Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981); The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980); Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947)

In his terrific new book Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema, Steven Rybin writes that the images in The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) "haunt us in ways that go beyond their functional place in a cleanly modulated, classical narrative, taking on, as so many images in Carpenter’s cinema do, a distinctive status as haunting details that remain with us long after the details of the narrative drive have been forgotten" (167). Rybin's contention here is, of course, the escape valve defenders of horror/slasher films wield to dismiss the genre's frequently sloppy narratives, especially their often risible endings. And while I agree with Rybin at least with respect to The Fog at its best, the narrative drive sometimes sticks with you despite your best efforts to go along with the style-over-substance defenses of the genre. This is an unenviable situation to find oneself in because you get pilloried if you dare to bring up some narrative inconsistency or even just request basic story information to make sense of the thing. 

Unfortunately for me, the one moment I remembered from Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) when I saw it first-run at 11 years old (!) was the scene with the hooker and the sailor in the train station phone booth. Given my age, I thought there was some arcane sex thing happening that caused the sailor to leave the phone booth in disgust. But over forty years later, watching the film again last week, I still don't know! Or rather, I know only slightly more. I'm assuming what happened is that the sailor came too quickly. I also assume that they're both upset about this because they had agreed on $30 for a 30-minute session. But a 30-minute blow job in a public place? Why is such a ludicrous deal even on the table? And why does the hooker get so initially upset about the sailor's quick nut? It's $30 for a job that took about a minute tops. 

OK so fine, I'm focusing on something drearily specific and ignoring all of De Palma's hallmark fireworks. But then why include this exchange in the first place? Since Burke (John Lithgow) is going to kill the hooker anyway, why not just have Burke proposition her and cut out the sailor entirely? And this in a scene which is extraneous to begin with as greyer eminences than me such as Robin Wood (in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond) have pointed out. Why not cut the fat and get to the fireworks that are De Palma's raison d'être? 

Criticism of this nature gets you accused of being one of what Hitchcock called "our old friends, the plausibles," those viewers who would ignore questions of form while harping on implausible plot points. The irony here is that the only such moment in Hitchcock's entire oeuvre that renders me a plausible, as opposed to dozens in De Palma's, is the scene in which Cary Grant holds onto the knife in Townsend's back in North by Northwest, an action I find narratively lazy. But all viewers become plausibles at some point, even De Palma's most ardent supporters. My plausibility meter gets triggered by violence, especially against women whose murdered bodies have been strewn across a century-plus of cinema. If a director is going to have a character murdered, then all the narrative t's better be crossed in order to justify the slaughter to whatever extent justification is even possible. If a murder is not going to approached with a certain amount of gravitas, then a narrative gaffe will only cheapen the effect and infuriate all the more. For me to accept an implausibility, there must be some other compensation beyond a gorgeous tracking shot or rococo set design. And I get it, misanthropes - humans are difficult to like. Let me hold off on any moral indignation to therefore state that it's easy and hence boring to imagine them slaughtered. Attempting to make even the barest of interpersonal connections with others would make for a fresher cinema if only because such a route is more difficult and hence consistently ignored by mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. (And quick, horror fans - name the actress who played the hooker).

Another irony is that the hooker/sailor scene did not cancel out whatever pleasure I took in Blow Out. In fact, I prefer it to Sisters, Carrie, Obsession, The Fury, and Dressed to Kill. It's never boring, the film production milieu is a cinephile's delight, and there are plenty of moments ridiculed by the plausibles that I'm perfectly fine with, namely, Jack's (John Travolta) reconstruction of the car crash via photographs from a magazine. A bigger problem, as always, is where the film winds up. Jack grows obsessed with pursuing justice for the Chappaquiddick-like incident he witnessed near the start of the film. Meanwhile, Burke is tasked with covering up the incident by killing Sally (Nancy Allen), the hooker who survived the car crash and can confirm what really happened on that bridge. Burke uses this convenience to become a serial killer and murder several other women in the hopes that Sally's eventual murder will be chalked up as merely one more thereby dissociating it from the car crash. The final shot confirms that Jack has abandoned his pursuit of justice in mourning Sally's murder. The film thus morphs from a political thriller into a slasher film, a trajectory that Chris Dumas, in his punky Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible, claims "makes Blow Out so difficult to read, to sort into coherence" (185). 

Quite to the contrary, Blow Out is all too coherent. It exemplifies Hollywood's compulsion for supplanting meditations on larger sociopolitical structures/institutions with stories driven by the psychology of an individual character. And it belongs to a distinctly post-1960s tradition of relinquishing oneself to the idea that corruption and violence are an indigenous part of American life and there's nothing one can do about it. In this respect, Blow Out is of a piece with such dubious faves as The Godfather saga and Chinatown. For Dumas, "this is how De Palma might be said to have a purely negative politics, as Adorno might be said to have had" (197), one which highlights how we are all whores with a price (200), how political crime "disappears in a blizzard of information noise," and how a "protagonist can only and always fail" (184). For me, it's permission to remain weak-willed and mutter "we're so fucked" when political corruption gets (or rather, continues to be) intense so we can hide our heads in the sand instead of organizing to fight. It's an insult to those who (foolishly, in this hopeless conception) hold doom at bay and battle for a better world. 

