Brian De Palma: Blow Out

Blow Out represents a breakthrough for Brian De Palma. After farcically and satirically pulling apart the bonds of cinema for nearly two decades, the self-reflexive director at last found a way to incorporate cinema into a narrative without breaking up the movie. There are still jokes in Blow Out, but they tend to be of the cosmic variety; the closest anyone comes to an outright punchline is one character's innocent assertion "I don't watch the news. It's too depressing." Instead, De Palma structures his gags as dark, wordless payoffs, all of them carrying a bitter, emotional irony that feel like punches to the gut, something only rarely felt in De Palma's canon up to this point.

As with Dressed to Kill, De Palma does open his film with an extended gag, in this case a POV shot of a mouth-breathing killer stalking a sorority hall, his magnified breathing and racing heartbeat raising tension as scantily clad coeds fail to notice him. At last, he moves into a Psycho pose in the shower, pulls back the curtain, raises the knife, and the woman lets out the most hysterically fake scream you ever did hear. The camera shifts to tripod-mounted third-person in an editing studio for exploitation features as soundman Jack Terry (John Travolta) chuckles at how bad it is to his teed-off boss. What was I saying about this not being a funny movie?

Tasked with finding new sounds to overcome the stale effects library, Jack heads out to a local park at night to get ambient noise, his microphone resembling a gun or a conductor's baton as he points it at various noises. Suddenly, he hears the tires of a car squealing and turns in time to get crisp audio of a loud bang as the car's front tire blows out and sends the vehicle careening off a bridge into the water below. Jack dives in and saves a woman, Sally (Nancy Allen), but the man inside died on impact. In the hospital, Jack learns that the man was Gov. McRyan, the front-runner against the president in the upcoming election.


An aural riff on the photographic obsession of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Blow Out also incorporates De Palma's usual love of Hitchcock, as well as the political thrillers of Alan J. Pakula. But where Pakula's camera generally remained still, conveying the threat of an overlooking presence so vast it bordered on the gnostic, De Palma's camera is that of a stalking predator, always following but remaining hidden. Pakula's forces create their own shadows; De Palma's must slink around in the system as it is. He uses split diopter lenses to give equality clarity to objects in the foreground and in the distance while still emphasizing the space between the two. At the park, the objects Jack records dominate the foreground as Travolta stands outside of space and time recording them from afar. Later, the sidewinding tracking shots present a growing grace in De Palma's form, less showy and more substantive: Burke (John Lithgow) an assassin tying up loose ends, stalks a woman through a market. De Palma visualizes this through elegant tracking shots that eventually move to settle in a close-up of a fish and a meat thermometer in the foreground in time for a hand to pick up the sharp-needled thermometer.

If the director back-pedals on his usual cheek, he at least retains his penchant for irony, which abounds here. De Palma introduces McRyan by way of a newscast reading out his staggering poll numbers at the beginning as Jack cuts new audio in his apartment, his loop of thunder portentously rumbling underneath the newscaster's discussion of the governor. As the film's plot thickens, red, white and blue dominates the color palettes in falsely patriotic ways; even the slasher in that film-within-a-film at the start wears a red, white and blue jacket. The director even sets the whole film against an anniversary celebration involving the Liberty Bell, but his view of the grimy, neon-streaked streets of Philadelphia robs the patriotic commemoration of all meaning. The only true uses of the Liberty Bell in the film involve Burke's disturbing stab pattern as he invents a serial killer persona to cover his tracks and in a chase at the end wherein Jack spends straight through the anniversary parade without taking a second glance at the proceedings, highlighting the secondary if not tertiary importance of such an event to a post-Nixon America jaded on the supposed greatness of our institutions.


The disregard Jack shows for politics in that early moment of him playing the TV as background noise shifts when he becomes convinced he heard the sound of a gunshot before the tire blew out, and soon he finds himself mired in a political conspiracy. Advised by a McRyan staffer to let the whole thing go and pretend Sally was never there to spare the governor's family embarrassment, Jack suddenly commits himself to getting out the truth.

