(From Hollywood
Vs. Dogville,
© by Jake Horsley)
“The thing you can determine from me and my career is
that I never gave a damn what anybody thought.”
—Brian De Palma,
1998
Was there ever
an auteur more amenable to selling out, more seemingly compatible with
Hollywood, than Brian De Palma? If we discount Spielberg, who falls short of
the criteria for personal filmmakers—and Lucas, who falls short of the criteria
for filmmakers, period—then of all the movie brats who came to prominence in
the ’70s, Brian De Palma must be the most extravagantly shallow visionary
showman currently working in America. By rights, he ought to have been the one
most warmly embraced by Hollywood, and yet bizarrely, the reverse is the case.
Life is full of paradoxes, and the sad paradox of Brian De Palma is that, hard
as he may try to sell out and become an A-list Hollywood director—and despite
his stubborn allegiance to the mainstream—he remains a fringe filmmaker.
Judging by De Palma’s best efforts to sell out, Hollywood (and the public) just
isn’t interested.
It may be
fitting in its way. De Palma started out as an underground filmmaker with a
predilection for social satire and subversion, and though few of his later
films have provided much evidence of this, De Palma’s sensibility and
temperament is actually far more radical and unorthodox than any of his peers,
including Scorsese, Altman, and Coppola. Perhaps it is this fact that lies at
the heart of the mystery, and explains why, throughout his career and with only
brief and momentary exceptions, De Palma has been shunned by the Bitch Goddess
Success?[1]
Commercially speaking, De Palma’s career has peaked twice, between 1976 (with Carrie) and 1980 (with
Dressed to Kill),
and then again, even more briefly, with The Untouchables in 1987 (we won’t mention Mission: Impossible,
since no amount of box office dividends can counter the dull fact of the film
itself). Artistically, on the other hand, he has peaked and continues to peak
at regular intervals, usually in diametric opposition to his commercial
success. In 1982, for example, he made Blow Out, his best film at the time and a
commercial flop. Like Powell’s Peeping Tom, Antonioni’s Blow Up, and Coppola’s The Conversation
(all of which inspired De Palma’s film), Blow Out was a film whose text
grew out of its subtext rather than vice versa, whose depths were all on the
surface, and whose theme was one with its plot. In the tradition of cinematic games, it was a puzzle, a film
about filmmaking, a movie about movies. Audiences just didn’t get it.[2]
Then in 1989, De Palma made his masterpiece, Casualties of War. The film was not a great
success, and was more or less overlooked by critics, considering that it was
easily one of the best American films of the decade. Following closely the
script by David Rabe, De Palma for once kept his customary flourishes and
self-serving directorial set-pieces to a minimum; he respected his material
and, intent on doing it full justice, he was both confident and generous enough
to take a back seat and let the script and the performers carry the show. Casualties of War
wasn’t “A Brian De Palma Film” in the usual, bombastic way, but it gave
intimations of what De Palma was really capable of as an artist. In the ten
years since Dressed to Kill, he had evolved in leaps and bounds, into
the most technically proficient of directors.[3]
After Casualties
of War, De Palma made a mixed bag of movies, only a couple of which
were worthy of his talents. Carlito’s Way
reunited the director with Sean Penn and Al Pacino, and although a rather
routine gangster story, De Palma’s talent for creating set-pieces with minimum
fuss and maximum delight were truly formidable. When it came to suspense
sequences—such as the poolroom shootout, the final hit on Sean Penn’s weasel
lawyer, and the climactic chase at Grand Central Station—De Palma was without
peer. Aside from this film, the director bracketed Raising Cain, a return to small-scale, personal (and negligible)
filmmaking, with the twin fiascoes Bonfire
of the Vanities and Mission
Impossible: mega-budget, star-studded exercises in futility of which it was
hard to say which was more regrettable—the amount of time and dollars poured
into them or the talent wasted. De Palma seemed unfazed by regret, however, and
Mission: Impossible, at least, was a
hit, though it seems doubtful if anybody understood (or liked) the film.