The Fog is certainly less ambitious than Blow Out. And its narrative is even more of a mess. As per horror ordinance, the ending is godawful; it's Carpenter admitting "oops - we forgot to kill off this important character so let's get that out of the way immediately before the end credits." And it has implausibilities that drive me bananas such as Jamie Lee Curtis wasted as a young gal implausibly (and quickly) falling for a man many years her senior (the few times it's the other way around, it's almost cause for a 20/20 exposé). But other implausibilities won my heart because they're not tied to violence and/or political resignation. For instance, Adrienne Barbeau's DJ is the source of much of the film's bizarre, even poetic charm. Implausibly, she plays a sort of cocktail jazz during her third-shift sets (I later discovered all of the songs are library music!). And there's a gorgeous shot of her implausibly playing station identification tapes (they sound eerily like number stations) on a cumbersome recorder as she descends a mammoth staircase to a lighthouse, the implausible location for her radio transmissions. Here is where implausibility shades into bafflement and the film takes on some of the hypnotic, indigestible quality of the best art films. By the climax, I didn't mind when she implausibly broadcasts to her listeners the trajectory of the murderous fog, tracking its every movement with a hilarious specificity (a paraphrase: "It's now winding its way down Applebury Lane right past Mrs. Fish's house!") 

Also lulling and attractive were the many shots of the still waters awaiting the fog's impending invasion. They reminded me of the infinitely superior Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947). One of the great head films, Le Tempestaire runs 23 minutes and does indeed feature a story. But it's merely a skeleton through which Epstein spaces out over the waters crashing off the coast of Brittany on Belle-Île-en-Mer. Through slow-motion, fast-motion, reverse, and long takes, Epstein transforms the titular tempest into a newly baptized form of nature, one with rules that transcend the natural world. It may be just as politically escapist as Blow Out. But it's far breezier and inexhaustible in its ability to dumbfound.

The version here has no English subtitles but you really don't need them. EDIT: Or you can enjoy it in better quality and with English subtitles here (thanks to the great Patrick Friel).

Blow Out: B+

The Fog: A-minus

Le Tempestaire: A+

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)

However shoddy Carrie comes across as a narrative or even a kinetic moviegoing experience, one can easily grasp how Pauline Kael and the Paulettes would gravitate towards it or much of De Palma's oeuvre as a punky tonic against the more dutiful, well-meaning wing of the New Hollywood. All the President's Men, Bound for Glory, Heaven Can Wait, Pretty Baby, Interiors all stifled Kael with their genteel distance and Oscar nods. To extol their virtues over the supposedly more vibrant likes of Convoy or Eyes of Laura Mars or National Lampoon's Animal House or Exorcist II: The Heretic or, um, The Last Waltz (huh??) was to evince a fear of movies, as Kael dubbed a 1978 column. And at the top of this scintillating pile of trash stands Carrie, a film Kael wrote about it as if she were reviewing the Ramones debut released the same year. Would that De Palma could cop to their economy.

De Palma rarely understood that trash feels most alive at higher rates of velocity. The man once rightfully dubbed "the world's oldest film student" sacrifices speed for his many trademark set pieces: split screens, penis-waving long takes, and, the biggest offense, slow-motion. That he also sacrifices narrative logic is our problem, De Palma boosters tell us. We're supposed to revel in the sensation and virtuosity and nuts to us if we're confused about anything. But as with porn and the musical, there has to be something at stake in the spectacle in order for it to achieve maximum voltage. 

Take the prom sequence. The swirling camera around Carrie (Sissy Spacek) and Tommy (William Katt) works because it evokes the delirium of dance and first love (although the accompanying Pino Donaggio-penned song is godawful!). But there's a big problem with the long crane shot of the mean couple sabotaging the prom king/queen ballots. It tracks them as they drop off the ballots to the teachers and then give the okay sign to the other mean couple, Billy (John Travolta) and Chris (Nancy Allen), waiting under the stage to ruin Carrie's moment. It eventually cranes up to the bucket of pig blood awaiting Carrie's coronation and then cranes down a bit to zoom in on Carrie and Tommy below as they learn that they've been voted king and queen of the prom. It's a terrific shot. Indeed, I do revel in its sensation and virtuosity. And it evinces narrative economy by linking cause and effect in one graceful crane. Solely on this level, an A+.

