The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (9 page)

Burbank Studios, Sound Stage 16. In silent
hommage to
Hitchcock, perhaps, Brian De Palma's belly swells formidably over the waistband of his safari suit
— So, at any rate, I had thought of beginning this profile of the light-fingered, flash-trash movie brute, director of
Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface —
and
Body Double.
But that was before I had been exposed to De Palma's obscure though unmistakable charm: three weeks, twenty telephone calls, and a few thousand miles later. 'I know you've come all the way from London, and I know Brian promised to see you while you were in LA,' his PA told me at the entrance to the lot. 'Well, he's
rescinded
on that,' she said, and laughed with musical significance. This significant laughter told me three things: one, that she was scandalised by his behaviour; two, that he did it all the time; and three, that I wasn't to take him seriously, because no one else did. I laughed too. I had never met a real-life moody genius before; and they
are
very funny.

So let's start again. Brian De Palma sits slumped on his director's chair, down at Burbank, in boiling Los Angeles. It is 'wrap' day on
Body Double,
his pornographic new thriller: only two climactic scenes remain to be shot. 'Put the chest back on,' De Palma tells the villain, played by Gregg Henry. 'Okay. New chest! New belly!' This means another forty-minute delay. De Palma gets to his feet and wanders heavily round the set. He is indeed rather tubby now, the back resting burdensomely on the buttocks, and he walks with an effortful, cross-footed gait. 'Hitchcock was sixty when he made
Psycho,'
De Palma would later tell me. '1 don't know if I'll be able to
walk
when I'm sixty.' A curious remark - but then Brian is not a good walker, even now, at forty-four; he is not a talented walker.

He walks as if he is concentrating very hard on what he has in his pockets.

I approached the sinister Gregg Henry and asked him about the scene they were shooting. It sounded like standard De Palma: 'I throttle Craig Wasson to the ground or whatever. I jump out of the grave. I rip off my false belly.' The false belly is part of Gregg's disguise, along with the rug, the redskin facial pancake, and the Meccano dentures. As in
Dressed to Kill,
a goody turns out to be a baddy, in disguise. It takes a headlining make-up veteran three-and-a-half hours to get Gregg looking as sinister as this. Presumably it takes the baddy in the film even longer — but this is a De Palma picture, where gross insults to plausibility are routine. The second shot involves an elaborate false-perspective prop (to dramatise the hero's claustrophobia as he is buried alive), like the staircase scene in
Vertigo.
The camera will wobble. 'With luck, you'll feel sick,' says the amiable first assistant.
Body Double
has gone pretty smoothly, within schedule and under budget. The only real hitch was a 'hair problem' with Melanie Griffith. She spent two weeks under the drier and over the sink. 'We tried brown, red, platinum — until we got what Brian wanted.’

Suddenly — that is to say, after a fifteen-minute yelling relay — the shot is ready to go again. De Palma talks to no one but the camera operator. 'Why don't you pull back a bit? Why don't you try to hold him from head to foot?' All his instructions are in this dogged rhetorical style. Action. Gregg Henry and Craig Wasson perform creditably ('Oh
man,'
says Gregg, peeling off his false belly, 'you ruined my whole surprise ending'), but De Palma is unhap ?y about the camera's swooning back-track. He should have been unhappy about his surprise ending, which doesn't work. 'New belly,' says Brian, and the delay resumes. A series of delays interrupted by repetitions: that's motion pictures.

De Palma went trudge-about. 'I think this would be a good time for you to be introduced to Brian,' said Rob, the unit publicist — also likeable. 'He's in a receptive mood.’

'Are you sure?’

'Yes. Very receptive.’

We walked over. I was introduced. De Palma wearily offered his hand. Rob explained who I was. 'Uh,' said De Palma, and turned away.

'Is that as good as it gets?' I asked as we walked off.

See him in New York, said Rob. He 11 be better, when he s wrapped.’

And so an hour or two later I left him in the lot, which was still doing its imitation of Hell. Gaunt ladies lurk near the catering caravan. Fat minders or shifters or teamsters called Buck and Flip and Heck move stoically about. The place is big and dark and hot, swathed in black drapes, vulcanic, loud with vile engines, horrid buzzers, expert noise-makers. Nearly all the time absolutely nothing is happening. Eight hours later, at midnight, De Palma wrapped.

As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. Unlike his peers and pals, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese (they all teamed up at Warner Brothers in the early Seventies), De Palma doesn't shoot miles of footage and then redesign the movie in the editing room. His rough cuts are usually shorter than the finished film. Every scene is meticulously story-boarded, every pan and zoom, every camera angle. Here's a sample on-set interview:

So,
Brian, before you make a movie, do you see the whole thing in your head?

Yes.

Do
you have problems re-creating the movie you see?

No.

How does the actual movie measure up to what you originally imagined?

It measures up.

He seldom advises or encourages his actors. Michael Caine has said that the highest praise you'll hear from De Palma is 'Print'. As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. The only question is: why does he want it?

Always an ungainly cultural phenomenon, De Palma's reputation has never been more oddly poised. He likes to think of himself as over the top and beyond the pale, an iconoclast and controversialist, someone that people love to hate or hate to love — someone, above all, who cannot be
ignored.
In moments of excitement he will grandly refer to 'whole schools of De Palma criticism' which say this, that and the other about his work. Well, too many people have failed to ignore De Palma for us to start ignoring him now. But it may be that the only serious school of De Palma criticism is the one where all the classrooms are empty. Everyone is off playing hookey. They're all busy ignoring him.

