Brian De Palma’s The Fury, Or: Hollywoodland

(I started writing this piece before the Newtown massacre – though it deals with violence, and the ways in which movies are made to fulfill our desire for violence, I think it has little or no relevance to the recent tragedy. I believe the primary reason that that tragedy took place is because a well-funded lobby has millions to spend to cajole politicians to do their bidding. They have more than thirty million to drop on political hacks and ink stained wretches to do their will, while the dead of Newtown and Aurora have nothing. I leave mourning to the families and friends of those who were killed, as I believe grief by strangers ends up as empty ostentation. I will only say that though I am afflicted with a coldness, a sensibility close to ice, only rarely moved to the weakest of feelings other than anger, I have to hold back tears when I see photos of some of the victims of last week’s shooting, and I am moved close to some ridiculous emotion even hearing that there was a children’s choir in the opening of “Saturday Night Live”.

I have written many stupid things here, but one of the dumbest was to write after the Aurora killings that the only thing that could be given to the victims was silence; we can give them far more than that. We can fight to make sure this never happens again. I am not certain yet how this goal might be achieved, which of the many paths available can be taken, but it can be done. One of the more nettlesome things of our modern era is the smirky attitude of those in power and their glittery flatterers in the press at how powerless we, the larger public, are: how easy it is to force us to work harder and for far less, how simple it is to tear apart financial regulation according to what they want, how our children may be shot and killed because a big money political group says so, the sad inertia where the winners always remain the same, that they can act however they wish, and there’s not a damn thing we can do, however angry our little hearts get. I give them gentle advice: laugh now, because we are not quite as powerless as you think. I feel at the moment only a cold passion that will endure long, but that I feel it is of no consequence. What matters, is that many feel just as I do. This passion, the only connecting point to what’s written below, is a fury, a driving fury, that will only be sated by consequential action. Again: we are not quite as powerless as you think.)

(The following contains spoilers for Dressed to Kill, Sisters, Femme Fatale, and, of course, The Fury. For obvious reasons of my own comfort, with reference to the above events, a few of the more graphic stills that might accompany this piece and might illuminate a point, will only be put up after a little time has passed.)

A movie about violence. If Dressed to Kill focuses on erotic fantasy, this looks at our thantic ones. It’s a movie about killing, about movie watching, and how we seek out our violent fantasies fulfilled in the movies we watch. I write of these observations as things self-evident, when they are not: they are suggestions that have always been there for me, of something beneath this movie’s surface, and what they most resemble to me is a thesis on violence we wish to act out, which is committed before our eyes, for us. I see this analogy for movies and movie making not to find some depth in a movie I greatly enjoy, but because it is a metaphor so strongly hinted at, I yield to it: I do not ever think of the meaning in something we enjoy, but our meanings, a semaphore which chimes deep with us, but which we can also find deeply grounded in the details of the work, one not entirely floating free, entirely of our own making.

HEROES, SUPERHEROES, MORTALS

The characters of this movie might be placed in three classes, classes which, even if not given formal names, are common to many popular movies. If we take our cues from Northrop Frye’s seminal Anatomy of Criticism, there are the heroes of romance, superior to us in degree, they “move in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him” – these are Peter Sandza and Ben Childress, respectively, a spy of extraordinary agility and endurance, and his opponent, a man who commands a secret agency we have never heard of, an agency that is almost all-powerful in its ability to surveil and kill – in the words of Sandza, “it’s a frightening power these people have, they can make almost anybody disappear at any time”; there are the two gifted with telekinesis, Robin and Gillian, “superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men”, divine beings; there are those comic characters who are far less powerful than either of these two groups, men and women who are ridiculous, either lower than us, or who we are, but dearly wish not to be, characters of an ironic mode: those who are “inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity…this is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.” These last may include many of those in the movie, including the Nuckells family and the two cops. Even when Sandza has his ridiculous moments – when his pants fall around his ankles or a shot where we hear him panting like a dirty caller during a phone call while shaking from the cold so we at first think he’s masturbating – these are effective because they are ridiculous moments for a heroic character, a character we do not expect to have such moments – they might best be compared to Han Solo having to deal with a spaceship that keeps breaking down, or Indiana Jones confidently reaching for a pistol, but finding only an empty holster.

Such classes exist in many such movies, with one group of heroes set apart for idolatry, and another placed aside for contempt – though we often may realize that we are closer to the latter category than the former, and we might resent and deny the fact. Though these classes are in the movie, they are not unaccompanied without self-awareness and skepticism, the film questioning our perspectives on these men and women. For example: at various moments, Peter acts absurdly, and we are given no reason for his actions, a ridiculing of the assumption that every action of the hero contains heroic genius. Near the movie’s opening, Peter Sandza drives away from the beach, away from his son, out to the open ocean, a clear target – what tactical purpose does this serve? We assume, despite all appearances, something is to be accomplished in this, because he is the hero. His boat is then blown up, but since he is a hero, superior to us in degree, he survives the explosion and doesn’t drown. We next see him fire a machine gun at Childress in order to wound him, then throw the gun down and walk away, and we must ask again, why? Why simply wound the man, why not try to get his son back? We assume his actions all have a greater purpose, again, because he is the hero. What this early wounding most certainly serves is the story’s aim, which gives these characters an almost mythic genesis. Sandza is rendered into an exile, a near invulnerable, near invisible man. Childress, whatever his secret villainy before, now assumes the outward appearance of a nemesis. He only wears black for the rest of the movie, his arm now entirely dead, a good half entirely vanished, the man now engulfed in shadow. The lame arm also serves as a taint of evil, as any deformity used to signify, such as Richard III’s hump, not simply a noble creature who has strayed into malevolence, but a man who embodies it. From now on, every phrase and action of Childress is malicious, without any mitigating humanity.

The heroic and super-heroic types – Sandza, Childress, Gillian, Robin – are distinguished from the lower, ironic types in two other ways as well. They are very good looking, the beauty of marquee movie stars, distinguishing them from the unattractive rabble. They also have far more money than any of these low characters, this money giving them a further freedom and grace that the others lack. We see the gorgeous high-rise Gillian and her mother live in; Peter and Robin have access to the great schools and foreign travel expected from a man paid a high salary by a government agency; the Paragon Institute, of course, has the money to buy just about anything. These qualities – good looks and wealth – are intertwined with their great powers, of degree and kind. We are shown Raymond Dunwoodie (played by the late and well-missed De Palma stalwart William Finley), a man with something like the abilities of Gillian and Robin, a powerful telepathy and precognition, yet he is a figure of contempt: Gillian looks upon him as a freak, while Sandza treats him with barely veiled impatience. He is, despite his powers, not a divine figure, but an ironic, ignoble one, a man of rotting teeth and shabby clothes, a man of poverty and ugliness that might remind the audience of their own, or which they may have experienced, and which they feel is ever close. Whatever this man’s magic, we do not wish to be him.

The contrast between these two classes, not simply of character, but economic classes, is in the sequence that begins after the phone call to Dunwoodie, when Sandza must flee his apartment. He demonstrates the incredible athleticism that we wish for, not just in youth, but which gives a man hope that some virility will persist late into life. The feats demonstrated in the escape are extraordinary, but also casual, without dramatic camera placement, or any music cues, the everyday feats of a heroic man who has done them often.

Sandza finds himself in the apartment of the Nuckells, a family living in poverty, entirely helpless before greater forces that dominate them – oil barons and the CIA, unable to do anything but watch on TV as these powers impose themselves. While Sandza has the physique of someone god-like, their mother, of comparable age, has a body that is falling apart – one is near immortal, one is mortal. Though we are very far from the era of TV-watching people, we may well feel closer to them than the man of action, Peter Sandza, the heroic type we aspire to, a man of strength and endurance who at least is able to fight back, who has a fighting chance against these same oppressors. The Nuckells are, of course, helpless before this man – they are weak, they are poor. Added to their past humiliations, they are soon bound in place by Sandza.

While at the Nuckells, Sandza puts on a disguise, and I think it’s further evidence of the distinction between these classes. It might be helpful at this point to quote a movie over which I have much mixed feelings, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, but which contains some dialogue that offers great insight into this moment. It is the well-known and oft-quoted “Superman” speech, that Bill gives near the film’s end:

BILL
Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S”, that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He’s weak… he’s unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race. Sorta like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plimpton.

I think Sandza’s disguise reflects the very same thing, a superhero having to pass for an ordinary man, the appearance of this ordinary man carrying the qualities of how Sandza views this other, lower class, and how the movies present such people – he is poor, he is weak, he is overweight, he wears shabby clothes, he is helpless, his life is worth nothing.

The moment he walks onto the street, he is immediately set upon by muggers who see these very same cues. The police think him a complete joke until he steps into their car, and reveals something of the fearlessness and determination of the man he truly is.

We also see in this sequence that where material possessions mean a great deal to these ironic types who have so little, whose status is tied to these possessions that they work so hard for, which they barely have the money to afford, these possessions are meaningless to those like Sandza because they have so much money, and have known only lives of plenty. When intelligence agents come into the boarding house to get Sandza, the landlord pleads with them not to break the door down. The income he has is meagre, and to repair or put in a new door would be a killing cost. It is something he knows well, but which these agents would know nothing about.

LANDLORD
Hey, government man. Don’t bust my door down, please. Use a pass key.

He, of course, must show great deference to this men, even if he wishes them to go to hell – because what power does he have in comparison to them?

We have something like this again after the incredible chase scene through the docks. Sandza has taken control of the car of the policemen, a car which this movie has made clear, is a recent purchase by one of the patrolmen, one that is very expensive for him, and which he values greatly:

EGGLESTON (honks horn)
Hey, how’s that for a horn?

EGGLESTON (turns on stereo)
Or listen to that stereo. I mean, you ever hear better fucking stereo sound in your life?

SANDZA
Hi Bob. Nice car.

EGGLESTON
Yeah, it’s brand new. I just picked up a half hour ago…I sure wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.

SANDZA
Don’t blame you.

EGGLESTON
God, oh god, please don’t let anything happen to my new car.

The end of this chase is well-known to anyone has seen the movie: another of the absurd moments of Peter Sandza, where we grant it some purpose because he is the hero. He takes this car, valued so much by the patrolman, and destroys it by driving off the pier and crashing into the water. This car has incredible value for this patrolman not just for its material qualities such as the stereo and horn, but how much it cost. The pride in owning the car lies in the pride of having earned so much, the pride of having worked so hard for it. Sandza, whose domain was of wealth, is entirely indifferent to the pride such a man might feel, and he tosses it away easily. We are left the same question as we have after the escapades in the beach – why not simply blindfold the men, or toss the keys into the river so they can’t follow him? We accept that in this grand, heroic gesture of flying into the river there is a reason. Sandza, of course, survives this crash: as we have seen already, like almost all action heroes, he is nearly immortal.

HESTER

I try to find what is the best place to speak of The Fury‘s character I find most sympathetic, whose appearance and death interconnect with so much of what I see in the movie. Though she is Sandza’s girlfriend, she is not heroic but a character of the low mimetic or ironic tradition. She is someone of great kindness, easily the gentlest character of the film, but also a woman that appears fragile and insecure. When she describes Sandza to Gillian and the description – the part about going out dancing and buying presents – doesn’t entirely match up to the man we’ve so far seen,

HESTER
Well, he’s very charming…swept me right off my feet. In the park.

GILLIAN
In the park?

HESTER
Yeah, he picked me up in the park.

GILLIAN
What was his line?

HESTER
He said he needed help.

GILLIAN
Some line.

HESTER
What are you talking about, it worked.

GILLIAN
Yeah…what’s he do?

HESTER
Do? He…travels around a lot.

GILLIAN
Where?

HESTER
All over. Oh, when he comes to town we go to parties, he loves people…he takes me out dancing, buys me presents…oh, he dresses beautifully, and he’s a good dancer.

GILLIAN
Yeah?

HESTER
The only trouble is, he’s very hard to get hold of.

we’re not sure if this is Hester trying to present her man as something he is not, or if these are details we just haven’t seen firsthand. An undercurrent to the whole film, it should be noted, are the unsatisfying relationships of three women: Hester and Peter, Lindstrom’s unreciprocated affection for Dr. McKeever, and Dr. Charles forced to act as consort for Robin. Gillian, who is in high school and may not have had any intimacies with a man, let alone a long-term relationship, has other ordeals to deal with.

Hester is a woman imposed on by others: when we first see her, she is obediently strapped into the telekinesis machine serving as a sample test subject. It is possible that Sandza sees in her this submissiveness, and he knows it will prove useful to his mission. She is, of course, entirely an order taker, never an order giver or dissenter in Sandza’s attempt to kidnap Gillian. That there is a mercenary component to his relationship with her, there is no doubt. Whether it is the sole motivation is another question. Sandza is genuinely moved by her death, but whether this feeling is for a woman he loved, or whether it’s over the death of a very kind-hearted woman who he knows that he used, is another question. Hester may well see this mercenary aspect as well, but deny it to herself. There is the suggestion of a woman who does not wish to see the most hurtful things beneath affection, perhaps because she has been very badly hurt in the past. I feel this maybe all the more strongly because of the resonant last images she’s in, where she runs cheerfully in the sunlight, the music buoyant, unaware of what a dangerous game she’s in the middle of.

Her death is a variation on the situations involving vengeance that occur again and again in the film, which begin with Childress shot in the arm, and ending with his death, inflicted by Gillian. In this scene, Sandza shoots at the agent (who has kept showing up in the background throughout the film) again and again, even after he’s wounded and helpless, solely as an outlet for his rage. This might be seen as a precursor to the finale, both with the same series of zooming cuts, both involving a good character, rather than the sociopath Robin, exacting revenge – but the vengeance of the movie’s end is purer, with an innocent, a blameless victim, destroying the villain. Here, the agent who is killed is not directly involved in Hester’s death, but more importantly, it is Sandza himself who is more to blame for this woman dying – it is he who involved her in this scheme, he who gave her no warning or preparation for escape. Once again, Sandza employs his heroic genius, employing a larger plan the audience can only guess at: he sits in a car far from the Institute, far from Gillian and Hester, then fires his gun at the on-coming car. He has nothing to fear in this situation, because he is near immortal; Hester, on the other hand, is very mortal, was built to die, so other men might kill other men in anger over her death.

PRINCE AND PRINCESS SUPERSTAR

Sandza’s storyline is one examination of the expected tropes of action movies, those of Gillian and Robin are another. Key to this examining is the opening, where Robin sees his father killed by arab terrorists, an event which will be used to make him into a weapon, a creature entirely of vengeance, vengeance for this terrible act he witnessed. This plot, a man who kills those in reprisal for the killing of a family member, perhaps even a family member killed by terrorists, is not an uncommon one in action movies. The Fury should not be seen as a political movie in the sense that it speaks to us in any way about the middle east, or U.S policy there. If The Fury is a political movie, it is because it examines the way in which the viewer is so easily manipulated by such simple provocative images, how movies give us a cathartic target for our anger, a release for our frustrations, an enemy we can hate and have a proxy destroy. That the convenient enemy here are arab terrorists is fitting for this thesis, but it could well have been a soviet military, a cuban militia, japanese or chinese business leaders, black gangsters and pimps – any number of villains.

The event from which Robin’s anger stems is, of course, entirely fabricated. Members of one intelligence agency play the part of the terrorists, and Sandza isn’t killed. The sole purpose is to create a fictional memory, which will give Robin a focus for his hate. This is not, I think, very different from many who form a sense of the world from TV and movies, where the outside world is an unending series of enemies to be destroyed. Robin disappears from the movie, and when we next see him, he is a lunatic sociopath – a proper rendering of someone governed only by destructive hatred. He has a power, and he only wishes to use it to kill.

His opposite is Gillian, a young woman with an equal or greater power, but who is deeply afraid of it, and deeply upset any time she comes close to hurting anyone with it. The movie, by its end, cleverly plays with these characters and what we in the audience want in our fantasies: that we are sane, decent people, unlike Robin, but that we want some violent catharsis, which is finally given us.

I detect an undertone to these characters that I do not think accidental: that Robin and Gillian have something like divine powers, through which the audience acts out their own desires, makes them something like movie stars, who are often associated with the divine, their beauty exceptional and unearthly, their very presence having a charismatic power comparable to a supernatural being. That this presence is often ubiquitous about the planet is perceived not a sign of a well-designed publicity network, but another indicator of their mystic gifts.

The Paragon Institute itself makes me think of the entertainment complex dealing in young actors, who attempt to nurture and train those whose talents they recognise, and which they may well view as extraordinary, but just as Gillian and Robin are there because they could prove to be useful weapons, the primary reason for the cultivating of these young talents is because they might have very lucrative possibilities. That Robin’s ability is directed solely towards the purpose of violence makes me think of great actors whose talents are placed, over and over again, in the service of the most simple-minded action movies. The way Robin’s every appetite is indulged cannot help but suggest those celebrities whose every degenerate whim is sated so that they remain happy and productive clients.

Then there are several isolated moments that I see as comparable to that of the life of many well-known actors, such as the extended scene where Robin tries and fails to make a high pole vault:

CHILDRESS
What’s he trying to prove?

DR.CHARLES
Mentally, Robin has developed this perfect psychotronic relationship with all kinds of machines. And so naturally he’s trying to do the same thing now with his body. Except that physically, he’s just…adequate. And when he fails…he’s intolerable.

That Robin has extraordinary mastery over one field, which he then futilely tries to duplicate in physical prowess, makes me think of actors, masterful at acting, who then try, and fail, to somehow emulate their actual roles – they try to engage in real-life heroics (or have their publicist plant such stories), they become insufferable bullies as they try to be actual gangsters that they once merely played, they think themselves full of wisdom and sagacity because they were once awarded for their brilliant acting work as saints and sages.

Here is another moment, when Robin can feel the near presence of Gillian, and he gets upset with Dr. Charles:

ROBIN
You know what’s the matter. It’s that goddamn girl.

DR.CHARLES
What girl?

ROBIN
One that’s like me.

DR. CHARLES
What do you mean, like you?

ROBIN
Oh, you think I don’t know she’s around. She’s right out there.

DR. CHARLES
There is no girl.

ROBIN
That’s a lie.

DR. CHARLES
No, it isn’t Robin.

ROBIN
She’ll do everything I’ll do, won’t she? And you won’t miss me at all.

Again, this makes me think of a noted star who realizes that his status is being challenged, as his agency and studio suddenly move their focus to some up and coming talent, and his anxiety that he’ll be reduced to some marginal figure.

There is this final scene, the last speech of Childress:

CHILDRESS
How did you sleep? OK? I was here most of the night. I guess you don’t remember. Move a little closer to the fire. I know what you’ve been going through these past couple of days. I know how exhausted you must be. It’ll take more than one night’s sleep. I know how I feel. Peter was my friend. Maybe the best friend I’ll ever had. But I had to do what I did. I mean, you saw what happened. Peter could have saved Robin. Instead, he let him go. He deliberately killed his son. I hope you don’t judge me too harshly. I can’t say what I did was right or wrong. I only know I acted…and it’s done. Robin is gone. Peter is gone. And you’re the only one who matters now. Yes, I know that hurts. That hurts so bad you wanna lie down and die. But you have to survive. You’re a healthy…strong…young girl. And you must survive. You’ll begin by putting all the tragedies behind you. I think that’ll be easier if you accept my help. All the bad things you heard about me just aren’t true. I’m not a bad man. All I want is for you to trust me. Time will take care of the hurting. That’s the simple truth. Tears are good. Don’t be afraid of crying. Tears are just what we need right now. I’ll be a good father to you, Gillian. You can depend on that.

This performance, given by a speaker so mendacious he doesn’t even hear the obvious insincerity of so many lines, with its utterly phony compassion and icky paternal feeling, suggests to me nothing else than yet another reptilian agent or producer, who is always affecting some ersatz intimacy, who lies so easily and so often that he can no longer even hear the blatancy of his deceit.

ILL COMMUNICATION / WE WANTS REVENGE

For me, the central sequence of this movie, and the one which hints so strongly that this unusual action movie is very much a self-examination of the experience of watching movies, is, suitably, at its very center, when Gillian is asked by Dr. Lindstrom to use her powers to find the current location of Robin. Gillian passes her hand over the photo of the boy, and then, suddenly, she falls into a trance, and then she is Robin, transported to the recent past, a test chamber where they play the footage of his father’s death over and over again, trying to gauge his reaction. She sees entirely what he sees, she moves her head in response to the commands of Dr. Charles, while the world outside this vision has entirely disappeared. The movie Peter watches in fact becomes reality, no longer a movie on-screen, but a re-play of what took place before, actual life, or actual life for these characters, Peter and Robin, just as movies can become vivid as life. When Gillian sees Sandza killed, she responds as Robin overwhelmed with anguish at the death of a father – and it is this reaction which nearly ends up killing off Lindstrom.

This, I think, is all not unlike what we experience in a movie, where our vision becomes that of the hero, and we respond with kindred feelings to the victories and suffering of this character we are linked to. That we are then unable to distinguish between reality and fiction, that we then do great harm through this lack of distinction, is an obvious truth as well. It is not so facile as movies inciting us to violence, but: say, a series of films are made, that are almost exclusively heroic narratives from the experiences of a recent war. Those who gain their sense of war from such films then expect that a subsequent war will unfold according to one of these heroic narratives, a brave native of their country in great battle against a foe whose defeat means that the chimes of freedom will now ring. That these narratives are made, and that we want them, is without question; yet with the wars launched years ago still on-going, no one now would be so cretinous to think that these heroic narratives come close to capturing the essence of what took place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For we not only take on the perspective of a character in a movie, it often gives us the opportunity to fulfill our own fantasies. Sometimes those fantasies involve intimacy with a beautiful lover, what it’s like to be obscenely wealthy, or: to kill someone who might serve as a convenient target for our anger. We are given, over and over this fantasy in The Fury, which we might accept without scrutiny, but which instead, I believe, we are intended to question. One of the major ones is a fulfillment of a revenge fantasy based around an event which we know to be false, the killing of Sandza by arab terrorists. Robin has been programmed by being forced to watch this event over and over again. We have in the carnival sequence an examination of the catharsis a movie death is supposed to provide: he is angered by the nuisances of his own life, jealousy over the lack of affection of a woman close to him, and then he moves this anger onto something both abstract and intimate, the arabs who he has seen, over and over, kill his father. He is given an ideal image of a target, saudi sheiks who are wealthy, clownish, entirely resembling each other, anonymous. He has the power to destroy at a distance, a power we ourselves might wish for our own revenge, and he exercises it. If it doesn’t give us the satisfaction of vengeance we might have in another movie, it is because we see clearly that our proxy for revenge here is a sociopath, that the inciting event is a manipulation, a lie – we cannot enter this vengeance fantasy, and we instead question the past times we have been given this same revenge plot.

The next involves Dr. Charles, and again, we have the possibilities of a satisfying revenge, but again, we are outside it. Dr. Charles has many of the qualities that would make her a villainous female marked for destruction in another movie: she is a variation on the taunting girl at Gillian’s school; beautiful, with a snooty british accent, sexually confident, but a little cold. She can have drinks with some male friends at a bar, and not care how it looks. She can describe a man’s performance in bed as, “he wants to please me”, adding “isn’t that the most important thing”, in a tone that suggests no, it isn’t. Yet despite these traits, despite the fact that she helps Childress, the entire performance is sympathetic, an ordinary female executive, tired and overwhelmed. Some have found the final violence done to her especially repulsive, and this misses the point: it is supposed to repulse us. We should not be able to watch this calmly, and marvel at its visual wit, or find satisfaction in her destruction, but be disturbed by it, just as we are repelled by Kate Miller’s death in Dressed to Kill: we question instead why movies so often give us this pattern, again, of a bitch nemesis destroyed. That the violence, again, is executed by the sociopath Robin only alienates us further.

It is around this time that the two polarities of good and evil in this movie converge at the estate, Sandza and Childress, Gillian and Robin. Before, whenever Sandza drove off in a motorboat, shot Childress in the arm, or went off a pier into the river, we assumed some brilliant tactical purpose was behind these works. Throughout the movie, Sandza has appeared impervious to death. Now, he goes to this heavily guarded estate without any prior plan whatsoever to get his son back – we assume once again he has some rationale for an utterly absurd move. Of course, that the hero acts in such a ridiculous manner and we must infer some genius from it is a staple of action movies. After Sandza is caught, then forced to retrieve his son, he ends up on the roof, his strength still that of heroic figure as he manages to hold onto the bulk of Peter with a single arm. His son, though, is now entirely lost to him, a complete lunatic who tries to kill his father. Sandza, whose whole quest was retrieving his child alive, ends up being the man who kills him. This man who seemingly cannot be killed by any man, gives himself the task, and dies by throwing himself off the roof.

After this death, Gillian and Robin lock eyes for the first, and only time, with Robin’s eye flaring up with light, and Gillian’s briefly burning as well, as if some vital essence is passed between them. There is something of great significance in this moment, just as the moment when Kate and Liz lock eyes is key to Dressed to Kill: it is never hinted at what passes between them, and we can only guess at it. There is the possibility that some power passes from one to the other, but it’s already been made clear that Gillian’s abilities are extraordinary, far greater than Robin’s. A transformation takes place in Gillian between this scene and the next, but I don’t think it has anything to do with what powers she has; instead, a malevolence passes from one to the other, and finally, Gillian becomes an effective weapon.

The last scene takes place in a woman’s bedroom, used often by De Palma as a setting for a woman changed into something else, a subtle, internal change.

In Femme Fatale, one woman takes over the role of another:

The bedroom in Sisters is where we realize with horror that Grace Collier has been successfully hypnotised into forgetting about a murder:

Dressed to Kill‘s Liz Blake, always a self-possessed woman despite trying circumstances, a sexually experienced and confident female, is finally very frightened, and wearing virginal white:

We open in this bedroom where Gillian has been asleep for a long time, the first shot not quite her, but her in a mirror. Prior to this, Gillian has always shown horror at what her powers can do, repelled by its effects, even when it hurts a school bully who has been taunting her. Now, as they say, things are different. Something has happened. Before, there was no place in this world for someone with such a destructive power who does not want to use it. Gillian, with her strange ability, has no idea where her place in the world is. She wants to meet Robin so he can show her what place there is for her in this world, and he, in the moment of light passing between them, has shown her. Where before we are given vengeance from which we were alienated, now, one is arranged through which we can finally take satisfaction. I have often wondered at the title of this movie: whose fury is it? I think I know now: it is our fury, the collected fury of the viewers, our private anger at so many things, for which we now get release. This movie which started in the maddeningly complex terrain of the middle east ends in a division that is entirely manichean. This, of course, is what is so often wanted from a movie, with whatever complex crisis is out there re-assembled into a match-up of good and evil. The villain is in black. Our heroine is in white. She, who never wished to use her powers for the most conscientious of reasons, now uses them with abandon, and it is what we want. The audience is indifferent to whether she is now a malevolent spirit like Robin. We want her to spill blood, and we want it now. She delivers for us gloriously, a sweet revenge we have been waiting for, with one of the great closing moments of any movie: “You go to hell.”

Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill, Or: Two Women

(This post contains spoilers for De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, Sisters, The Black Dahlia, Femme Fatale, Snake Eyes, and Body Double.)

A classic thriller and a quintessential De Palma film, it might be one of the most misunderstood movies of all time. Let’s go back to it being a classic thriller – it’s a movie where many elements of the genre are muted or dropped out entirely, so the director can concentrate on those things that interest him. Great emphasis is placed on other elements not for the purpose of making the movie a more stripped down, steroidal horror machine but to examine what the audience wants from movies, especially horror movies, and especially what men want from movies. It would be a little like if Beat The Devil, A Bout Du Souffle, or Shoot The Piano Player were named as classic crime movies – yeah, sure, but: they do not simply play out the old forms, but look only at what’s of interest to them, and sometimes viciously mock what’s there.

A movie, like almost all of De Palma’s work, dogged by charges of misogyny. This, again, as in all of De Palma’s work, is a misunderstanding. It is a movie whose center is two women and how they approach sex, and both are portrayed in a better light than any of the men around them, who are all weak, ridiculous, lecherous, and manipulative. The humiliations and, finally, butchery, endured by Kate Miller isn’t sadism that we are supposed to feel gleeful about, but something felt viscerally, where we simply cannot say, “it’s only a movie”. The aesthetics of the elevator death scene are brilliant, but I can never watch it and see the aesthetics alone; the death of Kate Miller I feel more keenly than just about anything in horror movies. That the violence is so truly felt, that it is not simply bravura editing and cinematography is what causes people to label this as sado-pornography when it is entirely its opposite – giving the viewer what they have asked for, but making the violence so difficult to watch that the audience is forced to ask: why did I want this in the first place?

THE WOMAN IN WHITE, THE WOMAN IN BLACK

I search for a way to begin writing about this film, and I pick as a possible beginning a recurrent theme in De Palma’s films which is so obvious it has no doubt been spoken of by others, but which is still insufficiently discussed – a theme of far greater importance than say, his occasional riffs on Hitchcock and others. Again and again in De Palma’s films, the women are color coded, one in white, one in black, with the obvious associations – the white of good and purity, the black of evil and carnality – and always these color codes are then mussed up. The woman in black is in fact the hero; the woman in white wears white just as a disguise; the woman in white is actually the woman in black. It is possibly the work of a man well-versed in catholic ideas of good women and bad women, virgins and whores, ideas still common in society now, who then employs these ideas only to ridicule them. You, the viewer, want the woman in white to be the woman in black. Or: you, the viewer, can no longer tell one from the other.

