American Film 1977

Considering DePalma

American Film

July-August 1977

Who, what and why is he? Critics are now paying attention to the young director of Carrie.

By Royal S. Brown

The film is winding down toward an apparently peaceful -- if sad -- conclusion. Carrie White, the ugly duckling, the late-blooming wallflower turned princess of the senior prom turned exterminating angel, has been done in by both her God-fearing mother and her own "diabolical" power of telekinesis. Sue Snell, the "good girl," is seen in lyrical slow motion, carrying flowers down a sunny, suburban street. On the soundtrack, the wistful musical theme suggests nothing more sinister than a sick doll. Sue arrives at the vacant lot where Carrie's house once stood. Now, there remains only a white, wooden cross bearing the words, "For Sale," and the graffiti "Carrie White Burns in Hell." Sue begins to place the flowers on the strangely parched ground beneath the cross. Suddenly, the scorched stones move, a bloody hand reaches up from beneath and grabs Sue Snell by the arm. The music has changed to a jagged, repeated figure in strings. As the camera backs up in the film's final shot, any viewer still watching the screen sees Sue Snell sobbing in her mother's arms. This ultimate bit of horror has been a bad dream.The sequence, of course, is the final one from Carrie, the most recent and most commercially successful film by Brian DePalma, an offbeat member of the new generation of American directors. Pauline Kael recently wrote, "The only morality that many of the best young filmmakers appear to have is an aesthetic morality." It's an assessment that in many ways is true of DePalma, who is one of the most cinematically aware of the new directors.Consider again the closing sequence of Carrie. Although the scene devastates the viewer who has been lulled into believing in a placid wind-down, it does not come as a complete surprise. For DePalma has set up a number of clues that register peripherally with the viewer, even if he does not notice exactly what is not "right." The first part of the final sequence, for instance, is run backward. And although DePalma had Amy Irving, who plays Sue Snell, walking backward so that on the screen she appears to be walking forward, the cars passing behind her move backward. For the second series of shots -- as Sue reaches the empty plot and bends down with the flowers -- DePalma brought in the rarely used (because rarely needed) filmic device of "night-for-day": The scene at the "For Sale" cross seems to take place in the daytime, because it appears to be a continuation of the preceding action and because it is fully lighted. It was, however, shot in the dead of night, as the black sky seen briefly behind the cross will reveal to the attentive viewer.

Empty gimmickry? Not in the least. DePalma sets us up with cinematic technique in the same way Hitchcock wets us up for the shower scene in Pscyho, with the rainstorm, the gothic setting, and the kinky motel manager with his stuffed animals, all of which play on negative predispositions in the audience's minds. In both cases, the directors have shown an awareness that the deepest impression comes not from the jolting, unprepared violence found in B-horror flicks, but from modulated variations, as extreme as some may be, which are all threads of a single fabric.

DePalma fits Carrie's finale into the film very much the same way a composer would close a musical composition, by reusing a "progression" that has been solidly established within the artistic structure. Each of the film's three climactic scenes -- the locker room scene leading up to Carrie's first menstruation; the sequence where Carrie and Tommy Ross are crowned queen and king of the senior prom and then doused in pig's blood; and the concluding sequence -- are all shot in slow motion. So by the time the third sequence of slow-motion lyricism begins, the audience is well acquainted with the inevitable modulation to blood, whether menstrual, pig or, ultimately, the blood of death. To the new filmmakers a "movie is like a musical composition," Kael says. "They'll put in a bloody climax because they need it at a certain point."As we might expect of one of the new American directors, DePalma did not come from within the movie establishment. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940, and brought up in Philadelphia in a very Catholic milieu (although he was not raised Catholic).The son of an orthopedic surgeon, he had originally intended to go into the sciences, for which he had shown great talent. It was in the intellectual environment of Columbia University where he got his B.A. in the late fifties, that he discovered film. His first efforts were shorts such as Icarus and Wotan's Wake, which showed a predilection for satire and modernized myths. Wotan's Wake, a fond examination of silent films and their styles, was awarded the Rosenthal Foundation Award (for the best film by an American under twenty-five) in 1963, and this was instrumental in bringing professional commissions for other shorts.DePalma's first feature, The Wedding Party, was not released until April 1969, even though he shot it in the summer of 1964 after completing work on his master's in fine arts at Sarah Lawrence College. In spite of its fairly conventional storyline, The Wedding Party, with its jump cuts, its slow and fast motion, and its often improvised acting, indicated a revolt against traditional American cinematic continuity and acting styles. It also, incidentally, featured an actor named Robert DeNiro. Murder à la Mod, filmed in 1966, was DePalma's first film to be commercially released. Not only did the film provide the director with his first suspense vehicle, it also gave him the opportunity to play around with existing cinematic vocabulary. In addition to telling the murder story three times from three different points of view, DePalma adapted his film style to suit each character. He describes these styles as soap opera (for the girl who gets killed); Hitchcock (for a male character involved in the action); and, in an extension of what he had already done in Wotan's Wake, silent comedy (for a deaf-mute, horror-film actor).

