* * * Part V
As a
cinephile, I have made it my business to collect as many films that I
find intriguing, interesting, exciting, and engaging as I could find
– the harder to find, the better the challenge. Such was the case
with many of Dario Argento's films during my collecting in the 1990s,
his films were continually hard (or nearly impossible) to come by
until the advent of DVD around the turn of the millennium. Strangely,
though, I was never compelled to collect DePalma's movies on VHS, in
spite of my adoration for his work. Mostly, I would just rent and
re-rent the VHS copies of Carrie, Blow Out, Body Double, Dressed to
Kill, Carlito's Way, with only a couple of exceptions, which
pertained only to his earlier films – Obsession was one of the VHS
videotapes I was lucky to have come by on a shopping excursion to
Bellingham, Washington; I'd found a copy of this movie in a VHS
retail chain called Suncoast Motion Pictures. Obsession was one of
DePalma's titles that I'd never been able to find up until that
point, and so after making the purchase it would be the fist time I'd
experience that thriller, which starred Genvieve Bujold, Cliff
Robertson, and John Lithgow – with Bujold playing a dual-role as
doubles. Obsession is DePalma's actually first stab at remaking
Vertigo, with the first Bujold character having met her death in a
firey car chasing following a botched kidnapping-for-ransom. Cliff
Robertson's character then meets Bujold's younger double, fifteen
years later, in an unlikely scenario in Florence, Italy. But this is
once place DePalma shines as a storyteller – not only in making us
believe in these unlikely coincidences, but in his ability to make us
want to believe in them. There is actually something genuinely and
inherently (and strangely, even innocently) romantic about DePalma's
storytelling.
The
other VHS tape I'd purchased was Sisters, thanks to that videostore
owner who let me buy it right off of the rental shelf of his store.
The third and last VHS tape I ever acquired of DePalma's catalogue
was The Fury, and this videotape had been given to my by one of my
sisters as a Christmas present one year in the late 90s.
* * *
The
Fury (1978) marks a very intriguing spot in DePalma's overall
catalogue, due to its cinematic content and its context within his
filmography – it's a horror-thriller based on a popular horror
novel of that time, and incorporates many of the virtuoso camera
flourishes that would become the stylistic hallmark of his following
films of the 80s. The Fury is essentially the bridge between
DePalma's early horror adaptations (Carrie, from the Stephen King
novel, and Phantom of the Paradise, a wild twist on “Phantom of the
Opera”) and his trip of erotic-thriller masterpieces of the early
80s. The Fury expertly weaves and experiments further on the stylish
cinematography and non-linear storytelling of his early thrillers
Sisters and Obsession with the visceral energy and immediacy
(paradoxically executed through long fluid shots and slow-motion
camerawork) of his horror films, Carrie and The Phantom of the
Paradox (the latter being more of a horror-thriller-musical in the
style of, but superior to in this writer's opinion, The Rocky Horror
Picture Show). This would all culminate in DePalma's unofficial
Psycho remake, Dressed to Kill in 1980, the film that would really
put DePalma on the map.
Although
DePalma had toyed with placing media and media technology in his
stories before the 1980s, with the television monitors and newspaper
writers is Sisters and the series of slide-photographs that help to
open the film Obsession, it wouldn't be until after Dressed to Kill
that he would really start experimenting with ideas of incorporating
all sorts of media and technology in his films. Of course, Blow Out
featuring jon Travolta s our sound technician and hero was really the
striking point for this, his subsequent Vertigo remake – Body
Double – intriguingly toyed with the then-new videotape media that
was just making its presence known in mainstream society, both in the
consumer realm as well as the production realm. Following Wasson's
first investigative moves through the Hollywood video rental store,
he then manages to get himself hired onto an actual porn production
in order to be able to meet with Melanie Griffith, the body double of
the film's murder victim. DePalma takes us through the entire
porn-scene production in one amazingly fluid set-piece that was: A)
Aped by Quentin Tarantino for his celebrated Inglourious Basterds
sequence that opens the fifth chapter of that film; and: B) Set to a
pulse-pounding rock soundtrack that would serve as DePalma's foray
into “rock video” territory, something that was in fashion within
the Hollywood studios of that time. DePalma knew that he was
basically shooting a rock video in service of this behind-the-scenes
porn-movie sequence, making the entire scene a double-meta affair: A
porn movie shot from behind-the-scenes as a rock video inside a movie
that is about Hollywood b-movie and porn-movie actors, based on
another movie from twenty-five years previous. Sound complex? It's
not, because another one of Brian DePalma's brilliant talents is the
ability to keep all of these overlapping meta-themes subtly riding
the undercurrent of his actual story, about sex, voyeurism, and
murder, without allowing these subtextual themes and secret
criticisms of voyeuristic media to get in the way of his expertly
stylized proceedings. Using a single word, DePalma basically has a
firm grasp on his own cinematic style.
After
DePalma would continue his stylistic approach to incorporating media
tech into his films, with Raising Cain, Mission Impossible, Snake
Eyes, and Femme Fatale, he would eventually twist the whole aspect of
all of these films' opening sequences in his latest film Passion
(2012), which would open up on a shot of the two lead heroines, both
of whom are focused in on the screen of a MacBook laptop. For once,
DePalma's camera is not showing us the images on the screen, instead,
we're make to patiently sit while watching the two women (Rachel
McAdams and Noomi Rapace) as they watch their shared computer screen
(also sitting). We see only their faces and bodies and the back of
the computer – they're the ones watching, and we don't know what
they're watching, and it is never revealed, marking a first for a
DePalma film. Soon, however, DePalma allows us to discover that
McAdams and Rapace work for a mega-conglomerate media corporation in
Europe. And sooner than later, iPhones, YouTube, security cameras,
laptop cameras, and commercial media all quickly slither their way,
extremely prominently, into DePalma's new take on the story of sexual
and corporate power-plays, murder, and double-crosses and
backstabbing while still managing to interweave the very importance
of dream and nightmare sequences into his personal storytelling. If
Passion is to be DePalma's last film, then he certainly went out at
his peak, which is astounding unto itself considering his first
notable step into the heavy-hitting cinema-auteur arena was Sisters,
almost forty years before Passion was released. Sadly, Passion only
received a limited theatrical release in North America, another
signal of the changing media technology and the way popular media is
delivered (and demanded) in society in 2012. The very way that
iPhones/uploading/video-streaming marked the shift in Rapace's
character's corporate power-position in Passion would wind up being
the very reason that DePalma's brilliant thriller would receive very
little attention in the cinemas and on hard-copy media distribution.
It may have fared better with a VOD streaming release; but of course,
watching a DePalma film on a Smart Phone is no way to watch a DePalma
film at all...
(To
be continued...)
