Part IV
...Another
notable cinematographic trait from Vertigo [that DePalma utilized in
his own films] was Novak's flashback whilst sitting alone in her
bedroom. Here, the camera has framed the actress perfectly as she
proceeds to write a note detailing her involvement in what we thought
was her double's suicide up until now – where she admits, via her
own voice-over and visualized for us (the audience) through a lengthy
flashback of the bell tower scene, revealing visual information that
we had not been privy to when the scene had originally played out
earlier, that the “suicide” had been in fact a cover for
murderous goings-ons. The mis-en-scene in the hotel room during the
flashback brings to mind the excitingly framed flashback sequence
from DePalma's The Fury when Amy Irving pauses halfway up an interior
stairway and receives a psychic vision of her missing brother.
DePalma shows us this vision as a split-screen as Irving remains
frozen on the steps for us to witness her reacting to the vision –
and while DePalma had played with dual-screen storytelling before in
Sisters and The Phantom of the Paradise, he had never displayed it in
this tricky and clever manner before – instead of the standard
dividing line between the two scenes playing simultaneously, in The
Fury, literally half of the backdrop surrounding Irving dissolves
away into the vision she's having as the camera turns around her.
Here, DePalma has displayed his most brilliant take on the
dual-screen technique. The whole flashback trope also teeters over
experimental territory, and although DePalma was no stranger to this
form on non-linear storytelling, he wouldn't fully experiment with it
until his later films, Raising Cain, wherein his seemingly
overlapping flashbacks and dream sequences were viewed as too
experimental for its time (1991) and DePalma succumbed to the
pressure to re-cut his film into its current “theatrical release”
version. Since that time, Raising Cain has been recut into a pseudo-
“director's” cut where the scenes of real time, flashback, and
dream fantasy have been restructured back into a form more closely
resembling DePalma's original idea for Raising Cain. (This latter
version is now available on a newer home video release). The epitome
of DePalma's use of flashbacks had to have been his sophisticated,
intricate, and suspenseful reveal of how and why Ethan Hunt's (Tom
Cruise's) team of spies had been set-up and killed in the big-budget
blockbuster Mission Impossible. This flashback sequence of DePalma's
is particularly fantastic because as the sequence plays out as Tom
Cruise's inner thoughts, mixing memory with gap-filling logic and
circumstantial accusations, John Voight is sitting across from him
simultaneously relaying a series of lies and his own false
accusations, speaking while the flashback is occurring. The killing
of the Mission Impossible team also happened in the first half hour
of this exciting action film, literally and cinematically amping up
the heroes-dying-halfway-through idea that had so intrigued Hitchcock
in Vertigo and Psycho.
The
ultimate experiment in non-linear storytelling for DePalma would
happen a few years after Raising Cain and Mission Impossible. It
would be the next decade, in fact, in 2002, when DePalma utilized a
hugely extravagant flash-forward for the entire second act and
continuing halfway through the third act of Femme Fatale, without
even letting the audience in on it until the last few minutes of the
film. At this point in his career, DePalma knew exactly how
experimental he was being, he held no allusions that the climax of
Femme Fatale might alienate his theatrical audiences. He was looking
forward to the reaction that his film would get when it was released
into cinemas.
DePalma's
inspired fascination with both cinema and media serves to set up
nearly every one of his key films in their opening frames. Sisters
opens up with a shot on a broadcast television monitor. This was in
1973, and when DePalma returned to this idea of opening his films
with televised monitors two decades later, he'd be nearly relentless
with this idea. Raising Cain opens with a shot of a video baby
monitor in a parents' bedroom. Mission Impossible with a shot of a
live-camera monitor, monitored by a group of spies. DePalma had an
obvious field day playing with interweaving video technology where a
group of spies is pitted against two other groups of spies in the
midst of double-crosses and doubleback twists – this is the very
epitome of voyeurism quite literally blown out of proportion. In
Snake Eyes, DePalma opens the camera shot on a series of new footage
monitors until the camera reveals the live footage in actuality,
without cutting. From this, the camera continues to weave expertly
without any noticeable visual cuts for nearly the next twenty
minutes, emulating Hitchcock's Rope once again as the camera follows
a rowdy and rambunctious police detective played by Nicholas Cage and
setting up the entire first act of the film, introducing all of the
film's key ensemble players. Snake Eyes is DePalma's version of Rope
on high-octane steroids. Instead of containing the fluid action to
the interior of an apartment, DePalma's single-setting is an entire
Las Vegas casino and hotel, his cameras gliding across casino
monitors, down hallways, around a boxing ring auditorium and across
the ceiling overlooking the insides of a row of hotel suites, all
elaborately decorated in individual colour schemes. It's no wonder
DePalma needed to hire Nicholas Cage for the role, at that time he
might've been the only Hollywood actor up to the challenge of
out-scene-ing the scenery. As for DePalma's key thriller trilogy of
the 1980s, none of them started out with television monitors,
instead, Dressed to Kill begins with an outright dream-fantasy
seemingly disconnected to the rest of the film's reality, while Blow
Out and Body Double both begin with the making of a b-moive, and both
of those movies retain the making of the b-movies as their underlying
sub-plots (both to be twisted in irony by the ends of those films).
It is finally Femme Fatale (2002) that culminated and somewhat
epitomizes DePalma's cinematic and media fetishes together – the
opening shot, post-90s-DePalma, is of a television (going all the way
back to Sisters), but this time the television is not displaying
anything that is happening within the reality of the film, as the
opening shots of monitors had done in every single past instance
DePalma had utilized this technique – this time, the television is
playing, appropriately, a scene form the classic Hollywood film noir
Double Indemnity. Watching this film on television, we see as the
camera fulls back, is a nude Rebecca Romijn, lying across a hotel
bed. This is preamble to a diamond heist that is about to occur
during a celebratory night at the Cannes Film Festival. This move
fixes DePalma's own cinema with his passion for media and cinema, and
these themes continue on through Femme Fatale as our other leading
character, Antonio Banders, is introduced as a media photographer.
Television, cinema, photography, and mass-marketing advertising all
crossover each other with DePalma's trademarks: sex and crime. And
like Vertigo, Rebecca Romijn takes over for an uncanny doppelganger
(also played by Romijn) when the weaker double commits suicide. Not
as much of a remake of Vertigo as Body Double is, DePalma's Femme
Fatale regardless freely uses and twists around Hitchcock's
plotpoints regarding the heroine and her double. The diamond-heisting
Romijn, the stronger, more sexually outward and confident one, even
gets involved with the dead double's love interest, just as Novak had
done with Stewart in Vertigo. DePalma's Femme Fatale actually plays
out like Vertigo from the heroine's point of veiw as opposed to the
male point of view, up until the third act where DePalma's
experimental intentions are finally revealed, pulling the rug out
from under the audience.
(To
be continued...)
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