DePalma is clearly a product of the media generation. Two of the directors who, in addition to Hitchcock, have had some influence on DePalma are the media-oriented Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick. More unexpectedly, DePalma also gives credit to documentary filmmakers such as Pennebaker, Leacock, and the Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens). "The Maysles have made some of the most important films in the last decade," DePalma told me. "I think the documentary background gives you a sort of contemporary conception of reality the dramatic background doesn't necessarily give you; you have a little more of an ear for what people perceive as real. The documentary reality and television reality have more or less given us a whole new conception of what we consider real. To people who come before that tradition, it might look a little hokey today, like naturalism or all the stuff that came out of group theatre."

Hardly a DePalma film appears that does not make some direct use of television and, often, of other visual media as well. A few samples: Greetings opens and closes with a televised Lyndon Johnson ("You never had it so good") speech; a key part of Hi, Mom! satirizes educational television with "N.I.T. Journal" (for National Intellectual Television) filming a brutal play in which the reality of the play's audience is at least as important as the reality of the play itself; the opening of Sisters transforms a piece of Hitchcockian voyeurism, complete with a Bernard Hermann musical drone, into a television show entitled "Peeping Tom;" much of Phantom of the Paradise could be considered a study of the many ways in which electronics can reshape -- and resuscitate -- reality. Even in Carrie, there is one scene in which Sue Snell and Tommy Ross, doing their homework together, have a television set between them showing the opening of the Ralph Nelson film Duel at Diablo.

Greetings (1968) was DePalma's first movie to receive national distribution. Given the Silver Bear award at the 1969 Berlin International Festival, Greetings, after Murder à la Mod, was another game of three. This time, however, the three principal characters are male and reflect three pervasive concerns of the sixties: the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution (in the form of pornography). Once again filled with New Wave jump cuts and freeze-frames, which DePalma had by this time expertly integrated into his own style, Greetings evokes Godard on a broad level. For while the movie makes us cringe at the 1960s' political and social absurdities by simply documenting them, the counterculture lives led by the three protagonists are seen as not much of an improvement on the "Great Society." Like Godard, whose Maoists in the 1968 La Chinoise play childish games in an apartment while they seek a way to destroy bourgeois values, DePalma is not as interested in taking sides as he is in entering into a dialectic exposing both, even if one side is inevitably favored.

Two movies that followed Greetings established DePalma for some as the cinematic spokesman for the pop culture. Hi, Mom! (1970) is filled with voyeuristic Super-8 film and can be seen as a sequel, in certain ways, to Greetings, especially with DeNiro taking up his "peep art" where he left off in the earlier movie. Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972) was made for Warner Bros., and it features, not surprisingly, a more conventional individual-versus-the-establishment battle. Tom Smothers, in his film debut, plays the corporation man who leaves his job to become a tap-dancer-magician. (Orson Welles has a brief part in the film as Dalesandro, the master magician who teaches Smothers his art.) Rabbit also marked DePalma's own battle with the establishment. Differences between the director and Warner Bros. were so irreconcilable that a studio executive was called in to finish the film, using a mild ending considerably different from the one DePalma had wanted.

In between Hi, Mom! and Rabbit, DePalma did an experimental film entitled Dionysus in '69. Presented completely in split-screen, the film shows, on one side, the Performance Group's adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides and, on the other side, the audience involvement in the play. Dionysus in '69 brought together two of the most important sides of DePalma's creative vision: his documentary view of reality as modified by the artistic and electronic documentation of it; and his concern with myths that continually manifest themselves. Dionysus in '69 used the split-screen, audience-performance device a year before Michael Wadleigh'sWoodstock.

Even the most avid DePalma followers could not have foreseen the direction taken by his next picture, Sisters (1972). As DePalma put it: "I was very concerned with working on a kind of visual structure for my films after I'd done Greetings and Hi, Mom!, and I knew I had a feeling for directing actors and handling comedy. I just wanted to start working on the visual aspects of the cinema, and that's why I did Sisters. I wanted to do a whole film instead of these little pastiches that was basically just a whole bunch of short scenes tied together."Not that the director had done a complete stylistic about-face. "I'm constantly concerned with finding the right use of the camera for the material that it's photographing. I think it's as important as the material itself. Probably not too many directors are of this school, or really try to give the visual aspects of the film that much importance. Obviously, you see this in Hitchcock, you see it in Kubrick. You see a conscious design for where the position of the camera is. When I make a movie, I lay it all out in shots, and I constantly move them around and try to orchestrate a visual design for a movie. That's as important as the writing of the movie, and that's where a director really directs, I feel."So concerned is DePalma with the visual element that he often takes photographs of a setup and sicks them on a wall to see whether the sequence will work. Occasionally, he will even preshoot some setups in eight millimeter.DePalma, seeking a continuous visual structure, needed a narrative to justify it and found it in suspense -- the genre of Hitchcock, the master of visual structure. And so Sisters became not only DePalma's first straight suspense film, but also a tribute to Hitchcock. It abounds in illusions: the voyeurism, the innocent bystander drawn into the arena of crime, the red herrings, the chaotic violence with Freudian overtones, and the macabre humor.

