The life of the current day cinephile is not a happy one. Very few films being released now create any excitement; some even inspire nothing but dread. It’s not just the endless push of woke faux-socialist propaganda or the constant regurgitation of samey formulas that sour the movie-going experience. To an alarming extent, films fail in their main field, that of a visual medium. When it comes to aesthetics, the audience can choose between films looking either like video games, TV commercials or made-for-TV movies. Films that really feel “cinematic” (like last year’s The Brutalist) are few and far between. Nor is it just mainstream cinema that is in a creative crisis; the arthouse circuit is in a drab place as well.
It was after another rather disappointing night at the movies that this author exclaimed to a dear friend, at the conclusion of a lengthy rant, that “Brian De Palma was always accused of ripping off Hitchcock—I wish someone would rip off De Palma!” The current-day cinephile should reconsider the works of Brian De Palma and re-discover the magic of style.
Brian De Palma, born in 1940, is an American film director, today mostly known for Scarface (1983), the horror classic Carrie (1976), the first Mission: Impossible (1996), 1987s The Untouchables, thrillers like Dressed To Kill (1980)— he is also infamous for directing one of the biggest flops in cinema history, the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Although he is championed by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, film circles still argue whether De Palma is an “important director” like his peers (and long-time friends) Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. At least this was for many years the main criticism of his work: “Isn’t he just copying Hitchcock?”. Truth be told, I was once myself one of his detractors. When I was a twenty-something Scorsese die-hard, I thought little of De Palma’s work, dismissing it as lacking in depth. That, however, changed drastically when I first saw The Phantom Of The Paradise, the subversive, and yet hilarious, 1974 rock musical that blends the Phantom of the Opera, Faust, Dorian Gray, glam rock and biting showbiz satire into a fascinating, colorful, yet dark spectacle, which might even be better than The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I realized that in the case of De Palma, style is substance! In fact substance without style can be pretty boring. Just look at today’s “Message films”, like Maria Schrader’s excruciatingly boring She Said.
For many years, the main criticism of De Palma’s work was: “Isn’t he just copying Hitchcock?”. But isn’t everyone?
To confront the often-repeated argument head-on: Is De Palma a Hitchcock copycat? I counter this: Isn’t everyone? The influence of Hitchcock on the cinematic arts is so massive that every director incorporates some of the master’s techniques into his own approach. De Palma just did it better than others, by doing it his very own way. De Palma learned the “language” of Hitchcock. And he learned it so well that he was able to tell his own stories and even his own jokes with it. Still, leaving it at that would be underselling his cinematic prowess: he was also very adept in “speaking” Welles, Godard and others. And he has a fine voice of his own. Brian De Palma was and is a man who knows film.
There are some very detailed studies on De Palma’s style, tropes (for example, his use of the split screen technique) and themes, which explain specifics more deeply and thoroughly than this space allows. What I want to highlight here are just a few aspects of De Palma’s style. Yes, he could do straight up Hitchcock pastiches, like Obsession, which is basically a remake of Vertigo, down to the Bernard Herrmann soundtrack. This was De Palma proving definitively that he could “speak” Hitchcock. Dressed To Kill however demonstrated how well he could redeploy Hitchcock’s language for his own stories. When the thriller came out in 1980, the nascent PC crowd were up in arms over its “violence towards women”, and many dismissed it as a sleazy remake of Psycho—but now it is rightly considered a classic tale about sexual repression and the dark desires hiding beneath respectable surface. Dressed To Kill is masterfully made, elegant and precise, laced with references to De Palma’s own past as the son of a distant surgeon, using his first film camera to expose his adulterous father’s affairs. Also, the suspense and thrill come with a slightly satiric sentiment, since the story is set in the more affluent, upper-class parts of New York, complete with bored housewives, high class prostitutes and deranged psychiatrists. How far the director could push the “Hitchcock trope” was shown in 1984’s Body Double. By combining Rear Window, Vertigo, the 80s porn industry, meta-commentary about the film industry and, er, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, De Palma delivered an absurdist piece of parody that is closer to Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety or Blazing Saddles than one might expect. This was him telling a joke in Hitchcock’s language.
By combining Rear Window, Vertigo, the 80s porn industry, meta-commentary about the film industry and, er, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Body Double (1984) is De Palma telling a joke in Hitchcock’s language.
But there is so much more to explore. When talking about De Palma, one must discuss Scarface. Once you get beyond its cult status and its misguided adoration in hip hop culture, you’ll find an extremely stylized, yet subversive operatic epic. The film is not subtle in depicting Tony Montana as a walking superiority complex (“Say hello to my little friend!”), a vicious narcissist who has to resort to violence, since he is otherwise incompetent as a human being. His flashy, decadent world is indeed an empty one. In many ways, Scarface is the crass correction to the “honourable gangster” stereotype as depicted in The Godfather. In his 2012 book Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, film scholar Chris Dumas called Scarface the most influential film of the last 40 (now 45) years—an interesting thought. Seldom discussed, however, is its “spiritual sequel”, 1993’s Carlito’s Way, again starring Al Pacino. Mirroring the 1983 film, Carlito’s Way tells the story of a Puerto Rican ex-gangster, trying to escape the criminal world, but who gets pulled back in. It’s not only a story about how a criminal life can never really be left behind, but also about how respectable figures like lawyers like to get in on the “glamour” of it. Carlito’s Way is an elegiac and beautiful film, on a par with some of Scorsese’s best.
