Brian De Palma: The Voyeur's Cinema

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Body Double: De Palma's Hitchcock-and-Sleaze Provocation

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Brian De Palma made Body Double in 1984 as a deliberate provocation, and the provocation still works. Coming off the enormous, blood-soaked Scarface, he turned to the smaller, dirtier obsession that had shadowed his whole career — the act of watching — and built a thriller so nakedly indebted to Alfred Hitchcock that critics at the time treated it as plagiarism dressed up as homage. That reading misses the joke. De Palma knew exactly what he was quoting, and the film is a sustained argument about voyeurism conducted through the vocabulary of the director who invented cinematic voyeurism in the first place.

Voyeurism - vo.rs

Brian De Palma: The Voyeur's Cinema

Body Double: De Palma's Hitchcock-and-Sleaze Provocation