But who will listen to him? Unlike the crusading journalists of All the President's Men or even the less scrupulous reporters of The Parallax View, De Palma's characters are the refuse of society. Jack records the effects for video nasties; Sally more or less works as a prostitute despite her desperate attempts to demarcate the blackmailing racket she's exploited for from outright whoring. They have no forum, no access, no means of telling people what happened, or any way to confirm anything happened at all.

Deepening Travolta's character is the revelation that he once served as a communications officer in the Army and later helped in a government crackdown on corrupt cops, thus linking him to politics outside these events. In a flashback, we see his failure to look out for an undercover cop who wore a wire to expose his colleague's mob collusion, and De Palma tacitly posits Jack's inability to save the man as the impetus for his going into film, where reality can be shifted at the push of a button and a few judicious uses of a razor blade and glue.

The nature of filmic truth becomes a recurring motif of the film: that jarring gag at the end of the opening segment serves as a breaking of the fourth wall even before the camera pulls back into the studio. It shatters the moment, connoting to the audience that it's not real, even within the film's world. With the flick of a few switches and dials, Jack and the other filmmaker can add or remove sounds, completely altering the tone and perception of the scene. Later, when Jack gets a hold of film a seedy blackmailer took of the "accident," he finds a way to splice in his audio at the right time to find out the truth, his constant replays and rewinds showing him trying to reverse the turn of events.

But, of course, he can't change reality, so the best he can hope for is to get the word out before someone gets to him. Intriguingly, Blow Out readily acknowledges that a conspiracy exists, unlike a number of such thrillers where directors seek to leave open the possibility of overactive paranoia. De Palma, radical leftist whose brazen politics were so visible in his early, underground work, is so cynical that he just knows that people are out to get Jack. What he leaves blank is who wants to cover up the event. Both shady government forces and supporters of McRyan put pressure on the narrative: the opposition wants to cover up involvement in the shooting, while McRyan's people are willing to let a murder go unpunished in order to save face. Even the supposedly noble side combating the president sink into shadow tactics simply to avoid rocking the boat.

Thus, the film lacks even the sliver of hope found in the '70s anti-Nixon movies. Even the bleakest of those movies at least implied that getting a few bad eggs out of the system might right it, even if few of those films ended positively. De Palma grounds this movie in the '60s and '70s, but he lets the influence of Reagan seep into the movie, as if to say that a public that would elect such a figure so overwhelmingly was beyond hope and that nothing would ever fix the machine.

But he also situates Jack, and perhaps even himself, as a product of that machine, at least in terms of the conservative behavior even in these committed do-gooders. Accusations of misogyny have already cropped up in my research of the De Palma films I've seen, and I believe it only gets worse from here. The opening segment of Blow Out hedges too closely to that of Dressed to Kill for me to consider the similarities coincidence or even proof of the director's love of Psycho. Is this, then, De Palma's reckoning with the potential misogyny of his previous feature's opening rape fantasy, a point he underlines by cutting to the studio where two men lackadaisically criticize only the falseness of the woman's scream and not the horrid moral content of this sleazy tripe?

Jack suffers similarly: he becomes so immediately obsessed with the conspiracy that he tries to get Sally to listen to his recording of the event that almost killed her merely a day after they meet. She tries to skip town to avoid trouble, but Jack subtly keeps her from her train just because he needs her help, which he later demands in bullshit moral posturing over her profession. Throughout, he guilts her with reminders of saving her life. A romance develops between Jack and Sally, but it is undermined at all times by the man's exploitation of the woman, a twisted relationship that peaks in the savage, ingenious, heartrending conclusion, in which the abuse goes so far that Jack can now bring back the actual dying screams of a woman to put into the exploitation movie.

Technical (and technological) skill abounds in Blow Out. But De Palma is no longer simply reveling in the artifice of cinema but trying to find reality and a path to changing it through film. After making so many Brechtian films, only now does De Palma truly see the outer edges and limitations of the form. Many people, myself included, routinely argue against that most infuriating and meaningless of critical shorthands, "style over substance," is a weak criticism because style is substance. Blow Out plays as a demonstration of this fact, intricately detailing how the construction of a movie, not only in the ordering of scenes but in the balance of elements within each shot, gives the film content and meaning.