A non-thorough overview is easy. The good sister in Sisters wears white.

Of small, but significant note – raised in a convent, this woman in white also wears a cross:

The bad sister is in black:

Both sisters, of couse, are the same woman.

In Femme Fatale, the femme fatale wears black in the opening:

Then returns, in disguise, in white:

But she is still the woman in black:

At the end, she is perhaps both, a woman with a white outfit and black bra, or perhaps she will always be the femme fatale, the woman in black:

The color theme of Femme, as well as its other themes are talked about here.

In The Black Dahlia, we have the ostensible villain, Madeleine Linscott, who dresses in black:

The good wife, Kay Lake, who dresses in white:

I think, however, it is Madeleine who is the real hero. She is the one who has a modern woman’s comfort with her sexuality, she who does what she wants, who sleeps with who she wants, and who fights back when others strike against her family. Kay is one of the movie’s villains, a manipulative woman who tries to arrange circumstances whereby her husband will be killed. The two women are marked by colors which in some ways are true – Madeleine is the more carnal of the two – but otherwise are reversed: good is evil, black is white. A full discussion of the movie, including this theme, is here.

In Snake Eyes, Julia Costello, arrives in an ironic disguise – a blonde wig and a low-cut white outfit. Ironic because it is a disguise which in fact reveals who she truely is – a pure-hearted do-gooder, almost of a by-gone age. This all goes against the sensual revealingness of the outfit, but this revealingness actually reveals nothing, reveals something false – this woman isn’t a sensual figure, is almost an asexual figure of the movie, a crusader on something like a holy mission:

When she must try to evade those looking to kill her, she dresses in a black shirt, and now she plays a carnal figure to survive:

Throughout, however, whatever clothes she wears, she remains constant, the same woman, a virtuous fighter, the only true hero of the film. Discussion of the movie, including this, can be found here.

Body Double, where the hero becomes obsessed with a wealthy woman in white:

Only to find out that the woman he is infatuated with is another woman altogether, a woman in black, porn star Holly Body:

This continues with Dressed To Kill, and is central to how the two women act. Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is a woman who craves the physical satisfaction of good sex, not necessarily sex without affection, but the satiation of lust, rather than the comfort of affection. She is, however, not expected to have such appetites – a married, decent woman, a figure of purity who wears white throughout:

Her opposite, Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), is a young woman who works as a prostitute and is very comfortable with sex. She carries no degrading marks that might label her as an escort – no slow-mindedness, no cruelty, no venereal scars, no slothfulness or slobbishness. She’s an attractive, streetwise woman of New York City who happens to get paid for sex. She is the carnal woman, and in the final scenes of the main plot, she wears almost a twin of Miller’s coat, only in black:

The outfit underneath is all black as well:

GAME SHOWS, HORROR SHOWS, SEX SHOWS

The division between these two women is one possible start, a scene from an earlier De Palma movie might be another. I think you can make the same analysis of much of De Palma’s work without it, but the opening of Sisters, a fake game show, is a useful rosetta stone, embodying so many themes from his films in one small moment.

It is a show where both the audience and the players must anticipate the actions of a voyeuristic man when he has the opportunity to look at a beautiful woman take her clothes off. This game is constructed for our pleasure, just as a suspense movie is a different construction for the sating of our appetites. The ostensible purpose of the game is to determine the outcome, but it’s real, obvious purpose is for the audience to see this woman take off her clothes, as well as a secondary one, to provide us a judas goat, whose behaviour is even worse than us, who we might well label the degenerate, while we remain among the normal. We look at this woman taking off her clothes knowing that she is just an actor, and not actually blind, while the man observing her has no such knowledge – he is the pervert, not us.

There’s also a small, obvious racial game being played here, with the scapegoat here a mixed race man, the surrounding imagery itself making obvious associations – the bars like those of the bars of a prison or a zoo. He is the criminal, he is the animal, not us. The game is spoiled when this judas goat fails his simple duty, looking away as the woman undresses. The game show audience expects this man to keep looking – wants him to keep peeping, but they are proven wrong. We are then suddenly outside the game and instead in the thriller genre, and it too is subverted. The expected voyeur instead carries all the best qualities of men in gentleness, decorum, and virtue. The woman, a beautiful, harmless, slightly ditzy type, is a murderous lunatic. She takes him to her house, but it is she who is the sexually aggressive one, and it is not her life that is in danger, but his.

This digression leads to Dressed To Kill, which is about the arrangements around which movies are constructed, to give the audience what they want, and then subverts that arrangement. Dressed is expected by its audience (as well as its producers and distributors) to provide the elements of the post-Psycho horror genre – thrills, gore, nudity – it does so, just not on the expected terms.

The movie’s opening might have one of the most effective scores ever written – a piece of simple, slow, building ecstasy that somehow never ends, but feels like it could mount infinitely. Its nature suggests, of course, the prelude to orgasm, but there’s also something ominous in what is in its absence, nothing dull or hard or everyday, like a narcotic that is such a crystalline world of gold light where you know the crash will be painful, or a spotless surface whose gleam must take a stain. When “Dressed To Kill”, in hard white, comes up, the contrast between the cold implications of the words on the card and the swoony music playing over it might be one of the best laughs the simple appearance of a movie’s title could ever produce.

With the opening scene, we get the start of the horror movie’s arrangements. We move closer and closer as a woman showers for us, giving us what we want, this naked woman. It is a woman’s fantasy, a body of youth, but the male viewer’s as well: women with bodies infinitely ripe. This is not, however, a fantasy for the character to have for herself, but for her to have for our purposes. Her pleasure might be entirely inward, but the faces she makes are outward, exhibitionistic, come-hither looks unseen by her husband through the glass, but seen by us, her looking out at the viewer.

This, then, is not entirely her fantasy, but ours as well. A man watching the movie might look at Kate’s husband, and think “I’m better looking than that guy. In better shape. Definitely much younger. If she can get excited over him, she’d most definitely get excited over me.” A man might think that, might think – if only I were there she would welcome me, and suddenly, we, the men watching this movie, thinking we could well have this woman, are there, as a handsome, much younger man shows up, and the movie makes its first slight change in the arrangement:

This is a horror movie with a shower scene, so we expect nudity, and we, expect, after Psycho, that there will be horror. We are given what we want, but: we are the horror, we are the intruders into this woman’s fantasy, and she doesn’t want us there at all. There is then a cut to Kate’s bedroom where her husband diligently, unfeelingly fucks her while she feigns pleasure. Where Kate before made exhibitionist poses for our satisfaction, she now groans for her husband – one piece of exhibitionism for the audience, now one for her mate, both for others, not for her.

I’ll talk about her son Peter later on, so I skip the scene between them, and go to the scene with her psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Robert’s female double is Bobbi, and he spells his last name with double ls and double ts. Elliott, aside from his double, is easily the most sympathetic male character in the movie, cerebral, understanding, and kind. He is very much Kate’s sexual ideal, a handsome older man who is a successful professional. Elliott serves as a happy proxy for the audience, a good-looking success sexually desired by this woman. However, he also serves as a criticism of what the audience wants, nothing so complex as love or the depths of mutual desire, but the satisfaction of fantasies, with sex beginning and ending with the woman exposed, nude. This woman desires him, and he desires her back, but any time he has an erection, it triggers the presence of his counter identity, Bobbi, who wants to destroy this woman who makes him feel such lust – and whenever he has these mixture of feelings, he looks into a mirror, contemplating what he is.

There are many things contained in this dual identity, but I don’t think the movie has anything to do with transexuality. We might instead see Bobbi as a puritanical maternal spirit, that destroys those women which step out of sexual bounds. So, the duality of importance to this movie is not of gender, but of that between the sane, scientific attitude toward sex, and a severe, lunatic one which brings the knife down whenever sex breaks out. The movie places puritans on the side of this lunatic, but it also makes clear that a horror movie’s mechanics are driven by puritanism as well – the woman who sleeps outside of marriage or with too many men endangers herself. Elliott serves also as the judas goat mentioned earlier – we, the audience, may have come to see a movie where women get naked and are then killed, but we are normal; it is this cross-dressing freak, who murders because he cross-dresses, this alien strange thing, who is the perverse, not us. That Elliott is made into a villain, into a grotesque, is what movies demand of such a character as well – he is the intellectual, the sensitive one, the member of the elite, the one who soundly refuses to violate his patients’ privacy, who looks at sex in a calm, rational fashion – that is the opposition, even now, of many. All these same qualities are also in opposition to the sensationalist ethos of the movie, and for that, he must be made the enemy and destroyed – this is not, however, done blindly, but done so that the discerning viewer might question what takes place, here and in other films.

There may also be something in this character that is a self-indictment by the director; in The Black Dahlia, De Palma played a seedy director harassing and belittling a woman for the benefit of the audience, and that might be thought of as a self-examination by a man accused (wrongly, I think) of complying with the desire of spectators to see women humiliated and destroyed. Just as this doctor plays the role of a woman, this movie centering around two women, requires the writer-director to take on the part of a woman, to look through her eyes – and the director can only wonder if he has pulled it off, or are his women characters simply men in drag, ludicrous creatures like Bobbi? Finally, the director is compelled to kill these women off not out of impulses of his own, but the bloodlust of the audience, just as Elliott is forced, out of control, to shift into a killer. We can extend this idea of a self-portrait further: the director sees himself as a clinician, a man seriously interested in the psychology of these characters, a type of psychiatrist, but the audience has come for blood, for garish tabloidy transvestite tales, and so he is then forced into this other part.

There are many things to be found in the strange twins of this doctor and the tall blonde; these may have been some of them.

PICTURES AT THE EXHIBITION, OR: THE MUSEUM SEQUENCE

What follows might be the film’s best scene, certainly its most justly famous, a lengthy piece where we get a very intimate sense of Kate Miller – all without dialogue. By the time Kate leaves the picture, we think we know her well – not in terms of the mundane specifics that movies too often dwell on, such as age, occupation, birthplace, but some central substance of who this woman is, making her death, and the pain of her death, keenly felt. Re-watching the movie will shock the viewer at how few lines Kate has – there is the dialogue in the brief scene with her son, the dialogue with her psychiatrist, and that’s it. Movies are images over all else, and the director makes this case as forcefully as he ever has, right here. That it all works is a tribute to the director, but also the actress, who is able to convey so much of this woman through small, delicate expressions. A side note: the museum is ostensibly New York’s Met – it was, in fact, filmed at the museum of Philadelphia, a place where another notable director spent some time relaxing during his hard days in that hard city.

The sequence opens with the statue of Diana by Saint-Guadens, a very apt one for a woman who is both hunting and hunted.

She sits down at a bench, passing the time, looks up at a painting: “West Interior”, by Alex Katz.

This is a movie where Elliott looks again and again at mirrors contemplating himself, and now Kate does something of the same, a woman of a certain age looking at a painting of a woman of a certain age that seems to be looking back, contemplating her.

She glances about, and sees different phases of her own life – a young girl dealing with flirtatious, handsy boys.

A man blatantly trying to pick up a woman a room over.

“Does anyone actually fall for that crap? Yes, of course. I have.”

The boy getting handsy with the girl again. He keeps sliding his hand, she keeps pulling it back up. She’s annoyed – but not that annoyed.

“God, I remember how annoying that was – boys trying to get their hands all over you.”

“I wish someone was trying to now.”

Another contemplative look at “West Interior” – well, this is who I am, this is how old I am, now.

An attempt to distract oneself from these thoughts, the arrangements needed for dinner tonight.

But this is just another harsh reminder of the husband she doesn’t want to see tonight. She looks up at another painting, “Reclining Nude” by Tom Palmore.

This sleepy ape reminds her, of course, of her husband. She goes back to looking about the museum.

Memories of being a mother with a young, mischievous child. All that time spent taking care of your kid, no longer just you and your husband.

She turns back to the picture of the gorilla. “Well, now you have all the time you want to spend with him…too bad.”

“Nuts”, not just for dinner, of course, but an expression of great exasperation at it all. We now expect the focus to move to Kate after writing this, something humorous, where we’ll both laugh at life’s small annoyances, but we get something different.

The scene gives us a first close-up, which we don’t expect, and there is nothing light in her expression – this lack of something physically satisfying, something that makes her feel beautiful and wanted, this isn’t a small burden, but cuts deep into her. She looks up, unable to keep thinking about this.

“Let’s try again, and not keep focusing on this.”

But there it is again – “Pick up turkey” – is this the bird, or her husband?

Another intimate close-up:

In the first shot of this sequence where we are behind the bench, we see the runaway child run from left to right, our focus on her, but it will be shifted now to a new entrant, the mystery lover, who sits down, after the child leaves the frame.

The mystery lover sits down. He is very close in physical type and look to her husband; she is not looking for something different from who she’s married to, a younger man over an older man, a bohemian type over a professional, but a sexually satisfying variation of the man she’s married to. There is another part of this game that is very familiar with a movie sexually pursuing women, but feels slightly off-kilter because it is so new here: the conquest, behind his dark glasses, remains without anything like a character, like so many female conquests in movies focusing on a man seeking them out.

Daringly, she looks over at him, but he doesn’t look back.

Her feet tap impatiently as she waits for him to look over at her. She looks over at him again.

He turns to her, she smiles in turn, but he looks at her without expression, then turns back, she is humiliated: rejected.

She folds her legs, showing them off: “well, mister, you could have had these, and now you won’t.” The white of her clothes is important, and so is the fact that she wears gloves – she lacks the easy familiarity with the sensual that Liz has. Now, she takes one of them off – “you could have felt these hands touch you, but now you never will.”

The sequence and the next is full of gestures where she accidentally does something which betrays some subconscious urge. She shows off her ring, revealing that she’s married. Why does she want to do this? There are many possibilities, none mutually exclusive: that she feels some hesitation and does not want to actually go through with this, that she wants to test this man to see how badly he wants her – if he’s willing to break this bond to have her, that he sees the diamond and knows how much she’s worth to another man and how hard he should work for her.

He expects him to at least sneak a look over at her attractions, but, no, he gets up and walks away.

She is astonished, so surprised she drops her glove and doesn’t notice. Again, another possible subconscious gesture – she wants to be lost and rescued by this man. She gets up and begins looking for him.

Yes, women actually fall for that crap. Suddenly, she comes upon him, and: he’s been waiting for her all along, knowing that she’d follow him. He gives a friendly nod of the head.

She is embarrassed, sheepish, to be caught chasing him like that. She darts away, then catches herself: this is ridiculous. So, I want this guy? What’s the shame in that?

She turns, but he has disappeared. She now gives up again. He picks up the glove.

She is looking at a sculpture when he taps her on the shoulder with her glove, and she’s now scared off again. She wants this, she wants his boldness, but she wants to be ready for his boldness, and this catches her by surprise. She moves away before realizing the gallant quality in this gesture – he was returning her glove just as she wanted.

She tries to forget all this nonsense, and looks through the museum map for another exhibit – she notices the missing glove. When she goes to the bench to retrieve it, she realizes the kindness of his gesture.

She goes searching for him again, uncaring this time of how it looks, but again, he has disappeared.

“Well, that could have been a fun time.” She throws away the remaining glove – her hands are now naked, exposed to the air. This adventure has not deterred her, but made her bolder to seek one out. She then sees the mystery man in a cab.

A note that Kate’s gloves can be likened to personal objects in a magic ritual, where possession of such an object gives one power over the owner. This mystery man now waves one glove and is able to pull her towards his cab, as if she’s under a spell. Bobbi, who we see briefly as the camera moves over to the cab,

now takes possession of the other one:

This glove also carries a magic for Bobbi: she is able to trace exactly where Kate goes. She even seems to know that Kate will return to the mystery man’s apartment when she forgets her ring there. This goes with other plot dynamics, where Bobbi is an instrument of what the plot needs to happen, of what the audience wants to happen, but it fits well with the idea that Kate is embodied in these objects, that when she loses them, she wants to lose part of herself, and that those that possess them do not simply possess the object, but possess part of Kate as well.

She is pulled down by this man into the cab, and she does not mind this boldness now, she expects it, she trusts it, she wants it. Her passion is overwhelming; the taxi driver peeks at her and she doesn’t mind, the hellish traffic of New York, who cares? This is what she’s wanted for so long, and now she finally has it.

The moment before they enter his building has always been cryptic to me – she feels a moment of hesitation, a sense of dread, that’s made greater when she spots this moving truck, a truck that plays no part in the movie earlier or later. My only guess is this: Dressed, a movie that very obviously deals with the intricacies of the horror form itself, even if it doesn’t do so as explicitly as something like Scream, is perhaps making a reference to these mechanics: the trucks are there, moving to strike the set, change the scene, and this character senses that her part will soon be over, and maybe even how she’ll leave.

A TIME TO KILL

We move immediately to the aftermath of their time together, briefly seeing this woman’s nude body outside of fantasy. It is not lit harshly, but sympathetically in dark light, a beautiful woman’s body, but a beautiful older woman’s body as well – her time of ecstasy is over, and now she returns to the life she had.

We note that the house of this man is spotless white, another blurring of this division of white and black, because despite this clear, clean surface, the man of this house is diseased and deceptive. She tries to call her house to apologize to her son for missing their meeting, but hangs up when her husband picks up – she doesn’t want to speak to him now.

She is so possessed by what’s happened that she doesn’t realize that she’s forgotten her underwear – another subconscious desire, that she perhaps wants to lose herself entirely to this passion, that she never wants to return to her old life.

She puts on her gold bracelets and it is obviously a hard, painful gesture, like someone putting chains back on.

The closest that this man comes to an identity – Warren Lockman.

The name may be coincidental, but for me it carries the quality of the gender reversal here in conquerors and conquests. We associate locks with women, and men with keys, the metaphors for genitalia, and I associate a warren with an animal shelter, a home, something domestic – the male here plays the usual female role of throwaway fling. Kate looks with some pride on the card – “Wall Street Athletic Club” – she did pretty good this time.

Though there’s been an incredible amount of economy in this sequence, a great deal of time is now devoted to what note Kate will now write – a gesture that would be given little or no importance if the genders were reversed, but one of crucial weight here. She tries first with “I loved the afternoon. Maybe we’ll meet again.”, then changes it to: “I loved our afternoon.” The afternoon is now possessive, it didn’t come upon them, but was due to their mutual effort. She does not want to hold out hope of another meeting with this man, were she to expect such a thing and he would turn her down, it would destroy what took place today. Anyway, anything that came after today would be less spontaneous, could never match what happened just now, and would only diminish what happened. Better to remain satisfied with just this.

She leaves the note, and then, of course, what follows is the cruel surprise well-known to those who have seen the movie.

It should be noted that what happens here, and what happens after to Kate are the traditional cinematic punishments for women who stray from marriage. You sleep with a strange man, you get a disease. You sleep with another man, you die. Some see this as sadism, with De Palma enacting these penalties on this decent women. He does, I think, the exact opposite. He creates an incredibly sympathetic character, a woman who does nothing wrong, who contains no malice, who sleeps with this man out of a simple, honest hunger, and then, by humiliating her and killing her in the manner with which every movie past has dealt with these transgressions, he points to the ridiculousness of this moral system: that every woman who sleeps outside of marriage is a bitch, a sacrificial lamb, whose blood can be spilled in artful patterns for our enjoyment.

Kate rushes out of the apartment, and goes down in the elevator. The camera moves past her and we see Bobbi hiding behind a door, bathed in sinister red light.

Kate gets into the elevator before realizing that she’s left her ring – another subconscious urge, of wanting to leave her old life entirely. She now must return to the apartment and get it, but here is a question: if Bobbi followed Kate to kill her, how is it that she knows that Kate will now return to this floor? We see no indication that Bobbi moves from the floor at all, or makes any effort to go down after Kate – it is as if Bobbi knows that she will return. There is the fact, already discussed, of the almost mystic properties of her possessions, but I think there’s something else, another way that the movie acknowledges the mechanics of the horror movie. This woman must die now, it’s inevitable, because her transgression is a mortal one, so it doesn’t matter where she travels to – she must return to this space so Bobbi may kill her.

On the way down, a woman and her child board the elevator, the child giving Kate an unsettling, unwavering stare. This stare, I think embodies all those who judge Kate harshly, or justify their voyeurism on the basis of the misdeed of the viewed, entirely indifferent to what the anguish this woman feels now – the stare of this child is disturbing, but it is not precocious. There is something cretinous and unseeing in it, even as it stares on and on, so for a moment we’re unsure whether the girl is blind or not.

These two leave, the elevator ascends, and Bobbi enters.

A detail that I think is key here, is the way Kate’s eyes remain focused on the blade and never look anywhere else. It is a steel blade providing a reflection – just as Elliott looks into mirrors contemplating himself, Bobbi forces her victim to look at herself and make her reflect on what she’s done. This blade is very much an instrument of vengeance, confronting the victim with their guilt before they are killed – and what is Kate guilty of? Breaking her marriage vows.

A note: that Kate’s sleeping with this man invites her death is explicitly stated by detective Marino later on; that Kate, in fact, does not want to sate some physical lust, but actually wants to die, because her act is so morally dangerous:

MARINO
Was she looking to get killed?

ELLIOTT
You mean was she suicidal?

MARINO
Yeah.

ELLIOTT
No.

MARINO
No? So why did she pick up this Lockman character, huh? He could’ve been a killer.

ELLIOTT
But he wasn’t.

MARINO
Yeah, but the next guy might’ve been. You know, if at first you don’t succeed…

ELLIOTT
You think she wanted to get killed?

MARINO
Don’t you? Hmmmm? Look, we got some hot pants broad cruising around for some action? That guy she picked up went down on her in the cab, for christ’s sake. I got a blow by blow description from the cabbie, huh. After she finishes with him, she comes on to some weirdo in the elevator? Hey, there’s all kinds of ways to get killed in this city: if you’re looking for it.

Now the second woman, Liz Blake, enters the movie. She has just seen a client and waits for the elevator to arrive. The link between these two women, both dealing with sex in very different ways, is made. Kate looks out and meets Liz’s eyes. Note: in this supposedly misogynistic movie, it is Liz’s client who scurries away in fear, while she’s held fast and tries to help the woman. The connection between these two women is made as they lock eyes:

The two women almost almost touch: Kate desperately reaches out her hand, while Liz reaches her hand out in turn, but before their hands meet, the door closes.

Another note: where Kate is transfixed by the image in the knife, the guilt felt over the sex that took place, Liz feels no such thing. The knife passes before her eyes, the light flashes, and rather than focusing on it, she looks away and above to the mirror, clearly seeing Bobbi.

After the doors close, she picks up the knife, and the crime of this murder is placed on her – she is a woman who freely has sex, so she must be guilty of something, and even if she is guilty of nothing, this wantonness destroys any legal protections she has.

This sequence ends with Bobbi escaping, and the elevator doors slamming shut over and over again, on Kate’s arm. It calls to mind the numb drilling of her husband, but, for me, it implies again that this character is simply an element in the horror machine, her hurt and her death created for our pleasure, this machine as entirely indifferent to her as this thudding door is to her tender body – the unexpected element, the humanity given her, that so few characters in horror possess, causing us to recoil from what happens to her, and question our own appetites.

THE LACKNESSES

It is in this middle section of Dressed that the strangeness of its structure really comes through – why I liken it to french new wave movies concentrating on some noir elements, while abandoning so much of noir itself. The most prominent example I can think of is this: both Warren Lockman and Kate’s husband would be given some time now in a more traditional thriller – instead they disappear altogether. This is a movie about women’s desires, and these men are only important as they relate to her desire. With her life extinguished, they now vanish. It might also give more focus to the investigation, narrowing down various suspects, one by one, the way one might in a police procedural or an Agatha Christie. Instead the focus remains almost entirely on Liz, with a few moments of Peter’s detective work thrown in. The various scenes in the middle all serve the movie’s purpose of women and sexuality, though they might seem jarring to those expecting the traditional rhythms of a suspense picture.

We have lengthy interrogations of both Elliott and Liz. What’s interesting is the way Marino, with his indifference to the privacy of doctor’s patients and his bullying of the prostitute, is on the side of the viewer in achieving the viewer’s ends: to find out who the killer is. Kay’s sense of dignity and Elliott’s propriety are the proper stance, and yet we are in opposition to them. It is these same principles that are opposed to the voyeurism that the movie grants us, where nothing is private, where the plot manipulates and moves women around for our pleasure – the film makes clear that the very pleasures we demand from this film and others like it, is antithetical to those ideals we value highly outside this movie.

There follows a scene that might seem unusual given the incredible economy with which the movie tells the rest of its story, a phone call between Liz and her procurer over the name of her client. I think the importance of this moment lies in the utter asymmetry of Liz’s position – she is granted no privacy at all, either by the police, or even by us at the end, in the bathroom, while her client is given full protection, with her agency head unwilling to give out the name to the woman who’d had sex with him.

There is a split screen sequence where we see both Elliott and Liz at their respective homes. A virgin viewer gets one of many hints that all is not as it seems with Elliott – if he is married, and it is a weeknight, why is his wife absent without a hint of where she might be? Elliott often breaks away from the action to look at a mirror – in the session with Kate, the session with Liz, when he first hears of Kate’s murder – and we now see him watching a talk show episode about transsexuals, the TV flanked by mirrors – he, as a man wanting to transition genders, watching this TV show is a little like Kate looking at “West Interior”, contemplating oneself while looking at someone very much like oneself.

While this takes place, Liz sets up another client on one phone while arranging a stock deal with another, again establishing Liz not as someone who is prostitute due to stupidity or psychological dysfunction, but simple practical sense – sometimes sex is great, sometimes it’s lousy, but it’s not something she’ll ever feel guilty over. There is also, I think, a clever joke being made here, for it is on the phone colored black, the color of inferno and damnation, that the stock deal is transacted, and on the phone colored white, the color of purity and sanctity, that the sex deal is conducted: the sort of gag a post-catholic post-marxist might make.

She finishes her phone call and puts on make-up for her date in front of a mirror; Kate and Elliott look at mirrors and pictures for purposes of contemplation about their sexual issues, while for Liz, the mirror has only utility – you put make-up on. Her use of the mirror is analogous to her attitude towards sex: sex is sex, nothing to get hung up over.

After meeting with her client, Liz is chased, first by the undercover police officer, then by Bobbi. That these two are interchangeable, points, I think, to the movie taking apart what is the focus of any horror movie – placing a woman in a state of fear, the actual circumstances which incite this state of no consequence. In a movie where the men are almost entirely malicious, deceptive, weak, or manipulative, the cabdriver is not without his good qualities, but: he is self-impressed, despite not doing much, and his heroic achievement, stopping the woman chasing Liz, doesn’t actually deter a potential killer, but instead, stops the very woman who might protect Liz.

The stock racial types on the subway serve a similar purpose as Elliott – a judas that allows us, those who have turned on this movie to watch women get naked and killed, the comfort that we are not them. They are cartoonishly ridiculous sexual predators – within seconds they want to rape this woman in a public place.

HOOD #1
Hey lady, what you looking for?

LIZ
A train. They still stop here, don’t they?

HOOD #1
Yeah, yeah. They stop here. They stop down there too.

LIZ
Am I bothering you?

HOOD #1
Nah, you ain’t bothering me.

LIZ
Good.

HOOD #2
But you’re bothering me.

HOOD #1
She’s bothering you, Sonny?

HOOD #2
Yeah, that’s right, this bitch is bothering me.

HOOD #1
What are you gonna do?

HOOD #2
I’m gonna break her fucking ass.

HOOD #1
Why break it when we can fuck it first, huh?

The music from their boom box may or may not be intended for comic effect.

There may be some aspect of examining racial anxieties here, but for me, the overwhelming theme is assigning a character who can be considered alien, not the audience, and making them the more sexually perverse. This is done with these black men, but also with the british Elliott. A later example of this can be found in Body Double where the voyeur is mirrored by a man, “the Indian”, who watches alongside as a neighbor strips.

Later, when he stalks her through a mall, this same man follows his motions.

A detective interrogating the voyeur, refers to “the Indian” as “your blood brother”. In this dialogue, the voyeur is accused of being an equally guilty party as “the Indian”, but he then redeems himself by cracking the case and discovering the real murder – we and the hero are both voyeurs, but we know that we contain heroic virtue, while this other man, this alien man, “the Indian” carries only villainy.

DETECTIVE MCLEAN
As far as I’m concerned, you’re the real reason Gloria Revelle got murdered. If you hadn’t been so busy getting off by peeping on her, if you had called the police about your blood brother, the Indian, Gloria Revelle would still be alive.

Pauline Kael, said of Double that it had one of the worst make-up jobs in recent memory in this character. That, I think, somewhat misses the point – the make-up is supposed to look artificial, primarily for the surreal feeling that the voyeur, who acts in an exploitation movie, suddenly finds himself living in an actual cheap cable horror movie. The other reason for this obviously ersatz disguise ties into this point of a double that is not us, not an actual native american, or anyone who looks anything like one, but a vision of horror, someone on whom one can assign blame, someone who is the animal and who cannot be us. In another time, this might have been someone of a different race, now perhaps it would be an arab, muslim, or anything else that movies conveniently use to distinguish (the majority) of the audience from those outside it.

The middle sequence ends with Peter and Liz joining forces to get the name of Elliott’s last patient, who they believe is Kate’s killer. This leads to the final sequence, and its dream aftermath. A few other notes before I get to that.