Of all the
major, maverick American directors, De Palma was the most adaptable and
seemingly “impersonal.” He didn’t appear to resent (or lament) the studios’
demands upon him, merely to regard it as part of the deal. Yet his increasingly
sinking status over the last fifteen years (since Casualties of War) as a studio hired hand means that his reputation
has suffered accordingly, and of all the directors to come to prominence in the
’70s (Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg), and even compared with the auteurs of the ’80s (Lynch, Stone,
Demme), De Palma’s reputation is now undoubtedly among the worst. (Two obvious exceptions would be Friedkin and Bogdanovich.) Even in the first part of his career, De Palma was
variously dismissed, reviled, scorned, or condemned by critics as an empty
showman, an untalented plagiarizer, a tasteless schlock-meister, and a sadistic
misogynist. To have offended so many different people was no easy feat, and De Palma, whatever critics had to say
about him, was a genuine individual. He was the most willfully irreverent and
playful of auteurs, and he seemed to possess almost
incalculable reserves of untapped talent. But De Palma’s charm was one with his
failing: he didn’t appear to take his own art seriously.
Recently, though De
Palma’s peaks have been less impressive, they have still matched those of most
other filmmakers currently working, and certainly surpassed those of his peers.
Yet the films have been almost unanimously dismissed by the critics (critics
who once took the time to revile him). Three times in succession, De Palma has
made a film of uneven but seductive brilliance and suffered the ignominy of
being ignored.[4] Snake
Eyes was a smart, suspenseful thriller boasting a powerful performance from
Nicholas Cage, a dazzlingly complex structure, and a virtuoso shooting style
that surpassed most if not all of De Palma’s contemporaries. Admittedly, it was
badly marred by a formulaic ending, but even so, in a period when halfway
decent movies were increasingly hard to find, Snake Eyes was completely
passed over as another mindless Hollywood action film.
Then
came Mission to Mars, a sumptuous piece of filmmaking that displayed the
director’s technique to be nearing a state-of-the-art perfection bordering on
cinematic grace. Mission to Mars had a richness of texture, a
visual beauty, and an emotional sweep to it that few movies (much less sci-fi
movies) can compete with. Depicting the zero gravity environment on the ship
and the heartfelt cavorting between Tim Robbins and Connie Nielson, De Palma
showed his passion and genius for moviemaking, his sheer love of the medium,
and put audiences briefly in movie heaven. Audiences didn’t seem to care,
however.[5]
Though once again a rather hackneyed ending reduced the overall
power of the movie, nothing could account for its vitriolic reception by
critics, the same critics (we might add) eulogizing over films like Dances
with Wolves, Titanic, Silence of the Lambs, Saving Private Ryan, Gosford Park, and
Gangs of New York.
Finally,
De Palma made Femme Fatale—probably his most personal work since Casualties
of War—and the film
barely registered on critics’ radar at all. Femme Fatale had many of the weaknesses of De
Palma’s worst “personal” (Hitchcockian) thrillers (Body Double, Raising Cain),
the improbable storyline, overblown set-pieces, and a penchant for voyeurism
more in keeping with an oversexed adolescent than a man in his sixties; but it
also had the soaring visual highs and the gleeful irony of his best earlier
works (Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Dressed to Kill). It was
dazzlingly shot, cunningly scripted, subtly moving, and wickedly entertaining.
But no one seemed to care, and the film was never even properly released in
Europe.
As
Auric Goldfinger tells James Bond: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.