In a sense, this is the most mercilessly comic film De Palma's made to this point, a shaggy dog story leading up to a horrible, revolting punchline, but the sorrow rolling off the film stands in sharp relief to the more sardonic wit found in earlier movies. Obsession and The Fury already contained elements of a more human side to De Palma's postmodernism, but Blow Out emerges as a full-on example of tragic romanticism. Searing as that final shot of Travolta desperately plugging his ears is, just as memorable is the 360-degree dolly track around him and Sally a few minutes earlier, the slow motion taking the jubilant ecstasy out of the concluding circles of Obsession and leaving only heartbreak, the pain only emphasized by the mocking fireworks bursting overhead.

This incorporation and modification of De Palma's other work -- the autocritique of his comic breaking down of Dressed to Kill; the image-centric first-run of the film, Murder à la Mod, playing on Manny's TV; the despairing alteration of De Palma's giddiest moment to date from Obsession; and the broad inversion of his recurring voyeur motif from image to sound -- gives Blow Out a mature take on the director's love of reference. By not simply regurgitating his work but analyzing it and shifting the meanings of previous moments, De Palma finds a way to examine the nature of film without losing sight of his narrative. In fact, he enhances the movie, gives it contours that not only adds different interpretations to the film but deepens the impact of the main story. And I must say, however blunt some may find it, the ending hit me harder than Antonioni's chilled, meditative ambiguity ever will. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking film, and it's one of the finest movies ever made on the subject of film.

Brian De Palma: Dressed to Kill

After using his student collaboration Home Movies to grab for that early sense of anarchic satire, Brian De Palma was all set to adapt Cruising, a thriller about a homophobic killer preying on gay bars in New York City. But that project fell through, eventually going to William Friedkin, who captured the gaudiness De Palma would no doubt have brought to the film but lacked any of the warped, witty dimensionality of Hitchcock's disciple. Undaunted, De Palma decided to make his own look at the effects of questioned sexual identity on the psyche. The result combined the disparate aspects of the director's early period into their first cohesive whole, mixing comedy, suspense, and the director's unique ability to at once flagrantly plagiarize and make even the most blatant ripoff something wholly his own.

If Obsession could be directly traced back to Hitchcock's Vertigo, Dressed to Kill clearly owes its nightmarish, violent sexual reverie to Psycho. Yet where De Palma's dreamlike tone in his first full Hitchcock homage matched the oneiric, rending tone of Vertigo in ways that reflected but also stretched and contorted the master, Dressed to Kill completely opposes the realist, spare vibe of Psycho. De Palma's film actually opens and closes with two separate dream sequences, both of which mix recollections of Hitchcock (both feature showers) with De Palma's own films, specifically Carrie.

Psycho showed Hitchcock using ripped-from-the-headlines realism against itself in one of his most brilliant subversions (albeit one slightly undermined by an adherence to psychological summary that Hitch does not ironically undermine and complicated in the way he often did). Meanwhile, Dressed to Kill plays out like the twisted fantasy inside Norman Bates' mind while he commits his crimes, a sleazy yet perversely conservative and quaint presentation that demonstrates De Palma's gift for splitting reality along the illusory. Though shot on location around New York City, Dressed to Kill has the look and feel of classic Hollywood -- even the subways are unreal and attain the same balance between glitz and gaudiness that defines the film's aesthetic.

Immediately establishing that real/fake dichotomy, De Palma opens his film with the same graceful, slow-motion tracking shot into a shower that began Carrie, only De Palma makes use of the then-new Steadicam to add three dimensional movement, no longer forced to move in a rigid line but gently curving through a bedroom into the bathroom beyond. Inside is a man shaving at the mirror and his wife in the shower, and De Palma naturally moves right on past the guy and moves right in with Angie Dickinson. Where the protagonist of Carrie undercut her own semi-erotic soaping with a discovery that revealed her sexual ignorance and fear, Dickinson's Kate, a bored housewife, washes herself with movements suggesting she isn't just trying to get clean. Her scrubbing morphs into masturbation, but suddenly a male figure appears behind her, choking her screams of fear as steam billows and obscures her from her husband's view. Suddenly, De Palma cuts to Dickinson in bed with her husband, revealing it had been not a dream but a fantasy, the severity of her lust an outgrowth from the clumsy thrusting of her inept husband. Kate then goes to see her therapist, but one doesn't need a degree to know that she must be unfulfilled if she's having lustful daydreams about rape.