THE OFFICER IS IN CHARGE

I’m never quite sure how contemptible I’m supposed to find officer Marino – he works in the interest of the audience to have this case resolved, while acting entirely in opposition to the best liberal values. The privacy rights of Elliott’s patients are of no consequence; those who seek Elliott’s help are weirdos and deviants; he simplemindedly believes that Kate Miller’s lust is not a desire for life, but a desire for death. What keeps me from seeing him as loathsome is the skill of the actor playing him, Dennis Franz. In an interview with the A.V. Club, Dabney Coleman speaks of actors like Henry Fonda who have an unschooled ease at doing their work; Franz hints at something of the same, a man who can hit his marks as easily as others breathe.

There is another, crucial, way in which Marino serves the audience – it is he who forces Liz, threatening her with jail, to get the records from the doctor’s office any way she can. This leads to Liz seducing the doctor, undressing down to her bra and undies, in order to distract him while she looks for the patient that might be Bobbi. In this way, Marino is something like a pimp, and, appropriately, he dresses something like a pimp as well – gold chains, a tacky wide lapel shirt, and a short leather jacket.

In Blow Out, the two actors playing Marino and Liz, Franz and Allen, would have parts with this same relation, explicitly: Allen would be a part-time prostitute, and Franz would be her pimp.

A DIGRESSION: IT’S ALL IN HOW YOU SAY IT

One of my favorite scenes in the movie, and a moment which I love for the way it’s written, as Marino moves from playful to angry, while Liz goes from demure ingenue to sophisticated lady in the bat of a lash. The scene’s effectiveness lies equally with the talents of two great actors, Nancy Allen and Dennis Franz, who are able to take the now banal two words of the near ending, and work magic with them.

MARINO
Tell me: how did you happen to be in that building that Ms. Miller was killed in?

LIZ
I was visiting a friend.

MARINO
And who was that?

LIZ
Well, it’s sort of embarrassing, I’d really rather not say.

MARINO
Why?

LIZ
He’s married.

MARINO
Woah! What kind of building is this? Everybody’s getting laid, after lunch.

LIZ
Well…I didn’t say I was getting laid…to use your expression.

MARINO
What’s the matter, huh? I’m a little crude for you, huh?

LIZ
That’s right.

MARINO tosses down his cigar.

MARINO
Ah, look, Ms. Blake, let’s cut this shit. I got all the dope on you right here.

Marino opens a folder and moves his chair towards her.

MARINO
Uh, does this look familiar, huh? Let me see here. March fifth, charged: disorderly conduct. Solicitation for the purpose of prostitution.

LIZ’s demeanour suddenly becomes much less prissy. She takes a cigarette out of her purse and lights it up.

MARINO
Arresting officer Durham, apprehended at the Park Avenue Hotel…oooooooooh, classy arrest.

LIZ (faux sweetly)
Thank you.

MARINO
Let’s face it, you’re a whore. A Park Avenue whore, but you’re still a whore. Now. Who’re you fucking?

LIZ moves a little forward to say the next line.

LIZ
Fuck you.

MARINO
No! Fuck you!

FOREVER BOY

In a movie where almost all the characters are defined by their attitudes towards sex – Kate’s guilt over it, Liz’s practical approach, Marino’s contemptful attitude toward the prostitute, Elliott’s conflicts – there is the notable absence of anything like it in Kate Miller’s son, Peter (Keith Gordon). He is a teenager in high school, not that far off in years from Liz (Allen, four years before Dressed, played a high school student in Carrie), so we expect him to be hormonal, with an attraction, even if supressed by shyness, towards this woman he spends so much time with – yet there is nothing, their relationship is that of siblings, unconflicted by sex. When Liz has a few double entendre lines with him,

LIZ
Well, your friend’s covering you for you tonight, right? Well, I’m your friend too. I’ll be the best cover you ever had.

PETER
Look, Liz, uh: I gotta go home and get to work.

LIZ
I’m gonna miss having you on my tail.

they are funny because the double sense seems to go unheard by both – he feels nothing like desire for this woman, and she does not conceive of him forming any for her. During the final scene in the doctor’s office, full of erotic tension as Liz tells dirty stories and takes off her clothes, Peter is outside in the rain, hearing none of it, barely able to see anything – where before he was distinguished by being able to hear and see so much more than other characters through his electronic equipment.

Peter feels like a new type, not simply someone obsessed with computers, but a man with no connection to the sensual world, a boy who exists entirely in a world of numbers and data. No doubt such a type existed before our new industrial era – but the conditions of our era, in which a disconnect from the sensual is no impediment but might even be helpful in existing and thriving in this ethereal numeric world, has perhaps encouraged their number, and where before they may have been exiled to the dusty corners of this life, they are now given wealth and prominence – it is no difficulty to imagine Peter Miller a few years after this movie as a man made very wealthy through some software he wrote.

“You go back to playing with your Peter,” says Kate, the last thing she says to her son. Peter’s extension is mechanical, his self-involvement entirely computational. Kate’s masturbation pushes her out into the world to find something that might equal her fantasies; Peter re-makes the world into engineering problems, whether they be transsexuality or solving his mother’s murder – another absence in the film: no time is spent on the child dwelling on the sexual life of the mother, some of which he hears about at the police station. It is not something kept under a lid, but something not there at all. There is, unsettlingly, nothing unfinished about Peter – this is not a young man whose sexuality will eventually mature, but one without any sexual sense at all. If one imagines the eventual Peter Miller who might become a software titan, one imagines entirely the same man – someone self-possessed, determined, very intelligent, with no interest or urges in the sexual world – a kind of forever boy.

There may also be a small rebuke in this character, by De Palma, to his critics. This boy studiously notes the exit times of various patients, without noting any of the other details – the old man so angry he is barely able to close the gate, or the woman so upset she seems to be on the verge of tears, with only the numbers of consequence.

When I see this, I can only think of those writers who dutifully note the various influences in a De Palma scene, Vertigo, Rear Window, etc. a diligently collecting such data and nothing else, their reviews made up only of these notes, the write-ups missing entirely the color and life of his movies.

PUSSY CONTROL / STATE OF FEAR

The final sequences serve as mirroring bookends for the movie, with Liz at Elliott’s office, then Liz taking a shower in the very bathroom that opened the movie. Much of what takes place in Elliott’s office has already been discussed – how Marino acts almost as a pimp to force Liz into this position where she must take off her clothes in order to get what Marino wants; that while Peter is able to hear the clinical descriptions of sex given by Elliott in the interrogation room, he is now barely able to see or hear what takes place in the office, perhaps the most erotic scene of the movie. The over-the-top baroque lightning reinforces the idea tha this is a film which skews and salutes the form, much like a post-noir film with a scene where everyone might show up at a fog-filled meeting in a trenchcoat and a fedora, rather than being anything like a sincere, ingenuous take.

What’s given too little mention in this scene is the story Liz tells Elliott to turn him on, before she takes off her clothes:

LIZ
I have horrible nightmares.

ELLIOTT
What were they about?

LIZ
Well…I have to get a cigarette. I’m in this house I’ve never been too before, visiting a friend. He’s not there. I’m watching TV, and the doorbell rings. It’s a man. He’s big…dark. He says his car broke down and he needs to use the phone. I believe it and let him in, although I know something’s wrong. He closes the door, locks it, and takes out a razor. He says he’s not going to hurt me. Then he tells me, what he’s going to do to me. And how much I’m going to like it. All the time he’s talking, I can see the bulge in his pants. He orders me to strip. I do it, keeping one eye on the razor. He drops his pants, and forces me down…on my stomach. And he spreads my legs, kneels down behind me, and lifts the cold blade…forcing it…I’m sorry.

It contains many details of the later dream sequence, of being in a friend’s house alone and vulnerable. It’s entirely a fantasy of a woman being forced to take off her clothes and have sex under the threat of a weapon. This recurring nightmare is very much a rape fantasy and it’s unclear why she tells it to Elliott – there’s nothing to show that she suspects him of being Bobbi, or anything that might make her think that he gets off on violent sex. The only possibility I can think of is that this is a tweaking of what the male viewer expects from this movie – women, forced, outside of control, to take off their clothes, then at knife point, put into the same vulnerable position of a woman about to be raped. Why does she tell this story? Because she knows what turns men on, and she wants to turn them on: when she is well-paid for it, she can pretend to be the object they want.

LIZ
I’ve done most of the bad things you just read about.

ELLIOTT
Do you like doing these things?

LIZ
Sometimes.

ELLIOTT
What do you like doing about it?

LIZ
I like to turn men on. I must do a pretty good job because they pay me a lot.

Liz goes to search for the records. Elliott looks, for the final time, into a mirror. There is the tumult after he transforms into Bobbi, and in this movie so often accused of misogyny, it is female officer Betty Luce who takes down the villain. We learn after that Marino was manipulating Liz all along, and never believed she had anything to do with the murder. Liz and Peter have their conversation on transsexuality, one that is clinical, but also firmly establishes Elliott as something alien, and his obsessions not our own.

It is in the dream that this is all given a nasty twist, one directed entirely towards us. We find ourselves in an asylum, dark except for spooky blue light. A busty nurse in a short white outfit appears – like many of the women in a horror movie she seems there to incite a desire to see her nude, and her very outfit makes us expect that this will happen.

The nurse walks along the beds till she reaches Elliott’s, where she starts tucking his bed until she’s suddenly choked to death by the psychiatrist. Now, Elliott starts slowly, erotically to remove the nurse’s outfit, ostensibly for a disguise, but really: to have this woman unclothed.

In this movie where Elliott confronts his reflection, the men in the audience finally see themselves reflected – the camera rises up as a horde of men, in rows and rows just like in a movie theater, look down in eager anticipation as the doctor takes the nurse’s clothes off. They are howling, gibbering, primitive slobs, as much lunatic animals as the men who keep being cast as judas, and they are neither sane nor good, but in the very same asylum as Elliott.

We then move to the Millers’ house, where Liz takes her shower. The house’s exterior lights break out into the same sharp points as those of the asylum. We see Liz start her shower; the asylum scene ended in a bravura camera movement of the inmates looking down on the nurse being unclothed, and this scene begins with us, the audience, looking down on the woman in the shower.

Liz’s moves in the shower are, again, like those of Kate before her, exhibitionistic. This deeply practical woman now moves unnaturally, for the eyes of others, as if someone is watching her, and of course, we are.

She moves out of the shower, the blue light outside the window exactly like that of the asylum and she sights Bobbi’s shoes. Liz, who has dealt with a number of adversities as best she can, now moves to open the cabinet to get the razor, the very one Kate’s husband shaved with at the beginning. We are given the same clear information that Liz is given, that Bobbi is to Liz’s left, right outside the door. As the camera lifts up, we see the empty shoes and Bobbi reflected in the mirror, and we realize she’s inside the bathroom, but still to Liz’s left, against the towel cupboard.

We are now thinking as Liz might, about where Bobbi is in the room in relation to her, but: it doesn’t matter that Liz is more of a fighter than Kate, that she feels none of Kate’s guilt that she deserves this death, it doesn’t matter where Liz thinks Bobbi is, or where we think Bobbi is – this is a rigged game anyway. Just as Bobbi somehow knows that Kate must return in order to be killed, it doesn’t matter what Liz does here – the arm comes out of the medicine cabinet with the razor she was going to use, and slices her throat.

We see her wake up, and she is suddenly more afraid than she has ever been in this movie.

All the control she has ever had in the movie has gone, disappeared, in this dream of others, where she was under control of others, in order to go through the horror movie ritual of a sexually active young woman – to be seen naked and then killed off. She is so frightened that when Peter appears, she is afraid even of him, this harmless, soft boy. We notice another detail: just like Kate, Liz now finally wears white. Something in her has been tamed, reshaped, so she’ll be made less fearless and more in the control of others.

A last note: many compare the ending of this movie to Carrie‘s, but for me, it reminds me very much of the closing of Sisters. The intrepid reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) has been through a lot, and been reduced to something of the state of a girl, taken care of by her mother, resting in the bedroom she had as a child, surrounded by a girl’s playthings. She has throughout the movie shown a fervent quest for the truth, in particular the details of the murder near her house, and now, in the most disturbing moment of the film, we realize that she has somehow been re-formed permanently under hypnosis, that she carries no memory of the case, does not even realize she has lost the memory, or the ways she has been changed.

GRACE COLLIER
It was all a ridiculous mistake. There was no body, because there was no murder.

This character has been made into something else in ways she cannot fight, and she doesn’t even realize it.

Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes

(The title of this post gives whole credit, unjustly, to a great director for the entire creation of this movie; whatever agreements or disagreements I have with auteur theory, lack of creditation for David Koepp’s work as co-writer on the movie has been omitted in the heading for simple reasons of limited text space, rather than any intentional slight.)

A movie that may not fully work, but that has an underestimated density: if its hoof is to be given the damning tag of “failure”, it is a branded creature that I find more compelling than the movies other people enjoy so much, their enjoyment estranging me further from them. One might point to the bravura sequence of a staggeringly long near uninterrupted shot (there are a few discrete cuts), which is unbookended by any virtuoso piece at the end. We also might want a more direct confrontation between the hero and villain, like the shoot-out in Carlito’s Way, etc. Both of these, however, are a result of the movie’s deliberate intent, which is more subtle and intricate than might first be realized, an examination and re-examination of what the audience wants in such a movie. If there is one overriding theme, it is the distance between the inherent morality of divine vision, and the amorality of a vision that approximates the divine, our contemporary observational technology, that allows us to see near anywhere, yet carries no moral ideal, except that which we ourselves bring. The various surveillance and tracking equipment shown in this film, now nearly fifteen years old, is quaintly antique: yet no one would assert that the more deeply peering eyes of our time have made us better men and women, only that they may have given us one more tool of cruelty.

We open in the restricted frame of TV, a single camera, before finding ourselves shifting out and away to the larger scale of the movie, giving us a freedom of movement unlike anything of the stationary camera outside the stadium. There is a horrific, random storm outside, yet the audience has chosen for refuge the staged chaos inside. That it is staged is to be expected, what only changes is what chaos ends up being staged. It is the last fight at this arena, to be replaced by the Powell Millennium casino. Gilbert Powell (John Heard) has made his money in defense contracts for weapons, which gives him the money to build casinos. The merger of these two economies, state funded weapon building and get-rich circuses, are to be merged in the design of the new casino, a gambling den inside a missile:

Powell, of course, is the man behind two rigged games, the fixed missile test and the fixed fight which gives cover for the killing.

In the opening outside sequence, we are shown the poster for the fight, dominated entirely by the picture and name of the champion, Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw).

What gives this man his prominence is entirely his fighting skill, which is devastating: his nick is “the Executioner”. He has the strength of an epic hero, without any heroic ideals; despite misgivings, he is entirely a mercenary, first throwing the fight, then giving out a brutal beating to detective Ric Santoro (Nicolas Cage). The fight at the beginning mirrors what takes place in the film itself, and the fact of that the man on the poster is expected to be heroic is paralleled with Santoro’s character. Nicolas Cage is the man on the movie’s poster, so there is the expectation that he must be heroic, yet what we see of him for much of the movie is entirely the opposite. He is a corrupt cop, an infidelitous husband, a man who shakes down drug dealers, an expert in the pay-off and the cover-up, who without compunction helps his friend in covering up what takes place during the assassination. This is not to say he is not without sympathetic qualities, or that he is uncharismatic. The men and women of life, outside any dramatic structure, are of the same difficult mix, their best details not making the venality and callousness of the rapacious any less repellent. It is a simple question of how we choose to see this man who has been placed in this role, played by a movie star, who is expected to be a hero without being a hero at all. That he does perform a heroic act is not to be taken as expected or assumed, an action that is heroic not because it is performed by a man in a heroic role, but because of the action itself.

That the audience wants a clear division between heroes and villains is played on in one of the movie’s first lines, delivered enthusiastically and very well by Cage.

SANTORO
THERE HE IS!

This makes me think of a point in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which Donato Totaro’s “Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism” reminded me of: in theory, it should take a child no time at all to solve a picture puzzle because it has already been conceived before the puzzle has even been opened. Santoro can implicitly identify the villain for us already because a villain has already been decided for us. The flux of deeds which make any judgement of a life in progress a difficult task is avoided, and not wanted, in most entertainments, and we are given an evil adversary, pre-conceived.

That the actions of Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) are villainous is beyond dispute; that we are necessarily good because we are not this man is an open question. For we accept without difficulty that Santoro must be good, must be heroic, because he is the lead, played by a movie star, and we ignore all his cruelties. This is very much the way Dunne might be seen as well, and certainly how he sees himself: he must be good because he is a decorated Navy commander, because he has acted virtuously in the past. The very tautology an audience might make of any movie lead, that his actions must be heroic because he is a hero, might be made by Dunne. Yet where the audience grants this liberty because the character is played by a star, and due to his position in the narrative, Dunne believes this for substantial reasons: he has in fact performed heroic deeds, has no doubt saved the lives of many men and women. That he has done so does not prevent him from committing heinous acts as well.

So, this movie is about a conflict of two men, who are almost doubles of each other, best friends since their childhood in Atlantic City. The movie audience arrives to watch this pre-arranged conflict, just as the spectators come to the stadium to watch the fight. This is a movie full of characters who reflect each other, and the fighters, Lincoln Tyler and Jose Pacifico Ruiz, mirror Dunne and Santoro.

Tyler is an expert, efficient professional who has contempt for the show-boating of Ruiz. Tyler must be seen to lose this fight, a fight he can easily win, so he can achieve the larger goal of a pay-off. Ruiz must simply play the part he’s expected to, and Ruiz fails at that. He gets knocked out by an easy punch, and his own knock-out punch doesn’t connect. Dunne has contempt for showboater Santoro, looking upon him as corrupt and incompetent.

SANTORO
Why did it have to be me? Why’d you want me next to you?

DUNNE
One, I needed a cop to back up my alibi. Two, I knew you could be bought if anything went wrong. No offence, pal, but I never thought
you’d get as far as you did.

Dunne must appear to lose his own game, allowing the defense minister to be killed, for his own goal, the AirGuard system spared from defense cuts. Dunne fails to play his part as well, not because of any lack of skill, but because, for once, he acts virtuously.

Dunne and Santoro mirror each other as well. Though the movie opens with Santoro as a man with a flamboyant, ostentatious persona, this is only one aspect of the man. He changes from his gaudy, now blood spattered, shirt, into a more spare white one, then shifts into finding the girl and we see him as someone different. He is a corrupt cop, but also a diligent, cool-headed investigator, more of a kindred spirit to Dunne than the naval officer expects him to be. Where Santoro begins the movie in a guise of hopped up lunacy and moves to the firm devotion of an ideal, saving one woman’s life, Dunne is a man who holds to a particular code that becomes more and more lunatic as the film progresses, where any life can be expended for future lives saved.

I won’t go into the aesthetic details of the lead-up to the assassination and the assassination itself; suffice to say, it’s very well put together. I make the small note, possible overlooked, that the key members of the security detail are the ones involved in the conspiracy. The man with the beacon who Donne runs down for his lack of attention, and the man sitting right behind the secretary.

This is a movie about finding a moral vision equal to our colossal technical sight, and so it’s intended irony that the most heroic character whose moral compass remains unshaken throughout, is rendered near blind from the near beginning.

We arrive now at the issue of the momentum and pace of the movie, which slows down after this sequence. This, I believe, is not due to any lack of skill of the creators, but inherent in the structural constraints of their goals. The audience storms out of the arena to leave the arena, just as we, watching, expect to move on to another distraction.

But, no: the audience is kept inside, to be identified and questioned. The arena is now a crime scene. Rather than move on to more mayhem, we will be placed in stasis, forced to examine the very details of the sequence.

The rest of the movie now mostly takes place in what feels like the backstage of a theater, empty of the color and motion filling the assassination sequence, that scene now played over and over in the participants’ memories. The closest to spectacle are the moments in the casino and hotel, yet here the major players are now intruders. Where before they were enraptured by the fight, now they are indifferent to the frenzy of the gambling floor and the dionysian possibilities of a hotel suite, their focus only on the past, the killing in the arena.

A good place to continue this analysis is with the character of the whistle-blower. It is she, more than Santoro, who is the true hero of the movie. That the hero is a she and almost nameless, are intertwined details, of which the movie is very well aware. They are crucial in terms of what the audience expects from this genre, and what the movie gives us instead. Unlike the other two leads, Rick Santoro and Kevin Dunne, we are never given her full name until the very end in the concluding newscast, but her heroism should require us to speak of her by name, rather than a more anonymous label, and so we do so.

JULIA COSTELLO

This is a movie where women are given roles either as sexual supplicants or domestics. There is the wife and mistress Santoro talks to on the phone, and afterwards talks about with Dunne.

DUNNE
How’s Angela?

SANTORO
Fat, fantastic. I love her.

DUNNE
What about the other one? What’s her name? Candy?

SANTORO
Monique. Skinny, mean, expensive. I love her.

There is the ring girl who Santoro feigns interest in, then ignores almost immediately afterwards, and has forgotten about by the time of the shooting.

SANTORO
My lucky number seven.

RING GIRL
Gee, that’s a new one, mister.

SANTORO
You are sunshine on a stormy day. You should work in the casino.

RING GIRL
Oh, I’m gonna. I mean, I wanna.

…

SANTORO
Do you know how to deal blackjack?

RING GIRL
No.

SANTORO
All right. Call me. I’m Rick.

SANTORO
Hello. What? Who are you? Where? My lucky number?

Two women in similar sensual dress, but only as a guise for their true missions in the arena. There is the redhead (Jayne Heitmeyer) who serves as an object of distraction, a bosomy long legged beauty, who the camera pores over as nothing but a sexual being, but: she is something more, a well-trained soldier and co-conspirator. When we see her after the tumult, she is out of costume, in the same sexless, genderless uniform of her fellow male military member.

Julia Costello is similarly in disguise, in a blonde wig and a low-cut white outfit. She is there for a specific and important objective, yet she is immediately approached by Santoro as another sexual figure, like the ring girl.

SANTORO
Hey, I dig affection, baby, but not while I’m driving.

COSTELLO
Oh, I’m sorry.

SANTORO
That seat’s taken. (sees her face) Oh, but you can sit here.

COSTELLO
Well, I’ll just need one minute.

SANTORO
Me too.

After the defense minister’s death, Costello flees to the bathroom to change. The camera drifts up to the bathroom sign, and I don’t think this is a simple need for beat in a cinematic rhythm, but to make clear what designates Costello’s position more than anything else: her gender.

We next see her, above like gods, as she washes herself of blood. There is some symbolic importance in this, as blood recurs over and over in this movie, with Costello able to wash the blood from herself – it is not her who had any party in this killing, it was caused by others. However, there is no material importance in this shot; we do not drift into the bathroom when Santoro changes his shirt, but we intrude here. The audience is granted the ability to drift into the ladies’ and float above her as she changes, and here is the asymmetry of the power of divine vision without divine purpose. Able to look anywhere, we expect to be able to look at this bosomy woman when she takes her shirt off.

This same moment recurs, in the suite bathroom, again with us positioned looking down on this character as she changes, again to no purpose, except for the sating of our own appetites.

This erotic perspective is absent anything in this woman, other than her body itself, compelling it. She is insistently an anti-erotic figure, first seized by her mission, then in fear of her life, a woman whose broad gestures of opening her blouse and fanning herself I read as those of someone unfamiliar in the arts of flirtation, now forced into this role to save herself.

COSTELLO
Um, who’s, uh–who’s winning?

GUEST
Looks like the number four horse, Daddy’s Hobby.

COSTELLO
Yeah? Ooh, God, I’m hot. Do you have air conditioning?

GUEST
Huh?

COSTELLO
In your room, air conditioning.

GUEST
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Costello ends up in this man’s hotel room and, again, she is approached sexually.

When she rejects this, and speaks of the danger she is in, the man asks her to leave. If she has no sexual purpose, she has none at all. Her progression in dress, I think, is not trivial. She begins in an all white outfit, a figure of purity, then she is forced to put on a sexier dark blouse as we gawk at her, in a room clearly labeling her as female, then, finally, she ends up in a light colored men’s shirt: it is she who will be taking on the traditional role of the male hero in this movie, even if she isn’t allowed to fully play it. For even after all this, she is not given full freedom of movement. What she most dearly wants is to leave the arena, but instead is confined by Santoro, when she would be far safer if she were let out.

That this character goes nameless for almost the entire movie is a counterpoint to what her true role: she is the nameless, disposable beautiful woman, just like the ring girl, but nothing like the ring girl, because ultimately she is a better, braver woman than either of the two men at the movie’s fore, a combination of their best qualities without their sins. She shares the same devotion to the well-being of the navy as Dunne, but without his lunatic solipsism, unable to see anything other than his own devotion to the cause. She has Santoro’s deductive skills, able to see that the test is fake, without his venality. She doesn’t want a pay-off, she just doesn’t want men and women to die.

She is, to borrow a phrase from H.G. Wells’ autobiography, “a solid rock of ethical resolution”* and this necessary fact may encumber the movie. Costello is played by the very good Carla Gugino, but that she must embody an idea, virtue continually mis-seen as carnal vice, limits her from being a more interesting character. Again, this impediment is not a flaw linked to the writing or the actress, but an unavoidable outcome of Costello as almost a mythic figure. She is a snow white virgin, but also, intentionally or not, a variation on Tiresias, the ancient prophet. Tiresias was blind and Costello is near-blind without her glasses; Tiresias combined equally the male and female, while Costello has a female body any man might covet, but her haircut is boyish and she plays the heroic male role; Tiresias truthfully told Oedipus his future, yet Oedipus refused to believe him, just as Santoro does not want to hear the horrific truth that Costello offer.

Seeing and this refusal to see are dealt with in the next part.

SEMI-DIVINE INFORMATION

This is a movie where amoral figures are given extraordinary powers of observation, visual gifts that would be considered magical or god-like in a more metaphysical era. Dunne has a tracking device which allows him to follow a beacon wherever it travels.

Santoro can see the fight from any angle, with the camera giving a god’s eye view down revealing that the knockout has been faked.

Later, Santoro can use the multitude of cameras in the casino to find Costello. Here, we also have the great disconnect between these great technologies and anything like a moral compass: the only issue of whether people steal or there are prostitutes is that this is detrimental to the business of the casino. Of course there are prostitutes, they simply need to keep their solicitations discrete; as for theft, this is the casino’s business. If the casino isn’t winning against you, you must be cheating.

Though such tools are fractional in power in terms of any hand-held device now, they remain an epochal step beyond anything before. Santoro’s associates must discover which room this man is going to – they do so by going to their database of past footage, and find the name flashed on his driver’s license, which they are then able to look up.

The story is about a conspiracy surrounding a missile system to deal with threats from nations like Iran, and the assassination is pinned on a palestinian. The middle east is once again playing the part of “the other”, yet now we encounter the usual paradox: the orient is without, the orient is within. This hotel is designed entirely in a faux Arabian Nights theme, with the halls and suites made up like an imitation sheik’s palace. It also allows for a surreal moment, where this synthetic castle suddenly takes on a genuine magical quality: the halls appear to reach out infinitely, each one entirely like the other, the powers of observation which have served so well till now entirely useless.

This may be a good place to mention that the viewer’s powers of observation match or exceed that of any of the characters. They travel with Santoro, who, as a cop is able to move almost anywhere by simply showing his badge.

This has nothing to do with Santoro being a good man; Costello is more virtuous, yet can travel nowhere near the places he can, and is ultimately sealed off in a room by Santoro. Yet our powers exceed even this. When Costello moves into a room, we pass through its walls.

As already said, we are able to move into a bathroom with ease, and look down on a half-naked woman. We also hear of information that is never revealed to Santoro or Costello, the key role of Gilbert Powell in the assassination plot. By the last scene, Santoro, Costello, and the media still think Powell is uninvolved in the conspiracy, and he remains unindicted, at the head of the company.

POWELL
In the plan I bought, that prairie populist…who was criminally dismantling the entire armed forces, goes down! The disloyal employee, she goes down with him. The fanatical terrorist, he takes the rap. The AirGuard missile contract is approved, and l, I get enough money to finish the goddam Millennium! It was a good plan! No humiliation, no scandal, no prison!

REPORTER V.O.
Meanwhile, the AirGuard investigation continued in Washington, and Gilbert Powell announced more firings at Powell Aircraft as he cleans house in the wake of the assassination.

Where Santoro and Dunne move about lost in the maze of hotel passages, we impossibly drift, like a divine spirit, across room after room, until we reach the suite we are searching for.

This movie is about the insufficiency of simply seeing, that this ability contains no moral power in and of itself. The film is about Santoro making proper judgement of what he has seen, and the movie ends with the open question of whether we have been properly discerning in what we too have gazed on.

An illustrative sequence of this is when Santoro is told by Costello what she herself has seen in the moments up to the killing. A notable detail which reveals the small gap between everybody’s memories – the dialogue we overhear when the secretary and Costello start talking to each other in the opening scene is this:

COSTELLO
It’s in the pocket.

SECRETARY
Have you been writing to me?

COSTELLO
Listen to me, Mr Secretary. I am telling you, you are the one that’s gonna be sorry.

It is now slightly different:

COSTELLO
It’s in the pocket.

SECRETARY
Excuse me. Did you say something?

COSTELLO
It’s in the pocket.

SECRETARY
Pocket? So you’ve been writing to me.

COSTELLO
But I am telling you, you’re the one that’s gonna be sorry.