The third time, Mr. Bond, is enemy action. De Palma’s artistry appeared to be under attack. Though none of these
films could exactly be called enduring works of art, they were all superior
pieces of entertainment, fresh, exciting movies from one of the country’s
foremost auteur filmmakers, one of the very few of who still seemed to be
evolving and experimenting with his gifts. There seemed no obvious reason why
audiences wouldn’t go see these films and enjoy them, except that critics (for
reasons equally mysterious) were almost unanimously telling them not to. As a
result, De Palma has been unable to get his films funded in his own country,
and has resorted (like Jarmusch) to seeking European backing. The sad irony is
that, never was a filmmaker less inclined to small, intimate, independent filmmaking than De Palma, who—like Gilliam, Stone,
Michael Mann or James Cameron—makes visual spectacles on a grand scale and has
little or no interest in doing it on the raw. (Was ever a filmmaker less likely
to do a Dogme film than De Palma?[6])
Like
Hitchcock (and Tarantino), De Palma has a disregard for content, and even
substance, a predilection for style. Though he often writes or co-writes his
films and is extremely gifted with plotting and dialogue, his all-consuming
passion for trying out and developing new cinematic techniques—for pure cinema,
as Hitchcock called it—tends to give his films the appearance of
superficiality. For De Palma however, style, taken to such a level, is
substance. Like Hitchcock, De Palma has the skill and the ingenuity to cast a
spell with his camera that precludes (or makes redundant) any questions of
depth or content. Unlike Hitchcock, who was eventually “understood” and fully
appreciated by critics and became the living exemplary of his medium, De Palma
has not been so lucky, but has become the victim of critics’ inability to look
beyond the content fully appreciate the style with his films are imbued. As the
director laments, with ample justification,
There’s a
whole school of de Palma criticism that says I’m absolutely terrible, that I’ve
never had an original idea in my life, that I’m just a poor man’s Hitchcock.
And, actually, I do get all the knocks Hitchcock used to get before critics
decided he was a genius. They say this
isn’t literary material, that my themes aren’t serious. I can give the answer
Hitchcock gave. Like, What is the content of a still life? Nada! But artists paint them anyway. [7]
Can there be any fate more galling than that of an artist enslaved to a
mainstream that refuses to acknowledge him and give him his due? Does Hollywood
have it in for Brian De Palma? Or is it just that, by choosing to focus on the
more superficial aspects of his trade and thereby limiting his creativity (the
man who made The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible is plainly not the
artist who made Blow Out and Casualties of War), De Palma has
offended his Muse, and so jinxed himself? Perhaps, by trying to satisfy two
mistresses at once, he has been faithful to neither, and incurred the wrath of
both? Like Orson Welles before him, he is in danger of becoming that most
tragic of animals: an artist cast out by his own medium.
Back
to Movies
[1] Relative
to his peers, of course, Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, et al. Relative
to the average, middle-class person, and even to most aspiring filmmakers, De
Palma has been hugely successful. But compared to his aspirations and talent,
clearly he has not.
[2] “No
one would answer my phone calls after Blow Out. It was a very bad time.
. . . You’ve gotta realize that when you’ve made a movie that may be
commercially disastrous, it may also be the best work you’ve ever done.” Brian De Palma: Interviews,
pg 88.
[3] His technique was as flawless as Hitchcock’s, but like Hitchcock, De Palma was only as good as his material; he didn’t have the visionary qualities of a Scorsese or a Coppola, and with a mediocre script (as with Wise Guys) he appeared no more than a competent hired hand, a hack (just like Hitchcock was a hack on Dial M For Murder or Torn Curtain).
[4] “They have an almost preprogrammed idea of ‘what De Palma is,’ and then
they just walk into a screening and measure it against that immediately,
without ever opening their eyes and watching what’s on the screen.” Interviews,
pg 171.
[5] For
a summer sci-fi movie, Mission
to Mars had genuine depth of feeling (in the central husband and wife
relationship), as well as an emotionally overwhelming scene in which one the
main characters dies. Apparently audiences didn’t want to be moved by a sci-fi blockbuster, however, much less
upset by it, and in part this may explain the film’s appalling reception.
[6] That said, De Palma did make Home Movies in 1980,
a slight but endearing comedy that he shot with his students as part of their
NY film course, using some of his regular actors (Keith Gordon and Nancy Allen
from Dressed to Kill, Kirk Douglas from the Fury, Garret Graham
from Phantom). The film was shot for next to nothing, and barely got a
release at all, but it has endured, a little-known gem for the director’s
followers (what there are of them), and one of his most enjoyably personal
films.
[7] Brian De Palma: Interviews, pg 85.