Her sexual hunger is such that she even hits on the psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), who calmly turns down her advances. Dejected, Kate heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where De Palma crafts perhaps the greatest sequence of his career to this point, or at least the best one since "Be Black, Baby." The scene starts simply, Kate sitting on a bench, spying on the men in the place, all of whom are either with a lady or hitting on one. De Palma then reverses the voyeurism when a black-clad man walks up and begins ogling Kate in turn. Completely wordless, the sequence highlights the always moving camera when the graceful movement becomes more complicated and labyrinthine as Kate and the mystery man enter in a cat-and-mouse chase, in which the roles of cat and mouse swap so often it is impossible to tell who is pursuing whom. (In pure De Palma fashion, the director ensures to stop for a moment just so he can frame Kate by paintings of nude women, particularly a giant vagina he frame in the center -- sometimes, the Rule of Thirds just does not apply.) At last, Kate stumbles her way out of the museum, only for the man to throw down her set of gloves that he nicked, luring her into his cab like a trail of bait leading to one of those old boxes propped up by a stick. He drags her inside and begins kissing her and feeling her up, and naturally the cabbie tilts his mirror to get a peek instead of worrying about a woman being pulled forcefully into the car and set upon. But Kate clearly enjoys the situation, all the more so for its element of danger, and she heads back to the man's apartment for a romp to make real her daydreams.

De Palma only gives the audience a brief amount of time to rest before taking the jumbled, ever-reversing structure of the setpiece before obliterating the whole thing by revealing the predatory feeling of the man to be a red herring, undercutting the suspense of his demeanor (and the note Kate finds in his desk saying he has an STD). Kate gets on the building's elevator to leave, only to remember she left her wedding ring in the man's apartment, a cheekily suggestive oversight. Before she can however, the doors open to reveal a tall, blond woman brandishing a razor. Grimly suspecting the man's sinister nature, we are instead treated to the proper villain from out of left field. It's a bait-and-switch worthy of Psycho, and De Palma not only introduces the true antagonist but also the proper narrative a full half-hour into the movie. A prostitute, Liz (Nancy Allen), spots the killer fleeing, but the murderer gets away before anyone else does, resulting in witnesses seeing only Liz standing over Kate's mutilated body holding the discarded razor. At least the characters are bewildered too; it's the least they could do to relate with the audience.


Dressed to Kill takes the purely Hitchcockian moment and uses it to start unifying the sometimes conflicting ideas that have run through his films to this point, ironically through one of his most egregiously strung-together narratives. The film unfolds in self-contained vignettes that add up to a unified whole, but it helps that each of these individual segments is so brilliant, and that they fit together thematically and stylistically if not putting forward a solidly coherent plot.

One of the familiar aspects of De Palma's cinema the director further develops here is his outlandish take on sexuality. Dressed to Kill set off a solid decade of intense antagonism from various feminist groups over the portrayal of sex and violence in the director's films, and even a neophyte like myself can understand where they were coming from with this film alone. I wracked my brain over the cruel moralism of Kate's death, her desire for sexual liberation and fulfillment not simply cut short with an animalistic butchering but preceded with the secondary punishment of venereal disease. Ultimately, however, the entire film exists as mired sexual fantasy, and De Palma is honest in showing that not all fantasies are wholesome (now that would have been regresive). Though I still cannot reconcile certain troubling aspects of the sexual violence against Kate, I would argue that, if her death is meant to be a cautionary tale, it is about the true dangers of the rape fantasies she gets off on, a harsh reminder that it is not a pleasant experience to be abducted and violated, and that sexual assault and literal assault often go hand in hand, even if De Palma does not depict both through the same character.