A more important point of the split screen is that we are shown two sets of images, on the right, what Costello personally has witnessed and now recalls, and images on the left – Dunne observing the arena through binoculars, giving orders by microphone, planting the papers on Rabat’s body – that she could not possibly have witnessed, that are entirely the creation of Santoro, imagining what actually took place. Though one set of images has a reasonable basis in the recall of an eyewitness, the left-hand set is entirely hypothetical, a reasonable hypothesis, but a hypothesis nonetheless, yet: both sets of images are presented as if they are equal, till we are given solely the images, Dunne planting the papers, which Santoro imagines.

Though this is valuable information, information he has been searching for, it is information he does not want. Again, it is not simply enough to have access to what others have seen, if we are unwilling to consider our own assumptions to be very wrong.

I think there is some resistance to how venal a character Rick Santoro is, and how close he is to Dunne in utter ruthlessness. This moment, Santoro right at the precipice, goes unmentioned in discussions of the movie, though I think it is crucial:

SANTORO
You decided to have this problem, not me! My world would’ve gone on turning just fine, but now either way I look, I have to do something I don’t want to do. Do you understand what I’m saying? I do not want to do this!

COSTELLO
Do what?

The question of what it is Santoro has to do next goes without answer, but I think it is a simple one: he has to kill this woman. We move suddenly away from the two in conversation at this point, and cut to a shot of the stairwell they’re in, and again, we’re in the fantastic dimensions of the endless corridors of the hotel as these stairs swirl away infinitely while ominous thunder rumbles outside.

That these stairs seem to move away in both directions endlessly is not empty cinematic bravura, but done for a specific point. Santoro can now choose whether to go to heaven or hell, based on what he’ll do next. The world is one of post-catholic iconography, where the powers of divine sight have been gifted to us, where the elysian heights are entirely synthetic, luxury hotel suites, but there are still deeds that can damn us to the flames. When Dunne kills his fellow soldiers, he does so only after descending a staircase to the bowels of the arena. Obviously, he passes through a red light.

It is this same place, descending these same stairs that he has Santoro beaten.

Of course, the other images that suggest catholic imagery in a post-catholic world is the taint of blood which touches those involved in the conspiracy. Costello is able to wash the blood from herself, Santoro changes his bloody shirt, but Gilbert Powell stays in the same blood-stained clothes.

Of course, the blood spat on the medals, which Dunne cannot clean off as easily as he thinks.

And the blood-stained bill reminds Santoro of his past sins, and warns him of his future ones.

Right after the fantastic shot of the stairwell, Santoro asks Costello certain defining details to fix her as an image, a woman with a family, someone alive and not simply statistic. It is this vision which keeps him from killing her. He says as much in the movie’s conclusion:

SANTORO
Don’t try to make a hero out of me. It won’t fit. If I hadn’t put a face to you, things probably would’ve gone a whole lot different.

Having been given the information, he first tries to persuade her that she has not seen this. He does this with no counter-information, only through the sheer force of his will. It is inconvenient for these events to have occurred, so they cannot have occurred. That Costello is a moral actor, that her actions are the right actions, that the effects of her actions are to have an overall beneficial effect, is irrelevant; if there are sufficient corrupt actors, who benefit from the corruption, than the moral actor must be discouraged, or killed. Santoro now nearly enters into the conspiracy, not with the portent of any sinister music, but simply because it is easier to be part of this conspiracy than outside of it. On this basis we may examine our own lives, and ask how many networks are we part of, which would never be given so ominous a name as a conspiracy, but which have an ultimate detrimental effect, yet which we are party to because it is easier to belong than be an outside skeptic?

Then we have another shocking moment, for Santoro does successfully intimidate her into changing her story. That the conspiracy succeeds or fails is not because she cannot be bent, it is only due to something in Santoro not allowing himself to do this.

SANTORO
You could be wrong. Isn’t it possible?

COSTELLO
Yes. Yes.

SANTORO
Isn’t it so?

COSTELLO
Yeah, now that I think about it, I think I could be wrong. Um, you remember I told you that my glasses, they had fallen off, and I couldn’t quite focus. I don’t think it was him.

SANTORO
Shit. Your glasses didn’t fall off till after the gunshots–

Santoro then locks her up, rather than simply let her go, for reasons that go unsaid. A sanguine viewer might believe it is simply that the detective still doesn’t know if he believes her, and whether she was party to the murder. A pessimist might think that Santoro still considers the possibility of killing this insignificant woman.

The detective returns to the arena, and finds a camera, a god’s eye view of the stage high in the ceiling, a recurrence of the theme of the divine vision. This camera is also a reprise of the “The false mirror” by René Magritte, an eye isolated from the body, but dense with a cloud-filled sky, an eye connected with the metaphysical substance of the soul. Santoro sees this vision, and realizes that his friend is chief party to the assassination.

After, both Dunne and Tyler descend from a great height, down the stairs to the control room. There may be a hell for ill-doers and murderers, but the aeries of real estate are filled with those whose hands may well be blood spattered. Elysium is a state of grace, found only in good, brave deeds.

Santoro is given a terrible beating, before being let go in order that he may be tracked to where he’s hidden Costello. As he wanders along the corridor, badly disoriented, he is followed by Dunne, who looks down on his tracking device, again, like a god gazing on a helpless bughill, a divine vision in the hands of a demon.

Santoro’s travel to the sealed room plays off of earlier scenes, important for this detecive’s position in the narrative, and how he serves, and does not serve, as a vehicle for what the audience wants. The next, brief, section is devoted to this.

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME?

A key line, early on in the extended shot, after Santoro beats Cyrus (the great Luis Guzman), the dealer, and busts up his supply:

CYRUS
You got a bad attitude, you hear, my friend? What makes you think you’re better than me?

SANTORO
Friends, Cyrus. Everybody loves Rick Santoro.

There is nothing distinguishing this low level dealer and this corrupt cop, the cop himself admits. He humiliates, beats, then extorts this dealer, all things he is able to do because he has the right friends. Santoro then watches the fight, a celebration of a rigged game, the boxing ring flanked by the weapons of Gilbert Powell, another example of a rigged game. Both are exhibits of vicarious violence, allowing a man to take the role of the champion, or military commander: did not many take vicarious martial satisfaction in the conquests of Iraq and Afghanistan, until such conquests turned sour and difficult? Just as the audience of the fight wishes to participate vicariously as Tyler, the movie viewer might wish Santoro to be their proxy, defeating the villains at the end through a vicious physical fight. Yet just as Tyler’s throwing the fight defeats the possibility of one vicarious pleasure, I think the film-makers deliberately choose to avoid giving the viewing audience their own satisfaction through violent proxy. To provide such a satiation for blood-thirst would be to play the same manipulative game that Gilbert Powell plays, making money through the pleasure of remote death.

It would also further the lie that superior force is necessarily accorded to the most virtuous, that whoever can beat the other man must necessarily be the creature of greater decency. The brave choice of Santoro should not be secondary to providing a context for an action scene involving his vengeance, but rather the focus should remain on the choice itself.

Instead, Santoro is beaten without mercy. Where before his connections allowed him to interrogate Tyler fearlessly, now that network is entirely gone, over-ridden by Dunne and his greater power. Rather than giving the viewer the satisfaction of him fighting back, we experience something very different for a movie like this: we watch him suffer. And not simply watch, for we are given his point of view when he wakes up, becoming him in this moment of greatest weakness. Where before he gave out a beating to a man of no consequence, now he has become a vulnerable man himself, who, just like Cyrus, can be destroyed without after-effect. The role he saw at a distance, a man savagely beaten, he has taken on himself.

The very wounds Tyler and Santoro suffer have a similar pattern.

Santoro manages to make it up the stairs, and we see him move through the very area where he beat Cyrus hours before, each step now filled with pain.

The audience is forced to see themselves in this man, beaten, weak, and vulnerable, the very opposite of the kinetic fantasy that they expected at this point. Just as we might wish to see ourselves in an action hero, we do not wish at all to see ourselves in Santoro now, yet we are forced to imagine ourselves in his condition, hurt and frightened. This should be a counterpoint to the earlier scene where Dunne kills his fellow soldier (Chip Chuipka). This man bears an uncanny physical similarity to Dunne; he looks strikingly similar to Gary Sinise in Reindeer Games, yet Dunne sees this mirror of himself, this fellow soldier, and feels nothing, killing him. This soldier may have taken part in the conspiracy, yet this moment of him begging for his life connects with us, the anguish of a dying man pleading for mercy affecting us no matter what he has done before, yet it touches Dunne not at all.

A DIGRESSION: GILBERT POWELL, MAN OF THE FUTURE

Among the valuable pieces on Snake Eyes on-line is Brian Eggert’s writing for Deep Focus Review, which I enjoyed, though I differed with the following line: “When viewed as a political thriller, its lack of last-minute twist or plausibility operate against it, while the conspiracy itself is questionable.” The conspiracy is also dismissed in the equally well-written segment by John H. Semley of the A.V. Club’s Caged Wisdom devoted to the film: “The political murder-mystery plotting borrows heavily from De Palma’s own Blow Out“.

My mind does not run to conspiratorial thinking, but I find this movie from 1998 remarkably prescient in its head of the conspiracy, Gilbert Powell, a man whose business is entirely made up of gambling and defense contracts. This, it would seem to me, in the wake of two bloody wars and the mortgage crisis, an excellent description of the bulk of the economy of the Bush epoch, with the contractor employing any weaselly subterfuge possible to advance his own interests, his construction of a casino jerry-rigged around a deception, his pious invocations of the military dead for financial gain, this movie seems to be not a re-hashing or an implausibility at all, but a startling metaphor of the era we just lived through before the era took place.

I end with a speech by Powell, that to me, expertly captures the oily mix of lachrymose and belligerence, the cheap cover for the squalid interests of too many, that passionately, negligently, led so many good men and women to their deaths.

POWELL
At this time I’d like to extend my deepest sympathies…to the secretary’s family…and to the nation…and to the people that he so faithfully and proudly served. And, uh…I have something else to say. To those that would try to bully us or to terrorize us, to divert us from the causes of peace and justice, I want you to know that in spite of what’s happened here tonight, we are not deterred. Production of the AirGuard missile system will go ahead in accordance with Secretary Kirkland’s wishes.

ONE MORE DIGRESSION: MOMENTS WITH NICOLAS CAGE

When he goes to interview Tyler in his dressing room:

SANTORO
And you sign my kid’s autograph!

Refusing to co-operate:

DUNNE
Snake eyes. The house wins. Now, where is she?

SANTORO
Fuck. You.

The difficult art of looking relaxed:

A DIVINE INVASION / YOU ARE THE QUARRY

Santoro arrives at the sealed room, Dunne right behind him. The lightning flashes, and Santoro sees Dunne’s shadow, the man who has given in to killing, just as Santoro might have.

It is here that Santoro, weaponless, a gun pointed at him, is given something of a divine reprieve. Just as the light falls out of the sky at just the right angle in De Palma’s Femme Fatale, now Santoro is granted a god-given escape. Just as the camera eye provided a vision from the heavens confirming Costello’s story, now another vision gives him the possibility of survival. Santoro looks up and sees the television showing a police truck speeding towards their location, then moves quickly to the door, going into the sealed room which suddenly breaks apart like a stage set opened up, the police sliding to a stop inches from them, a longed for divine invasion into this world.

Before it was “snake’s eyes”, the house wins, Dunne can call on greater power than Santoro. Now, they are in a different rigged game; the audience requires a happy ending, and Dunne must lose.

DUNNE
No, wait! Wait a minute! Wait! I’m with D.O.D.!

COP
Put it down now!

DUNNE
Listen to me! Listen!

COP
Put the gun down!

DUNNE
This– This woman is a suspect!

COP
We’ll be forced to fire.

DUNNE
No, she’s a suspect, goddam it! I am Commander Kevin Dunne,

COP
I suggest you drop it now!

DUNNE
…and this woman is a threat to the security of the United States. Rick, tell ‘em! Please, for God’s sake, tell ‘em what we got here!

SANTORO
There’s no “we,” Kevin! You got snake eyes!

Dunne finds himself before the camera, then kills himself.

It should be asked at this point, what exactly is Dunne caught doing? He is simply holding a gun, in an agitated state, while chasing suspects. He has the appearance of guilt, this is enough, and Dunne is sufficiently savvy to know that this is enough. It is he who understands how such coverage works, who predicts exactly what will eventually happen to Santoro after the press makes him into a hero.

DUNNE
What is this, a heroic stand? You’re the wrong guy for it, Rick. You’ll be all alone in the spotlight, and guys like you can’t stand up to that light. You’ll burn up under it. The press starts looking for dirt on you, and they will, it’ll be a mud slide. Forget about your job, your sweet life in Margate. Start thinkin’ about jail! Your girlfriend will be gone, too, at the first sign of trouble, but not before she has a little chat with Angela! So say goodbye to your wife too! Twice a month with Michael won’t be so bad if you can get him to spend a night…in your shitty apartment! You’ll lose it all, my friend! Everything! And your whole connected life will fall the hell apart. Is that what you want? All you gotta do is be consistent, for Christ’s sake.

There is nothing just in this result, it is solely an outcome that this form demands, the end of the villain, though such methods could well condemn an innocent man. Dunne’s killing himself, while it satisfies the need for the villain’s destruction, is something else, which makes it so valuable in our time of exploitation media, indifferent to who the victim is: it is a snuff film, someone committing suicide on camera.

The movie now becomes a tabloid news format, a stark difference from what took place before. The narrative we’ve just left has been a movement from distance, Santoro and the women around him, Santoro and the violence of the fighters, towards empathy, Santoro and Costello, Santoro knowing now what it is to be powerless, what it is to suffer such a beating. Here, in these tabloid stories, there is always distance from the subject, either giving in to worship, Santoro as a hero, or desecration, Santoro as a corrupt cop. The reporter who covers the unfolding scandal is, of course, his old friend Lou, who bribed Santoro for the job.

LOU
Hey, if you’re gonna be on TV, who better asking you the questions, than your old pal Lou, huh? Plus, I can have two grand cash in an hour and a half.

SANTORO
You are a disgusting human being.

LOU
Hey, five grand in an hour.

SANTORO
Congratulations, Lou. You’re the guy!

LOU
Hey, Rick, I gotta tell you, I will always be there for you, my friend.

LOU V.O.
There have been allegations of bribery coming out of the mayor’s office. Could you comment on those? What about the cocaine–

SANTORO
Cocaine, my ass!

The same line that Santoro used, announcing the pre-conceived villain, is now used on him. He has been selected as the enemy, not a man of many acts, but now only a corrupt cop.

PHOTOGRAPHER V.O.
There he is.

REPORTER V.O.
Richard Santoro’s moment in the public eye produced an unexpected backlash this week as allegations of corruption swirled around him.

His complexities are irrelevant to this form, just as irrelevant as whatever made Dunne “look” guilty. The importance is the footage of Dunne killing himself, of Santoro running in flight, of Santoro in decline. The coverage given is no different than that given to the life of a tumultous actress. Shots of her beautiful, shots of her drunk, shots of her with a new boyfriend, her with a new girlfriend, her with no panties, her with a needle in her arm, her back from re-hab, her now beautiful again, her now no longer alive. What underlies the shots is irrelvant, the value lies in the shots themselves. We are now returned to the same asymmetry as we had in the arena, the possibility to see almost everything, and the amorality of that sight.

We return after this to Costello and Santoro. Santoro, as Dunne predicted, has lost everything and will spend some time in jail. In this last scene, there may or may not be a greater significance in a small gesture. As Santoro lists all that he has lost, it is crushing to us, and we wish for some relief for this man, just as we wanted these two to escape, and were granted this relief. Costello tells of her own achievements, the congressional hearings, and the possibility of reform. She then either does something that is in preparation for a kiss, or a signal that what follows is entirely given as a comfort to the audience. This movie, whose themes revolve around sight, now takes off her glasses. A major point of the film is that Costello is almost blind without them. Yet she removes them, gives Costello a deep kiss, then walks off, among the crowded boardwalk, keeping them off. Given her near lack of sight, how is she able to do this? Again, one may read this as part of a larger romantic gesture, or as a sign that what takes place after she removes the glasses is entirely false, allowing us a return to our own lives. Costello now has a curvaceous, form-fitting top, different from the loose men’s shirt of before. Throughout the movie, she resisted being viewed as sexual, now she initiates intimacies.

I do not imply that she does not do so on her terms, or that there is no basis for it, only that it is a moment that the audience wants, and that the audience gets, a chosen sight, a milder variation of what Santoro wants and does not want to see, where we too may choose not to see the detail signaling that it’s false. That the final line, “At least I got to be on TV”, is said without regret or bitterness, might be seen as equally false, returning us to the comfortable lie that there is something equitable and just in what is seen, and what is not, and that this man exposed only for the purpose of desecration, is some rare and occasional exception.

* It is actually from a book by Grant Allen, with Wells excerpting his review of the book in his memoir. The criticism is somewhat apt for this character as well, and somewhat not. Julia Costello is less real than a character in a book which might be low or high mimetic, but this movie is very much of the heightened notes of the thriller genre. I include an excerpt of Wells’ excerpt:

“We have endeavoured to piece this character together, and we cannot conceive the living woman. She is, he assures us with a certain pathos, a ‘real woman.’ But one doubts it from the outset. ‘A living proof of the doctrine of heredity’ is her own idea, but that is scarcely the right effect of her. Mr. Grant Allen seems nearer the truth when he describes her as ‘a solid rock of ethical resolution.” Her solidity is witnessed to by allusions to her ‘opulent form’ and the ‘lissom grace of her rounded figure.’ Fancy a girl with an ‘opulent’ form! Her ‘face was, above all things, the face of a free woman,’ a ‘statuesque’ face, and upon this Mr. Grant Allen has[464] chiselled certain inappropriate ‘dimples,’ which mar but do not modify that statuesque quality.”

“Clearly this is not a human being. No more a human being than the women twelve hands tall of the fashion magazines. Had her author respected her less he might have drawn her better. Surely Mr. Grant Allen has lived long enough to know that real women do not have spotless souls and a physical beauty that is invariably overpowering. Real women are things of dietary and secretions, of subtle desires and mental intricacy; even the purest among them have at least beauty spots upon their souls.”

The entire autobiography can be found here

(Images and screenplay excerpts copyright Buena Vista and Touchstone Pictures)

Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale: The Only Thing Missing Is The Woman Part Two

Part One Part Two

(SPOILERS for FEMME FATALE and BLOW OUT)

THE ETERNAL RETURN

The middle episode of Femme Fatale is commonly described as a “dream” though it is more complicated than that.

As a preface to discussing this, we may look first at the preceding scenes. The Femme Fatale moves through an airport hotel, whose images and characters will recur in the middle episode.

She passes Shiff and Stansfield Phillips, Watts’ lawyer; however, here they appear as business associates, perhaps even a couple, rather than in their position as assistant to Shiff.

She ascends in the elevator, with the maid, carrying champagne. This maid and the champagne, of course, re-appear.

Finally, as she walks along the passage, she passes Watts. Two details. The first,

is that he is wearing a wedding ring. He is married. On the plane, he no longer is.

The second:

The Femme Fatale looks back, twice, at this man. I do not believe this is a look of attraction, but recognition. She has seen him somewhere before, but where?

As she passes to her room, she sees Lily’s parents:

This shot is echoed later on, as Nicolas Bardo sees her walk above him along the corridor:

She arrives at the room for her passport, the same room where later she and Bardo meet:

She is thrown from the passage, where we get a close-up of her eyes. They have no tears, but we dissolve to a room where rain passes down over the windows.

This is a pastoral refuge, filled with flowers of mourning and pictures of animals. Lily is named after a flower, and she wears flower covered dresses. It might be considered a place of traditional feminine poses, female fecundity, the house where Laure is re-born as Lily is surrounded with rain, like the water of the embryo.

Laure picks up one of Lily’s flower print dresses. She hates it. The dress is for the Good Daughter archetype, not her.

Lily kills herself. Laure looks on, like a voyeur, like Nicolas later on – she is framed by the drapes, as Nicolas is framed by the door when he watches her dance.

The scene begins with water streaming down the windows. It is bookended with what looks like a tear on a plane engine. Like this story, it seems to spin endlessly.

Laure boards the plane. She wears an outfit whose color blends in with the color of the surrounding plane; she does not wish to stand out, she wants to blend in.

Throughout this episode, the sound of pouring water is always highlighted on the soundtrack. This episode was born in water, the rain about the house, and it will end in water with Laure’s drowning.

On the plane,

In the cafe with Bardo,

At the police station:

Sitting with Watts. The wedding ring is now gone.

So, we have the possibility that the people witnessed by Laure become re-animated in this dream, playing slightly different roles, with Shiff and Stansfield Phillips now working for Watts, Watts a single man, etc., the location of the hotel now being re-played in her dream.

There are two obstacles to this hypothesis. A small one is the re-appearance of Pierre, the security guard from the heist sequence in the bar. He, like Shiff and Phillips, has now been placed in a different role. However, based on what we’ve seen, the Femme Fatale never meets or sees Pierre. So, why does he re-appear in this dream?

A more obvious point is Watts as a married man. When Laure first passes him in the hotel, he wears a wedding ring. On the plane, he no longer wears it. This would fit a dream where he is now re-imagined as a single man.

However, after Laure drowns and returns to the pastoral house, we have Laure say the following to Lily, trying to get her to continue living:

LAURE
But if you don’t end it here and you get your ass on that plane to America your future will be sitting right next to you. His name is Bruce and he’s a really good guy and he’s gonna look into your eyes and he’s gonna fall in love.

Watts, outside Laure’s dream, is still single in this future. And, of course, after he meets Lily they are married:

JOHNNY
You know who Bruce Hewitt Watts is?

BARDO
The new American ambassador?

JOHNNY
Bingo. He’s got this wife and three kids but no one seems to have a picture of them.

There is this other point that sticks out in the middle of the movie. Bardo tells Laure about his photo collages:

BARDO
But…there is a square here in Paris full of coffee shops, beautiful, and there is one in particular in a corner, you know, with these light reflections and I saw something that changed my life…

LAURE
It’s a great story, Nicolas.

BARDO
This is the best part!

LAURE
I know. I know. Maybe another time.

We are never told at this juncture what it is that changed Bardo’s life. There is nothing in Bardo’s collage from the middle sequence that shows it, it’s simply the square, almost entirely absent of people, with an overcast sky. We can, however, guess at what he might see that had such an extraordinary effect on him – the image of Laure, in front of the truck reflecting the light, that becomes the center of his collage, but, of course, only in the future.

So, there’s another possibility. That the movie is about the eternal return, the idea of characters and events playing out in infinite variations, the various events in time not one after the other, but actually alongside each other.

I make a quick crib of the idea of the eternal return from Borges’ essay, “Theory of Cycles”:

[The doctrine of cycles] (whose most recent inventor called it the doctrine of the Eternal Return) may be formulatd in the following manner:

The number of all the atoms that compose the world is immense but finite, and as such only capable of a finite (though also immense) number of permutations. In an infinite stretch of time, the number of possible permutations must be run through, and the universe has to repeat itself. Once again you will be born from a belly, once again your skeleton will grow, once again this same page will reach your identical hands, once again you will follow the course of all the hours of your life until that of your incredible death.

Such is the customary order of this argument, from its insipid preliminaries to its enormous and threatening outcome. It is commonly attributed to Nietzsche.

The most well-known variation of this might be Groundhog Day, though it is a variation where the person experiencing the Return is conscious of all past events, and finds the recurrence to be a prison. Here, the characters may only have a vague memory of other lives, a “deja vu”, just like the movie that Laure appears to star in, “Deja Vue”. When Laure turns back and looks at Watts, it is because of this remembrance of having been this man’s wife in another life. The compulsion that causes Bardo to take picture after picture of the square arises from something he remembers from the past, but which he experiences again at the end of the movie.

A clue to the way time exists for the characters in the movie is in the final collage, where the truck reflects the light while by Laure, yet the truck is also in the photo where it is involved in the accident, a few feet from Laure, and at another point, again a few feet distance, Laure receives her passport from Veronica, though this took place years before the other events. Another clue is in the child’s room, where we have a collage of her house, and below, a collage of her at various ages. The photos are of the child at various ages, side by side, just as the photos of her house, taken at various times, lie next to each other.

The characters in the movie are constantly trying to evaluate what will take place through the evidence visible to them. An attempt could be made to deduce the organization of the story of Femme Fatale, but it would fail, since the organization is left ambiguous enough that it remains at the level of the mystic, like the foresight talked about by the TV psychic at Lily’s house.

The archetypes here have been seen in movie after movie, involved in similar actions, voyeurism, theft, blackmail, betrayal, again and again. They have also been in this movie, again and again, variations on a theme, just like Ravel’s Bolero.

THE ONLY THING MISSING IS THE WOMAN

SERRA
What happened, Mr. Bardo was a car belonging to Ambassador Watts was found in your possession.

BARDO
I know, I know that…

SERRA
On the front seat was a gun, bullets, blouse and dress. The only thing missing is the woman.

The Femme Fatale first shows as a transparent, shadowy image projected on the TV screen. She is someone on whom others project an idea, what they wish to believe. Some fault Rebecca Romijn’s french accent as not credible for a french speaker; it should not be credible, because it is not her accent that causes someone like Watts to believe that she’s french, but her beauty.

On the plane, when she meets Watts she is pretending to be the Good Daughter. The Femme Fatale’s chief trait is deception; she plays a few other roles.

She is a princess, living in a castle.

A woman in trouble (here, her reflection also falls on the movie poster of herself drowning).

The Marilyn Monroesque child-woman unaware of the power of her own sexuality.

In the middle section, Bardo never connects with her as a woman. She is first an image to be captured, then a figure to be spied on, a tragic figure to be saved. He does not notice, or does not care, how little what he says is of interest to her. This inability to connect is not heroic, and might even be considered by the movie’s author as anti-heroic. This is shown in the most obvious way in the movie’s dress codes, which I believe are the traditional black and white to mark its heroes and villains.

Black Tie and Racine, for instance,

During the heist, Laure’s in black,

When she returns to France and must persuade Bardo that she’s being driven to suicide by her husband’s beatings, she tries to disguise her nature, and dresses in white,

When it’s revealed that she’s behind the hostage plot, she goes back to black. Bardo, however, is not a hero. He might be a proxy for the audience, but for almost the entire movie, he dresses in black as well:

When Laure does her strip tease, both Napoleon and Bardo are voyeurs. First, Napoleon forces himself on Laure, then Bardo. Bardo has sex with equal contempt for Laure as Napoleon might have. Napoleon, however, serves as the scapegoat for this, first as voyeur (though Bardo looks on as well),

then for the assault,

which allows Bardo to play the role of hero, though he then does the same thing Napoleon was about to:

The only thing missing, underneath it all, is the woman. The men project onto her images they want to believe of her, yet the veil never falls of what’s beneath, though in this case it cannot fall – she is this archetype, and there cannot be anything underneath, only the illusion that there is something underneath, a mystery finally revealed to the right man.

The mystery may be simpler and more obvious; that this is a woman not attracted to men. Her sexual intimacy with Veronica seems very sincere, as intimate as anything she does with the men later. There is a quick shot of friendly intimacy between the two I never see in the movie between Laure and any man.

The movie at the beginning is Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck, an actress who always had a strongly hinted attraction to other women, without ever being fully out*. If we can speak of symbols linking characters, we have the hats of both Veronica and Laure bent in the very same way:

That “bent” is sometimes slang for someone attracted to their own sex I leave out there, though make no definite conclusions.

From some of the last lines between the women:

LAURE
Not bad for a night’s work, huh?

VERONICA
You call that work?

Her dialogue with Bardo during the seduction scene is entirely unsubtle, without the possibility of attraction between a man and a woman, simple flattery of a man who is childish and she is not interested in any way,

BARDO
Are you flirting?

LAURE
Was I?

BARDO
I believe so, yeah.

LAURE
I didn’t mean to…

LAURE
It’s just that all your boyhood stories make you so damn lovable.

She passes off Watts to Lily without any regret. If he is such a good guy, you would think there would be at least the sense of sacrifice, that she is losing the possibility of a good man in her own life, but there is nothing of the kind.

That there are these cues of the Femme Fatale’s sexual orientation which are ignored, might be echoed in the scene in the bar at the bridge. It is a bar entirely filled with men, and only men, with the exception of Laure, with all the men dressed in leather.

This, one would think, is almost a stereotypical gay bar. Yet despite the appearances, it is assumed that all the men want to have sex with this woman. This may be an unintended effect, but I don’t believe it is.

After falling from the bridge, the Femme Fatale is naked, though not the sensual nudity that a man might want, but almost a return to a pure state. She is outside her costume, in effect, outside her archetype. It is after this point that she helps Lily, and their lives diverge again.

The movie ends now with the deaths of Racine and Black Tie, rather than Laure being drowned. A note on scapegoats from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is appropriate,

The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos [scapegoat] and gets rid of him. The detective story begins in the Sherlock Holmes period as an intensification of low mimetic [realistic tradition], in the sharpening of attention to details that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living leap into mysterious and fateful significance. But as we move further away from this we move toward a ritual drama around a corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes over a group of “suspects” and finally settles on one. The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated. If it were really inevitable, we should have tragic irony, as in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov’s crime is so interwoven with his character that there can be no question of any “whodunit” mystery. In the growing brutality of the crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form, as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer), detection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

I don’t think we can speak of Black Tie or Racine as bad in the way of Raskolnikov; Raskolnikov must choose to commit evil. The Femme Fatale, Black Tie, Racine are archetypes conceived to only perform evil.

