Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [78]
The voyeur-hero is a star of most of his major horror movies. In Sisters, Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) sees a murder through a window, but even after hunting down the killer, she is left knowing less than when she started. The young science nerd (Keith Gordon) turns into a Peeping Tom to solve the murder of his mother (Angie Dickinson) in Dressed to Kill. In Blow Out, a Philadelphia soundman, Jack (John Travolta), accidentally stumbles upon evidence that an accident was murder, but his search for the truth ends in confusion and the death of the sweetly naive actress Sally (Nancy Allen) whom he tries to save.
Like Tobe Hooper, De Palma focused on the horror of the helplessness of the observer. But De Palma was not interested in building a better monster. What scared him was the prospect of losing control. You can see this in his characters, who are carried away romantically, psychically, or in the weeds of a conspiracy. They respond, as De Palma did, by watching, spying, and developing conspiracy theories. Voyeurism is the theme that unites his entire career, one that includes genres such as science fiction, gangster, action, comedy, and in his most artistically fertile period, horror. His movies are filled with shuffling, sneaky doctors, young boys futilely playing savior, dangerous sexuality, and horrible acts seen through windows. After catching his father in the act, Brian De Palma did not let go.
DE PALMA came of age when the romantic image of an aspiring auteur was not the cigar-smoking Hollywood player. It was the antiestablishment outsider (think Godard) poking holes in the artifice of it all. De Palma has one foot in the world of European art cinema and another in exploitation. But he was also firmly entrenched in the New Hollywood clique of whiz-kid directors along with peers Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. There is a remarkable consistency in his themes and characters and story lines throughout his career. The same notes hit again and again: taboo sexual desire; a skeptical, even paranoid worldview; and the horror of being on the outside looking in. His perspective on horror was that of the younger brother: helpless, overlooked, confused, and lost in the shuffle.
Whatever insecurities he might have had, De Palma projected confidence in public, and his friends at Columbia recall his sardonic wit and charm. He was drawn to performers. Finley, a sensitive actor with a talent for playing oddballs, was more of the loner. By contrast, Jared Martin, a dashing leading man in some of De Palma’s early work who was also his roommate, was social, liked to drink, and had the defiant politics of the counterculture. De Palma shared the same ideas and avoided the draft, but he was not a joiner by nature. Confident and sarcastic, he was too much of a wiseacre for slogans. Occasionally he grew a beard, but then he’d shave it off. His clothes were as unpretentious as his taste in movies. He got into show business for the same reason most awkward young straight men do: to meet girls. “I remember directing a scene in college,” he says, “and it was on a bed with a girl and for a moment, I stopped and thought to myself: This is the most beautiful girl I have ever been this close to.”
Columbia had girls, but no theater department. Sarah Lawrence, however, had a theater department and girls, and since it was single sex, they needed male actors. So when he was invited to act in a play, De Palma gravitated toward their campus in Westchester County, New York, and their young professor Wilford Leach, a director from the South whose calm, steady style had a huge influence on De Palma. Leach, who would win a Tony Award in 1981 for his staging of the musical The Pirates of Penzance, cast him in a production of Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine, a romance involving a knight and fairies from early twentieth-century Paris that blends fantasy and the real world.
De Palma made his first short films while avoiding class starting