At the other end of the movie is Liz, who serves as Kate's opposite. Kate, an upper-middle-class housewife whose material comforts cannot overcome her sexual desires, dies at the feet of Liz, a prostitute who uses sex to raise money to play the stock market. Apart from being a hysterical and slightly prescient take on the coming impact of Reaganomics, Liz's relationship with sex and money is the complete inverse of Kate. Liz, comfortable with sex, uses it to aid her financial insecurity, though the hooking itself provides more job security than playing the market, which was a scant two years away from a major downturn. Kate's intelligent, innovative son Peter (Keith Gordon), mired in his quest for revenge, ends up saving Liz from an attack by her stalker, but Liz is so kind and friendly that it never appears to occur to Peter to view her fawning gratitude as a route to a relationship. It's as if Liz is not exactly a hooker with a heart of gold so much as a smart hooker taken to be one with a heart of gold by the male figure. Only when Peter helps Liz use her seductive powers on Dr. Elliott to try to find the identity of the killer does he finally realize her sexual presence.

Then, there's the matter of Bobbi, the transsexual who murdered Kate in sexual frustration and stalks Liz to tie up loose ends. Just as the disturbing nature of some of the sex in the film drew criticism from feminists, De Palma's depiction of a transsexual killer lashing out in violent manifestation of confusion and self-hatred won him a number of complaints from LBGT groups. Yet consider the true identity of Bobbi: in the clearest effort to step outside his piety to Psycho, De Palma does not make the sweet, mother-obsessed Peter the true culprit but Dr. Elliott, the psychiatrist. We hear "Bobbi's" voice on Elliott's answering machine (in the clipped, sleazily slurred tones of William Finley, who may be the first actor to sound like a chronic and intemperate masturbator) hissing furious taunts at the doctor for refusing to sign off on his sex-change operation. When another psychiatrist launches into the expected monologue of Elliott/Bobbi's motives, he confirms that Bobbi really did hate Elliott, the feminine half of Elliott's mind refused its liberation by Elliott, who despite the human empathy of his learned profession cannot extend that same understanding to himself. Elliott's violence arises from his sexual confusion, which in turn is the product of repressive old codes of order that torture him. De Palma slyly uses a real news clip of a transsexual on Donahue that presents the male-to-female guest as someone initially reticent to speak about her life until she says with a smile that she has "always been a committed heterosexual." Elliott/Bobbi does not have that centered self-awareness, so when Elliott's masculine side gets attracted to Kate (and, later, Liz), Bobbi takes over and uses the phallic image of the straight, hard razor to cut apart that which made him erect. If you'll forgive me, that's some ballsy filmmaking.

The Elliott/Bobbi split brings up De Palma's interest with body doubles, previously shown with Sisters -- and an obsession De Palma would continue to investigate, even past the film openly titled Body Double. Elliot's double, Bobbi, is just the man in a wig and women's clothing, but his psyche and sexual lust splits, creating two separate people from one body. This is further complicated by the female police officer assigned to watch Liz (whether to absolve her or prove her guilt is not entirely clear): hilariously, she looks exactly like Bobbi, leading to several misdirections that add suspense and humor. During the aforementioned scene with the Phil Donahue clip, De Palma not only lays hints of Elliott's true identity but uses a split screen to contrast Elliott watching with an inscrutable look on his face trapped between scholarly curiosity and resistance to his dawning new self with Liz viewing the same program as she dresses for "work." Liz, Elliott's target not simply because she witnessed his crime but because she arouses Bobbi's masculine side, distractedly watches as she preens in front of the vanity mirror (which duplicates and divides the image further), highlighting all her feminine elements in preparation for the night's johns. Elliott, meanwhile, surrenders entirely to his masculine side, and the ominous tinge of revulsion in Caine's face could well be Bobby's if he could only look to the other side of the frame and spot Liz.


There are even literal instances of doubles in the film. The close-ups of Dickinson's lathered body as she touches herself at the beginning are actually those of Victoria Lynn, a Penthouse model, effectively teasing the audience with bawdy imagery of a sex icon that really isn't her. Even the Metropolitan is doubled: though the outside is the proper building, the interior shots were recorded in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These structural, not diegetic, doubles complicate the movie in the sort of half-serious put-on De Palma excels at, raising ouroboric questions of what can be trusted.