Racine and Black Tie are skewered in public,

an elaborate, exhibitionist death which suggests sacrifice, just as throwing a woman to the waters suggests a sacrifice, a ritual sacrifice for sin. That these men are killed does not, I think, imply a more just or karmic moral order than if a double crossing woman who kills two men is in turn killed by her old crime partners – it would not be difficult to conceive of a movie ending that way, and there may well be movies that end such a way. That the characters who die are stand-ins for racial or gender types that the audience wishes to see hurt or humiliated, is an obvious point, but one that I won’t go into here.

The last question is whether, by movie’s end, Laure is still the Femme Fatale archetype. In terms of the color codes just mentioned, she now dresses in white. Bardo, for the first time in the movie, now dresses in white, rather than black,

When seeing the accident, she places her hand to her mouth in shock, a gesture she never makes before, a gesture of an innocent rather than a hardened criminal. It is a gesture that Lily makes as well.

Laure wears white with some dirt on it – the slightly soiled virgin.

A hint that this is just another pose is the bra that lies underneath the clothes – it’s black. Another might be the last shot, where Bardo remains in frame, a look of puzzlement, while she is already off-screen, the space next to Bardo empty except for the distant background. Bardo remains the patsy. The woman is missing again.

The final dialogue:

BARDO
You look so familiar. Haven’t we met before somewhere?

THE FEMME FATALE
Only in my dreams.

Bardo’s line, however stale, is truly meant – he has seen her before, in the sequences he’s been in, again and again. Her line, I believe, is ironic. The images we have seen of her, are not her own dreams, but dreams of others where she plays an intended role. That she now be a redeemed innocent, though a gorgeous one, who can now fall in love with a man, is another role asked of her, not one she asks for. The movie ends with some melancholy piano that resolves itself into Ravel’s “Bolero”.

* An interview late in her life for the book Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh gives some insight on this. The interview itself is fitting for this movie and this post, as it itself has the dramatic quality of a film noir.

[Boze Hadleigh]: Since you mention it…There’s a list – I did not compile it – that came out in 1981 in a paper called the Hollywood Star, of seventy bisexual Hollywood actresses.
[Barbara Stanwyck]: [Slowly.] I never saw it.
BH: If you wanted to see it, I have the half page with the headline, and the full page, from inside, with the list of seventy.
BS: You may show it to me. [I do, she unfolds the headline, then the full page list; the name on the top left is Barbara Stanwyck, but I don't dare congratulate her on her top billing. She studies the list, eyes opening wider a few times, then hands it back to me impassively.]
BH: This followed a list they’d published of bisexual actors. Did you see on the top right? It says, “Although many of the listed actresses prefer both men and women, it has no bearing on their talent as actresses.”
BS: [Pause.] It’s a star studded list, isn’t it?
BH: Not in alphabetical order…
BS: [Sharply.] I’d like you to give me the list. You don’t mind [reaches for it; I yield it up].

Part One Part Two

Femme Fatale script and images copyright Warner Bros; Blow Out images copyright MGM.

Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia Part Five

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

(This post contains spoilers for the movie The Black Dahlia, as well as the novel by James Ellroy, and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. Though some of the stills from Dahlia necessary for supporting some points feature nudity, the nudity has been distorted.)

THE UPSIDE OF CAMP

The tropes of Black Dahlia are those of noir, a genre native to american film and Los Angeles, with such standards as vertical blinds, smoking, a femme fatale, the rich sisters of The Big Sleep, a love triangle, no doubt others. These are all ritual elements, as recognizable as aspects of a christian painting, and they are supposed to be given proper veneration, homage to mystic relics. De Palma does something different, not openly desecrating for cheap laughs, but bending them through camp elements. The noir elements do not make a film great any more than a 19th century sitting room makes for a serious film, anymore than anything that features a harpsichord is “serious” music. The movie Dahlia takes in noir elements and upends each of them.

Consider the possibility that the hypotheses of the previous posts are true. Then this film is about an alpha male, Lee Blanchard, who is actually gay, Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a bisexual man attracted to both Blanchard and his appearances only girlfriend, Kay Lake, a woman of moral purity who tries to make sure that her male rival for Bleichert’s affections is killed, so they can both live happily after together on his stolen money. The story also features the classic trope of a femme fatale, Madeleine Linscott, as well as another classic trope (around since Laura), the girl who is a double for a dead woman. In this movie, however, Madeleine looks nothing like her double, but she does seem like a double for Bleichert, and shares his bisexuality. The dead woman, the Dahlia of the title, is an afterthought to the whole story, which is eventually solved through a baroque solution, and given a baroque presentation. This dead woman, a brutalized victim, is supposed to be the centerpiece of the plot, but she’s overshadowed by Kay and Madeleine, who seem to be smarter than almost all of the men of the story, and are very good at manipulating them. Madeleine sees very clearly the corruption of Kay and Blanchard, as well as the sexual identity of Bleichert. The detective, threatened by all this, kills her. So, the expected noir story, though outwardly little different and carrying all the identifying details, is turned entirely on its head.

Probably the best, most obvious place to start this discussion is near the ending, when Ramona Linscott confesses to the murder. From here on I rely, and perhaps overrely, on Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” for reference. Sontag throws a very wide net over what she considers camp, including Caravaggio and The Maltese Falcon, but her essay is very useful for the expected thoughtfulness, but also for being so well-known that it serves as an easy touchstone on what is broadly considered camp, even if we disagree with some of its inclusions and exclusions. The essay warns against intentional attempts at camp, and here, I think De Palma is very effective, because the camp effects of the film prompted reviewers to ask the wanted question: “was that done on purpose?”

The Ramona Linscott scene is helped with this “Camp” quote on high art, which I think is important here as a counterpoint for what the movie tries to avoid:

35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds – in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes’ plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven’s quartets, and – among people – Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.

The Linscott confession scene starts out like most such scenes in a conventional noir, the detective has the suspects at the point of a gun, and he threatens them to confess. In the book, Bleichert starts destroying works of art by shooting some of them as a way of getting answers. The novel, as it treats many things, treats this very seriously. In the film, it is given such a ridiculous, heightened quality so that it’s laughable. Various high art objects are destroyed, valued not for their qualities themselves, but their “seriousness”, and most important for a family whose fortune was built on firetraps, their “respectability”. So, Bleichert shoots these various pieces, the movie defiantly trying to avoid formal seriousness. A chandelier falls to the ground, the high art is destroyed, and the camp really starts.

The novel’s confession contains many of the same elements as Ramona’s, but even more elaborate and morbid. It is all given in a sober tone, an inquiry into the darkness of the soul, very much serious art. I enjoyed most of the book, but found the final revelation to be so complex and gory I kept trying to reshuffle things in my head to make it more effective. De Palma seems to have found it unworkably baroque, and given it an appropriate delivery. Rather than a serious monologue, it’s delivered from the top of the stairs like an aria without music. Various pieces of high culture lie smashed about the players, and only camp remains. I have no doubt that some review made reference to Goebbels line about “when I hear the word culture”, and, hopefully, gave credit to someone other than Goebbels, since the intent here is not against high culture, only an opposition to the idea that certain forms or tropes are inherently great or serious. The destruction of the serious art and the lurid monologue are about this movie’s sensibility, but also a manifesto for De Palma’s career, a non-deference for respectable stories, the nineteenth century romance, someone or other dying of cancer etc., in favor of work in “trashy” popular genres.

Moving on, this “Notes on Camp” point, I think, is very relevant to this film:

15. [...] To camp is a mode of seduction — one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a noun, when a person or a thing is “a camp,” a duplicity is involved. Behind the “straight” public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

But most importantly, this:

The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best examples that can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant female-ness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillière.

This idea I think dominates the film, and we are given a quick image which embodies the way the film’s camp undermine the seriousness of the noir form in a crucial scene.

There is the bust of a man which, frankly I can’t identify (my only guess is Thomas Jefferson), but no doubt a possible member of the group of serious individuals mentioned in the previous “Camp” note, in the sequence at the Olympic:

Then, from behind this piece of serious art, appears the androgyne, “one of the great images of Camp sensibility”, Madeleine in her man’s suit.

Two other moments where the picture clearly tips its hand. Bleichert walks into a room after showing off his behind to the camera, and looks at the audience, as if aware he’s in a movie and they’re looking at him.

He goes about the business of exposition in the scene, necessary for the later confession, before arriving at a picture that catches his attention. It’s a picture of The Man Who Laughs, laughing at whoever looks at it.

In this case, it is, literally, laughing at these characters and the noir ritual of exposition. “I don’t get modern art,” says Bleichert. “I doubt modern art gets you either,” replies Madeleine.

The last, and my favorite, wink would be the scene at the dinner table. In the book, Martha, Madeleine’s sister, is an unattractive, malicious girl who is silent during dinner while she sketches Bleichert. Martha of the movie is a bright, vital, attractive woman (the excellent Rachel Miner) who carries on a normal conversation, one might call it a small investigation, with Bleichert.

On the surface, it is entirely an ordinary conversation. At the same time, Bleichert and Madeleine are being rendered into parody figures.

The characters of the movie are not parodies, and if they were, camp wouldn’t be possible. Yet they all have an exaggerated note to them, that may not entirely be noticed, since noir is full of these exaggerated notes.

THE DOWNSIDE OF CAMP

By treating his characters as surfaces, individuals who correspond outwardly as noir types but are very different underneath, makes for a fascinating movie, but by doing so, something compelling is lost from the book.

I struggled to put what this is into words, but this fragment from “The Dragon’s Egg”, by Adam Gopnik, discussing the compelling qualities of young adult fiction is a good starting point:

Books win their audiences for a reason. Most popular books wear their artlessness on their sleeve: Stephenie Meyer, the author of the “Twilight” series, is an awkward writer with little feeling for construction, but the intensity of emotion with which she imbues her characters is enviable. You never doubt her commitment to the material, which is half the battle won.

Ellroy is a better writer than Meyer, though not, despite his claims, as good as Tolstoy. Whatever the weaknesses of his books, his commitment to the Dahlia is complete and unfeigned, his belief in the writing of books as a penitence through which damned individuals expose the authors own damnations, and redeem themselves through heroic acts the author himself wishes for, is complete, a quality of extraordinary importance in a writer, one unlearned and unlearnable. THe obsessions of Bleichert and Madeleine are either Ellroy’s own, or felt to be Ellroy’s own, and like Meyer this gives Dahlia an intensity of emotion that is enviable. De Palma has had no difficulty with commitment to characters of similar obsessions, whether in Blow Out or Casualties of War, but in this case, he, purposefully, does not connect with these men and women. It may be because that there is something inherent in the material that does not allow him this commitment, that in his movies he always skeptically questioned his own obsessions, while in Ellroy’s Dahlia we are given nothing but the man’s obsession, unquestioned. Such examination of the motives of those who make movies and books is always an unreliable business, I enjoy avoiding it, and I end it here.

What is best examined are the effects of books and movies, what they attempt to achieve, and how they do so. On those terms, I think the approach of both is very different. De Palma’s Dahlia is ostensibly about a man possessed by a woman, with every element subverting this very story, with the movie ultimately about the false aspects of these heroic fantasy, the roles it forces women to play, the roles men dearly want to play in these fantasies, and makes camp of both. Ellroy is so deep inside his obsessions in Dahlia that he has no possibility of skepticism, and his belief in this world allows for our belief as well, locating our obsessions, however different, in Bleichert and Madeleine. The distance of camp does not allow this, and this is what causes some to despise the camp and ironic approaches. In some contexts, camp and irony are seen as a diminishment of possibility, the empathy any reader or viewer has with some characters. It is possible to cherish the characters of Jane Austen; I’m unsure if it’s possible to cherish the characters of John Barth. De Palma’s Dahlia has such sympathy for one character only, looked at entirely without any bend or slant, and that’s Elizabeth Short, a troubled young woman of luminescent beauty, who conveniently dies, allowing her image to persist for the machineries of obsession, fantasies of the characters and our own. Again, the quote from Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere is apt: “Downtown came and went; the woman stayed.”

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Images and Screenplay Copyright Universal Pictures, Millennium Films, Equity Pictures, and associated producers.

Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia Part Four

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

(This post contains spoilers for the movie The Black Dahlia, as well as the novel by James Ellroy. Though some of the stills from Dahlia necessary for supporting some points feature nudity, the nudity has been distorted.)

THE AMBIGUITIES OF KAY LAKE

An auburn haired beauty of the novel is now a blonde. Thin all over, waif-life, as Blanchard likes them, in the book is bodacious now. This last is not, I think, due to any low appetites, but in correspondence with the movie’s schematic. Blanchard loathes himself for what he is, so he seeks a woman who exudes feminity, buxom, rather than a sexless reedy figure. She should also embody fertility, the wealth and bounty of the food on her dinner table and her pristine house. That there may be an ugliness underlying all this, migrant labor and stolen water for the California agriculture, secret bargains and blood money for the house, are all things that can be thought about later.

She is a wounded woman, branded with scars by her former pimp, Bobby De Witt, still shaped by her experiences with this man. She is also very, very smart, “always the smarter of the two of us”, says Bleichert in the book, and this, despite appearances, is true in the movie, all the way through. In the book, her major switched among pre-med, psychology, English lit, then history; in the movie she has a masters in history.

I’ll start with a succinct outline of the movie’s Kay as I see it. She is a woman who has gone through horrific experiences, found a protector, Blanchard, but one who she is deeply unhappy with. She wants to abandon this man, for another one, Bleichert, but he refuses to betray his partner. She is either directly complicit in having the first man killed, or tries to make sure that it is more likely that he will die. It is convenient that this man die for another reason: he is her romantic rival for Bleichert’s affections.

When this new man takes over, she must make sure that they are bound together, first through sex, then by a secret, that the beautiful home they live in was bought with stolen money. She is throughout this, like I said, very smart, and simply plays stupid in order for her schemes to work, this stupidity accepted without question by Bleichert, but also by the audience, who don’t consider the possibility that a blonde might just be playing at dull headedness. Kay does not act out of pointless malice, but because she knows first-hand the viciousness of this life. In her audition tape, Betty Short plays on the line from Gone With The Wind: “As god as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again…even if I have to lie…or cheat…or steal…I’ll never go hungry again.” This is something like Kay’s credo. It should also be said that this theory goes entirely against Kay’s image in the film, which is, essentially, a passive victim.

I show here a series of images of Kay from the film, from beginning to end. They give a sense, I think, a woman who is saucy, witty, with a piercing look, slowly hiding herself, giving herself the exterior of a dull-minded, passive, child-like figure, occasionally a hysteric. This is an exterior society prefers, but it’s also necessary for her own ends.

Our introduction:

At the gym. This is when she reveals that Lee and her don’t sleep together:

A brief glimpse of the image Kay will become. The night of the shoot-out with Baxter Fitch and associates, and when Bleichert tells her about the return of Bobby De Witt:

This is the last scene where we see this old Kay. Her eyes are probing. It is when she asks, “what about us?”, wanting to be with him, and Bleichert refuses to betray his partner:

Now, it starts. We, the audience are almost always with Bleichert, moving with him. One of the few exceptions is when the camera pulls away from the detective prior to the Baxter Fitch shoot-out. The other times are with Kay. Here, we are in the house with Kay for a few seconds before Bleichert arrives. When she hears the door, she arranges her character, touching her eyes, lighting her cigarette.

During this scene, when he presses her on where Blanchard is. She may have a nervous tic about her mouth, it may be a tell. I don’t think this tic ever shows up again:

The night before they have sex for the first time:

She asks Dwight to repair the kitchen tile. While he’s there, again, for one of the only times in the film, we are away from Bleichert, and with her. What does she do, after the man who protected and rescued her dies? She pours drinks. Why does she do this at this point, when Bleichert’s removing the tile? Because she knows what he’ll find. Her old protector is dead. She now has a new one, and she wants to celebrate: the money and sex will now make them partners. This makes me think of nothing other than when a femme fatale celebrates after they kill her husband together. She pours the drinks, and ascends the staircase, going up, as characters do in this movie, to damnation:

But Bleichert surprises her. He is still connected with a very sentimental image of Blanchard. She plays this very stupid:

This causes Bleichert to bolt from the house, to return to Madeleine. When Kay arrives at the mansion and confronts them, she is a shrieky harridan. Again, she plays the facts about the money very stupid:

Bleichert kills Madeleine and returns to Kay. This is the last image of her, and it is a very different Kay than the one of the beginning:

I go now through the movie’s scenes that feature only Kay and Bleichert, contrast it with its equivalent in the book, and point how the intent each time has subtly changed.

The meeting with Kay where she first prompts him about having an affair:

I found Kay in her usual weeknight posture–reading on the living room couch. She didn’t look up when I walked in, she just blew a lazy smoke ring and said, “Hi, Dwight.”

I took a chair across the coffee table from her. “How’d you know it was me?”

Kay circled a passage in the book. “Lee stomps, you tread cautiously.”

I laughed. “It’s symbolic, but don’t tell anybody.” Kay stubbed out her cigarette and put the book down.

“You sound worried.”

I said, “Lee’s all bent out of shape on the dead girl. He got us detached to work the investigation when we should be going after a priority warrantee, and he’s taking Benzedrine and starting to go a little squirrely. Has he told you about her?”

Kay nodded. “A little.”

“Have you read the papers?”

“I’ve avoided them.”

“Well, the girl is being played up as the hottest number since the atom bomb. There’s a hundred men working a single homicide, Ellis Loew’s looking to get fat off of it, Lee’s cuckoo on the subject–” Kay disarmed my tirade with a smile. “And you were front page news on Monday, but you’re stale bread today. And you want to go after your big bad robber man and get yourself another headline.”

“Touché, but that’s only part of it.”

“I know. Once you got the headline, you’d hide out and not read the papers.”

I sighed. “Jesus, I wish you weren’t so much smarter than me.”

“And I wish you weren’t so cautious and complicated. Dwight, what is going to happen with us?”

“The three of us?”

“No, us.”

I looked around the living room, all wood and leather and Deco chromium. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet; it was filled with Kay’s cashmere sweaters, all the shades of the rainbow at forty dollars a pop. The woman herself, South Dakota white trash molded by a cop’s love, sat across from me, and for once I said exactly what was on my mind. “You’d never leave him. You’d never leave this. Maybe if you did, maybe if Lee and I were quits as partners, maybe then we’d have a chance together. But you’d never give it all up.”

Kay took her time lighting a cigarette. Exhaling a breath of smoke, she said, “You know what he’s done for me?”

I said, “And for me.”

The scene in the movie:

KAY
Hello Dwight.

DWIGHT
How’d you know it was me?

KAY
Lee stomps. Is Lee working late? What’s wrong?

DWIGHT
He’s all bent out of shape over this dead girl. He’s getting all squirrely. Benzedrine, I think. Did you read the papers? She’s been played up as the hottest number since the atom bomb. Ellis Loew’s gonna make a career out of this, and Lee’s not far behind.

KAY
What about you?

DWIGHT
What about me?

KAY
What’s gonna happen to us, Dwight?

DWIGHT
The three of us…

KAY
No, us. Just the two of us.

DWIGHT
Kay, there is no two of us. He’s my partner.

KAY
That’s everything.

DWIGHT
He’s done a lot for me.

KAY
He’s done even more for me. There’s food in the fridge. Good night.

In the book, the relationship wouldn’t be possible because of Kay. She wouldn’t leave this man or this life. The movie shifts the choice entirely to Bleichert who won’t betray this man. “He’s my partner”, and I think we should read a secondary meaning to that, of a union that rivals what he has with Kay.

It is right after this that she tries to tempt him in her nightdress. He refuses, and she slams the door on him:

Next, a scene whose small changes give an entirely different light to the relationship between Blanchard, Bleichert, Lake.

Blanchard has taken Dahlia case files home, Kay is very upset and throws them out, Bleichert comes along in the middle of the action.

Pulling up, I saw Kay storming out the door and down the steps, hurling an armful of paper onto the lawn, then storming back while Lee stormed beside her, shouting and waving his arms. I walked over and knelt beside the discarded pile; the papers were carbons of LAPD report forms. Sifting through them, I saw FIs, evidence indexes, questioning reports, tip lists and a complete autopsy protocol–all with “E. Short, W.F. D.O.D. 1/15/47″ typed at the top. They were obviously bootlegged from University Station–and the very possession of them was enough to guarantee Lee a suspension from duty.

Kay came back with another load, shouting, “After all that’s happened, all that might happen, how can you do this? It’s sick and it’s insane!” She dumped the papers beside the other pile; 39th and Norton glossies glinted up at me. Lee grabbed her by the arms and held her while she squirmed. “Goddamnit, you know what this is to me. You _know_. Now I’ll rent a room to keep the stuff in, but babe, you stick by me on this. It’s _mine_, and I need you . . . and you _know_.”

They noticed me then. Lee said, “Bucky, you tell her. You reason with her.”

It was the funniest Dahlia circus line I’d heard so far. “Kay’s right. You’ve pulled at least three misdemeanors on this thing, and it’s getting out–” I stopped, thinking of what _I’d_ pulled, and where I was going at midnight. Looking at Kay, I shifted gears. “I promised him a week on it. That means four more days. On Wednesday it’s over.”

Kay sighed, “Dwight, you can be so gutless sometimes,” then walked into the house. Lee opened his mouth to say something funny. I kicked a path through official LAPD paper to my car.

Almost entirely the same scene.

KAY
I’m not having this in my house anymore. It is sick and insane. After all that’s happened, all that might happen…

BLANCHARD
Talk to her Bucky, reason with her.

BUCKY (WHISPER)
Jesus.

This is where it departs from the book. The visual aspect is crucial.

BUCKY
Lee, she’s right. There’s at least three misdemeanours, here. You can’t…

BLANCHARD stares pleadingly at him.

BUCKY
I promised him a week on this, four more days, and then it’s over.

KAY
Bucky, you can be so gutless some time, you know that?

In the novel, Bleichert holds himself back from rebuking Blanchard because of the impropriety of his liaison with Madeleine, and that he’s arranged sex with her in return for not bringing her name into the investigation. Bleichert hasn’t spoken to Madeleine yet at this point in the movie, so that isn’t what holds him back. It’s entirely his connection with Blanchard, and his movement back and forth between the man and the woman is about the rivalry the two have for his feelings.

The scene ends with Bucky’s voiceover. I bold a part that might have a double meaning.

BUCKY V.O.
Three days since we killed four men. Three days till Bobby De Witt got out. I tried to tell myself that I was the straight leg in this triangle. I was worried it was true.

Now, perhaps the most important moment between Kay and Bleichert. There is no equivalent in the book. Blanchard has gone to meet De Witt.

KAY
You’re famous, Dwight. [about a newspaper headline on the failure of the two cops to capture Raymond Nash]

DWIGHT
Notorious. Where’s Lee?

KAY doesn’t answer.

DWIGHT
Bobby De Witt’s probably in LA right now.

KAY
Lee always said I’d be safe.

DWIGHT
You will be. You will be.

DWIGHT reaches out and holds KAY’s hand.

KAY
He had a sister.

DWIGHT
What?

KAY
He had a little sister. She was killed when he was fifteen and they never caught the guy.

DWIGHT
What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?

KAY
He made me promise never to tell you. He thought it made him too easy to figure.

DWIGHT
Well, that explains some things.

KAY
No, it doesn’t.

DWIGHT
Kay, where’s Lee?

KAY doesn’t answer.

DWIGHT
If you know, you should tell me.

KAY doesn’t answer.

DWIGHT
Kay…Bobby De Witt just got out. Lee’s all hopped up on Benzedrines, what do you think’s gonna happen?

KAY doesn’t answer.

DWIGHT
Where is he?

KAY
Morrie Friedman called a couple of hours ago.

DWIGHT
The guy from New Year’s?

KAY
Bobby’s got a drug deal somewhere…a building Friedman owns, the Olympic I think.

DWIGHT
When?

KAY
Now.

DWIGHT rushes up to leave.

KAY
Dwight.

Kay knows that Lee is going to meet De Witt. She knows that Lee might be in danger. If she wants De Witt killed, it would seem she would have no difficulty telling Bleichert right away about the deal so he can get there immediately to help his partner. But she holds out on the information, delaying as much and as long as possible. My belief is that she does this so Bleichert is not there to help Blanchard. In order that Blanchard is killed.

A contrast now between how the novel treats Bleichert’s return to Kay after he finds out about the death of Blanchard. The novel has Blanchard dying off-scene in Mexico:

Dawn was pushing up over the Hollywood Hills when I knocked on Kay’s door. I stood on the porch shivering, storm clouds and streaks of sunlight looming as strange things I didn’t want to see. I heard “Dwight?” inside, followed by the sound of bolts being unlatched. Then the other remaining partner in the Blanchard/Bleichert/Lake triad was there, saying, “And all that.”

It was an epitaph I didn’t want to hear.

I walked inside, stunned at how strange and pretty the living room was. Kay said, “Lee’s dead?” I sat down in his favorite chair for the first time. “The Rurales or some Mexican woman or her friends killed him. Oh, babe, I–”

Using Lee’s endearment jarred me. I looked at Kay, standing by the door, backlighted by the weird sunstreaks. “He hired the Rurales to kill DeWitt, but that doesn’t mean shit. We’ve got to get Russ Millard and some decent Mexican cops on it . .

I stopped, noticing the phone on the coffee table. I started dialing the padre’s home number. Kay’s hand halted me. “No. I want to talk to you first.”

The scene in the movie is almost entirely non-verbal, has a different reaction from Bleichert, perhaps a response to a different, more intimate, though not physically intimate, bond between the men. Bleichert simply starts sobbing and can’t stop, even after Kay comes out and asks him what’s wrong.

Later, they try to have dinner, without Blanchard. Bleichert blames himself for his partner’s death, that his immobility at a crucial point doomed his friend.

BLEICHERT
I couldn’t move…I couldn’t move. I didn’t move. I never move. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Kay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. (under his breath) I could’ve saved him. I could’ve saved him.

This, strikes a strange note for me: Bleichert is almost in constant motion on the stairs, trying to save his friend until he’s knocked unconscious. It isn’t Bleichert whose immobility may have led to Blanchard’s death but Kay’s; she is the one who stayed silent, not answering his questions about where Blanchard was, perhaps keeping him from reaching the Olympic till it was too late.

After Bleichert returns from Mexico, the novel has Kay tell him the full story of Blanchard’s involvement in the robbery. That it was he who did the robbery, blaming it on her pimp, De Witt. A lengthy excerpt:

I moved from the chair to the couch; Kay sat beside me. She said, “You’ll hurt Lee if you go crazy with this.”

That was when I knew she’d been expecting it; that was when I knew she knew more than I did. “You can’t hurt something dead.”

“Oh, yes you can, babe.”

“Don’t call me that! That’s his!”

Kay moved closer and touched my cheek. “You can hurt him and you can hurt us.”

I pulled away from the caress. “You tell me why, _babe_.”

Kay cinched the belt on her robe and fixed me with a cold look. “I didn’t meet Lee at Bobby’s trial,” she said. “I met him before. We became friends, and I lied about where I was staying so Lee wouldn’t know about Bobby. Then he found out on his own, and I told him how bad it was, and he told me about a business opportunity he had coming up. He wouldn’t tell me the details, and then Bobby was arrested for bank robbery and everything was chaos.

“Lee planned the robbery and got three men to help him. He’d bought his way out of his contract with Ben Siegel [Blanchard's boxing contract], and it cost him every cent he’d made as a boxer. Two of the men were killed during the robbery, one escaped to Canada, and Lee was the fourth. Lee framed Bobby because he hated him for what he did to me. Bobby didn’t know we were seeing each other, and we made it look like we met at the trial. Bobby knew it was a frame, but he didn’t suspect Lee, just the LAPD in general.

“Lee wanted to give me a home, and he did. He was very cautious with his part of the robbery money, and he always talked up his boxing savings and his gambling so the brass wouldn’t think he was living above his means. He hurt his career by living with a woman, even though we weren’t together that way. It was like a happy fairy tale until last fall, right after you and Lee became partners.”

I moved toward Kay, awed by Lee as the most audacious rogue cop in history. “I knew he had it in him.”

Kay drew away from me. “Let me finish before you get sentimental. When Lee heard about Bobby getting an early parole date, he went to Ben Siegel to try to get him killed. He was afraid of Bobby talking about me, upsetting our fairy tale with all the ugly things he knew about yours truly. Siegel wouldn’t do it, and I told Lee it didn’t matter, that there were three of us now and the truth couldn’t hurt us. Then, right before New Year’s, the third man from the robbery showed up. He knew that Bobby De Witt was getting out on parole, and he made a blackmail demand: Lee was to pay him ten thousand dollars, or he would tell Bobby that Lee masterminded the robbery and framed him.

“The man said Lee’s deadline was Bobby’s release date. Lee put him off, then went to Ben Siegel to try to borrow the money. Siegel wouldn’t do it, and Lee begged him to have the man killed. He wouldn’t do that either. Lee learned that the man hung out with some Negroes who sold marijuana, and he–”

I saw it coming, huge and black like the headlines it got me, Kay’s words the new fine print: “That man’s name was Baxter Fitch. Siegel wouldn’t help Lee, so he got you. The men were armed, so I guess you were legally justified, and I guess you were damn lucky that no one looked into it. It’s the one thing I can’t forgive him for, the one thing I hate myself for tolerating. Still feeling sentimental, triggerman?”

I couldn’t answer; Kay did it for me. “I didn’t think so. I’ll finish up, and you tell me if you still want revenge.

