A thread to discuss all things De Palma.
Do not know how to transmigrate posts, so any and all help would be appreciated.
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Thank you - at least we needed this!
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Discussion De Palma
A piece I think is helpful:
From the above:
I would argue that the intense appeal his films hold for us goes beyond visual voluptuousness or camp—though such matters are not incidental—and into a deeper, subconscious realm that rejects fixed identities, embraces marginalization, and acknowledges the integrity, even the necessity of social performance.
De Palma’s films are about surface/performance, and not about creating nuanced/in-depth psychological portraits (leave that to Bergman and Cassavetes). But De Palma’s staying on the surface is not an objectification of his characters. He is showing the fluidity of their surfaces as they interact with different people and situations, and how narrative-making and role-playing occur in (and often govern) life.
More later–have to get back to work. But look forward to your and everyone else’s thoughts.
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I have a love/hate relation with De Palma and his movies.
Most of the time the movies have a great beginning and middle, they are beautiful shot and full of exciting scene’s and suspense, thinking now for example of the museum scene from Dressed to Kill it’s fantastic, but almost all movies end for me with a anti climax and that leaves me don’t liking his movies as much as I would have liked. It’s than such a dissapointment that the rest of the movie isn’t much liked either by me. I can almost mention every movie where this happens for me. And stealing to much ideas from other movies, especially from Hitchcock, so that you can often guess the outcome, kind of.
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That is a very interesting observation, and I understand your perspective on this. In the case of FEMME FATALE it definitely works to receive the film that way.
Maybe my perspective on De Palma is too heavily influenced by the critical opinion during the 80´s at least here in Germany. De Palma was seen as two things: a gifted director mostly stealing from Hitchcock and a terrible misogynist. Both labels made it difficult for me as a teenager to enjoy De Palma or even defend him; on the one hand his films had that intriguing forbidden mix of nudity and violence (especially for teenagers who barely were allowed to buy a ticket at the box office - most of his films were only allowed from 16 years onwards) , on the other hand they also left one troubled and saddened (mostly) due to the disturbing images and often unhappy endings.
My first De Palma was “Dressed to kill”, and I do remember that my friends and I went to see it because of - you guessed it - the shower scene. That ends terribly, of course, so all the arousal it offered suddenly turned into shock; one felt punished for enjoying Dickinson (or better her double) soaping herself. The murder then was so disturbingly brutal (we did not know about this before attending the cinema) that from that point onwards we steeled ourselves and tried to pride ourselves with being so tough that we could stomach this film. I remember leaving the cinema with my friends, joking and feeling so above it - but secretly being terrified and getting nightmares. Still the fascination remained, and I bought the Donaggio score which naturally also has the wonderful and sweet melancholy pared with frightening dissonance. Just listening to it could scare me. And I was 16 years old at that time! But the fear also was kind of delicious. Especially when I got used to it and felt more powerful because I, well, could stand it.
I did not watch BODY DOUBLE, however, when it was released because the driller murder was heavily criticized in the German media back then, and I did not think I could stomach that.
The next De Palma I saw was THE UNTOUCHABLES, and that was a true crowd pleaser - somehow everybody I knew could get on board with that. Hey, the good guys won and it got a happy ending. Morricone´s score was uplifting. And it had CONNERY (even if he died, which was a shame). All in all, what a good time at the movies.
Then I watched CASUALTIES OF WAR, mainly because I was a fan of Michael J. Fox and thought he was such an underrated actor. I liked the film but I was again disturbed by it (a quality of movies I only later on could appreciate, when I got older and more cinema experienced).
My next De Palmas were BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (which has its moments amidst many flaws), CARLITO´S WAY (which I mainly loved for its final 20 minutes), RAISING CAIN (which left me kind of cold) and SNAKE EYES (which I still find extremely exciting, due to Cage and my personal love for stories taking place within strongly confined settings - which also explains my John Carpenter love).