De Palma at his peak, though, is 1981’s Blowout, which takes some inspiration from Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which the protagonist uses sound rather than photography to solve a mystery, and also from the famous “Zapruder film”, the amateur film documenting the Kennedy assassination. John Travolta offers a career-best performance as a sound engineer on the brink of discovering a political conspiracy, which alludes to Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident, in which a car accident caused the death of the Kennedy heir’s girlfriend Mary Jo Kopechne. This is Brian De Palma speaking with his own voice, proving himself to be a master of suspense. It is a rich, masterfully composed film, touching on themes like political cover-ups, scandal culture and the process of filmmaking. What makes it special, however is the focus on the main characters (especially the part of Sally, as played by De Palma’s then-wife Nancy Allen), which makes the ending even more shocking and tragic. Blowout flopped upon release but has now rightfully gained a reputation as one of the best films of the 1980s.
Blowout (1981), with John Travolta, is Brian De Palma speaking with his own voice, proving himself to be a master of suspense.
But even seemingly commercial fare like The Untouchables deserves a second look. Kevin Costner’s upstanding cop Elliot Ness isn’t exactly all that heroic, once you realize he ponders a bit too long whether he should shoot a gangster or save a baby carriage in the famous shoot-out scene in the train station. Moral ambiguity is one of De Palma’s central themes. The finest example for this is Snake Eyes, starring Nicholas Cage as a corrupt cop who finally does something right and not just for personal gain. Also, libertarians and anarchists take note: De Palma offers a healthy distrust of any kind of authority, especially the government. Authority figures have a bad standing in De Palma’s works. Mission: Impossible is to Hitchcock’s North By Northwest what North By Northwest is to Kafka’s The Trial: a man struggling with forces beyond his control—except that this time, Agent Hunt is hunted by none other than his own people, the CIA itself. The world of “National Security” is an ugly, corrupt one. Ethan Hunt has no happy ending—a fact that might have escaped Tom Cruise. Even in his later years, De Palma has still been daring as an artist, even going further than many younger directors would. The 2007 Iraq War drama Redacted incorporates real war footage into the narrative, portraying the US forces in a decidedly critical light. This was, in fact not the first time, De Palma voiced his criticism of the US military: His Vietnam drama Casualties of War depicts the gruesome rape of a Vietnamese girl at the hands of US soldiers.
If there is one thing we can learn from Brian De Palma, it is this: you can tell complex, layered stories, even with some subversive anti-establishment messages (De Palma’s roots lay in the very left-wing underground movements of the late 60s), without being boring, preachy or stuck-up. One can give endless, dour speeches about hardships young girls face—or just watch Carrie, which, by the way, belies the accusation of De Palma being a “misogynist”. When “filling the big screen”, don’t be afraid of some panache, some extravaganza—don’t be afraid of style.
In that regard, we can look at another contemporary of Brian De Palma, a man who could turn stories as quaint as female-centric dramas and composer biographies into controversies: the British director Ken Russell (1927-2011).
If there is one thing we can learn from Brian De Palma, it is this: you can tell complex, layered stories, even with some subversive anti-establishment messages, without being boring, preachy or stuck-up.
Russell was in some ways similar to De Palma. Both had a distinctive style, often misunderstood by critics, and their share of scandals. Both pushed the boundaries of “realism” into the realms of (grounded) surrealism. Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, with its infamous “rape of Christ” scene, depicting a explicit orgy in a nun’s convent, might be the most controversial (and heavily censored) film in British film history. Yet, just as with Scarface, if one looks beyond the scandal, one will find a powerful, disturbing story about the intersection of religious and political power and its abuse. Sure, Russell could also direct scenes which depict Richard Wagner as a Glam Rock Nazi Frankenstein’s Monster terrorizing a Jewish ghetto (Lisztomania) or 1975’s Tommy in all its acid-trip delirium, but his style was always substantial: what Russell intended was the film as an experience, where even the most serious themes were presented in an imaginative, astounding and ultimately gripping way. He went over the top to get his point across. De Palma did it differently than his more flamboyant English colleague, but with the same intent.
Re-visit and watch some of the films discussed in this article. Of course, even today, there are some directors with a style of their own—Paul Thomas Anderson, Denis Villeneuve or the Coen Brothers come to mind. There is always place for more, though. For films which belong on a big screen. Films that … look and feel like cinema.
