Brian De Palma
Dressed to Kill
Blow Out
The artist at the helm of this week’s double features is none other than Sarah Lawrence-graduate and thriller director extraordinaire Brian De Palma. Largely known for his films Scarface, Carrie, and tonight’s first film Dressed to Kill, De Palma’s work is stylistically and contextually exhilarating. He finds fun and mindfulness in every story he tells, no matter how brutal or violent the subject matter. Always referencing, always making you focus intently upon the dominoes he sets up, De Palma became one of the best auteurs of his time with a combination of storytelling that pushed the limits and an avant-garde cinematographic style. As an audience, we’re placed directly into De Palma’s vision, which in Dressed to Kill, looked like a violent expression of horniness. Visually, this film is as captivating as it is disorienting, but the overall story could’ve used some tweaking. The devil’s in the details in De Palma films, but at times it felt like the only good parts to this movie were its details. The gratuitous female nudity and feminine exploitation in general was implemented in a more distinctive and unabashed way than the actual murders, and the downright transphobic storyline muddied what would've been an otherwise excellent movie. It’s well-executed, utilizing all of De Palma’s signature shots and aesthetics, but for a movie so boundary-pushing, it shows its age very clearly. I feel like there’s a reality in which this film is made with all of its evocative imagery in tact, but with a much more well-rounded, cohesive story. There is an overarching theme of slut-shaming throughout, a frustrating premise that positions women as neither the whore nor the madonna, but rather as exploratory sexual creatures who will inevitably face the consequences of their curiosity. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but no split-screen or ambient lighting could distract from the overall sense of misogyny here. Dressed To Kill remains to be one of the most iconic murder mysteries of its day, but with its heavy reliance upon the male gaze and confusing messaging surrounding gender, the feminine killer that could’ve been terrifying comes off as uninspired and frankly, a little disappointing. I won’t spoil anymore of this movie, and though I’ve just spent a few lines roasting it, Dressed To Kill is certainly worth exploring—at the very least to see how far we’ve come in terms of sexually-empowered female characters in cinema. Shifting to a slightly less sexy, but an even more engrossing story, the 1981 film Blow Out seems like a more fully-realized, fully-cooked De Palma project. All at once subtle and completely over the top, I understand why Blow Out is seen as the quintessential De Palma movie. De Palma’s usual suspects: John Travolta—at maybe his hottest?—along with an immensely sexualized Nancy Allen, a startling John Lithgow, and human cartoon tough guy Dennis Franz, really brought this story to life. This was far less scary than Carrie, far less horny than Dressed to Kill, and yet I felt more invested during Blow Out. The mystery and the suspense came naturally, and its self awareness only added to its unassuming, unpredictable nature. Making perfect use of sound and split-screen, Blow Out is yet another murder mystery, that pays homage to the art of filmmaking throughout. It’s a fun look into the process of sound mixing and movie magic, presented alongside a genuinely riveting story. Though self-aware and at times tongue-in-cheek, Blow Out is never pretentious or too audacious in its storytelling, instead it offers us enough details to place us right into the story—close enough to solve the case ourselves. I hesitate to mention any more details of this film, because, like with other patient, enthralling slow-burns, Blow Out needs to be seen and heard to be fully appreciated. I’ve yet to see Scarface and Body Double, but I have to wonder how they could be any better than the explosive, subversive experience that is Blow Out.