Only then I started to seek out the earlier De Palma movies. While I did not really like many of them - apart from his masterpiece BLOW OUT (still my favorite De Palma) - I always enjoyed his, shall I call it operatic style, the heightened visuals married to a dominating score (I love melodic scores which turn to eleven). And at his best De Palma gives his movies that dangerous feeling of “anything could happen and you’re not safe” which often haunted me even hours after having watched them.
But returning to the “sex and identity as performances”-interpretation: I am aware of that, now that you and the Film Comment article mentioned this much more so, but I still feel a bit guilty whenever I see a De Palma movie showing women as pleasure objects.
Maybe because my impression of De Palma, the man, makes me think he really is one of the dirty old white men who only like women to be pleasure objects.
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First, thanks for your great response.
That is the way he was seen here as well. Critics slowly began to see and argue that he was doing more than merely stealing from Hitchcock–that he was actually developing AH’s themes in new directions.
As for the misogyny–it is always going to be an issue. Even De Palma has said that he could not make DRESSED TO KILL today. He is glad queer viewers like his work, but is aware of its problems.
BODY DOUBLE is interesting. Like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, it is the story of one man scripting a narrative for another man to follow, therein becoming the first man’s scapegoat. The film also looks at the issues of fantasy/reality, and Hollywood filmmaking versus porn filmmaking (both centered in Southern California at the time of the fim).
A good take:
Its conclusion:
And then De Palma pulls the entire rug out from underneath the film’s reality and turns everything we’ve just seen into a prolonged Brechtian shaggy-dog joke, only to then pull the rug out from under that joke and halfheartedly reaffirm the film’s reality as a mystery-thriller. By the end of this masterpiece, one of the great and most uniquely American films of the 1980s, we only trust surfaces, which are as fleeting and illusory as anything else.
If a viewer is not in the mood for meta- cinema, they should avoid De Palma like a vampire avoids daylight.
Beautiful observation, and exactly what I believe De Palma wants a viewer to feel–uncertain, shaken. Another good review:
Again great. De Palma at his best arouses complicated, contradictory feelings and ideas in his viewers. He is not a tidy director, nor, as the first article states, a polemical one (which would have helped him with his critics). He is an artist of ideas, surfaces, and meta- everything. He is also deeply engaged with the world in which he is making films.
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Thanks back to you, great sources to study!
What do you think about CASUALTIES OF WAR (regarding surfaces, it seems to really be a scathing critique of the US military, with the only decent character played by someone who looks like a little boy, unable to uphold the America he naively believes in) and BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (again with a main character looking boyish instead of the mega-WASP Master of the Universe of the novel, fooling around and ending up in the NY circle of hell)?
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Have not seen it since its opening weekend. Will have to watch it again.
Great description. De Palma movies are full of impotent men/boys who cannot live up to/defend their ideals. He is the most political filmmaker of his cohort.
Again, have not seen it since it opened.
This discussion has already caused my to buy BODY DOUBLE in 4K, and I suspect there will be more in the future.
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Same here. Also added the Arrow edition of OBSESSION.
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BODY DOUBLE (1984) on 4K Blu-ray restoration
The disc arrived yesterday, and, of course, I stayed up to watch it (for the record: I still made it to work on time).
Meta- to the max (or is it to the HBO Max?), BODY DOUBLE is a double helix of a movie, where everything twists back on itself. Characters follow one another in circles, and when they happen to stand still, the camera circles them. Bodies are doubled, characters adopt/cast off roles with abandon, and perspectives are always to be questioned.
Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and REAR WINDOW are part of the film’s DNA, but less referenced or called back to, than ingested and returned in new iterations.
Then there are the De Palma surfaces–they are everywhere. Sometimes there are surfaces upon surfaces, or surfaces reflecting surfaces. Mirrors and cameras proliferate. Are we dealing with deeply-drawn, nuanced characters? No. But a viewer is presented with psychological situations they can identify with and recognize from their own life.
As for the performances, BODY DOUBLE ranks as among Craig Wasson’s and Melanie Griffith’s finest hours. Holly Body detailing what she will and will not do on screen is a master class in comic delivery.