“The Short thing happened then, and Lee latched on to it for his little sister and who knows what else. He was terrified that Fitch had already talked to Bobby, that Bobby knew about the frame. He wanted to kill him or have him killed, and I begged and pleaded with him to just let it be, no one would believe Bobby, so just don’t hurt anybody else. If it wasn’t for that fucking dead girl I might have convinced him. But the case went down to Mexico, and so did Bobby and Lee and you. I knew that the fairy tale was over. And it is.”

This information, some of this information, is not freely given by Kay in the movie. She only tells it when angrily prompted by Bleichert after he discovers the money in the bathroom:

KAY
I always wondered where he kept it.

BUCKY
Were you ever gonna tell me?

KAY
He’d given all his money to Ben Siegel…he wanted to buy us a home, I didn’t know there was any left.

BUCKY
Were you ever gonna tell me?

KAY
Something’s burning.

KAY rushes down to the kitchen, BUCKY follows.

KAY
Bobby did do the bank job, Bucky, don’t get the wrong idea.

BUCKY
I don’t know what kinda idea I got right now.

BUCKY throws money down on counter with a violent gesture.

KAY moves away and starts putting candles in candle holder.

KAY
Things were getting really bad between me and Bobby and I had to get out. I knew this guy that…Bobby made me be with once. It was a hophead who sometimes snitched to cops for dope money.

BUCKY
And that’s how you met Lee.

KAY
I told him what Bobby was doing, about how he cut me and pimped me to his friends. I told him about the bank job and where Bobby was hiding the money. And then last year…the guy…

BUCKY
The hophead.

KAY
Yeah. Lee had given him a thousand dollars for introducing us. He found that Bobby was getting out, he threatened to tell that we stole from him. He wanted money that we didn’t have, Dwight. He wanted ten thousand dollars. What were we going to do? Promise me, promise me, you’ll forgive him for DeWitt, forgive him for the bank. Please. It doesn’t matter to us.

BUCKY
What’s the guy’s name?

KAY
It doesn’t matter.

The first thing obvious is that Kay, a very intelligent woman in both versions, is cool-headed and smart in her presentation in the book. The movie has this intelligent woman as a hysteric (my word choice is not arbitrary), who avoids Bleichert’s questions with the ridiculous evasion of “Something’s burning!” It is not an intelligent woman doing stupid things, it is an intelligent woman playing at being stupid. How much Kay is lying in this scene is never resolved, as it’s the last time these details are brought up. If we take Kay’s version in the book as the true version, then she is lying about the major fact that Blanchard was behind the robbery. A further tip-off is the way she mentions this: “Bobby did do the bank job, Bucky, don’t get the wrong idea.” Why expect that Bleichert would immediately get this idea?

I bold part of Bucky’s line that I think can have a double reading:

BUCKY
Kay, tell me the guy’s name…was it Baxter Fitch?

BUCKY V.O.
Baxter Fitch…and then DeWitt. Lee killed them both, and took the bank money. Making me witness. Stooge. Weak point. In a fairy tale triangle.

KAY O.S.
You’re so good at some things.

BUCKY rushes out.

The line “You’re so good at some things” is referenced at the end, and I think both times there’s an irony to it.

KAY
Dwight, he loved you, he loved both of us, so much. This has nothing to do with us, Dwight. DON’T RUN OUT ON US!

This line is important for the reference to love, and what immediately follows this scene. Bleichert returns to Madeleine, and gives us the voiceover.

BUCKY V.O.
Lee and Kay had lived in sin. Not because their shack job was against department regs, but because the ghosts of their past had forced them to choose love over passion. A veneer of a fairy tale. Only a band-aid to cover a fractured life. I didn’t believe in fairy tales. It was a reunion of avowed tramps. Old rutters who knew they would never have it as good with anyone else.

Bleichert never tells us what those ghosts are that force this choice of love over passion. Kay has already said that it’s not the death of his sister that’s behind Blanchard’s chastity. I read Kay’s line, “Dwight, he loved you, he loved both of us, so much”, in juxtaposition with Dwight’s voiceover, and it seems a good fit. Blanchard had to choose love over passion for both points of this triangle, one for whom he could feel no sexual attraction, and the other, for whom he was not allowed to show an attraction.

While at Madeleine’s, Bleichert is confronted by Kay. This is how the scene plays out in the book, the entire focus on the morbid aspect of his sexual obsession with a woman who’s a twin for the Dahlia:

Kay was wearing her Eisenhower jacket and tweed skirt, just like when I’d first met her. I said, “Babe,” and started to ask “Why?” My wife counterpunched: “Did you think I’d let my husband vanish for three weeks and do nothing about it? [in the book, Kay and Bleichert get married after Blanchard's death] I’ve had detectives following you, Dwight. She looks like that fucking dead girl, so you can have _her_–not me.”

Kay’s dry eyes and calm voice were worse than what she was saying. I felt shakes coming on, bad heebie-jeebies. “Babe, goddamn it–”

Kay backed out of grabbing range. “Whoremonger. Coward. _Necrophile_.”

The movie changes the nature of the confrontation, with Bleichert angry at Kay for her deceptions, all the things she hid, all the things she might still be hiding. She first evades this charge by saying that she did not lie out of her own interest, but for his benefit, their benefit. When he refuses to accept this, only then does she bring up Madeleine, “She looks like that dead girl!”

BUCKY
Kay. The hell are you doing here?

KAY
What am I doing here? How could you, how could you Dwight?

BUCKY
You followed me here after what you’ve done?

KAY
What have I done? Nothing.

BUCKY
You lied to me.

KAY
I lied for you. I lied for us. What could I do, but lie, Dwight?

BUCKY
You could have told me the truth.

KAY
She looks like that dead girl! How sick are you! You’re gonna end up like Lee, you will. But I will not.

This last line pushes him away from Madeleine and he resumes his investigation. There is, I think, a very important hidden significance to this line, which echoes in voice over as Bleichert resumes work on the Dahlia case.

KAY V.O.
She looks like that dead girl! How sick are you! You’re gonna end up like Lee.

Madeleine, as already said, isn’t the Dahlia’s double, but Bleichert’s. The line implies that his relationship with Madeleine over Kay is a choice of a sexual netherworld, one that will lead him to an entirely different sexual orientation: “You’re gonna end up like Lee.” This frightens Bleichert, just as his first sense of Madeleine as his twin, deeply frightened him, and pushes him back into the case.

After solving the murder, Bleichert kills Madeleine, the end of an actual life, but also the end of a virtual one, the closing of certain possibilities for the man. He does a deep inhale in his car, echoing the same deep inhale he made during the credit sequence, in the locker room before the boxing match with Blanchard, the first a preface to a substitute for “passion”, the second a regret over a “passion” that will never be fulfilled.

He is overwhelmed with sadness, returning to a woman who helped kill a man he loved, a man he himself wanted killed so he could have Kay, but also to end the frightening inconvenience of the love he felt.

He re-unites with Kay in a last, very strange scene.

This is the book’s conclusion, Bleichert heading to Massachusetts where he’ll meet Kay.

On the plane I thought of all the things I’d have to explain to Kay, evidence to keep a new foundation of lies from destroying the two–or three–of us.

She would have to know that I was a detective without a badge, that for one month in the year 1949 I possessed brilliance and courage and the will to make sacrifices. She would have to know that the heat of that time would always make me vulnerable, prey to dark curiosities. She would have to believe that my strongest resolve was not to let any of it hurt her.

The last paragraph is a simple description of what took place in the last month of his investigation of the Dahlia murder, with him discovering the killer, then covering it up so that Madeleine’s mother would not be the one indicted, then having to turn in Madeleine, despite his obsession with her, and knowing that what haunted him then would always haunt him. I don’t think there is anything obscure that makes it difficult to connect with the recent events of the novel that have taken place. Despite this past darkness, the future holds the possibility of great happiness for the man, and it’s about the only upbeat ending for any lead character, ever, in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet.

Contrast this with the voice over in the film, Bleichert’s last lines:

BUCKY V.O.
Madeleine was wrong. I had others. Ones I’d loved, ones who’d loved me. People I betrayed, and people I needed to protect. And for the first time in my life, I knew that for the briefest of times, in the darkest of places, I had been so so good at some things.

My reaction to this, on first seeing the film was, “What the hell is he talking about?” I’ll just quote the last part of the dialogue with Madeleine to make clear what Bleichert is responding to. It’s in the hotel right before he kills her:

MADELEINE
You chose me over her. You’ll choose me over him. He was going to take Daddy’s money and leave. Leave all of you.

BUCKY points gun at MADELEINE.

MADELEINE
You’ll never shoot me. Don’t forget who I look like.

CLOSE UP of BUCKY.

MADELEINE
Because that girl, that sad, dead, bitch. She’s all you have.

BUCKY
No.

BUCKY shoots MADELEINE.

Visually, Bleichert’s return to the house suggests that he has found an alternative to this dead woman, the Dahlia, and her living incarnation, Madeleine, in his love with Kay. Then the voiceover completely flummoxes this assumption. Bleichert speaks in the plural. More importantly, he speaks in the past tense, except for needing to protect. Bleichert mentions his skills in the last paragraphs of the book because they were crucial for putting the Dahlia case to rest and being able to re-unite her, but why is it important for him to be so good at some things in this context?

My only resolution for this is that Bleichert returns to nothing in the present, that what he loves, protects, and betrays, are only memories now. He loved Blanchard and Kay (“Ones I’d loved”), both loved him back (“ones who’d loved me”). He betrayed Blanchard, by wanting him to die, so he could have Kay and so their inconvenient love could end (“People I betrayed”). The “people”, plural, he needs to protect are the Kay and Blanchard of his memories (“You don’t talk about them, okay?”, he says to Madeleine), a heroic cop and his loyal, pure woman. The “so good at some things”, is a reprisal of something Kay says to him when he asks her about Baxter Fitch (him: “Kay, tell me the guy’s name…was it Baxter Fitch?” her: “You’re so good at some things”). As I said, I think there’s an irony to this line both times. What’s remarkable is not what Blanchard sees, but how much he doesn’t see, such as the fact that a cop with such an expensive house must be corrupt in some way or other. Bleichert is good, not at seeing, but at not seeing. The brief time he turns to, are the memories of Kay and Blanchard, when he was so good at not seeing them as they are, but as he wanted to see them.

Bleichert ascends the steps to the house, ascending to hell. We then arrive at a brief shot, possibly the most striking in the movie, Kay behind the door, only her lips visible in the strip of glass.

There are a multiplicity of ideas in this image: an isolated part of a woman to be pecked at, the feed of pornography and the voyeur; the woman trapped in a seraglio, as Kay remakes herself, outwardly, into a passive female; soft lips, soft like Bleichert’s, apart from any body of either gender; an inversion of The Man Who Laughs, whose monstrous mouth is hidden while his eyes are exposed, while it is Kay’s eyes, which grow duller and duller through the film, which makes her monstrous.

The door opens, the house is filled with a hot, ungentle light.

Suddenly, behind Bleichert is the body of the Dahlia again, a crow feasting on her looks directly at him.

The viewer, as I said before, sometimes glides through the air with this bird’s freedom. Viewers may have come to feed on the carrion of nude women and gore of this film, evil without, and their attention has been mis-directed. They have stayed fixated on this plot, when the true story, the true evil, has all been here at this triangle. Bleichert turns, briefly, to see the bird, as he turned to look into the camera at the Linscott mansion, and then the image is gone. The hot artificial light disappears, but Kay remains the same cold child self she’s been for half the movie. “Come inside”, she says, but the invitation carries no comfort. The door closes, and for the last time in the film, we, the voyeurs, are left outside.

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Images and Screenplay Copyright Universal Pictures, Millennium Films, Equity Pictures, and associated producers.

Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia Part Three

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(This post contains spoilers for the movie The Black Dahlia, as well as the novel by James Ellroy. It also contains spoilers for The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential, also by Ellroy. There are quotes from Ellroy’s books which contain VERY explicit language. Though some of the stills from Dahlia necessary for supporting some points feature nudity, the nudity has been distorted.)

THE AMBIGUITIES OF LEE BLANCHARD

Blanchard and Kay serve as best examples of the way in which the movie takes elements from the book and entirely inverts them. Much of the dialogue and details of both characters is retained, with enough small edits and additions to make both more mysterious, and radically different from the man and woman of the novel.

Lee Blanchard of the book is a heroic cop burdened with the memory of a sister, Laurie, kidnapped, never found, forever missing. This is a point made early on, and emphatically throughout the book. Kay, same as in the movie, was rescued by Blanchard from a robber named Bobby De Witt who pimped her out and brutalized her. Kay reveals, near the novel’s outset, that though they live together, she and Lee do not sleep with each other. By placing the story of the missing sister early on and in such detail, the reader assigns this event as the cause for their strange chastity. Blanchard was having sex with someone when his sister was kidnapped, so perhaps sex for him has become a tainted thing. He desires to protect a sister substitute in a way he was unable to with his lost sibling, and Kay fills this role; sex would destroy his seeing her as a sister proxy. That she is a wounded woman, scarred by De Witt, only makes her more fitting for this part. In a newspaper article about Blanchard’s arrest of De Witt and rescue of Kay, we have a telling quote by Blanchard: “She has that waiflike beauty I’m a sucker for.” This detective wants someone waifish, with a vulnerable look, who he can save and protect.

Blanchard’s sister is almost entirely removed from the movie’s story, except a small mention far in, right before Blanchard’s death:

KAY
He had a sister.

DWIGHT
What?

KAY
He had a little sister. She was killed when he was fifteen and they never caught the guy.

DWIGHT
What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?

KAY
He made me promise never to tell you. He thought it made him too easy to figure.

DWIGHT
Well, that explains some things.

KAY
No, it doesn’t.

Kay’s answer, that no, it doesn’t explain the obvious question of their platonic union, touches on a key aspect of Blanchard. That this man feels no attraction for Kay, but he perhaps does feel something for Bleichert, and Bleichert feels something back.

I should emphasize that any attraction between the two is unconsummated. Blanchard sublimates his desire two ways, through violence, and the purity of the quest for the Dahlia’s killer. This, I think, is the underlying motif in the boxing match between the two men, physical violence, in close contact, as a substitute for sexual contact. The fight comes right after the following dialogue:

BLEICHERT
You know shacking up’s against regs. Probably cost him his stripes. Waste of diamonds and bassinets.

KAY
Well, you’d have to sleep together for that, Dwight.

It is after the fight that Bleichert and Blanchard becomes partners. They go out together with Kay, her always in the middle, never in between. She, of course, is not the one who both points of the triangle covet, it’s Bleichert; the man of soft, androgynous features, who desires both of them, is desired by both, and whose double is Madeleine, another figure of androgynous features, but who freely travels between both genders.

The movie gives us two pictures of the trinity, one at the theater, the other at dinner, once with Kay in the middle, another with Blanchard. The invisible, unseen picture is the one that hangs over both, Bleichert in the center.

It is at the New Year’s party where we have the first disconcerting moment in the relationship. This scene is the most vivid in terms of color of any in the movie, bright and rich, filled with red and blue. Kay and Lee stand apart, far from Blanchard, and kiss.

Blanchard blows them a kiss, and then, in an incongruous note, as both turn their backs to him, gives them a stare of poisonous menace:

No explicit answer is given for this. The book provides a sense of an unhappy couple, but the scene is different.

On New Year’s Eve, we drove down to Balboa Island to catch Stan Kenton’s band. We danced in 1947, high on champagne, and Kay flipped coins to see who got last dance and first kiss when midnight hit. Lee won the dance, and I watched them swirl across the floor to “Perfidia,” feeling awe for the way they had changed my life. Then it was midnight, the band fired up, and I didn’t know how to play it.

Kay took the problem away, kissing me softly on the lips, whispering, “I love you, Dwight.” A fat woman grabbed me and blew a noisemaker in my face before I could return the words.

We drove home on Pacific Coast Highway, part of a long stream of horn-honking revelers. When we got to the house, my car wouldn’t start, so I made myself a bed on the couch and promptly passed out from too much booze. Sometime toward dawn, I woke up to strange sounds muffling through the walls. I perked my ears to identify them, picking out sobs followed by Kay’s voice, softer and lower than I had ever heard it. The sobbing got worse–trailing into whimpers. I pulled the pillow over my head and forced myself back to sleep.

Kay is very sad in her union, in love with Dwight, but the feeling of Blanchard angry at the two is absent.

I’ll give further support to this by going to the end of the book. It is from a part of Kay’s dialogue, about Blanchard taking the shakedown money and leaving for Mexico:

“Lee was going to run away no matter what. I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, and I wanted him to be comfortable, if such a thing was possible. He didn’t trust himself to deal with Emmett Sprague again, so I picked up the money. Dwight, he knew I was in love with you, and he wanted us to be together. That was one of the reasons he left.”

The movie does not give us the information that Blanchard would leave through Kay. It gives us this through Madeleine, and she presents it as a taunt, and Bleichert is very angry in his reaction:

MADELEINE
A murderer? Of Lee Blanchard? You should thank me for Lee Blanchard. If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have the balls to fuck your partner’s girl.

BUCKY
You don’t talk about them, okay?

MADELEINE
Wait…I forgot. You don’t fuck her anymore…because you’d rather fuck me.

BUCKY
You don’t talk about them.

MADELEINE
You chose me over her. You’ll choose me over him. He was going to take Daddy’s money and leave. Leave all of you.

BUCKY points gun at MADELEINE.

Blanchard feels tremendous anger towards his situation, towards Kay, who can have Bleichert when he cannot, and toward other women as well.

This anger about who he is shows up during the stag film.

The men are enjoying this movie, which has zero investigative purpose. Only Blanchard is seething with fury. He ends up stomping out of the detectives’ room while the film is playing. In the book, he is more demonstrative, and is given lines making clear why he is angry. His fury lies with the killer of this woman, like the killer of his sister, out there and uncaught:

I wanted to shut my eyes, but couldn’t. Next to me, Chief Horrall said calmly, “Russ, what do you think? You think this has got anything to do with the girl’s murder?”

Millard answered with a hoarse voice. “It’s a long shot, Chief. The movie was made in November and from what the Martilkova girl said, the Mexican doesn’t play as a killer. It’s got to be checked out, though. Maybe the Mex showed the movie to somebody, and _he_ got a case on Betty. What I–”

Lee kicked his chair over and shouted: “Who gives a fuck if he didn’t kill her! I’ve sent Boy Scouts to the green room for less than that! So if you won’t do something about it, I will!”

Everyone sat there, shock-stilled. Lee stood in front of the screen, blinking from the hot white light in his eyes. He wheeled and ripped the obscenity down; the screen and tripod hit the floor with a crash. Betty and Lorna continued their sex on a chalked-up blackboard; Lee took off running. I heard the projector knocked over in back of me; Millard yelled, “Bleichert, get him!”

In the aftermath, the emphasis for the outburst is placed on Blanchard’s drive to find the killer and his missing sister:

Loew had murder in his eyes. It hit me that Lee’s explosion came from his weird chastity, a week of death and dope and its pornographic capper. Safe myself, I put an arm around my partner’s shoulders. “Mr. Loew, it was just that goddamn movie. Lee thought the dykes here could give us a lead on the Mex.”

Loew hissed, “Bleichert, shut up,” then turned his velvet rage on Lee: “Blanchard, I got you Warrants. You’re my man, and you made me look like a fool in front of the two most powerful men in the Department. This is no lesbian killing, those girls were on drugs and hated it. Now I covered for you with Horrall and Green, but I don’t know how much good that will do you in the long run. If you weren’t _Mr.Fire, Big Lee Blanchard_, you’d be suspended from duty already. You’ve gotten personally involved in the Short case, and that’s an unprofessionalism I will not tolerate. You’re back on Warrants duty as of tomorrow morning. Report to me at 0800, and bring in formal letters of apology to Chief Horrall and Chief Green. For the sake of your pension, I advise you to grovel.”

Lee, his body limp, said, “I want to go to TJ to look for the smut man.”

Loew shook his head. “Under the circumstances, I would call that request ridiculous. Vogel and Koenig are going to Tijuana, you’re back on Warrants, and Bleichert, you’re to remain on the Short case. Good day, Officers.”

Loew stormed over to his black-and-white; the patrolman driver hung a U-turn out into traffic. Lee said, “I have to talk to Kay.” I nodded, and a sheriff’s patrol car cruised by, the passenger cop blowing kisses to the lezzies in the doorway. Lee walked to his car murmuring, “Laurie. Laurie, oh babe.”

In the film, Blanchard, while watching the stag flick, gets up and throws a film can to the floor. We have only this line from Lieutenant Green, no dialogue from Blanchard:

LIEUTENANT GREEN
What’s that about gentlemen? The boy can’t hold his water?

In the locker room right after, no reference to anything to do with Blanchard’s sister or the murder case:

ELLIS LOEW
I got you warrants. You’re my men. You made me look like a fool in front of the most powerful man in the department. (to LEE) And you. Yeah, you. Look at me. Blanchard. LOOK. AT. ME!

BLANCHARD cannot look at LOEW.

LOEW
If you weren’t Mr. Fire, you’d already be suspended from duty…you’re a punch drunk, washed up fighter…stay out of it Bleichert!

RUSS MILLAND
Ellis!

LOEW
You’re back on warrants as of tomorrow. I want you to report to me at oh eight hundred with a letter of apology for Chief Green. You. Are. A POLITICAL ANIMAL! And for the sake of your pension, I suggest that you grovel.

The script’s emphasis on Blanchard looking at Loew, and Blanchard unable to meet his gaze, is, I think, a subtle, but important change from the novel. When we look into someone’s eyes, there is the greater possibility of revealing ourselves. Blanchard knows this, and is deeply afraid of what he might reveal of himself, something distinct from the Blanchard of the novel. If there is something histrionic in Loew’s speech in the film, I believe it’s by design, for Loew himself may be playing a part, having his own sense of what Blanchard’s action reveals. By L.A. Confidential, the third book of the quartet, Loew is revealed to clearly be gay:

Ed [Exley] laid a folder on his desk. “Sid Hudgens had a file on you. Contribution shakedowns, felony indictments you dismissed for money. He’s got the McPherson tank job documented, and Pierce Patchett had a photograph of you sucking a male prostitute’s dick. Resign from office or it all goes public.”

[Ellis] Loew–sheet white. “I’ll take you with me.”

The reaction of Blanchard to the movie may be similar to a scene that happens in another book of the L.A. Quartet, The Big Nowhere. Detective Danny Upshaw, as part of his undercover work, is to seduce Claire De Haven, a screenwriter, to get information on a labour union she’s connected with. The only problem is that Upshaw is gay, and De Haven has already figured this out:

Claire took his hand and led him through the kitchen to a room lined with bookcases, the front wall covered by a projection screen. A long leather couch faced the screen; a projector was mounted on a tripod a few feet behind it, a reel of film already fed in. Danny sat down; Claire hit switches, doused the lights and snuggled into him, legs curled under a swell of skirt. Light took over the screen, the movie started.

A test pattern; a black-and-white fade-in; a zaftig blonde and a Mexican with a duck’s ass haircut stripping. A motel room backdrop: bed, chipped stucco walls, sombrero lamps and a bullfight poster on the closet door. Tijuana, pure and simple.

Danny felt Claire’s hand hovering. The blonde rolled her eyes to heaven; she’d just seen her co-star’s cock–huge, veiny, hooked at the middle like a dowsing rod. She salaamed before him, hit her knees and started sucking. The camera caught her acne scars and his needle tracks. She sucked while the hophead gyrated his hips; he pulled out of her mouth and sprayed.

Danny looked away; Claire touched his thigh. Danny flinched, tried to relax but kept flinching; Claire fingered a ridge of coiled muscle inches from his stuff. Hophead screwed Pimples from behind, the insertion close in. Danny’s stomach growled–worse than when he was on a no-food jag. Claire’s hand kept probing; Danny felt himself shriveling–cold shower time where you shrunk down to nothing.

The blonde and the Mexican fucked with abandon; Claire kneaded muscles that would not yield. Danny started to cramp, grabbed Claire’s hand and squeezed it to his knee, like they were back at the jazz club and he was calling the shots. Claire pulled away; the movie ended with a close-up of the blonde and the Mex tongue-kissing.

Film snapped off the cylinder; Claire got up, hit the lights and exchanged reels. Danny uncramped into his best version of Ted Krugman at ease–legs loosely crossed, hands laced behind his head. Claire turned and said, “I was saving this for après bed, but I think we might need it now.”

A black screen; Danny going light-headed from holding his breath, sensing Claire’s eyes on him. Then all color footage, naked men circling each other just like the dogs, going for each other with sucking mouths, 69 close-ups, a pullback shot and Felix Gordean in a red devil costume, capering, prancing.

Danny got hard; Claire’s hand went there–like she knew. Danny squirmed, tried to shut his eyes, couldn’t and kept looking.

A quick cut; then Pretty Boy Christopher, naked and hard, pointing his thing at the camera, the head nearly eclipsing the screen like a giant battering ram, white background borders looking just like parted lips and teeth holding the image intact through rigor mortis–

Danny bolted, double-timed to the front of the house, found a bathroom and locked the door. He got his shakes chilled with a litany: BE A POLICEMAN BE A POLICEMAN BE A POLICEMAN.

This anger is part of why Blanchard chooses the Dahlia case over Raymond Nash; it is not just that the Dahlia is high profile because she is a white victim and Nash’s victims are non-white, it is because Blanchard has some understanding for a man who would hate a woman so much as to disfigure her, specifically to destroy her beauty, a beauty that could attract someone like Bleichert.

This expression of violence shows up near the end as well, and it serves as a good example of how the movie takes almost identical materials and changes them subtly, but radically. In the book, Madeleine’s sister, Margaret, out of hatred of her sibling, calls in a tip to the police, which leads to the blackmail attempt on the family:

I braced myself for the spooky stuff. “Martha, did you call the police with a tip on La Verne’s Hideaway?”

Martha lowered her eyes. “Yes.”

“Did you talk to–”

“I told the man about my dyke sister, how she met a cop named Bucky Bleichert at La Verne’s last night and had a date with him tonight. Maddy was gloating to the whole family about you, and I was jealous. But I only wanted to hurt her — not you.”

Lee taking the call while I sat across a desk from him in University squadroom; Lee going directly to La Verne’s when _Slave Girls From Hell_ drove him around the twist. I said, “Martha, you come clean on the rest of it.”

Martha looked around and clenched herself–legs together, arms to her sides, fists balled. “Lee Blanchard came to the house and told Father he’d talked to women at La Verne’s — lesbians who could tie Maddy in to the Black Dahlia. He said he had to leave town, and for a price he wouldn’t report his information on Maddy. Father agreed, and gave him all the money he had in his safe.”

In the story, when this tip is placed, Blanchard goes directly to this lesbian bar to find out about the film and the Dahlia killer:

Then Lee got out and pushed through the door of La Verne’s Hideaway. Worse panic made me stomp the brakes and fishtail the cruiser into the sidewalk; thoughts of Madeleine and evidence suppression raps propelled me into the dive after my partner.

Lee was facing off booths full of daggers and femmes, shouting curses. I flailed with my eyes for Madeleine and the barmaid I’d rousted; not seeing them, I got ready to cold cock my best friend.

“You fucking quiff divers seen a little movie called _Slave Girls From Hell_? You buy your stag shit from a fat Mex about forty? You–”

I grabbed Lee from behind in a full nelson and spun him around toward the door.

So, the first importance of the tip for Blanchard is information on the murderer of the Dahlia.

The movie takes this same plot turn, but tells it with much greater economy, and a small twist.

In the initial sequence, Blanchard asks for matches, and Bleichert tosses the matchbook from La Verne’s the lesbian bar.

Blanchard sees Madeleine’s name written inside, sees that it is La Verne’s, and deduces that Madeleine and the Dahlia know each other.

When Bleichert replays the sequence in his head, however, there is an additional element, not in the novel:

Blanchard sees that it’s LaVerne’s and the name Madeleine Linscott. He knows that the investigation involved lesbian bars. The culmination of these shots should be Madeleine’s name – that would be the most important element, if all that’s necessary for this sequence to convey is Blanchard getting the information that Madeleine, an associate of La Verne’s, might be connected with the Dahlia. Instead, the emphasis falls on Blanchard’s eyes moving back from the name to Bleichert, a focus on his menacing stare, the same stare of the New Year’s Eve party. The name is of importance to Bleichert because he wrote it down, and there must be a romantic coupling, because if this was simply the name of a suspect or witness he came across in one of these bars, he would have shared it with the investigation. Instead, he specifically keeps it out. The anger over this coupling, fulfilling something with Bleichert that he cannot fulfill, is the prime motivation for him going to the Linscott house, and beating Madeleine’s father so badly.

This does not entirely finish the subject of Blanchard, but the rest overlaps with the even more mysterious woman of the triangle, Kay Lake.

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Images and Screenplay Copyright Universal Pictures, Millennium Films, Equity Pictures, and associated producers.

Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia Part Two

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(This post contains spoilers for the movie The Black Dahlia, as well as the novel by James Ellroy. Though some of the stills from Dahlia necessary for supporting some points feature nudity, the nudity has been distorted.)

WHAT MEN MIGHT WANT, OR: VOYEURS WILL BE DISAPPOINTED

Where the book is about obsession with a single image, the Dahlia, the movie is about what men want from movies, and how the form and the characters are not exclusively developed for narrative purposes, but to satisfy these tastes. An example of this from another movie would be making some character a strip club owner, so we can have a scene in a strip club, which will have naked women running around. Another would be a beautiful actress taking her shirt off before a love scene, or other purposeless context – only for the edification of the men. I don’t give citation for these examples because they’re so ever present. Black Dahlia is about a murder victim who slept around and made a stag film, with another woman, her supposed double, who also sleeps around, and a good looking detective who has sex many times with both. It would be very easy for this film to use this as a context to sate simple appetites; instead, the movie turns things on their head, using the context as a vehicle to examine and play games with these same desires.

