man, leading him to move out of the apartment, which is in her name.
Sensing a need for a career boost, Jake begins going out on auditions, which is where he runs across Sam, who quickly befriends him and sets him up with a housesitting opportunity in a beautiful apartment with two very tempting attractions: a telescope and an exhibitionist neighbor, Gloria, prone to performing a one-woman sex show from her bedroom window. These episodes soon become a nightly ritual for Jake, but they take a dark turn when he notices that he is not alone in watching her act; an “Indian,” who may be plotting to rob her, has taken an interest in her nocturnal activities, as well.
Until this point, Jake is still a spectator, but when he makes the decision to add himself into the stalking equation by tailing both Gloria and her pursuer to a mall, he has become an “actor” in this story, leaving us alone as the spectators. De Palma further complicates matters for the audience by adding a more perverse level to Jake’s obsession with Gloria, going so far as to have him retrieve a pair of her used panties from a trash can, yet so assured is De Palma’s storytelling that we stick with Jake even after he has acted in such a repulsive manner. This is pivotal, as, once Gloria has been murdered, Jake descends into the world of pornography to enlist the aid of the only person who can exonerate him, Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, who, it must be noted, is the daughter of Tippi Hedren, the luminous star of Hitch’s THE BIRDS and MARNIE.)
Clearly, De Palma was addressing the wounding charges of misogynism from DRESSED TO KILL (even the title, BODY DOUBLE, references a smaller controversy that surrounded Angie Dickinson’s shower scene from the previous film,) but, as the Village Voice’s Amy Taubin pointed out in the panel from the first week of the retrospective, so byzantine is his humor that De Palma succeeded only in providing his critics with more ammunition. In the end, Wasson’s flawed protagonist is the vehicle through which De Palma seems to be extending his hand to his female detractors. “Yes,” he appears to be saying, “I’m a flawed human being, but I’m on your side.” That he never lets us see Holly, who honestly believes Jake to be a necropheliac, accept Jake’s help to get out of her own grave is, perhaps, De Palma’s pessimistic acceptance that he will be perpetually misunderstood.
Next week: the grand finale, which includes THE FURY and MISSION TO MARS on Saturday, and a big, bloody gangster Sunday with SCARFACE and CARLITO’S WAY. As always, send me your comments and favorite Bazooka Joe comics!
Faithfully submitted,