The problem is that the shot also picks up Sue (Amy Irving) sneaking behind the stage...to do what? Sue starts the film as a bad girl. She's the one who opens up the case in the girls' locker room to pelt a menstruating Carrie with a torrent of pads. So when she enlists her boyfriend Tommy to ask Carrie to the prom, we assume she's in on the plot to sabotage Carrie. As our information-craving surrogate, the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), questions her motives in a later scene. But there's no indication in this scene that Sue has (all of a sudden?) become affectionate towards Carrie. As Miss Collins asks, why is she sacrificing her own prom for Carrie, a girl she barely knows and presumably doesn't even like? For that matter, the same question applies to Tommy. Thus, the power of the nifty shot described above is diminished by Sue's baffling presence at the prom. It's difficult to ooh and aah when you're trying to suss out some basic story information.

And this, in turn, diminishes the power of the subsequent slow-motion sequence when Carrie (and, let's not forget, Tommy who may have been killed by the bucket slamming down on his head) gets the pig blood dumped on her. Sue realizes what's about to happen and tries to warn Miss Collins. Miss Collins pulls Sue away because Sue's not supposed to be at prom without a date. But the potential gravity of the slow-motion results in bloat since at this point, we have to take it on faith, and not from any internal logic, that Sue is there to help Carrie. Whatever economy De Palma may have gained in the crane shot evaporates here.

Again, I know I'm apparently the doofus for caring about such silly billy narrative questions although I'll note that Kael was baffled by Sue too ("this girl's involvement in trapping Carrie is left too ambiguous"*). But think of how much more effective, more kinetic the prom sequence could be with just a teensy bit of motivation for Sue and Tommy, something to assure you that you didn't fall asleep for ten minutes at some point. And there's a perfect chunk of screen time which De Palma could replace for such a scene. After Carrie telekinetically blows up Billy and Chris in their car, she walks home in a shot that lasts over a minute. Question: why? Dude, cut! Or at least have a dissolve get her into the house. This is punky trash? This is kinetic virtuosity? And I'll end here by not mentioning the terrible performances (Spacek is terrific but you'd never suspect that Buckley is a decorated actor from the botch she makes of her role) and some of the most wince-inducing dialogue since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Billy and Chris swear like toddlers or Martians trying out English for the first time).

Grade: B

* Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), p. 210.

The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)

I'm closer to understanding why I cannot stand The Fury. The fireworks don't begin until 47 damn minutes into the film when Gillian (Amy Irving) has her staircase vision. (If you're going to tell me the first nosebleed or even the toy train scene are anything to write home about, then you've got a lot of calisthenics to do). And, okay, I dug the Celine and Julie Go Boating-ish vibe of Gillian's visions. But it's too little, too late. There need to be more "numbers" in the first half and all throughout. It's not preposterous enough! Femme Fatale is redonkulous from the very first scene (compare The Fury's opening scene and weep despite the great close-up of Cassavetes' feet). I knew Showgirls would be the greatest film of 1995 ten minutes into it. The Devil is a Woman astounds from frame one to frame last. Etc. And this is to leave out The Fury's prehistoric sexual politics. So despite all the smart people who dig if not adore this film, I'm moving on to campier pastures. Oh and one more problem: Andrew Stevens' body is underutilized so voilà:

Grade: C+

Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980)

I've read that this is supposedly a feminist film because it's largely about a woman looking at/after another woman (the female cop shadowing Liz [Nancy Allen]. But that revelation comes too in the film to matter. And on one level, the ending is an acknowledgment of the shared oppression between Kate (Angie Dickinson) and Liz. But on another, it's a baffling, lazy dream scene, a godawful ending more unimaginative than any of the Hitchcock steals. Risible, juvenile, Dressed to Kill is yet another baffling entry in De Palma worship. Do I much prefer Femme Fatale solely because it doesn’t seem driven by the fears of a 15-yo boy?

Grade: C+

Domino (Brian De Palma, 2019)

It's a mess alright. Plagued with finance problems, it makes for a swift but convoluted ride. It looks incredibly cheap. (Can someone explain to me why it always seems to be dusk in the film? Color correction?) And it ends terribly with a trite critique of "our" predilection for seeing horrifying violence, a desire De Palma stokes by showing us...horrifying violence. But you know what? It has the grungy, late-night feel of 1990s cable fodder. A week after seeing it, you'll wonder if it's a dream you had rather than a film you saw. That's why I don't mind its incompleteness. Makes for one of those broken cognitive experiences I cherish so. And for the De Palma stans, several trademark set pieces remain including a fun, over-the-top climax involving a drone. At 89 minutes (!) with seven minutes of closing credits (!), it may be infuriating but it's definitely not boring.

Grade: A-minus

Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)

Sisters starts off promisingly. It's a damn fine film about Manhattan chauvinism. I didn't want it to swerve from the stories of Staten Island and police corruption. And I love the split-screen introduction of Jennifer Salt's reporter. But then the dopey twin-sisters horror kicks in, as it must, and I start to drift off. Quantum leaps better than the freakishly and bafflingly overrated The Fury, though.

Grade: B+