Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [77]
“But in Psycho,” De Palma responded, the eager student, “the murder doesn’t happen until forty . . .”
“You are not Hitchcock. He can make his movies as slow as he wants in the beginning. And do you know why? Because he is Hitchcock and they will wait.”
Herrmann was passing along advice that was similar to the instruction he did not follow from Hitchcock himself. In effect, he told De Palma that he needed to consider the expectations of the audience, exactly what he did not do, according to Hitchcock. De Palma understood he was right, so he agreed to have Herrmann write an eighty-second piece of music.
These artistic dialogues about technique and style are the stories that De Palma and his critics focus on. De Palma has long said he worked in the highly cinematic horror genre to teach himself how to tell stories using the camera. But that’s only part of the story. De Palma is indeed a brilliant manipulative technical director, but to reduce him to only that misunderstands his work. Vertigo was a crucial inspiration, but in the same year, several months earlier, he had recorded his father having an affair. Hitchcock may have given him a language, but to understand why he expressed what he did, you need to look away from the movie theater. His best movies are deeply personal and filled with the raw material of his own life.
Many of the childhood homes of the great horror directors are filled with forceful mothers, absent and remote fathers, and the unsettling tension of marital discord. The early scars of a parental slight or lack of support fade from memory, but for most artists looking to scare an audience, they never truly go away. They harden into lore, retold again and again, migrating into the movies where they speak to viewers who then use the standard story of an ignored and misunderstood childhood to understand their own lives. Discovering his father’s affair is a scene that has emerged in De Palma’s movies, directly or indirectly, throughout his career. It’s no accident that when he left home in the fall for college, De Palma told one friend that the photos were his “first film.”
After moving to New York to attend Columbia University, De Palma’s attitude toward the dissolution of his parents’ marriage was not tragic or melancholy, but philosophical. “Maybe it was bravado,” says William Finley, a close friend and star of many of De Palma’s early movies. “It was all like a joke.” Later on, his first wife, Nancy Allen, who met him while acting in Carrie in 1975, said he stewed over the infidelity. “He was furious about it. I thought parents do the best they can. He thought they had more responsibility,” she says. “In Brian’s mind, he was being his mother’s hero. He protected her.”
De Palma looks back at his detective work fondly. What still bothers him, however, is that he didn’t do anything sooner to help his mother or brothers. After decades of deflecting questions about the content of his thrillers, he more recently concluded that the helplessness and anguish he felt as a young man were key ingredients of his movies. “As the smallest of three brothers and seeing Bart upset over my mother being torn up and being too small to do anything about it, that had an impact on me,” De Palma says. “I realized that’s why I always have characters who can’t save