De Palma's history forms a promising confection, full of quir-kiness and mild exoticism. His parents were both Italian Catholics yet little Brian was reared as a Presbyterian, The Catholic imagery was naturally the more tenacious for the young artist ('that is one spooky religion') and its themes and forms linger in his work: the diabolism, the ritualised but arbitrary moral schemes, the guilt. De Palma Senior was a surgeon - orthopaedics, the correction of deformity. Brian used to sit in on operations, often catching a skin graft or a bone transplant, and would later do vacation jobs in medical laboratories. 'I have a high tolerance for blood,' he says. The cast of
The Fury (1978)
nicknamed him Brian De Plasma. On the set his most frequent remarks are 'Action', 'Print' and 'More blood!' De Palma was tempted by medicine but rejected the discipline as 'not precise enough'.

He used to be keen on precision, and still sees his work in terms of 'precise visual story-telling', streamlined and dynamic, all pincer grips and rapier thrusts. In fact, 'precision' in De Palma is entirely a matter of sharp surfaces and smooth assembly; within, all is smudge and fudge, woolliness, approximation. The young Brian was also something of a physics prodigy and computer whiz. At a National Science Fair competition he took second prize for his critical study of hydrogen quantum mechanics through cybernetics. (This is impressive all right.
You
try it.) One imagines the teenage De Palma as owlish, bespectacled and solitary, like the kid in
Dressed to Kill.
That solitude is still with him, I would say. Then at university the brainy loner changed tack, selling his home-made computers for a ßolex film camera, 'trading one obsession for another'.

Born in Newark, raised in Philadelphia, a student of physics at Columbia and of drama at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, De Palma is solidly East Coast in his origins, urban, radical, anti-establishment, anti-Hollywood. He admired Godard, Polanski and of course Hitchcock, but he entered the industry from left field: via the TV-dominated world of documentary and vérité, low-budget satire and chaotic improvisation, war protest and sexual daring — a product of the Sixties, that golden age of high energy and low art. It must be said that of all De Palma's early work, from
Greetings
in
1968
to
Phantom of the Paradise
in 1974, nothing survives.
These
films are now no more than memories of art-house late nights, student screenings, left-wing laughter and radical applause. De Palma's first visit to Hollywood, for
Get to Know Your Rabbit,
was a disaster movie in itself. His authority attacked, his star out of control, De Palma 'quit' the picture two weeks before its completion — as he would later quit
Prince of the City
and
Flashdance.
The film was shelved for two years. On his own admission De Palma was suddenly 'dead' in Los Angeles, where the locals are superstitious about failure; they quarantine you, in case failure is catching. No one returned his calls. They crossed the street to avoid him. 'People think — what has he
got
in that can?' In any event,
Rabbit was a dog.
Furtively released in 1974 as a B-feature, it interred itself within a week.

Then two years later along came
Carrie,
far and away De Palma's most successful film, in all senses. By now Brian's contemporaries, his Warner brothers, were all drowning in riches and esteem, and he was 'more than ready' for a smash of his own. 'I pleaded,
pleaded
to do
Carrie.'
And so began De Palma's assimilation into the Hollywood machine, his extended stay in 'the land of the devil'. The Sixties radical package was merely the set of values that got to him first, and he had wearied of a 'revolution' he found ever more commercialised. De Palma now wanted the other kind of independence, the 'dignity' that comes from power and success within the establishment. He is honest — or at any rate brazen — about the reversal. 'I too became a capitalist,' he has said. 'By even dealing with the devil you become devilish. There's no clean money. There I was, worrying about
Carrie
not doing forty million. That's how deranged your perspectives get." Nowadays his politics are cautious and pragmatic: 'capitalism tempered by compassion, do unto others — stuff like that'. The liberal minimum. His later films do sometimes deal in political questions of the Watergate-buff variety, but the slant is personal, prankish, paranoid — De Palmaesque. All that remains of the Sixties guerrilla is an unquenchable taste for anarchy: moral anarchy, artistic anarchy.

What use has he made of his freedom? What exactly are we looking at here? 'Mature' De Palma consists of
Dressed to Kill, Blowout
and now
Body Double.
These are the medium-budget films which De Palma conceived, wrote, directed and cut.
(The Fury
and
Scarface
we can set aside as fancy-priced hackwork, while
Home’

Movies,
a shoe-string project put together at Sarah Lawrence and released'in 1980, is already a vanished curiosity.) De Palma's three main credits, or debits, reveal his cinematic vision, unfettered
by any
constraints other than those imposed by the censors. They also show how blinkered, intransigent and marginal that vision really is. Such unedifying fixity has no equivalent in mainstream cinema, and none in literature, except perhaps Celine, or William Burroughs — or Kathy Acker.

Each instalment in the De Palma trilogy concerns itself with a man who goes about the place cutting up women: straight razor, chisel, power drill. The women are either prostitutes, sexual adventuresses or adult-movie queens. There is no conventional sex whatever in De Palma's movies: it is always a function of money, violence or defilement, glimpsed at a voyeuristic remove or through a pornographic sheen (and this interest in flash and peep goes right back to
Greetings).
The heroes are childish or ineffectual figures, helpless in the face of the villain's superior human energies. There are no plots: the narratives themselves submit to a psychopathic rationale, and are Jittered with coincidence, blind spots, black holes. Like its predecessors,
Body Double
could be exploded by a telephone call, by a pertinent question, by five minutes' thought. Most candidly of all, De Palma dispenses with the humanistic ensemble of character, motive, development and resolution. He tries his best, but people bore him, and that's that.