Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [76]
De Palma had a curious mind drawn to solving puzzles. He once found a way to sneak a microphone into a girls’ sex education class in high school and caught the teacher on tape. This pleased his parents much less than when he won the gold medal at the Delaware Valley Science Fair for a paper called “The Application of Cybernetics to the Solution of Differential Equations.” Film was not an obsession of his at this point, but science and technology were. So when his mother told him that she needed documentation of an affair to get a divorce, he knew how to build a high-tech trap. He recorded his father’s phone calls in early 1958 and followed him to work, snapping photos outside his window. Then he made his move, breaking into his father’s office, where he found what he was looking for: a nurse in a slip.
The De Palmas got divorced, and Anthony married the nurse. Spying worked. It was among other things a learning experience. “I was the only son strong enough to get her out of the marriage,” De Palma says, describing his youth in the language of a movie pitch. “Bruce was the genius. Bart was the artist. I was the public relations man. I could get things done.” He described his dad as “the heavy.”
The first profile of Brian De Palma in The New York Times begins with a quote from the director saying the outside world doesn’t matter to him and what he really cares about is film. Like almost every story that profiles De Palma, this view, expressed in 1973, went unchallenged, and was even burnished with hyperbole. The Times called De Palma the “coldest hot young director in town,” and the image of the cerebral formalist stuck. His critics dismissed his taut scary movies such as Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and The Fury as formulaic, derivative rip-offs of Alfred Hitchcock, more style than substance. His admirers argued that his meticulously storyboarded suspense scenes outdid Hitchcock and that De Palma’s genre tweaking ingeniously blurred the lines between horror and comedy.
Everyone agrees that De Palma approached the world of his films at a distance and through jaundiced eyes. Unlike his friends and contemporaries Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, he was not a personal artist. He was a cineaste who spent more time in dark rooms memorizing shots than digging deep into his feelings or family history. De Palma himself has probably done more than anyone to give credence to this take on his work. He has said that his content is his form, and when asked about where the inspiration for his macabre subject matter comes from, he prefers to talk about movies, especially those of Alfred Hitchcock. Despite varied opinions on De Palma, this view of his work as cool and impersonal is widely shared and has hardened into a common wisdom. It is also wrong.
The familiar story about the artistic awakening of Brian De Palma, retold in countless profiles, begins with a description of him as a science-obsessed kid whose father brought him along to work to show him the bloody business of surgery. At the time, he was not interested in horror or even particularly curious about movies. That would change, as De Palma has said many times, when he moved to New York, spending days and nights at movie houses watching, studying, and laying the groundwork for his film education. His epiphany came in 1958 when he saw Vertigo. As he described it, the movie did not just engage his creative imagination. It worked on his practical side as well. “I’d look and I’d say, okay, now how do you do that?” he said. “Like when I was a kid, I’d look at machines and say, let’s figure out how to do this.”
What he learned from Hitchcock was