Let’s start with one of the first important changes in the movie. As said, in the book, Bleichert is something of a grotesque, having massive obvious buck teeth. In the movie, these are visible in the opening shot before the fight when he does a deep inhale:

Then, during the fight, these front teeth are graphically knocked out.

New, proper teeth are put in.

That his buck teeth make Bleichert into something of a grotesque comes up several times in the book:

I danced and counterpunched and hooked to the liver, always keeping my guard up, afraid that catching too many head shots would ruin my looks worse than my teeth already had.

“My girlfriend saw you fight at the Olympic and said you’d be handsome if you got your teeth fixed, and maybe you _could_ take me.” [Blanchard talking]

“You’d be very handsome if you got your teeth fixed.” [Kay talking]

Smiling without exposing my teeth, I said, “Hello.” [at the Sprague family dinner]

The kids noticed me first. I flashed my teeth at them until they started laughing. [at the school where Kay teaches]

So, the fight carries some of the fantastic, ridiculous qualities of movie violence. Not only do the effects of these blows disappear within days, but they make Bleichert better looking. He moves from a grotesque to a very handsome man without aberration.

As an actor for this role, Josh Hartnett was criticized as mis-cast and too blank. I think this misunderstands a critical quality of this part. He is supposed to be blank, so that a man might better project himself onto this figure, and so that he might better serve as a proxy for heroic deeds and sexual feats. It might be argued that this slight blankness, in combination with great looks, is a necessary part of being a leading man, because what is wanted is this projection, something not possible with faces of too distinct or eccentric feature, where the actor is that character, and it is impossible to imagine oneself as that man. Bleichert is our proxy, with a man perhaps imagining with some small step, some teeth fixed or small physical error repaired, he might well be this person.

Bleichert has the traditional role of an avatar, allowing the men in the audience the possibility of vicarious sexual conquest. The movie plays a simple game with this. Each time there is a scene involving sex, the audience is brought close before being reminded that we are outsiders, not Bleichert at all, simple voyeurs to this image:

The first scene with Madeleine, we follow Bleichert and her to the hotel, before the smeared glass comes between us:

The scene between Bleichert and Kay, they start to have sex on a table, and suddenly, we are outside the house, looking in:

And when Bleichert returns to Madeleine, we look on through the glass of the door.

In each of these scenes, the violence of the motions of caressing and removing clothes approaches, intentionally, camp. The gestures are ostentatious because they are acted out for the benefit of the audience, not out of any necessity to present something of the characters.

After the last mentioned scene with Madeleine, the viewer is again placed behind a barrier, looking down on Bucky and Madeleine through a veil:

Here, De Palma plays another little trick. There are countless movies where a nude woman turns over and gets up for no purpose other than to show some appetizing part of her body. Perhaps there is the expectation that something like this will happen here. But, no, it is not the woman, but Bleichert, naked, in a shot that adds nothing to the movie, other than the pleasure a body part might give, who gets out of bed and walks around. De Palma emphasizes that the only point of this is titillation, though not for straight men, by moving his camera to a conveniently located mirror. There is one other subtle visual point made here: De Palma rudely mooning the wants of a straight man.

In the mirror, he looks at his reflection, but also at us:

Subsequent to this scene, at the beginning of the next, Bleichert walks into the room and is looking off at something, but ends up looking straight into the camera. Both moments I read in one way: a character briefly wondering, am I being watched?

A similar game is played in the Lorna Mertz sequence. In the book, Lorna Martilkova (Mertz in the film), a past associate of the Dahlia, is spotted by a barman who calls it in to police, she runs out of the bar, the police give chase and Bleichert pins her to the ground, saying nothing in response to her protests. The scene, is very different for the movie, and I think the changes are, again, about the way men look at a movie.

It opens with Bleichert at the park reading a paper.

Something catches his attention.

However, it is something where he does not want the object to know he is looking at them, so he puts up the paper and lowers his hat.

We now get his perspective, that of a girl in a juvenile’s sailor costume. She is eating ice cream, and in one of those gestures that seem entirely designed for the edification of men, she lifts up her skirt to lick some ice cream that’s spilled on her leg.

I think there’s an obvious reason why Bleichert might have been staring in the first place, and why this image is there. I don’t think it’s for police purposes, because now the cast of his face shifts, and only then is there recognition that this girl is of importance to the investigation.

Another image that seems designed for our appetites, she licks off some ice cream that’s fallen under her shirt:

Now, Bleichert rises up from his seat:

She, not knowing who he is, is suddenly frightened of this man and starts to run:

He chases her about and holds her down:

His line after the chase, that gives this the observation of the girl the all-clear, is “I’m a police officer!” I don’t think this is some criticism of the power of police in society. It’s very much about the audience being given license to do certain things. Were Bleichert to look at this girl and he were a pedophile or other aberrant, the very possibility of edification would not be possible, because it would be through a deviant’s perspective. Here, the voyeurism is part of a criminal investigation, not for any essential part of the inquiry, but solely for the voyeurism itself.

De Palma explicitly states this when the stag movie is screened. It features Lorna and Betty topless and engaged in sex play, of which the audience is given a few seconds sight. We then move to the detectives looking at the film and get this dialogue.

LIEUTENTANT GREEN
What do you think, Russ? This got anything to do with the girl’s murder?

RUSS MILLARD
Long shot, chief.

The joke, of course, is that there is no purpose to what we just looked at. The detectives are not watching this for its critical importance in the investigation, and the audience has not been given a look at it for any need of story or character, but only to watch some women with their tops off roll around.

This stag film also has a visual punchline. The movie, as said, is told almost entirely from Buckey’s perspective, and we, as voyeurs, always travel with him, looking from his view or over his shoulder at the beautiful women he encounters. We associate ourselves with Bucky, in wanting to see the same things he wants to see, and we have no problems with associating ourselves with this handsome man. Whatever nudity we see, we see not as voyeurs, but as a natural part of the journey of his character. At the very end, however, we’re given a brief, unwelcome shift. We move to a flashback of the making of the stag film, and again, we are looking over someone’s shoulder at the nude women. Again, we immediately associate ourselves with the viewer, because we share wanting to see these things:

Then suddenly the angle shifts, and the figure who is our proxy is the disfigured grotesque Georgie. The erotic view is no longer that of a handsome detective, but an outsider scarred degenerate murderer. We are suddenly him, just as before, we were Bleichert:

The culmination of this, the most explicit examination of men looking at women in film, are the audition clips of Betty Short, conducted by an unseen director, voiced by the same Mr. De Palma who directed the amin feature. They are the only points when we see her, they are entirely of the movie, with nothing of the kind in the book, serving no simple expository purpose. The clips do not give anything like the fuller sense of Short we have in the book through various witness interviews. They serve as a fractional view of her, but one that contrasts with the roles that Kay Lake and Madeleine Linscott play in the film. The interviews serve as an indictment of the audience, but also a self-indictment of the director. The sets of The Man Who Laughs serve also as the sets for the stag film, and De Palma presents himself as the worst sense of what directors can be, simple pimps procuring beautiful women for the delectation of their clientele. The doubling of the stag film and Man Who Laughs feels like an indictment of contemporary film itself, a question of at what point the medium becomes so debased, so simple a mechanism for sating the dullest tastes that it becomes indistinguishable from the artlessness of pornography?

A digression: we see the debased role of other actresses in the brief scene with Sheryl Saddon, Betty Short’s roommate. She waits in her room, looking out, the blinds like prison bars:

She is waiting for the casting truck, or cattle car, filled with female extras:

Of course, she is dressed as a slave girl.

The anonymous director procures these women for us, but he also performs another task: to reprimand them for being so beautiful, so distant from the men in the audience, he also punishes them by humiliating them, all in the guise of acting, or getting some insight into them. Betty Short gives a terrible performance as Scarlett O’Hara, then is made to crawl on the floor till she is close to tears, then finally, provides a personal story that is sneered at. This is all difficult to watch, but how different is it from the desire and counter desire in the entertainment industry then and now, which both demands attractive women, and then demands that they be humiliated or destroyed, a reprimand for the audacity of her beauty and fame. The audition clips are also a study in contrast, with Mia Kirshner luminescent in every frame, something like a silent movie actress, all while her character is laughed at for her shoddy acting.

MORAL HEIGHTS: STAIRS, CRANE SHOTS, AND CROWS

A key visual theme that runs through the movie is ascent, and movement from a great height. There is, again, a slight trick played here. We associate a position at great height with something unreachable, but also with the great moral purity, the divine. Here, the point of great height is the very opposite of some moral peak, but the pit of damnation. That the viewer of the film often has the perspective of one on a mountain top looking down does not provide any moral distance, but indicts him as equally culpable as those damned.

The best example of this would be the best known sequence of the film, where, for the only extended period, the camera leave Bleichert’s perspective and travels on its own.

We start at the base of the Holden Pet Food store:

Then move to the top of the building. We, the audience, have the power of flight, just like the crows that caw on this roof.

We then move out from the roof, to the field where a woman has come across the body of Betty Short, then follow a car, then a bike, before we follow Baxter Fitch and his girlfriend.

As a brief digression, the following quote by Joan Didion from her novel Democracy was appropriate for De Palma’s Femme Fatale, and it is appropriate here:

I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know.

The camera has given us this extraordinary freedom, that no other character has, to move about the neighborhood, but when it turns back to the car it leaves out the simple fragment of what is going on at the Pet Food store when Blanchard pulls out his gun: is someone firing at him, or did he fire first? We, the viewer, have been granted extraordinary power, yet it is arbitrary, with vital, simple images withheld, ones that we wish withheld for suspense.

Returning to that uninterrupted shot: that we pass over the building and the crows sound is not, I believe incidental. The viewer’s power of flight, to wish to swoop down on parts of this landscape is connected to the most vulgar aspect of the crow, which can also move about and land where it wishes.

The next time the crow appears in this sequence is here, after the discovery of Betty Short’s nude body when it lands and starts to peck at it. Not unlike some men, perhaps us, is how this crow travels, searching for some nude part to sight and feed on.

The position of the camera here makes obvious that our perspective of great height has nothing to do with some enlightened moral distance; it is entirely at the whim of the director. Before, we sailed freely through the air, far above the detectives and pimps. Now, we look up at the police from the perspective of Betty Short’s body, where, even crouched, they tower above us.

To make the association clear, the visual theme is repeated during the autopsy. We look down at the body at great height, just like one of the crows. Then we move closer and closer till we reach near where one of the crows pecked, then our view shifts, and we are looking up at the detectives, again level with Betty Short. That the gore of the Dahlia’s corpse is close within reach, but always kept away from our eyes, may be another game played on those whose appetite desire to look on such morbid things in a movie about a serial killer.

Two major sequences are set on winding stairs, the killing of Lee Blanchard at the Olympic, and the confession of Ramona Lincott. They continue the theme of ascent as descent, stairways to inferno that run up, rather than down.

Bobby De Witt starts at the bottom, then steadily moves up. At the very top of the stairs is Lee Blanchard, Georgie, and Madeleine Lincott.

At the Lincott mansion, Bleichert is at the base, Madeleine and Emmett are a landing up, with Ramona at the very top.

The killing of Baxter Fitch and associates takes place in a house with stairs, which partners ascend.

The men take on the Black Dahlia case, which will take them away from Raymond Nash, when Blanchard lies that it’s being covered. It is after this that we see the men on the police station’s stairs mid-point. Bleichert protests here, but ultimately does nothing.

Finally, there is the theme of ascendance as damnation in the Blanchard house. The home is purchased through sinful works, blood money, corrupt acts, bribes and possibly even a bank robbery. In the novel, Kay relinquishes it because she cannot bear to have it on her conscience. Kay, as we’ll later look at, is a different character in the movie than the book. Bleichert acquiring the house, Kay Lake, and the funds that come with it, completes his damnation, though visually, it’s entirely an ascent.

Kay, a deeply ambiguous figure, is a woman Bleichert badly wants. Both times when he sees her partially nude form it is when she is in the bathroom at the top of the stairs.

That the bathroom is at the top of these stairs is not incidental. The bathroom is where money that Blanchard either stole from De Witt, or stole from the bank itself is buried.

The house has a set of stairs which he must climb.

The very last shot involves him walking up this set of stairs. The viewer has no sense of superiority over Bleichert; the camera’s perspective, the audience’s perspective, is already at the top of the steps as he makes this climb.

THE FIGHT

In the movie, the fight is set aside as an act of central importance. The entire opening scene of Bleichert in his training room is a lead-up to this sequence, before cutting back to when Bleichert and Blanchard first met. The book simply has the fight in plot sequence, while the film wishes to place special emphasis on this moment. Another key difference, connected with the first, is that in the novel, Bleichert arranges to throw the fight before deciding that he won’t, though he loses anyway.

From the book:

The crowd was chanting, “Buck-kee! Buck-kee! Buck-kee!” as I weaved to my corner. I spat out my mouthpiece and gasped for air; I looked out at the fans and knew that all bets were off, that I was going to pound Blanchard into dog meat and milk Warrants for every process and repo dollar I could get my hands on, put the old man in a home with that money and have the whole enchilada.

The film has Bleichert arranging to throw the fight, then provide a voice over which starts to imply he’ll double cross the bookies as well, before leading to a point that he, in fact, will throw the fight.

That the fight is set aside may be because it serves as an embodiment for everything that follows. The external conflict is not at all what it appears to be. The book’s Bleichert and Blanchard are moving in opposite directions, with Blanchard among the damned and Bleichert with the saved. This match suggests that they are actually moving towards the same end, though Blanchard may be unaware of it. There is also the quality of the rigged game, with the designated hero having to win, not because he is skilled, or even because he is good, but only because he is perceived as the good man. There is another aspect to this fight, but that lies with the ambiguous nature of Lee Blanchard, and I’ll leave it to later.

Among the consequences of the fight, as mentioned, is, improbably, that Bleichert becomes a better looking man. Another is that he now has the money to place his father in a rest home. In the book, this man is a despicable character who’s a member of the German Bund. The father of the novel being placed in a rest home that he’ll have to share with jews is sweet revenge. The movie changes this to a man who longs for the Europe left behind.

In the movie:

BLEICHERT’s FATHER
Englische ist scheisse! Amerikanische ist scheisse! ["English is shit! America is shit!"]

In the book:

I pulled the old man up into a standing position. He dropped the BB pistol and Expectolar pint and said, “Guten Tag, Dwight,” like he had just seen me the day before.

I brushed tears from my eyes. “Speak English, Papa.”

The old man grabbed the crook of his right elbow and shook his fist at me in a slapdash fungoo.

“Englisch Scheisser! Churchill Scheisser! Amerikanisch Juden Scheisser!”

When the father is left at the rest home in the novel:

For two grand a year and fifty a month deducted from his Social Security check, the old man would have his own room, three squares and plenty of “group activities.” Most of the oldsters at the home were Jewish, and it pleased me that the crazy Kraut was going to be spending the rest of his life in an enemy camp.

When the father is left at the rest home in the movie, it feels like a confirming detail in what might be the squalid lack of family closeness that existed in Europe in contrast with the United States. Though Bleichert wants his father to like the rest home, with the father giving a look that Bleichert reacts with utter despair.

After throwing this fight and leaving his father behind, we might think there would be a visual note of Bleichert’s descent. But no: as mentioned, the movie acts in reverse. In the scene following the fight and the rest home, he is shot from his balcony, far above the street, far above Blanchard.

A DOUBLE THAT ISN’T, A DOUBLE THAT IS, A BLACK ANGEL

A strange detail that many reviews comment on is that while the novel makes clear that Madeleine and the Dahlia are near twins, and in the movie various characters comment on the resemblance between the two, Madeleine (Hillary Swank) and the Dahlia (Mia Kirshner), obviously, visually, look nothing alike. That it would be no difficulty to cast the same actress in both roles, or very similar looking women in both roles then provokes the question, why cast two women who look nothing alike as virtual twins?

There are several games, I think, being played here. The first, is that these characters, in a movie made in our time, who in many ways entirely resemble us, do not see things entirely as we do, though we may see the very same things. Ellroy, in his other novels, quickly establishes the divide between his police characters and the contemporary reader, by having them freely use racial epithets and often talk about men and women of certain races as subhuman. The reader may consider individual acts of the characters as heroic, but almost immediately, an easy identification is destroyed.

The only example of this is the film’s portrayal of Ellis Loew, the district attorney, or in the words of the police, the “jew DA”. Almost all of the book’s epithets have been scrubbed, except this one. Loew throughout the quartet is a venal opportunist. The movie’s transformation of him into a shallow grotesque suggests less a surrender to the views of the characters in the book, and more an attempt to create a compromise: can such a grotesque truly be real, or is it a creation of the characters’ perspectives? A tip of the hat to the latter appears in the last scene with Loews. We keep switching to Bleichert’s perspective, seeing Loew as a vindictive martinet throughout, chastising him for Blanchard’s absence.

Now, our last shot of Loew from Bleichert’s perspective, the “jew DA” looms large, entirely a grotesque, his semitic marker, an oversized nose poking into the camera. This, is how Bleichert sees this man, not just an opportunistic DA, but an opportunistic “jew DA”.

Another is to question the movie’s assumptions that it might present as absent of doubt. That characters at the end of a film are young and good-looking, in love and with money, should not imply that they are without malice or that the victory is noble. If a man positioned as the hero in a story kills someone, it should not be assumed that the killing is necessarily righteous.

That the movie will present things that are not what they are, blatantly, is done quite clearly in another instance. The photo of Elizabeth Short, as part of an attempt to get leads for her murder, is publicized as the “Black Dahlia”, a play on the then contemporary movie The Blue Dahlia because of the dark dresses she wears.

The flower in her hair, however, which I believe is a dahlia, is not black at all, but white, in almost every photo. We see it in the collage of photos of Short at Bleichert’s apartment:

It is one of these photos that is used for the front page story that gives the Black Dahlia her name. It can be glimpsed in this shot:

So, the movie is somehow able to convince the viewer that white is black.

All this should not be taken that Madeleine is without a double. She has a double, but it’s not Betty Short. It’s Bleichert.

This, I think, is only obvious in the last minutes of the film, when we see Madeleine in her man’s suit which others have seen her in, but we only see now. I have Bleichert in outfit next to her for comparison and contrast.

There is also, I think, a very clear point when Bleichert realizes he is Madeleine’s double.

They are lying together in bed, face to face:

She tells him that she once had sex with Elizabeth Short because she wanted to know what it was like to sleep with someone who looked just like her. In the book, it is this revelation that disturbs Bleichert. He can’t handle this idea:

I slid over to where I could eyeball Madeleine up close. Her lipstick was a bloody disarray, and I daubed at it with the pillow. “Babe, I’m withholding evidence for you. It’s a fair trade for what I’m getting, but it still spooks me. So you be damn sure you come clean. I’ll ask you one time. Is there anything you haven’t told me about you and Betty and Linda?”

Madeleine ran her fingers down my rib cage, exploring the welt scars I’d gotten in the Blanchard fight. “Sugar, Betty and I made love once, that one time we met last summer. I just did it to see what it would be like to be with a girl who looked so much like me.”

I felt like I was sinking; like the bed was dropping out from under me. Madeleine looked like she was at the end of a long tunnel, captured by some kind of weird camera trick. She said, “Bucky, that’s all of it, I swear that’s all of it,” her voice wobbling from deep nowhere. I got up and dressed, and it was only when I strapped on my .38 and cuffs that I felt like I’d quit treading quicksand.

Madeleine pleaded, “Stay, sugar, stay”; I went out the door before I could succumb.

The movie handles in a slightly different way. Madeleine tells Bleichert, “Betty and I made love once that one time last summer”.

Bleichert cracks up. He’s not bothered at all by this revelation.

Then there is a slight change to the book’s dialogue. The line in the book is, “I just did it to see what it would be like to be with a girl who looked so much like me”, all part of the line about Betty Short. The movie’s dialogue is, “I just did it to see what it would be like to do it with someone who looked like me”, and puts it after Bleichert laughs. It is after she says this line, that he turns to her, sees something in her face literally, and then the revelation hits him, disturbing him so much that he shoots out of bed, very scared.

He starts to leave, she begs him to stay: “Bucky, please stay.” He then says the line, not in the book, “You stupid slut.” Then, she begs him to stay, again: “Stay, sugar, stay.” He leaves anyway.

Madeleine is Bleichert’s dark half, a twin who acts in ways he will not and does the things he wants, but which he will not permit himself. She is the one who initiates sex with him, rather than the other way around. Bleichert wants Kay Lake and the house, subconsciously wants Blanchard out of the way, perhaps finds Blanchard in an inconvenience for another reason, and it is Madeleine who kills him. She acts as the agent of his own hidden desires, which might make her something like his “Black Angel”. Her very identity is introduced in the Pantages marquee that we see right before the scenes in the lesbian clubs and her entrance.

Finally, Madeleine travels among men and women equally, having sex with both. This is what frightens Bleichert most about Madeleine; if she is an equal mirror, than they share this attribute as well, though she acts on it, while he represses it.

All these qualities, especially the last, are what make Madeleine so deeply disturbing to Bleichert. After he rushes out of the hotel bedroom, he stays away, only lured back much later, in an image where Madeleine stands at the balcony of her mansion like some gothic phantom:

Madeleine’s final scene is her taunting Bleichert about their twinship, and their polarities. She acts as she wants, he does not.

MADELEINE
I think you’d rather fuck me than kill me. But you don’t have the guts to do either. You’re a boxer, not a fighter.

BUCKY
You’re a murderer. Of my partner.

MADELEINE
A murderer? Of Lee Blanchard? You should thank me for Lee Blanchard. If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have the balls to fuck your partner’s girl.

For Bleichert, there is something taboo about speaking ill of Kay and Blanchard, a defamation of the temple. There are two aspects of the movie Black Dahlia, in the first, two men, one in a perfect marriage with a beautiful woman, are on a modern day quest, the hunt for a killer of a beautiful woman, Elizabeth Short; the other is of a man drawn to a woman, his twin, who states that everything in this other plot is false. Blanchard is a crooked cop and a wicked man with no loyalty for either Bleichert or Kay, a man Bleichert is grateful his twin killed. The nihilism of Madeleine is how Hollywood operates, how the LAPD operates, and it is closer to how Bleichert, who throws a fight and ultimately accepts a house bought with stolen money, operates as well, though he would dearly like to believe he does not. There is also something of a sexual netherworld that he chooses when he is with Madeleine instead of Kay, a place of neither here nor there, of a dissolution in gender.

BUCKY
You don’t talk about them, okay?

MADELEINE
Wait…I forgot. You don’t fuck her anymore…because you’d rather fuck me.

BUCKY
You don’t talk about them.

MADELEINE
You chose me over her. You’ll choose me over him. He was going to take Daddy’s money and leave. Leave all of you.

BUCKY points gun at MADELEINE.

MADELEINE
You’ll never shoot me. Don’t forget who I look like.

CLOSE UP of BUCKY.

She isn’t just taunting him with her resemblance to the Dahlia, which only the characters of the movie see, but her resemblance to him. It is also necessary, however, to imagine her for how she’s seen by the characters in the movie, as a virtual double for the Dahlia, an image whose destruction they have committed themselves to resolve. Madeleine says all the noble ideals of their lives are ridiculous; if Bleichert kills her, he will end up destroying these illusions anyway, because he will himself destroying this sacred image again. His only excuse then would be that this image has nothing to do with reality, but this now could well be said of the idealized exterior and actual details of the lives of Kay and Blanchard. The intentional irony of this, of course, is that, to the viewer’s eyes, Madeleine looks nothing like the sacred image of the Dahlia. The scene moves to its conclusion:

MADELEINE
Because that girl, that sad, dead, bitch. She’s all you have.

BUCKY
No.

BUCKY shoots MADELEINE.

I end this part by noting that of all the women in the movie, Madeleine is the one who moves with the greatest freedom. She has sex with who she wants. She is the only one who is able take on all the privileges of a man, when she puts on a suit. In the book, Madeleine kills Blanchard by manipulating other men through her sexual powers. The movie has her killing him herself, in cold blood. She may be wicked, but I see her as a good less cruel than, say, Blanchard. Her house is built on corrupt money, but so is Blanchard’s. She may have helped cover up evidence leading to the killer of the Dahlia, but so did Blanchard. She has the blood on her hands of one man, Blanchard has that of many.

She killed Blanchard, but this a man who beat her father for shakedown money. In doing so, she acted not as a woman is expected, but like a man. According to the very code that Bleichert holds to, the misdeeds of her father are irrelevant, just as the misdeeds of his partner are irrelevant. Emmett was her father. Blanchard was his partner. When they are hurt or killed, there must be vengeance. I do not say whether this is a good or bad code, only that if it is the code Bleichert cites for killing her, it is the very same code by which she operates.

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Images and Screenplay Copyright Universal Pictures, Millennium Films, Equity Pictures, and associated producers.

Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia Part One

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

(This post contains spoilers for the movie The Black Dahlia, as well as the novel by James Ellroy. Though some of the stills from Dahlia necessary for supporting some points feature nudity, the nudity has been distorted.)

An example of a movie making small changes in certain details to a book that make it into something entirely different. This post is an attempt at examining those changes, why I think the novel works so extraordinarily well, and trying to get at the movie, which may be a failure, but one which I find to be a fascinating, inscrutable, enigmatic one.

Laying a few cards on the table, I think Brian De Palma is a director whose movies are distinct from others the way a rapturous, frightening dream is different from an unenthusiastic puppet show. He, along with David Lynch, is one of those men who I do not wish to imagine the movies without, any more than I want to imagine a world that never moved past oil portraits. He is, I think, falsely saddled with the reputation of a film-maker who hates women and likes to hurt them on-screen, when he does something entirely different. The taboo De Palma violates is not that of hurting or humiliating women in his movies, for there is no such taboo, it is a commonplace; the taboo he violates is that sympathetic women are hurt or killed, in circumstances that in other movies are usually the basis for heroic fantasy, but here the male hero is unable to prevent her suffering and death, such as Casualties of War or complicit in her suffering and death, such as Blow Out. Again and again, De Palma makes movies which have serious questions about what men expect in movies, the fantasies the movies fed, and each time he receives the same reward for his inquiries, one more variation on the review headline, “Another Sadistic Piece Of Garbage From Misogynist Brian De Palma”.

So, I do not say callously or cavalierly that I think the Black Dahlia feels like a movie of extraordinary contempt, contempt for the audience, contempt for what movies have become, contempt for the fantasies people have about movies themselves; it is not contempt that is easy or stupid, but one of extraordinary focus and design, of a brilliant craftsman, something akin to Sam Peckinpah in Straw Dogs, a man fulfilling certain fantasies for the audience, hating the audience for those fantasies, and asking, is this the best this vivid mess of images is capable of, fulfilling our cheap ideas of vengeance? Like Straw Dogs, I think it’s possible to consider The Black Dahlia brilliant, as well as a deeply disturbing and repellent one at the same time.

I don’t think Black Dahlia has the same seamless build of Dogs, yet every shot demonstrates incredible skill, and its conception, including the crucial changes to the novel, has been well thought out, even if this conception is ultimately a failure. The movie takes the single story of the novel, and turns into two stories, a superficial narrative on top about the chase for a serial killer, and another beneath: if the topmost story were more compelling, the movie would have been a greater box office success; if the secondary story were less subtle, and more obvious to viewers, it would have been praised as an avant-garde masterpiece – instead it received neither laurel. It’s a work of a genius, but I don’t think I like it, though it’s so full of bitterness, I think it would wear my dislike for a crown.

An initial note: it might be the most cynical movie De Palma has ever made, surpassing both Bonfire of the Vanities and Scarface. Scarface at least is quite clearly about a clear villain, and that he is almost wholely evil may even be a comfort that the wickedness of the world lies entirely with thugs like these, not the petty sins of ordinary men and women. Bonfire is clearly a satire, and we expect any one to be treated cruelly in this form. Dahlia is something different, outwardly the tale of a heroic figure who, though flawed, is ultimately good, doing just work and finding sanctuary in the home of another victim. I say outwardly, because I think through the fiddling of a few details, with very specific intent, not out of clumsiness, De Palma has entirely changed the trajectory of Ellroy’s novel, of protagonists moving from damnation to salvation, to entirely the reverse, and his condemnation of his characters, Lee Blanchard, Bucky Bleichert and Kay Lake, is not just a condemnation of them, but the audience and their naive fantasies as well.

I preface what is a very lengthy analysis by saying it is entirely absent of theory; I find the best, most insightful analysis looks at narrative works in detail, and why their details are there, rather than grouping them from a distance as belonging to this or that category of ideas. Those with a taste for a more theory heavy look can find it with this John Demetry post, at Revolution To Revelation. I also offer a strong caveat: as a book, I think The Black Dahlia is direct in what it is about, while the movie, despite belonging to two genres that are expected to be forthright, the serial killer chase and film noir, it is very ambiguous, and I present my hypotheses as tenuous possibilities. Perhaps the closest to come to some of them would be Keith Uhlich, in his piece “Ghost World” at Reverse Shot. If the director Brian De Palma is sincere in his answers in this invaluable interview conducted by Jeremy Smith, then some of these hypotheses are wrong. I start with a long, but necessary, look at the original novel.