DePalma also became the first of the new American directors to rediscover one of the key elements in some of the greatest Hitchcock films (Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho): the music of Bernard Hermann. During the screening of rushes from the Sisters murder scene, the editor Paul Hirsch "laid in" the famous violin shrieks from Hermann's score for Psycho. DePalma was bowled over and managed to obtain Hermann's services for Sisters. Hermann, using a large orchestra that included two Moog electronic synthesizers, composed one of his best and most developed scores in recent years. DePalma again turned to Hermann for Obsession, another, less successful Hitchcock tribute (this one à la Vertigo).The composer died before DePalma could use him for Carrie. But DePalma laid in Hermann's music during screenings of the rushes for the benefit of Carrie composer PinoDonaggio. In Carrie, DePalma briefly alludes to the Psycho violin shrieks at several points when Carrie uses her power of telekinesis to move objects. DePalma, who has described the Psycho shower music as "a chilling distortion of a human cry," explained, "The fact is, I was trying to find a sound for the flexing (when she moves things), and we used a lot of the Psycho violins when we were screening the film before it had a score. We found it very effective, and couldn't find anything better. Consequently, when we recorded the score, we recorded something very similar to that violin sound. It's a great sound, probably one of the best in cinema. So, thank you Benny Hermann."Between Sisters and Obsession, DePalma did a film, Phantom of the Paradise, that in some ways seemed to hark back to his earlier work. He even used two actors, William Finley (The Phantom) and Gerrit Graham (Beef), who had major roles in his earlier films. (Finley, in fact, goes all the way back to The Wedding Party.) Phantom is obsessed with the various aspects of the seventies' pop culture, in particular its music -- the principal star is Paul Williams, who, along with George Tipton, wrote the film's music -- and also its drugs, its freaks, its orgies, its marketing manipulations, its youth crazy, and ultimately its death wish.

But it was precisely here that the film definitely belongs to what we might term DePalma's second phase. For while his films of the sixties often stress revolt as an attempt to reaffirm life, Phantom, as well as his other films of the seventies, depicts existence as an extended love affair with death. Phantom shows this in a cynical, satirical, and often extremely frenetic fashion; death is seen as a kind of monstrous spectacle that feeds on youth. DePalma throws in the Faust legend and his version of The Picture of Dorian Gray and blends them with a staple of movie mythology, The Phantom of the Opera. The movie, however, remains a strange mixture of nearly all the elements of DePalma's cinematic vocabulary.But Carrie successfully brings together all these elements. As DePalma says, "I sort of put everything into Carrie: I had the romantic story between Tommy Ross and Carrie White; I had all the visual suspense elements; and I was using everything I knew, including comedy and improvisation, from all the other pictures I had made." One thing that gives Carrie its particular depth is it human dimension. The film is anything but a continuation of the voguish Exorcist-Omen type of demonry, in spite of United Artists' advertising hype. The telekinesis element, for instance, is considerably played down, in contrast to the Stephen King novel on which the film is based."The telekinesis," DePalma said, "is just an extension of Carrie's own adolescent emotionality, basically. It has no good or evil attached to it; it's just an extension of her subconscious desires. And, unfortunately, it's used in a kind of very emotional sense. She has no control over it; it just sort of erupts. It seems that when she does use it, it is used in fact for what one would consider good purposes. Obviously, she should be able to go to the prom. And obviously, when all those people do all those terrible things to her, they should 'get it.' And they do get it. And obviously her mother, who is trying to kill her, should get it, and she does. And obviously, when she's committed matricide, she should die, and she in fact dies."

Another side of Carrie's human dimension can be seen in the director's refusal to indulge in melodramatic taking of sides. This ability to embrace the good and bad of all his characters stems directly from DePalma's own personality. He is a soft-spoken man harboring few grudges. He can understand the point of view of even the most intransigent movie executives he has to do battle with; they are doing what they have to do.

