Part III
Media
itself has played very integral roles in DePalma's most successful
thrillers. Without exception in every one of DePlama's key films
media has been organically integrated into the themes and plots of
these thrillers. Of course, DePalma's use of media in these movies
are a technological and societal development of voyeurism, something
that Hitchcock also utilized to highly effective extents in Vertigo,
Psycho, and of course, Rear Window. With Hitchcock's films, it was
telescopes, windows and peepholes. DePalma turns a technological
twist to all of this, as with the opening to his film Sisters, where
he simultaneously engages his fiction characters and the audience
themselves in an act of voyeurism through a filmed television screen
which is broadcasting a clip of a new reality-game show that has its
own basis in voyeurism – Margot Kidder is pretending to be a blind
woman who has accidentally walked into the men's changing room at a
gym, and proceeds to undress in front of one of the male clients. The
idea of the fictitious game show is “What would he do?”, to which
the studio audience and contestants (inside the film) have to take a
guess in order to win the game show prize. And while this is all
happening, DePalma is also slyly critiquing the whole idea of
television media as just another, albeit accepted and even
celebrated, form of voyeurism. An extension of Hitchcock's
peephole-voyeurism that all of television-watching society condemns –
and so DePalma is pointing out our, his film's audience's (and
accepted society's), own hypocrisy when it comes to where the line is
drawn with our sometimes vampiric voyeuristic tendencies. Media as a
plot device then comes around again, this time in the forms of
cameras and photography, in Dressed to Kill, where the young hero
played by Keith Gordon sets up a hidden automatic time-lapse camera
outside of his mother's psychiatrist's office so that he might
capture evidence incriminating the psychiatrist in his mother's
(Angie Dickinson's) murder. Camera and photography come around again
in Femme Fatale, where a crucial photograph taken of a
woman-in-hiding throws her fairy-tale world into turmoil when the
photograph becomes a printed-media advertising sensation and is
plastered all over Europe. In Blow Out, photography is present in the
deepening complexity of the plot, but this film is more about the
media utilized in the making of b-movies, specifically, recorded
sound. In Blow Out it is John Travolta's sound recording that is, in
effect, the first witness to a conspiratorial murder, but when
Travolta teams up with the good-hearted prostitute Nancy Allen to
utilize sound recordings and hidden microphones to solve the murder
and capture the villain (John Lithgow), things go spinning out of
control and Trovolta winds up completely lost and adrift in his
personal world of sound, which throughout the film has become his own
personal circle of hell. A precursor to Body Double, DePalma's Blow
Out also perversely toys around with the heroine's “doubles”, as
villain John Lithgow, needing to be rid of Allen's character as she
was also a witness to the key murder in this story, decides to create
an alibi for her impending murder by first murdering several other
prostitutes who bear an uncanny likeness to Nancy Allen's character.
This way, Allen's character's murder would look like a random one in
a line of serial killings that had been plaguing the city. Here,
then, we also begin to get a mix of slasher-film aesthetics in a film
where Travolta is first seen sound-editing a b-movie slasher film;
and also DePalma's increasingly flirtatious tango with the
misogynistic controversy, something that celebrated writer Harlan
Ellison had some very opinionated things to say about within the
introduction of a paperback re-print of his book “Shatterday” in
1981.
Voyeurism
went from the telescope and directly to the then-cutting-edge media
technology of the videotape industry in Body Double. While windows
still remained a key element through witch our characters' voyeurism
could be accomplished in Body Double, Vertigo, and obviously Rear
Window, it was the mass acceptance of videotape technology that gave
a welcome twist to Body Double; when hero Craig Wasson peruses the
video rental shelves in the Hollywood videostore, launching his
amateur investigation into the murder of Deborah Shelton, it's a
curiously electrifying scene as we're waiting to see what could
possibly come of this. When he finds the VHS videotape featuring the
porn star (played by Melanie Griffith) who's erotic-dance routine
eerily echoed the murder victim's window-dance, he's able to find,
through the production credits, a thin track to follow in possibly
finding Melanie Griffith's character, and hence, the possible key to
solving a murder. Wasson not only finds Griffith and the key to
solving the puzzle, but also manages to find far more danger than he
was prepared for. At the end of Body Double, DePalma returns us to
the scene of the b-movie production, with film cameras rolling and
body doubles put into place for the leading b-movie actress, and this
all intentionally circles back to the opening erotic-fantasy sequence
in Dressed to Kill (1980) comically triggering memories of Angie
Dickinson's shower scene and the practical use of her body double –
and so then DePalma has created a mini meta-world of circling media
and voyeurism by cleverly utilizing b-movie production, camera,
sound, VHS tapes, slasher films, and body-doubles throughout his key
thriller trilogy. In all of this, DePalma's inherent good-humour
about films and filmmaking are completely in evidence by the time
Body Double's end credits begin to roll up over the body double's
funny shower scene.