That, in turn, feeds into the grandest theme of De Palma's canon: the line between illusion and reality. If, as I argued, Kate's death is less a critique of her "loose" morals than of her dangerous fantasies, the weight of her death is lessened not only by the structure of plot moving beyond her immediately but also by the oneiric aesthetic of the entire film. Never has New York City looked so artificial, not even now in its plastic Disneyfication: slightly saturated colors make the image pop, seductive in its vivid beauty but also repellent in its blatant artificial sheen over on-location shots. And the spatial relationship of the mise-en-scène is always shifting, particularly in a playful but sinister sequence on the subway. A gang of thugs surround Liz on the platform and give chase when she runs, vanishing into thin air when she leaps into a train car with a police officer, who chastises her for making up stories. As the train moves to its next stop, Liz finds herself alone again, only for the gang to show up again and slowly move in for her as she moves from car to car. Just as they close in on her, the blond stalker strikes, proving the thugs meaningless but using them to tantalize and manipulate solely to their own end.

These elements have never fit together so well in De Palma's early, anarchic style, here smoothed out by the lilting but ironic grace of the Steadicam. A dollop of De Palma's humor, so offbeat it may only ever appeal to him, spackles the cracks -- I will cast my vote in favor of any film that can melt an orgasmic squeal into a car horn, or lets Dennis Franz gnaw on scenery as the most stereotypical New Yawk detective who has ever lived. De Palma even turns the psychobabble of the other therapist's summary into a joke when he has Liz repeat it to Peter in a restaurant as a prim and proper old woman glances over from behind Peter in horrified offense. The last sequence, of course, is just another outgrowth of this dark wit, a final scary/hilarious reveries à la Carrie that gives one last jolt before releasing the audience to contemplate its various twists and turns. One of the director's more contentious films, Dressed to Kill delighted me as much as the best of his work to this point. If the fiery debates that greeted his subsequent '80s features had as much merit to warrant a discussion as this, my apprehension over this most-vilified period will abate quickly.

Brian De Palma: Home Movies

Considering the often-questionable acting prowess seen on the screen in Brian De Palma's movies, to say nothing of the borderline anarchy of his early work, accusations that the director had no idea what he was doing were understandable, if myopic. Of course, both of those traits were deliberate moves by a man both obsessed with the artifice of cinema and always on the lookout for a good joke, preferably at the expense of the audience.

Made during New Hollywood's implosion, this low-budget, 16mm comedy, filmed during De Palma's time as a guest lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, looks on the surface like an attempt to return to the director's early mode of filmmaking, that hyper-political, Godardian slapstick. But it might also be the director's answer to those critics who charged De Palma with being an incompetent: if they thought he didn't understand film form before, just wait until they got a load of this.

Granted, that interpretation gives away my opinion of the film, not to mention suggests that De Palma intentionally made this to be a nearly unwatchable train wreck. But I cannot lie: he and his students, who coordinated with the director on the project, crafted one stiff comedy. While I do not hold most of the earliest films of De Palma in highest regard (with the exceptions of Hi, Mom! and Phantom of the Paradise), I find those early comedies funny precisely because the humor is as reflective of De Palma's deep knowledge and rejection of film form at the onset of his career as the direction itself. De Palma knew the rules before breaking them, and he appears to use the students to see what would happen if someone never bothered to learn the "proper" way to make a film. I think of this wonderful quote by bass virtuoso Victor Wooten: "If you take a newborn baby and put them on the instrument, they're going to get sounds out of it that I can't get out of it, so we're all the best." Perhaps by letting these people make the film they want before someone tells them how to do it, they can become the next generation of movers and shakers. And by limiting the budget, De Palma not only teaches others but himself how to be ingenuous in a time when budgets were starting to inflate beyond reason.

At the same time, Home Movies' central flaw is the uneasy tug-of-war between its more chaotic side and a loyalty to conventional comedy structure that makes what could have been free-form brilliance into a sloppy take on what looks suspiciously like an attempt to hitch wagons to the National Lampoon's contemporary success with teen comedies. Plus, the students at Sarah Lawrence had an advantage most film students do not: they got to make their movie with proven actors, either old character standbys from De Palma's films or some of his stars. Nancy Allen is a major character, and Kirk Douglas himself appears as "The Maestro," an obvious De Palma stand-in who instructs the classroom full of students working on the film.