Forty years ago, scorn and opprobrium rained down on De Palma for BODY DOUBLE (how he got Columbia to finance and release the movie is a minor miracle). Watched today, it is more apparent than ever what a cerebral filmmaker De Palma is, and how complex and entertaining his mise en scene can be. I found myself leaning forward on my couch to get closer to his images. Of the New Hollywood filmmakers, he may lie most near the cohort’s edge, and his output can be uneven, but it holds up better than many (myself included) had thought it might.
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Cannot resist:
De Palma entwining Hollywood films and porn movies, and the glory of Melanie Griffith:
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But what do you think about the end of the movie?
I found it so dissapointing, especially the first time I watched it.
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You mean the twist?
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No suddenly he is back in the Dracula movie from the start of the movie, it almost suggest that all before was just his imagination, or his fear while locked in the coffin and nothing was real? But I’m not realy sure about this.
But this completely took me out of the movie, taking away the suspense from the previous scene, even though it was almost over of course.
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I like it.
Summary
Jake gets his vampire role back. The actor/double hired to replace him turned out to be a bad fit.
When first presented, there is a slight question whether it is Jake’s old movie, or a new vampire-themed porn movie. Also, the scene being shot uses a body double, and there is the tedious difficulty of how to insert a body double, along with Dennis Franz’ hilarious “auteur moment” frustration. De Palma continues to entwine the two types of movie production to the last shot–one that could fit in both a horror movie and a porn movie.
Then add Holly Body telling the actress who is being doubled that this scene will garner her a lot of dates, i.e., the body double’s body is going to work great for her, and it almost becomes a meta- pile-on on the part of De Palma. He doesn’t untwist the threads, or provide a tidy resolution.
It is almost as if he is saying: “And this is where you came in.”
I was going to ask: “Disappointing how/why?”, but have seen your response.
But De Palma has been doing this the entire movie. As one of the critiques I posted said: De Palma pulls out the rug from under his film, and then turns around and pulls out the floor that was underneath the rug. At the end, some order seems to be restored: we are back on a movie set.
“Sure, I manufactured suspense, but now I am going to show you how cumbersome it is to manufacture not only suspense, but all visceral responses.”
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Mr. De Palma agrees with you:
Were there any scenes in Body Double that you weren’t able to do the way you originally envisioned?
The ending didn’t come off exactly how I had planned it. We went back to do some reshooting. At the end of Body Double, we pan down and show you what a body double actually is and demonstrate it for the audience. I originally had that at the start of the movie, where you see Craig working with the girl and he’s supposed to be some type of vampire. Somehow, I felt that gave the whole idea away right in the beginning. So I stuck that scene at the end. But it’s not a great ending. Endings are very tricky in movies. If you could have a couple of movies that have great endings, it’s a miracle. Bridge on the River Kwai has a great ending.
Complete at archive.ph (and a worthwhile read):
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That’s it. I have to go on a DePalma binge now.
And why did I forget that I own a digital copy of THE BLACK DAHLIA? I remember liking it - but I hardly remember the film itself.
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Enjoy!! It may be a rocky trip at times, but the joys are numerous–if frequently embedded in flawed films.
As I watched BODY DOUBLE, I thought: “Is this a thriller? A satire? A pastiche? A documentary about mid-1980s L.A.?”
Then I understood: it was all of those and more.
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Mod note: De Palma posts from the film conversation moved here.
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Thanks so much Dustin.
For those who have not seen it (and even those who have–I was fascinated on my second viewing), I recommend this documentary DE PALMA, which seems to be streaming in many places, sometimes for free with ads.
I have realized that if Scorsese is a Catholic filmmaker, then De Palma is a Quaker one.
@jamesb007nd will also be glad to learn that De Palma thinks endings are the hardest parts of a film to get right, and that a filmmaker accomplishes a good ending only two or three times in his career.
De Palma also comments that he starts with a structure, and then finds a narrative to fit inside it, which he then needs his actors to flesh out. It is a process that he contrasts with that of his questioners–Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow–whom he says start with character(s), for whom a narrative is then found.
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