• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 757 0

This put you in her point of view and made her pursuit less taboo than deeply human. Always looking for how to tell a story through images, De Palma cut the narration, preferring to let the camera explain what happens. Aesthetically, it’s a brilliant choice—the scene remains elegantly simple even though it’s incredibly complicated in terms of the multitude and variety of shots—but it also perhaps makes the director’s point of view less articulate. By the time she dies, the audience might not be that invested in Kate, as a character, as much as a sex object. “If you read the script to that movie, the first part really reads like it’s from her subjective point of view,” Gordon says. “It’s almost first-person. It’s clear [De Palma] empathizes with her, that he is not hoping to punish her. But what he perhaps didn’t realize is that this convention is so powerful that the audience would read it in that light.”

Still, in telling a story about a young technically oriented kid who tries to save his mother through spying, De Palma was becoming more biographical in his movies at the same time that he was increasingly discreet in his private life. Before he made Dressed to Kill, De Palma made a highly unusual move for a director at the peak of his powers. Instead of moving further into the mainstream the way his friends did, he recruited George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to help raise the money to make a cheap independent movie as part of a class he taught on filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence. Home Movies cost only $400,000, but it was an attempt to escape the thriller genre. This was a comedy in an antic tone, but in a somewhat apt twist, De Palma perversely used the silly style to make his most brazenly confessional work.

“Everyone is the star of the movie of his own life,” the Maestro (Kirk Douglas) tells an earnest young aspiring filmmaker, Denis Byrd (Keith Gordon, again playing the De Palma stand-in). Denis, ignored by his mother and overshadowed by his brother, and at his mother’s urging, films his father having an affair with his nurse. During the shoot, Gordon at one point confided in Allen that while he liked the movie, he wondered if the spying and filming of the father was plausible. Would he really record his own father cheating? Allen thought, You have no idea, but kept that to herself.

De Palma had always made personal movies, but when he put his life on-screen with the least amount of disguise, the result was a flop. The movie had a wobbly style, an odd brand of humor, and not enough suspense for fans of Carrie and Dressed to Kill. It sat on a shelf for years, and when it opened, critics dismissed it as a minor effort and audiences hardly showed up. At that point, they had come to expect scares from De Palma and instead he gave them whimsy and quirkiness, with dark, confessional anguish lurking underneath the surface. It might be his most obscure movie of the seventies and yet, also, the most nakedly revealing. “My movie stunk. So did my life,” Byrd says at one point, confused about what to do with his life. “I never did anything heroic or exciting except for spy on my father.” Then it hit him: he needed to put that into a movie.

CHAPTER NINE

THE THING IN-BETWEEN

I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil’s eyes.

Dr. Sam Loomis, Halloween

EVEN AFTER The Exorcist, Jaws, and Carrie, many successful directors remained uncomfortable with being pigeonholed inside the horror genre. “Never seemed like a horror film to me,” Brian De Palma says about Carrie. “Horror films are Hammer films—vampires and Frankenstein.” As for The Exorcist, William Friedkin rejected the label.

Critics held on to their prejudice as well. The reviews for Jaws were glowing, but what was telling was how few of them called Jaws a horror film. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert deemed it an “adventure movie,” and Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was “at heart, the old stand-by, the science-fiction film.” The week before it opened, Time magazine ran a