Ostensibly the story of Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon, essentially laying the framework for his career here as a shy, likable geek), a young man trapped in a highly dysfunctional family, Home Movies immediately throws the audience for a loop, playing the beginning of Byrd's story through the classroom as the Maestro lectures not only the class but the film crew he brings with him at all times. Dennis, pining for his brother's fiancée, Kristina (Nancy Allen), not only attempts to convince her that his domineering brother isn't the saint people inexplicably think he is but tries to uncover his surgeon father's infidelity. The Maestro occasionally intrudes upon Dennis' life, chastising the boy for sitting in a tree spying on his dad and making himself an extra in his own life instead of the star. He instructs Dennis to film his own life to ensure that he finally becomes the protagonist of his existence, meaning that Home Movies follows The Maestro and his class watching a movie of a young man's life as that man also films that life. It might be worthy of Charlie Kaufman if the execution wasn't so clumsy.

I do not like to guess a filmmaker's motives unless I am feeling particularly dismissive; it's all too easy to forgive or damn a film by building up a strawman of the director's intent and hanging interpretation off of a wild guess. With Home Movies, you can't even speculate on the construction: De Palma's themes and style are all over this movie, from the focus on film's artifice and voyeurism to the constant division within the frame by beams and lines, effectively creating homemade split-screen. And even with the 16mm stock, Home Movies does look cinematic. Does this mean the director edged aside his students to make entirely his movie? Or did De Palma, renowned for paying tribute (if not outright stealing) to the films he loves, encourage his students to spoof him?

Home Movies certainly has some of the feel of De Palm's early films, with such exaggerated madness as Dennis' mother stumbling in on Dennis making out with a woman, being reminded of her husband's own tomfoolery and subsequently faking her suicide by pill overdose (a sequence that ends in one of the few funny bits in the film as the doctor husband pumps her stomach). Elsewhere, Kristina appears to be possessed by a stuffed rabbit that brings out her id, making for yet more oddball comedy that is just too silly to work. Kristina's attempts to cure herself of her addictions, chiefly to fast food and sex, make for the funniest recurring joke of the film, but the joke eventually wears thin.

To be honest, the aspect of the film that made me laugh the hardest was how natural Keith Gordon was. Nearly everyone in all De Palma films up to this point has been deliberately exaggerated, but Gordon is one of the few to act like someone who just got told to make a film of his life. At long last, a performance people could praise, and it's in the one film that would have benefited from total wackiness.

Still, there are some things that work here. The comedy may be a dud, but the ideas behind Home Movies are intriguing, if infuriatingly unfocused. Dennis' brother, James (Gerrit Graham), teaches a course he calls "Spartanetics," a hypermasculine, young adult version of the Boy Scouts advancing the idea of male self-sufficiency. De Palma ruthlessly skewers this idiot, even as most of the characters in the film look up to him. Likewise, the Maestro's class, Explorations on Star Theory, encourages people to make themselves the matinee name in the film of their lives, but with manly man Douglas preaching the message, the course puts out a subtly patriarchal view. De Palma was on the cusp of a string of films that would earn accusations of misogyny at almost every turn, but the director is openly mocking of chauvinism here, and by filtering some of the masculinity through the Maestro and his brand of filmmaking, De Palma even spares an attack for the sexism inherent in cinema.

By titling the film Home Movies, De Palma suggests one of two things: that he loves the cinema so much that he would equate the act of helping students get their first hands-on experience at filmmaking with tapes of babies learning their first words or taking their first steps, or that, in making the film, he realizes that his early style of filmmaking is stuck in the past where he cannot return to it. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in-between. In an interview with Gerald Peary around the time of the film's release, De Palma explained his issue with film schools: "The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don't give the students an idea of what's happening. Students should be exposed to the best people in the profession. If you study surgery, you study with the best doctors working in the hospital. You don't study with the ones who couldn't get a job." ¹ That's an interesting take, but also one that underlines how much of a vanity project Home Movies is, De Palma's excuse to use the clout he'd gathered up to hide from the mainstream for awhile just as he was starting to break into it. There's an air of sadness at the end because of this, as De Palma assembles the final cut and realizes he can never go back to what he used to be. If he could have seen the critical bloodbath that awaited him in the coming decade, Home Movies might well have been a full, Grecian tragedy.

¹Interview with Brian De Palma, by Gerald Peary. Originally published in Take One, January 1979.