Is it OK to like Brian De Palma?

Written by: Lance Carmichael, CC2K Staff Writer

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Now, it might be that "You Are So Beautiful" came out just when this movie did, and in a moment of irresistible corporate synergy, the studio insisted it be included in the film. Perhaps they said," Alright, Brian, you can make this script, but only on the condition that you push this hot new artist our record division just signed…a guy you'll all be hearing a lot about soon: Mr. Michael Bolton," and de Palma could either make the picture and use the song, or go back to directing Menards commercials. These are the only conceivable set of circumstances that could make using this song in some very abstract way acceptable. But still not forgivable. IF that were the case — and I'm just trying to be generous here to de Palma, I honestly have no idea how this actually went down — then de Palma should have walked away from the picture. He should"ve retired, if that"s what it took. If using a Michael Bolton song in a completely earnest way isn't the point where an artist finally throws up his hands and refuses to cave in to the demands of commerce, then you've got a filmmaker with a Leni Riefenstahl-sized problem.  

But what if de Palma actually LIKED the song? What if he picked it out himself? What if it was he and his wife"s "special song," and he thought that the naked emotion and heartfelt love it expressed was the perfect culmination of what thousands of other musicians had strived for and failed to reach while making love songs, and that using it in Carlito"s Way really made you feel the love between Carlito and Love Interest?

The implications of that are too terrifying to consider. Does the fact that he, in complete seriousness, used "You Are So Beautiful" in a tender, nudity-free love scene montage render all the other moments of cinematic brilliance in his career completely null and void" It seems to me to be the Kiddie Rape of musical choices: There"ve been a number of musicians who have been accused of raping little kids (Michael Jackson, Gary Glitter, etc). After that point you hear about the accusations, you can't listen to one SECOND of their music without the thought "This guy raped a child" screaming in your head. On the moral scale, liking the song "You Are So Beautiful" isn"t as bad as raping a little boy…but it"s close.

 

And "You Are So Beautiful" doesn"t just score the love scene in this movie. When Carlito tragically, slowly dies at the end, and the movie fades to black, and De Palma"s directing credit comes up, guess which Michael Bolton song is reprised?  

It might be that "You Are So Beautiful" wasn"t the unholy monstrosity back then that it"s become now. It probably wasn"t always such a planetary-sized cliché. It probably took some time for it to be used in movies and commercials and played over and over on the radio before it became so clichéd that to hear it in an earnest love scene would embarrass pretty much any human being on the planet with any shred of decency. But even when it came out, any reasonably hip person would have to recognize what a horrible song it was. And de Palma was a hip movie director, not just some cool guy off the street.  

Though we don't really explicitly admit it, one of the things we really like about good movies is the version of Cool they sell us. Hip directors treat us to another very seductive way to act and wear clothes and listen to music that"ll make us hipper. They sell us attitude, and the hipper the director you can find, the hipper the attitude you"ll acquire versus the mouth-breathers of the world: the retro-dorky Cool of the costumes in Wes Anderson's movies, the street hipster fashions, soundtrack, and surroundings in Fight Club, the way de Niro says the words "a little bit" in Goodfellas. But de Palma has a total tin ear for this kind of stuff. He"s got the great, tension-filled setpieces, but his idea of cool is basically just totally lame, unless he's working on a frequency of cool so high that only after the advance of culture for forty years will people be able to appreciate it. But I doubt it. His movies are full of neon nightclubs, cocaine, big city, Miami Vice-style cool. It could be retro if you didn't have the sinking suspicion that de Palma didn't actually think those things really are cool ON THEIR OWN, with no layers of irony on top of them. Essentially, Brian De Palma is a huge dork. And not in a good way.

 

 

So should I love him or hate him? 

The question is too important to leave unanswered. For some really weird reason, for a lot of Europeans, De Palma is THE American director. They fucking love him. Is this ultra-refined taste, appreciating the trash in his movies as sly winks to the intellectuals out there before he pounds out another brilliant sequence of Pure Cinema" Or is it Eurotrash cluelessness?

De Palma is also one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite directors. The ultimate cinephile — the man who"s seen more movies than maybe any other human being — lists Blow Out as one of his three favorite movies of all time. He loves to tell a story about being so excited to see Carlito's Way on opening day that he went all by himself to the first matinee screening so he could take in the movie without any distractions, and then came back that night to watch it with his friends. Could Quentin be wrong?

There's no way I can make the call for myself on de Palma with the limited amount of movies of his I've seen. So without consulting the IMDB, here are the de Palma movies I"ve seen and what I remember about my opinion of them.

Scarface : Quintissential de Palma. Tacky excess and over-wrought story interrupted by the occasional brilliant sequence.

The Untouchables : Loved it as a kid. Great, schlocky score and mind-blowing train station sequence at end.

Mission Impossible : Loved it as a kid. Noc List scene a classic.

Snake Eyes : Shit Eyes.

Femme Fatale : To-die-for opening sequence at Cannes Film Festival. Really sexy lapdance scene with Rebecca Romijn Stamos. Shitty movie in between.

Carlito's Way: Still holds up whenever Michael Bolton isn't torturing his voice on the soundtrack.

Besides Carlito's Way and Femme Fatale , I haven't seen any of these movies in the last five years. All I know about de Palma in the 70s is that he was the first director to use De Niro, he almost directed Taxi Driver (we dodged a bullet there), he was buddies with Martin Scorsese, and that I feel really guilty and pop culturally-inadquate for not having seen Carrie . Part of me suspects that I really know almost nothing about Brian De Palma since I haven't seen anything he made before 1980. (If I judged Francis Ford Coppola the same way, I would think he was an untalented version of Rob Reiner.)  

So it seems like a perfect time to systematically go through Brian's filmography and render a final verdict on him in my head. And Netflix provides the perfect opportunity to do it. So folks, I"m about to enroll in "Graduate Thesis in Brian De Palma."

Stay tuned to see how the class goes.