Media
also rears its head, again integral to the plots, in DePalma's later
films, both of the throwback thriller with which he's gained his fame
from, as well as his Hollywood studio summer blockbuster. In Raising
Cain, the leading married couple (John Lithgow and Lolita Davidovich)
have set up video baby-monitors which become both a storytelling and
a camerawork element of that film; and in Mission Impossible, the
whole plotpoint regarding media files stored on a hard-disc
eventually becomes one of the biggest, most elaborately
sought-after-and-captured MacGuffins in spy-movie history, once again
providing a grinning example of DePalma's sly, cinematic humour.
Funnily, both of these DePalma films also relied heavily on flashback
storytelling, something that he'd avoided in his key thriller trilogy
(Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double) – a slight exception being
Travolta's character back-story in Blow Out – but that flashback
did not have any bearing on the exposition of the solving of the
mystery in the movie, unlike Raising Cain, Mission Impossible, and
unlike Hitchcock's Vertigo, wherein each of these films the cinematic
flashbacks actually explained the entire mystery.
Sisters
(1973) actually cleverly weaved the cinematic flashback trope with
DePalma's interest in media technology by providing a construct for
the movie's flashback sequence through warped memory (echoing
Stewart's dream sequence imagery in Vertigo) and recorded laboratory
research as projected through black-and-white 16mm documentary film
footage. From there, DePalma drew far more specific flashback
inspiration from Hitchcock's Vertigo in both storytelling and
framing mis-en-scene technique, twisting it for his own exhilarating
cinematic means, in his 1978 film The Fury. Following The Fury, from
1980-1984 DePalma dropped the on-screen flashback storytelling trope
in favour of expositional-dialogue as had been used during the
conclusion of Hitchcock's Psycho. Dressed to Kill, in particular, was
more of a remake of Psycho just as Body Double was a remake of
Vertigo. Listening to the summing-up-the-entire-mystery dialogue at
the end of DePalma's Dressed to Kill, we can't help but think of the
conclusion of Psycho, which then causes us to reflect on the whole of
DePalma's film and the fact that each scene is really an updating of
Hitchcock's film within the expanded boundaries of sexualism,
realism, and secret hypocritical voyeurism/coveting of “professional”
people in society of the 1980s.
As a
remake, Body Double also included a circling-camera shot lifted
directly from Vertigo, the shot was also exhilaratingly employed in
Blow Out – circling John Travolta in Blow Out's most celebrated
camera shot as he discovers, tape by tape, that every sound recording
in his sound studio has been systematically erased. The circling
camera shot is used to maximum effectiveness during the beach scene
where Deborah Shelton and Craig Wasson finally interact without
telescopes, windows, or lingerie-store changing rooms between them.
As the unlikely couple kisses, giving into desire, this is a more
lustful and technically updated version of the same take from Vertigo
where James Stewart and Kim Novak finally begin connecting. While
DePalma's take emotionally mixes love, lust, obsession, and anxiety
in Body Double, his take on this same twirling camerawork in Blow Out
strictly served to masterfully induce deepening anxiety. DePalma, if
anything, is a master of camera movements, to the point that when he
was ready to go into production for Femme Fatale (2002) he would
require camera rigs that would need to be invented specifically for
his film. His virtuoso camerawork, mixed with the heightened
sexuality of his content (and context), is what makes his work stand
out and stand apart. He is a technically more proficient filmmaker
than Hitchcock, but without Hitchcock's experiments in
cinematography, from the opening sequence in Psycho to the ongoing
takes in Rope (which also required specialized equipment and
operators at that time) to the inventive camerawork that permeates
nearly every frame of Vertigo, DePalma might not have had such a
critical base from which to launch from.
(To
be continued...)
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