Brian De Palma: The Voyeur's Cinema

For half a century the standard charge against Brian De Palma has been the same word: thief. He steals from Hitchcock. He restages Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window and Rope without apology. The charge is true and it misses everything, because De Palma quotes Hitchcock the way a jazz musician quotes a standard — to take it somewhere colder, filthier and more self-aware than the original ever allowed. Where Hitchcock made you a guilty watcher and then let you off the hook with a resolution, De Palma leaves you hanging on the hook and makes you notice the barb.

De Palma was born in New Jersey in 1940, the son of an orthopaedic surgeon whose operations he watched as a boy — a biographical detail he has offered often, and one that reads straight through a filmography obsessed with looking at bodies clinically. He came up in the same late-1960s ferment as Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas and Schrader, the so-called Movie Brats, and he was the technician of the group, the one who cared most about the grammar of the image itself.

The apparatus

The De Palma set piece is the thing to understand first, because everything else hangs off it. He builds long, wordless, virtuoso sequences where the camera does the storytelling and the plot goes quiet — a slow crane, a circling Steadicam, a split-diopter shot holding a face in the foreground and a threat in the deep background both in sharp focus at once. And the split screen, his most notorious device, where two images run side by side and force you to choose what to watch and to feel the choosing.

None of this is decoration. The split-diopter and the split-screen are arguments about attention. They make the act of looking visible, so that a De Palma thriller is always partly about its own audience. You are never allowed to forget that you have paid to watch beautiful people be spied on, seduced and murdered, and that the pleasure is not clean. The clinical framing he inherited from watching surgery becomes an ethics: the camera as scalpel, the viewer as the surgeon who cannot look away.

The 1970s: the sensibility forms

After the counterculture comedies Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), the horror-thriller Sisters (1973) announced the mature De Palma — split screen, Bernard Herrmann score, a murder witnessed through a window that no one will believe. Phantom of the Paradise (1974) is a glam-rock Faust that flopped and became a cult totem. Obsession (1976) is his most nakedly Vertigo, and Carrie (1976) is the breakthrough, a Stephen King adaptation whose prom-night massacre remains one of the most controlled crescendos in American horror, split screen and slow motion turning teenage cruelty into apocalypse.

The thriller peak

The run from 1980 to 1984 is where the voyeur’s cinema reaches full argument. Dressed to Kill (1980) is a museum-set seduction and a shower killing that dares you to name its debts to Psycho. Blow Out (1981) is the masterpiece — a sound-recordist stumbles onto a political assassination and tries to reconstruct the truth from audio and image, and the film becomes a devastating essay on media, evidence and helplessness. It is De Palma’s closest sibling to The Conversation, Coppola’s surveillance nightmare from a few years earlier; the two films are the decade’s paranoid twins, one built on sound, both ending in a man alone with a recording and no power to change what it proves.

Then Body Double (1984), the provocation that got him accused of misogyny and of self-parody in the same breath. It fuses Rear Window and Vertigo into a story about a struggling actor spying on a neighbour, then plunges into the adult-film industry with a sleaze so knowing it curdles into critique. Body Double is De Palma daring you to enjoy the leer and then rubbing your face in what enjoying it means.

De Palma also thinks in music. He has leaned on the composer Pino Donaggio for the swooning, deliberately overheated scores that push his images toward operatic melodrama, and on the ghost of Bernard Herrmann, who actually scored Sisters and Obsession near the end of his life and whose sound is the connective tissue back to Hitchcock. The lushness is a trap. It seduces you into the very romantic identification the plot is about to punish, so that the score becomes another voyeuristic instrument, flooding a stalking with the emotional grammar of a love scene. Pair that with his fondness for slow motion — the stretched, dreamlike time of the Carrie prom or the Blow Out finale — and you have a filmmaker who manipulates every axis of the medium at once: focus, framing, split, sound, tempo. He is a maximalist in an era that increasingly prized realism, and the maximalism is the argument. A film this heightened can never pretend it is a neutral window on the world; it keeps confessing that it is a made thing, watched by you, on purpose.

The mainstream and the misfires

De Palma could also make hits that hid the sensibility inside genre machinery. Scarface (1983) is operatic excess played for real, a gangster tragedy that outlived its dismissive reviews to become a cultural monument. The Untouchables (1987) is his most classical entertainment, and its Union Station staircase shootout — a deliberate restaging of the Odessa Steps from Battleship Potemkin — is the purest demonstration that his “theft” is really a scholar’s homage performed at the highest level of craft. Carlito’s Way (1993) is a mournful, underrated crime elegy, and Mission: Impossible (1996) proved he could deliver a franchise blockbuster whose Langley break-in set piece still gets studied.

The misfires are real and instructive. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) is a famous studio disaster, its satire misjudged from the first frame. Snake Eyes (1998) and Mission to Mars (2000) show a great technician stranded by weak material, and The Black Dahlia (2006) drowns a promising noir in plot. De Palma without a strong control of tone can tip from delirium into camp, and the later films are where you see the risk of a style this exposed.

Late work and the accusation, answered

The double is the other spine of the work, and it deserves a mention alongside the voyeur. Raising Cain (1992) built a whole psychological thriller around a fractured personality and let an actor multiply into his own antagonists; Femme Fatale and Body Double both hinge on a woman or a role standing in for another. Looking and doubling are the same anxiety in De Palma — the fear that the person you are watching is not who they appear, and that neither are you. Femme Fatale (2002) is the great late film, a jewel-heist puzzle-box that folds voyeurism, doubling and premonition into a structure that rewards a second viewing and answers his critics on their own terms. Redacted (2007) turned his obsession with mediated images toward the Iraq war and the screens through which we consume atrocity, a bleaker cousin of Blow Out’s despair about evidence. Passion (2012) revisits the erotic thriller with a colder eye.

The misogyny charge deserves a straight answer, because it has followed him for decades. De Palma’s films are saturated with the endangerment of women, and he stages that endangerment with a beauty that unsettles. The defence is not that the beauty isn’t there — it is that the films are consistently about the pleasure of watching, and they keep turning the accusation back on the viewer. A director who only leered would not build Body Double to make the leer unbearable. Whether that self-implication redeems the images is the argument his cinema exists to provoke, and he has never tried to settle it for you.

Why it works

The mechanics come down to control of information. De Palma withholds and reveals with a precision most thrillers never attempt, using the frame itself as the unit of suspense rather than the dialogue or the cut. When he splits the screen, he is handing you two truths and making you responsible for holding both. When he lets a set piece run silent for ten minutes, he is trusting the image to carry meaning the way silent cinema once did. This is the most purely cinematic body of work in the American New Hollywood, and its influence runs through every filmmaker who treats the camera as a moral instrument. The erotic-thriller genre he helped codify reaches its commercial summit in Basic Instinct, a film unthinkable without Dressed to Kill and Body Double clearing the ground first.

Where to start

Begin with Blow Out — it is the richest, most humane and most complete statement of everything he does, and it makes a case for him no dismissal survives. Follow it with Carrie to see the craft in its most crowd-pleasing form, then Body Double once you are ready to be provoked rather than pleased. Save Femme Fatale for last, when you know his moves well enough to watch him play them against you. De Palma spent a career being called a copyist by people who never noticed the copy was an X-ray.