DePalma likes Carrie because "all the characters have essentially positive motivations, whether they are good or evil. You try to show that each character has a correct point of view. This is very much like The Bridge on the River Kwai. Like the three elements converging on the bridge. The Alec Guinness character, the Bill Holden, the Japanese character: They all have a very correct point of view. I think this is essentially the same in Carrie with all the characters, from Sue Snell, the good girl, to Chris, the bad girl, to the mother, who really believes this power is dangerous and shouldn't be used, to the gym teacher who is very guilty about the way she handled the situation in the shower, who tries to make the girls pay for what they did, and in fact makes things a lot worse. All these people are acting on essentially what they consider their best intentions, and they are diametrically opposed. The whole good and evil thing is very relative."In addition to this, however, Carrie represents the most profound -- and disturbing -- use DePalma has yet made of mythic motives and structures. The essence of myth is to move backward: The ending is known from the start. In Carrie, the opening sequence immediately establishes the basic opposition that will dominate the film. Starting with a crane shot of a group of high school girls playing volleyball in their gym suits, the camera slowly descends and moves in on Carrie as she misses the shot that loses the game for her side. She is brutally vilified by her classmates. Unable to meet the demands of a highly competitive society, she is established as an outsider, one of the most prevalent types in both myth and fairy tales. And DePalma has accomplished this exposition in an almost purely visual manner, using means that belong entirely to film. Both camera angle and camera movement become part of a symbolic language perfectly adapted to both the story and the medium.

The beginning sequences of Carrie, furthermore, are filled with signals that point toward the ultimate catastrophes, whether little (and, again, entirely visual) hints of telekinesis or the senior prom announcements that pop up in numerous shots. Even the posters for the film itself, showing the two Carries -- one the queen of the prom, the other the blood-drenched scapegoat -- allow the audience no doubts as to the direction the film will follow.

In true mythic fashion, the power that helps the heroine attain an exalted position (even if it is only queen of the ball) comes from outside the "normal" social order. Carrie's telekinesis serves as a fairy godmother helping her overcome the evil mother to go to the ball. But the fairy tale ends here, and more serious myth takes over completely. Carrie must fall, even if she takes a good portion of her tormentors with her. She is therefore destroyed, first by the society she has momentarily risen above; then by her mother, whose fanatical religious attitudes she has opposed to attain her moment of glory; and finally by the very force that helped her both in her rise and in her vengeance -- the telekinesis turns in upon itself, consuming Carrie and the house she lived in.The epilogue with Sue Snell's "nightmare" sums up in visual and musical terms the film's entire mythos. The final victory is that of the nonsocial forces, the forces of the irrational, whether in dream or in their extreme form, death. In this sense, Carrie is a kind of reverse Psycho: Hitchcock gives us the zinger (the shower scene) toward the beginning and then spends the rest of the film unraveling the mystery of this illogical eruption of the irrational. DePalma, on the other hand, spends the entire first half of Carrie building up the suspense leading to the prom scene (the Hitchcockian bomb the audience knows will explode) and then creates a second movement of suspense as Carrie's mother waits, sacrificial knife in hand, for her daughter to bathe away the pig's blood. The shocker (invented by DePalma and found neither in the novel nor the film script by Lawrence Cohen) comes at the very end, leaving the audience with absolutely no rational crutch to lean upon. As DePalma described it, "A sad little scene, and all of a sudden, we're never going to let you go."In Carrie, DePalma also remains faithful to the 1960s part of his creative personality, for the film shows an acute sensitivity to ambiguous American attitudes toward religion. Instead of pitting diabolical forces of evil against a religious-oriented good, Carrie sets up religious fanaticism, along with scapegoatism, as the primary negative force in the film.

The iconography of the fanaticism -- the myriad of candles, the grotesque crucifix -- is strongly Catholic. But, theologically and from the character of Carrie's mother, the religion smacks of a certain brand of evangelical Protestantism,

particularly in the anti-female attitude that has repressed Carrie. Woman causes the fall of man, dooming the race to mortality and the pain of childbearing; menstrual blood symbolizes both procreation and mortality. DePalma sums up the entire Eden myth: The title sequence (following the volleyball scene) presents a group of nude girls romping, in slow motion, in the haze of locker room steam. A simple, lyrical flute theme -- the same as heard at the end -- plays on the soundtrack. This scene of innocence leads to the shower and Carrie's first menstruation, bringing us to a view of woman as evil.Carrie manipulates the audience with narrative and structure, both of which must be equally stressed in effective myth. The film accomplishes the tour de force of giving the audience the story it can identify with while constantly using structure to remind the spectators that the story is limited by neither time, space, nor psychological motivation.DePalma has begun to catch on, first and foremost with the filmgoing public but also film critics such as Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Greenspun. Carrie even got Academy Award nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, while both Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie have won the grand prize at the fantastic film festival in Avoriaz, France. The critic Gerard Lenne, writing in Ecran, France's best film journal, has described DePalma as "the most brilliant filmmaker to come from America in recent years."