© 2016 by James Clark
Brian De Palma, apparently pigeonholed as a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock, would seem to be an unlikely kin to a strict, Jesuitical Catholic who, for all his technical and narrative skills, regarded movie production as clever manipulation in the service of marking time before going to a better show. (Of course there would be clandestine cultivation of phenomenal regions not officially sanctioned. But such embellishments would be harnessed to a prescribed triviality.) Hitchcock’s films brim with entertaining instances of entropy (gradual decline into disorder) from out of precepts inculcated by theological doctrine, not close, free-wheeling experiential investigation. De Palma’s embrace of entropy is quite a different matter, even granting that he does include motifs from Hitchcock films in many of his endeavors to enlighten, rather than amuse.
You might imagine that a career change of focus from physics and incipient computer science at Columbia University to theatre and film studies would be more than a siren call to fame and fortune, especially in view of a researcher, from secondary school onward, winning many prizes for inventiveness along sightlines of fundamental questions. There are ways, not terribly abstruse, of incorporating the distemper, gore and eroticism of a film like Dressed to Kill (1980), within a purview of serious reflection. The history of modern film is quite heavily populated with rich variations of such outreach, erected by artists who regard colleagues as part of a history of crucial largesse (including actors, whom Hitchcock never tired of denouncing as puppets with brains far inferior to his).
At and near the beginning of today’s film, there are two renditions of the iconic shower assault in Psycho (1960). Their impact is diametrically opposite to the Hitchcock classic inasmuch as they evoke a specific apparition in the history of avant-garde film—namely, Giuliana, the entropic and amazingly resilient protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964)—rather than discharge a spectacular storm of venom and horror for the sake of maintaining that worldly experience is a nullity. (more…)