The De Palma Decade by Laurent Bouzereau
“Brian De Palma, Master of the Macabre, Invites you to a Showing of the Latest Fashion … in Murder.”
So reads the advertisement for De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), a piece of copy that could have been copied, almost word for word, from an Alfred Hitchcock tagline from two decades earlier. And that’s just it: De Palma often presented himself as Hitchcock for a more explicit age, when all the social niceties were dropped and most everything that can be shown should be shown.
All of that is probably just fine with the author of The De Palma Decade. Laurent Bouzereau, a documentary filmmaker and movie historian, focuses on the nine formative years of De Palma’s career from the little-remarked Sisters (1972) through his John Travolta psycho-thriller Blow Out (1981). He examines seven of De Palma’s eight films from those years, not chronologically but in loosey-goosey themes. The De Palma Decade is composed in fragments, with the author’s comments interspersed among quotes from De Palma, his screenwriters and cast members.
De Palma’s own words are sometimes insightful. Handed a modest budget for what became his breakout, Carrie (1976), he was forced “to make things smaller” than in Stephen King’s novel. Destroy the whole town? Too expensive! “Let’s just destroy the high school,” De Palma explained, “not only for economical reasons, but because high school symbolizes the adolescent world,” he said.
Bouzereau identifies three main themes in De Palma’s oeuvre: Guilt, Voyeurism and the Double. The first two owe a distinct debt to Hitchcock (fully acknowledged by De Palma) while the third is more idiosyncratic, a preoccupation with split personalities, even split screens. Bouzereau’s brief is to deny that De Palma is merely a copycat. “Isn’t he, rather, the legitimate heir to the Hitchcock kingdom?” he asks.
The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens is published by Running Press.
D Laurent Bouzereau, a documentary filmmaker and movie historian, focuses on the formative years of De Palma’s career from Sisters (1972) Blow Out (1981).
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