“That Brian De Palma documentary is bullshit if the director
doesn't wake up at the end and realize he dreamed Brain De Palma.” - tweet I tweeted immediately after finishing Dressed to Kill
I want to say I have a love/hate relationship with Brian De Palma but it’s really more a like/hate relationship with a heavy emphasis on kind of not giving a fuck.
My mind is all over the place after finally watching
Dressed to Kill, which I remember from its original release,
but I was too young to see it. I also remember its opening scene from some
random night on cable about 15 years ago, when for whatever reason I did not
finish the film. Had I done so, I would probably not be reviewing it now. I
coudn’t see it returning to my queue in anything under--well, it would take me
over two years to watch every other Criterion currently available first, so let’s
say 3 years.
We can even begin with that first scene. If you ever need an
object lesson to illustrate the male gaze, it’s this: Angie Dickinson in a shower
performing a masturbatory dance in hopes that her husband will notice. The
audience for this routine isn’t really the husband, though, who continues
shaving, blissfully unaware; it’s the movie-going public, here in our role as
peeping tom. It’s also the ticket-buying audience 90 minutes later when Nancy
Allen achieves orgasm at the mere touch of the water stream from the same
showerhead; the same way De Palma tries to have his cake and eat it, too, by
creating a grotesque approximation of the theatrical arena by arranging an
unrealistic number of mental patients to watch his villain in the asylum. We
have seen the voyeur, and they is us.
The best part, though, is how obvious it is that it’s not
really Angie Dickinson’s body, a fact that horny men my father’s age never
realized back in 1980 and probably vehemently deny now. De Palma is the king of
the fake-out, and that is just the first of many in Dressed to
Kill. Some of them are earned (the unexpected arrival in the film’s
genuine climax is a pretty great twist); some of them are not (oh, hello, last
three scenes).
For those not in the know, here is the basic plot: a bored
wife (Dickinson) goes to the art museum and hooks up with a man who seduces
her--via a visually clever chase amongst the paintings, no less--only to be
murdered in the elevator after leaving his apartment. Liz (Allen), an
escort working in the building, stumbles across the murder in progress, and
when the police suspect her of the killing, she has to find the blonde woman in
trench coat and sunglasses she saw in the elevator mirror--who also may or may
not now be stalking Liz. Both helping and hindering Liz are the dead woman’s
psychiatrist (Michael Kaine), her son (Keith Gordon), and the homicide
detective assigned to the case (Dennis Franz). (The husband, it would seem, is
useless throughout.)
As plots go, it’s not much, and really, it’s just a
gender-bent Psycho. The whole film, really, is what if
Alfred Hitchcock adapted Penthouse Forum. That the nerdy
son--a De Palma stand-in who loves cameras and recording equipment--never even
makes a move on Liz is kind of ludicrous. So I guess kudos to De Palma for not
succumbing to that obvious happening.
It’s not all that De Palma gets right. One can always praise
his technique. His use of split-screen, for instance, is both dazzling and
efficient, bringing an added layer to the storytelling, juxtaposing two scenes
while also linking them (in one scene, he has two characters watching the same
expository Phil Donahue episode while otherwise going about their seemingly unconnected
business). In these instances, and elsewhere, De Palma lets the action run
large, and in the sequences leading up to the first murder, even lets them play
without dialogue, enticing the viewer through lush orchestral music and leading
us to focus on various details, some of which are clues and others which are
red herrings. De Palma and director of photography Ralf Bode also know how to
compose a shot so that the foreground and background have two different courses
of action, artfully hipping the viewer to certain info about what the varying
characters are doing. They also use carefully placed mirrors to create echoes
and dualities, the reflective glass being both a storytelling clue and a de
fact conscience, depending who is looking at themselves and how.
And if we’re being generous, De Palma seems sympathetic to
the trans community, and is progressive for his time, even as he exploits being
transsexual for the purposes of plot. It’s easy to see the dangerous clichés he
falls into now that a couple of decades have passed, but consider that he never
suggests his villain is evil because of being trans; that person’s identity is
never denigrated, nor is their identity suggested to be a dangerous psychosis,
they just happen to have homicidal tendencies. Dressed to
Kill may be problematic, and carries baggage that De Palma wasn’t even
likely aware of, but it never suggests that its villain is deviant or wrong
just for accepting their own state of well-being, the murders are motivated by
some other impulse. And it doesn’t seem sexual either, even if the overall
symbology is that in both the case of Dickinson and Allen’s characters, it’s
the sexually active women whose lives are threatened. Which, let’s be honest,
is a whole other set of problems, and perhaps lends more weight to the notion
that De Palma hasn’t really considered the implications of his choices all that
much, he just likes blood and sex.
All the skill and good will aside, though, Dressed to Kill is a decent movie, but it’s not a very good one, and De Palma is a proficient filmmaker, but a hack storyteller. Dressed to Kill’s plot is thin, and many of its machinations are contrived to the point of straining disbelief. The narrative meanders, but it holds interest throughout, never entirely tipping its hand toward the solution of its plot ahead of the full reveal. De Palma tries to cover his ass with a denouement where many of the movie’s internal failings are explained, yet it feels like too little too late--especially when the auteur succumbs to the classic “one more shock” blunder. That event in itself is not a bad idea, but the negation of it in the very last scene is. This is De Palma’s m.o., and his regular employment of “then I woke up” endings is easily his worst trait. As it stands, the final scene in Dressed to Kill doesn’t give us one final thrill; on the contrary, it just seems like a director who didn’t really have an ending, so he tacked one on. Not quite the cop-out of some of his other work, like Femme Fatale, but cheap all the same.
All the skill and good will aside, though, Dressed to Kill is a decent movie, but it’s not a very good one, and De Palma is a proficient filmmaker, but a hack storyteller. Dressed to Kill’s plot is thin, and many of its machinations are contrived to the point of straining disbelief. The narrative meanders, but it holds interest throughout, never entirely tipping its hand toward the solution of its plot ahead of the full reveal. De Palma tries to cover his ass with a denouement where many of the movie’s internal failings are explained, yet it feels like too little too late--especially when the auteur succumbs to the classic “one more shock” blunder. That event in itself is not a bad idea, but the negation of it in the very last scene is. This is De Palma’s m.o., and his regular employment of “then I woke up” endings is easily his worst trait. As it stands, the final scene in Dressed to Kill doesn’t give us one final thrill; on the contrary, it just seems like a director who didn’t really have an ending, so he tacked one on. Not quite the cop-out of some of his other work, like Femme Fatale, but cheap all the same.
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