THE NOVEL

The book is a story of redemption, of Dwight Bleichert, a man who has betrayed his Japanese American friends, Sam Murakami and Hideo Ashida, in order to get a position with the LAPD, whose father is a member of the German Bund and Reich sympathizer. Importantly, he is something of a grotesque: he has buck teeth, the reason for his nickname, which he has never had the money to fix. He joins up with Lee Blanchard, a cop, who he looks to as a heroic ideal. When the police department holds a fight to publicize a bond issue, Bleichert betrays bookies and refuses to throw it; he loses anyway, and the payments are made, but this refusal is his first act toward redemption. He now has the money to put his senile father in a group home, taking glee in the fact that this racist man now sits down and eats with jews. Blanchard and Bleichert become friends, with Bleichert looking to Blanchard as an older, noble brother. He also starts to fall in love with Blanchard’s wife, Kay, a mysterious, brilliant woman.

The two become involved in the Betty Short murder case (named the Black Dahlia by a newspaper for her dark clothes, playing off the title of the contemporary film The Blue Dahlia), with both becoming obsessed with it. For Blanchard, the Black Dahlia is connected with his sister, kidnapped and killed at a young age, and resolving this investigation becomes a way of bringing justice where no justice was done in this earlier, unsolved one. For Bleichert, the obsession is erotic, he becomes infatuated not with the Black Dahlia as she lived, but the Black Dahlia as an image, apart from life. Bleichert wishes to somehow re-create this image in life, and his desire is fulfilled when he meets Madeleine Sprague, a woman who consciously makes herself into the image of the Dahlia, becoming her living twin*.

As the story progresses, Bleichert gets more and more erotically obsessed with the Dahlia and Madeleine; it also becomes clearer that Blanchard is nothing like his heroic exterior, but is a deeply corrupt cop. The book develops into an examination of two illusions and the people who become these illusions, and surpass them. Bleichert ends up a better cop than Blanchard ever was. The Dahlia, who was a lousy actress who had sex as a recourse from loneliness is surpassed by Madeleine, a woman who is a gifted mimic who revels in sex and her image, the image of the dead girl. The attraction of the Dahlia is also an intersection with the now ubiquitous culture of fame, fame exclusively through an image, rather than any achievement. Though Betty Short was entirely unknown as performer or individual, the image of the Dahlia becomes known throughout Los Angeles, and it is the ubiquity of this image, that so many other men lust for this image, that makes Bleichert want it even more. This is something that plagues every well-known beautiful actress: a woman who is not just beautiful, but a beauty ever present in the dreams of men, Liz Taylor or Scarlett Johansson. A line from Ellroy’s Dahlia sequel, The Big Nowhere, is apt: “Downtown came and went; the woman stayed.”

The bulk of the book are interviews by Bleichert and associates with those who knew the Dahlia, and are possible suspects. The Dahlia herself never appears as a character, we only get a distant sense of her through the words of others. In this context, Madeleine as the Dahlia creates an uncanny image: the woman is dead, yet here she is, more alive than ever. Whatever the complexities and detours of the plot, which causes Bleichert to move about among possible interviews, it holds together through his obsession with the Dahlia. Despite all the busy plotting, the focus always returns to this point.

A key point is reached when Blanchard disappears in Mexico. It is Bleichert’s search for his partner, his discovery of the body, which mirrors Bleichert’s own unresolved search for his missing sister. For it to properly mirror Bleichert’s missing sister, Blanchard must be missing, he cannot die on-screen, and his body must be found. It serves as another point in Bleichert’s redemption, and his surpassing of his flawed mentor.

The search for Blanchard and its discovery of the body is crucial to the book. It is given, rightly, a holy aspect. It’s the best piece of writing in The Black Dahlia and possibly the best piece of writing in the entire quartet.

Bleichert searches for Blanchard’s body with a private detective he doesn’t trust, Milton Dolphine:

The burial ground was ten miles south of Ensenada, just off the coast road on a bluff overlooking the ocean. A big, burning cross marked the spot. Dolphine pulled up next to it and killed the engine. “It’s not what you think. The locals keep the damn thing lit up because they don’t know who’s buried there, and lots of them have got missing loved ones. It’s a ritual with them. They burn the crosses, and the Rurales tolerate it, like it’s some kind of panacea to keep the great unwashed gun-shy.”

Dolphine got out of the car, walked around and popped open the trunk. I followed, watching him remove a large earth spade. Flame glow illuminated the PI’s old Dodge coupe; I noticed a pile of fence pickets and rags next to the spare tire. Tucking the .38 into my waistband, I fashioned two torches out of them, wrapping the rags around the ends of the posts, then igniting them in the cross. Handing one to Dolphine, I said, “Walk ahead of me.”

We strode into the sand pit, outlaws holding fireballs on a stick. The softness made the going slow;torchlight let me pick out grave offerings–little bouquets and religious statues placed atop dunes here and there. Dolphine kept muttering how gringos got dumped on the far side; I felt bones cracking beneath my feet. We reached an especially high drift, and Dolphine waved his torch at a tattered American flag spread out on the sand.

A putrid smell rose from a big crater at our feet. “Dig,” I said. Dolphine went at it; I thought of ghosts–Betty Short and Laurie Blanchard–waiting for the shovel to hit bones. The first time it did I recited a psalm the old man had force-fed me; the second time, it was the “Our Fathers” that Danny Boylan used to chant before our sparring sessions. When Dolphine said, “Sailor. I can see his jumper,” I didn’t know if I wanted Lee alive and in grief or dead and nowhere–so I pushed Dolphine aside and shoveled myself.

My first blow sheared off the sailor’s skull, my second tore into the front of his tunic, pulling the torso free from the rest of the skeleton. The legs were in crumbled pieces; I shoveled past them into plain sand glinting with mica. Then it was maggot nests and entrails and a blood-mattted crinoline dress and sand and odd bones and nothing–and then it was sunburned pink skin and blond eyebrows covered with stitch scars that looked familiar. Then Lee was smiling like the Dahlia, with worms creeping out of his mouth and the holes where his eyes used to be.

Blanchard took on the quest for the killer of the Dahlia to somehow resolve the loss of his sister, but also to redeem himself for the corruption he engaged in for so long – but his own quest became corrupted. He discovered that Madeleine had a relationship with the Dahlia, and used this information to shake down her father for money. Bleichert takes up the quest now entirely on his own, but he does so with a purity that is another step in his penitence. Brutality and co-ercion are a common place in the LAPD of the novel’s time (perhaps not only of the novel’s time), but Bleichert breaks from these tactics, putting himself in opposition to one of the most brutal cops, Fritzie Vogel.

Eventually, Bleichert discovers that those behind the Dahlia’s murder are Madeleine’s mother, and the mother’s former boyfriend. The choice of these people for the killers is not arbitrary but vital. Bleichert, as said before, is something of a grotesque, marked by his buck teeth. The Spragues (Linscotts in the movie), Madeleine’s family, are divided into those who are marked by beauty and power, respectively, Madeleine and her father, Emmett, and those who are marked by their lack of beauty. There is Ramona Sprague, the mother, a fat, flaccid woman who was married for her money, Madeleine’s sister Martha, pudgy and marked by bad skin, and, most importantly, Georgie Tilden, her mother’s boyfriend: he was a good-looking man, a heroic veteran of the first World War, and Madeleine’s real father. Emmett, after discovering Madeleine’s paternity, cut up Georgie’s face, turning him into a grotesque, and causing him to lose his mind. So, Ramona and Georgie are like Bleichert in that they are in various ways physically marred, they don’t possess the beauty of Madeleine or the Dahlia. Georgie, obsessed with the image of Betty Short, wanted to sleep with her, just as Bleichert was obsessed with her. Ramona ends up killing this woman for her resemblance to Madeleine because among the men Madeleine sleeps with is Emmett: she hates Betty Short as a romantic rival and for her resemblance to a romantic rival. As grotesques, they are transfixed and envious of this beauty, and want to destroy it. That they disfigure her by cutting at her mouth, and that Bleichert’s disfigurement is in his mouth, I do not believe is trivial.

Bleichert does not kill any of those involved except Georgie; that he shows mercy is part of his path to redemption, and part, I believe, because he sees some of the same harmful qualities in himself as in the killers. I stress the details of this ending, because, though it is very baroque, it is of a piece with what’s come before, with the obsessions of the hero and the killers converging. Bleichert discovers that Madeleine was behind the death of Blanchard, that she had him killed after he shook down her father for blackmail money; she has passed through the book earlier, this time in the role of a beautiful mexican woman.

The book ends with Bleichert redeemed. Kay has left for Massachusetts, leaving the house in Los Angeles bought with money from Blanchard’s corrupt activities, and the last sentences have Bleichert descending from the clouds in his flight to join her.

I mention some of the more prominent details of the book so as to make obvious the small changes the movie makes and why they make such a difference in why the movie does not work in ways the book does, but how the subject of the book and the movie are very different.

* A quote that applies to both Madeleine and the Dahlia is the following, from Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age: “She had the fatal gift of beauty, and that more fatal gift which does not always accompany mere beauty, the power of fascination, a power that may, indeed, exist without beauty.”

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Images and Screenplay Copyright Universal Pictures, Millennium Films, Equity Pictures, and associated producers.

Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale: The Only Thing Missing Is The Woman Part One

Part One Part Two

(SPOILERS for FEMME FATALE and BLOW OUT)

A movie by Brian De Palma, released almost ten years ago, that intrigued me when I saw it, and which I’ve looked at a few times in the past week, to try and get a better fix on.

A good starting point, I think, is that there are no characters in the movie, in the “realistic” sense. The main characters in the movie are archetypes who have been summoned to play their parts for the edification of the audience. We might be able to imagine the off-screen life of Carlito Brigante or Carrie White; there is no off-screen life for the men and women here. They exist only as images, each their archetype, nothing more, defined by their emblems.

The names I employ for these archetypes are somewhat arbitrary; the Good Daughter could also be the Grieving Widow, the Hero could also be the Patsy, etc. However, they should all be recognizable to anyone who reads novels and watches movies. A more formal, more diligent study here might look at the history of character types. These should be suitable enough. I think it is unambiguous that all have only one or two defining traits in the course of the movie, and unambiguous about what those traits are.

The Femme Fatale – the icy blonde. Her emblem, a sexy dress.

The Good Daughter – a grieving widow. Her emblem, a flower print dress.

The Slut – A woman who acts only through sexual motives, to be used and abused through sex. Her emblem, her nudity.

The Hero / Voyeur – an observer, the proxy for the audience, his emblems, a motorbike and a camera.

The Businessman – a modern-day King. He has money and power. Emblem: a business suit.

The Bodyguard – the King’s guard, his emblem, a car with tinted windows.

The Thieves – the villains. Their sole interest is getting the money, nothing else. Their emblems: tuxedo, cap, leather jacket.

The Detective – an investigator who should be an ally of the hero, but is an obstacle to the hero’s quest, and may be in league with the powerful businessman. No visual emblem, but: everything he says is either an interrogative question or an accusation.

The Clown – a ridiculous, weak, harmless figure who can be humiliated by others without fear of retribution. In this movie, he is the guard who’s the inside man in the Cannes robbery. Emblem: he’s rather fat.

A key line in the movie, I believe, is this:

LAURE / LILY

You know why no good deed goes unpunished? Because this world is hell and you’re nothing but a fucking patsy.

They are in hell, they have no freedom of choice, they can only act out their roles as they are defined. Lily can only be the bad woman, Nicolas can only be the patsy. The only possible reference I can think of is Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, with the key difference that the actors can never break or talk outside of these roles. Taking the characters as archetypes helps explain one of the stranger moments in the movie; Black Tie, leaving prison in the very same costume he arrived in, to be picked up by Racine, also in the same outfit that he wore in the heist. It’s the same principle for why a cartoon character like Lisa Simpson always wears the same dress, or a film noir satire might feature a detective who always wore a trenchcoat.

The mid-section of the movie deals with a thriller archetype (the Femme Fatale) falling into another movie, a family tragedy, and being mistaken for another archetype (the Good Daughter), then moving back into her own movie under this guise.

The structure and characters have some similarities to another movie also written by De Palma, Blow Out, though we can speak of actual, often complex, characters there, and not simple archetypes.

There we have the hero / observer, Jack Terry (John Travolta),

The tainted woman, Sally (Nancy Allen),

Where Lily has former criminal associates, so Sally has a former criminal associate, Manny Karp (Dennis Franz):

The security, the unhinged Burke (John Lithgow):

The slut, an anonymous prostitute (Deborah Everton):

The detective, Mackey (John Aquino):

There is no king in Blow Out, only one that Jack imagines he is fighting against, who is the vast power behind the conspiracy; he is actually only fighting against the mediocrity Burke. In terms of structure, Blow Out plays with a male viewer’s expectations; the opening sequence is a parody of a movie that could be produced in the expectation of a male audience. A group of sorority women are observed by a serial killer. They are in various ways, tainted by sex, and will soon be killed by this lunatic, with the entire sequence shot through the eyes of the killer. Blow Out then cuts away from this movie to its main plot, which gives us many of the same elements, but not in the way the audience wants; there is, again, a serial killer, Burke, who kills a series of women tainted by sex, whose murders we see up close. A woman, Sally, who has gone to bed with men to blackmail them, is eventually killed by Burke. Where the murders in the pre-credit film might have given us thrills, these killings provide only despair.

Femme Fatale opens with a sequence that has been pointed out as unrealistic; it is utterly, self-consciously, unrealistic since it is conceived not from reality, but created entirely for the expectations of the (male) audience. A half-naked woman; glittering jewels; a daring theft; blood; a power blackout; night vision goggles; not least, sex between two beautiful women. The “Bolero” that plays is not only about the variations in this scene, between the various scenes in the movie, but that this heist is only an outrageous variation on others that have gone before it. The theft is ridiculous, but so are most movie thefts which are designed to have elements (a sexy girl, a helicopter, high tech equipment) for their visual and kinetic aspect. A movie has these elements not because most robberies have them, but for the same reason a circus has a dancing bear and a firebreather.

That those in the robbery are only limited archetypes, limited in their actions is emphasised by Black Tie’s opening line. They are directions for what will happen during the robbery. There are no names, only symbols (“Snake”, “Wetsuit”, “Torpedos” etc.) Their actions will lie not with their individual character in the scene, but entirely within the limits of these types. The Femme Fatale knows no one; the name she’s given here (“Laure Ash”) is a false one. The one she adopts later (“Lily”) is not hers either. She is a nameless archetype, the bad woman.

BLACK TIE

Listen up. At twenty two hundred, Wetsuit’s down the hole when the snake hits the carpet. Security lifts the key. I terminate the torpedoes. You charm the Snake into the stall. Bait and switch. At twenty two twenty, Wetsuit turns out the lights. Glasses on. I bag the snake. Key in the bag. Bag to the boat. No radio unless absolutely necessary. Code Red. Five minutes to blackout. Drop everything. Walk away. If the cops get you, tell them the truth. You know no one.

A second point: the opening image, is Laura as a dim shadowy veil over earlier incarnations of this movie`s archetypes, the Femme Fatale and Patsy of Double Indemnity.

So, these elements are there, yet they are not given play the way a man might want. The woman does not turn out to be good, but stays within her definition, is always bad. She has sex with the hero, but never gives herself over to him. There is even the possibility that the Femme Fatale does not just have sex with a woman for this crime, but is a full-blown lesbian, with no sexual interest in men.

THE OPENING

I will only make a few short notes on the very intricate jewel theft scene. It should be studied in-depth, shot by shot, on how it is organized, and I cannot do so at this time.

Black Tie is designed as an archetype to only be interested in stealing the jewels, and later, getting the money from them being fenced. He doesn’t exist outside of this intent. I think we see this, almost comically, in two moments during the theft.

In the opening preparation scene, the very beautiful Femme Fatale gets up off her bed, topless, yet he never breaks his concentration from his speech outlining the robbery; he does not even acknowledge her nakedness with a furtive look.

This happens again, during the robbery.

The two women are having sex behind the glass. Most men might steal a glance; in the broad vocabulary of a heist scene, a criminal might be expected to give a nasty smile or laugh. Black Tie is entirely indifferent to it, does not even have to fight an impulse to look. His archetype’s only trait is getting the money. There is a tradition, of course, of male and female characters of different races not attracted to each other by deliberate design. This may be a subtle commentary on that as well.

Beginning in the theft sequence, we see an emphasis throughout the movie in controlling one’s image and observing what others do not. A key plot point is for Laure to obtain a false passport. Another key point is when her photograph is taken without her permission. Throughout, characters are at an advantage or disadvantage by what they know or don’t know, information obtained from great distance, oftentimes seen at great distance.

This starts with the heist. We do not see Laure’s face close up in the pre-theft scene. Our first look at her face is on the forged press card, giving a false identity, a photo of her, but not looking like her in any part of the movie. The camera then moves up, but her face is blocked by a camera, one like Bardo’s, which allows her to see at great distance.

The sequence ends with the power going out. What happens next might be a good visual metaphor for much of the movie; the Femme Fatale walks about in the dark seeing perfectly, while other characters, and the moviegoers themselves, stumble about blind. This should not be taken that she is in control; she is ultimately a prisoner of her archetype.

The final moment in the heist points up to the intentional ridiculous quality of it; the elaborate attempt to obtain a single key all just to unlock a simple door. Given the high-tech equipment available, it would seem an ordinary lockpick might be easier.

The opening bookend was of the shadowy Femme Fatale reflected on the TV, gradually becoming more visible. The closing bookend, and the beginning of the next part of the movie, is now her solid image in the cab, Paris reflected in the glass, passing the Eiffel, near where she’ll later drown.

THE AUTHOR, THE FEMME FATALE, THE AUDIENCE

There are some valid critiques of the idea that the all exclusive genius behind a movie is a director, responsible for each and every choice; I won’t argue with these, except to say that when watching a movie I often assign some individual identity as creator of the world. Even more so in a thriller where the audience is conscious of an inteventionist god, if you will, that alters and shifts perspective for the fullest effect of suspense, rather than, say, a “realistic” film where one is provided the illusion that we are seeing the unfiltered ordinary days in the life of a village, a relationship, etc.

This is a thriller, so the audience expects the author to withhold information for the effect of suspense. To keep the fact that Raskolnikov killed the pawnbroker a secret is pointless and would make Crime and Punishment hopeless confusing; to reveal the identity of the criminal in the opening paragraph of a Sherlock Holmes story, or hint too strongly at the identity, would destroy the point of the story.

A more succinct description is given by Joan Didion in her novel Democracy, when the writer herself steps in to give an explanation of her effects:

I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know.

Each character in Femme Fatale attempts to have an advantage over the other by obtaining more information on the others while concealing their own details. Racine, Shiff, and Bardo all use binoculars to see at great distance. Shiff conceals himself in a car with tinted windows. Bardo pretends to be a gay man, in order to put Laure at ease and enter her room. Racine and Black Tie pretend to be homeless to put Shiff at ease. Laure disguises herself in a wig, and later, pretends to be Lily.

When watching Femme Fatale one is aware that the author (one might substitute writer-director Brian De Palma’s name here) keeps information from us, but also provides a sense that we are gods of this world, knowing and seeing more than almost all the characters on screen, except, of course, for the Femme Fatale.

Again and again, we have a god’s eye view, looking down on the characters from a great distance.

When Laure hides the gun, she knows where it is, but we do as well; when Nicolas enters the room, we have an idea where the gun will be hidden before he finds it.

Others cannot see into Shiff’s car, but we go inside it. We know of Laure’s background in the heist and the episode in the country, which neither Bardo nor Watts know about.

Early on, we’re given an illustration of the limited information the characters have, compared to our point of view, as well as how crucial it is for them to have access to hidden or inaccessible information.

Bardo takes a photo of Laure, which he can take at incredible distance because of his camera. Laure retreats to the church, where she is out of reach of Bardo’s camera, while still falling under the eye of Racine’s. We see her close-up. She opens the directions for where to get the new passport. We are given an intimate view of the paper; Racine sees this vital information from a great distance.

We then move to perspectives in the church. On the left, is Laure’s view, the undifferentiated crowd at a distance. For our benefit, we’re given a close view of Lily’s parents reacting to who they think is their daughter.

Laure, frightened, leaves the church. Bardo stays focused on the photo of this ambiguous exchange, while outside and around him, the story continues.

This perhaps foreshadows the mistake he makes later in the movie, that the entire story is contained in this photo, and no further details are needed. From the police interrogation:

BARDO
Mrs. Watts was trying to kill herself. I stopped her so she set me up for you guys, to get me out of her way.

SERRA
How did you come up with that?

BARDO
I read a lot of mysteries and I just figure out the endings half way…I put the clues together and I know what happened, sir.

It is after Lily wipes off the bruise and knocks the maid into a coma that we realize that the Femme Fatale knows far more than we do, whatever our sense of full knowledge. We are in the same position as Bardo after he takes the photo of Laure and Veronica at the church; there are details outside of what we see that alter everything.

This ties in with the almost totemic aspect in the movie of being photographed or recorded. There is, of course, the ancient superstition that a photograph captures the soul. Here, there’s always a great danger associated with any kind of visual or audio copy.

Bardo taking Laure’s picture,

Laure photographed before she is nearly killed,

The photo of Laure which endangers her. In this movie where characters hide who they are and what they know, while trying to see further than others, Bardo is only able to take the photo by passing himself off as a blind man:

Security head Shiff, his massive head dominating the screen relative to Bardo tells him all that he knows of the man and his power over him. Bardo, of course, has no idea where Shiff is, and can’t see him anyway because of the car’s tinted windows:

SHIFF

I don’t think you realize who you’re dealing with, Mr. Bardo. We know all about you, your overdrawn bank account your criminal record. I suggest you get that picture back and you bring it to me at the residence tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. Sharp.

Shiff is able to see via his binoculars that Bardo will be wearing a wire when talking to Watts. This cannot be allowed.

SHIFF

Park Bardo in the office until I can get…Hold on a second.

(SHIFF sees BARDO through binoculars take out a recording device and insert a disc)

I don’t believe it. This paparazzi scum is wearing a wire. Make sure he doesn’t get past security.

Bardo’s threat at the end is that he has recorded Lily, and she kills him for it.

There are always practical reasons in each instance for why people do not want to be recorded, but it is also a contrast with a movie where images are frequently false in their isolation, that these recorded images and sounds are invested with sacred truth. Another point: a character that is only an archetype is entirely revealed when their veil is down and their self recorded. There is no multitude of character, of which this is only one aspect; this is the only aspect.

A few further examples of the limited vision of the audience. At the beginning of the middle episode, we have a split screen where the left side stays with Bardo on his balcony, with the right side starting in near the same position as the left, then moving out through the sky, from the top to the bottom of the church, across the street, to the cafe. It’s an incredible space and freedom compared to the fixed position of Bardo. At the end of this, Bardo picks up his camera and photographs the women at the cafe, the very place the right side of the screen is at. Whatever our freedom, we run on the rails set by the author, and despite our incredible freedom, we have only been brought to the same point as Bardo, who seems to lack our freedom of movement. Our greater freedom as a viewer isn’t illusory, but the viewer remains very much the slave to the author’s vision.

Near the end of the movie, we again move beyond the tinted windows of Shiff’s car, to see what someone outside would not, Shiff held hostage by Black Tie and Racine. A fight breaks out, but we are unable to see the outcome as the author now pulls us outside the car. Where before the camera might move further and further up, a god’s eye view, now the camera moves further and further down till it is level with the car’s bumper – our power of observation is at the whim of this author.

A scene between Serra and Watts’ counsel, Stansfield Phillips re-states this idea. The detective simply wishes to “see” Ms. Watts. Phillips will not allow such a thing. The camera moves from a high privileged view, to a point where the spectator is at a worm’s eye view, looking up at these characters, when Phillips makes her pronouncement.

SERRA
I’d still like to talk to Mrs. Watts.

PHILLIPS
And what crime has she committed?

SERRA
No crime, I just want to see her.

PHILLIPS
Well, I’m sure we all want to see lots of people but fortunately in our country and in yours they are not compelled to see us. Good day, Inspector.

Another, more striking point is made through the collages assembled by Bardo. These are vast pictures of the space before his balcony, made up of individual photos taken of the area about him. They are on the one hand accurate, yet false. There are three collages seen during the course of the movie:

The first, when Bardo takes the picture of Laure meeting Veronica,

the second, during the middle episode after he has been double crossed by Laure,

the third, at the very end, after Black Tie and Racine are killed:

A quick detour; this collage is mirrored by collages in the room of Lily’s child,

The collages are a diligent attempt to re-create the world outside. They are, of course, selective, showing only the vision Bardo has chosen. The first collage contains no people except the Veronica and Laure meeting; the second, does not even contain this picture. The third is most important of all, containing a radically different image, of sunlight bursting through, Laure reacting to the accident, the accident itself. We have seen how long it takes Bardo to take and print each picture, so it’s not possible for him to take the pictures and alter the collage before running down to help Laure. The landscape does not change based on what Bardo does and does not observe, but what the author decrees. In one moment, the visual collage has entirely changed; this may also account for the disappearance of Laure and Veronica in the second collage. She changes her identity, and her past itself completely disappears.

This idea of authorial intervention, very close to that idea of an interventionist god, converge in the final scene. Lily and Veronica are saved, not through their own actions, or Bardo’s, but sunlight moving in an intricate set of reflections to strike the eyes of the truck’s driver. The complicated route of the light reminds me of the complex engineering of the opening heist; the sun could well be the usual god symbol; it is, in effect, arbitrary, coming about only because of the mercy Laure shows earlier. The mercy shown by Laure, of course, is also from the author himself, the archetype willed to act one way rather than another. This may also be part of the relationship between author and the audience. The audience wants a happy ending, whatever the circumstances, and the author has given it to them.

DAVID HOCKNEY ON PHOTOGRAPHY

The collages are very much an homage to the work of David Hockney, who would construct an image through multiple small images, creating a cubist effect. An example would be “Pearblossom Hwy., 11 – 18th April 1986, #2″.

Hockney’s thoughts on photography and perspective, expressed eloquently in That’s The Way I See It, may be of some value in thinking about this movie. A small sample of relevance:

In the late seventies, when I didn’t do that many paintings, I worked a lot in the theatre. Now the theatre, or the kind of theatre I was working in, the opera, is Italian theatre, that is, it is deeply connected with perspective, it illusionistic theatre beyond a plane it is a box: there is a proscenium and that proscenium represents a plane, Beyond that plane is an illusion. In front of the plane is you, the audience, and, in a sense, there’s a separation between you and it. There is, of course, another kind of theatre, very well known in England: the Shakespearean theatre, which is quite different. The Shakespearean theatre is Cubist theatre in a way, in the sense that it is not an illusion behind a proscenium. The stage juts out into the audience and occupies the same space as the audience, so different people see completely different angles. Shakespeare did not need illusionistic settings. I think perhaps that’s why Shakespeare never fully works on television, because television, being a box, belongs to the Italian conception of theatre. Beyond the screen is an illusion and, of course, the box. These illusions involve perspective.

It took me a long time…to realize fully that, contrary to what some people may think, there is no actual distortion in Picasso. What he does may appear distorted only if you think one particular way of seeing, which is always from a distance and always in a kind of stopped, frozen time. The moment you realize what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well – and that is why you could see round the back of the body as well as the front – once you begin to realize this, it becomes a very profound experience, because you begin to see that what he is doing is not a distortion, and lowly it then begins to look more and more real. In fact it is naturalism that begins to look less and less real. And that, of course, leads you into thinking about the nature of realism an what it is and what it isn’t. You become aware, perhaps more than ever before, that there are different forms of realism and that some are more real than others.

One reason, among others, why I think Picasso is so crucial is because he brings very much to the fore the question of versimilitude versus the remaking of appearance. And what led me into questioning the verisimilitude of naturalism was that it was not real enough. Because the problem is not that naturalism is too real, but that it just is not real enough.

We tend to think of the photograph as a perfect record of life. But in fact that photograph is the ultimate Renaissance picture. It is the mechanical formulation of the theories of perspective of the Renaissance, of the invention in fifteenth-century Italy of the vanishing point, which many people think was one of the most profound inventions of all time. Brunelleschi, looking through a hole at a street in Florence, makes a depiction of it from a fixed view-point. The Renaissance painters, of course, always suspected the rigid rules of perspective and bent them – as all good painters would.

Conventional art history takes the line that Cubism was a forerunner of abstraction by 1925. That was the year that saw the beginnings of Mondrian and much else…But that is where we run into a problem, because people then thought, ah yes, we have abstraction, what we call abstraction, which does not seem to look like the world, or it doesn’t matter whether it looks like the world or not; and then we have representation, where things do look like the world; and the ultimate representation is the photograph.

I, like everybody else, went along with that thinking. But now I am not sure at all about that. I think, in fact, the more you go on the more you realize there’s only abstraction. The photograph is a refined abstraction, a highly refined one, just as perspective is. In this sense, a Canaletto painting is a more abstract, and much less ‘real’, picture than an eighteenth-century Chinese scroll.

A BRIEF NOTE: THE FROZEN CLOCKS OF THE MIDDLE EPISODE

In the middle sequence, all clocks are frozen at 3:33 (a trinity of trinities, having both mystic and christian significance, which I won’t go into now). An overview,

Part One Part Two

Femme Fatale script and images copyright Warner Bros; Blow Out images copyright MGM. “Pearblossom Hwy., 11 – 18th April 1986, #2″ copyright David Hockney.