Marcia Pally - An Interview with Brian De Palma

Site updated Jan. 24, 2010

‘Double’ Trouble

An Interview with Brian De Palma

by Marcia Pally

"Film Comment," October 1984

It would be easy to say Brian De Palma hates women. He goes after them in the most grisly ways. Carrie impales her mother with kitchen utensils, gets pig blood dumped all over her (De Palma's idea of a prank), and is transformed into a monster to make your skin crawl. Angie Dickinson in "Dressed to Kill" is cut up with a straight-edge razor in the now-famous elevator scene. And in De Palma's latest effort, "Body Double," a guy takes an electric drill to his lady and drills her to the floor. You gotta wonder about the mind that conjures such delicacies. If that's the upchuck, what's churning around inside?

"I like women," says De Palma. Let's say he does. But he told "Esquire" in a January '84 interview, "Sex is terrifying." Put them together and you have the straight man's burden: how to get laid when the experience is so flattening. (What an ironic worry it is: women's fear of sexual adventure is supported by the assault stats — and the "New York Post" — yet look who invents vagina dentata.)

De Palma does not like to be terrified or, in fact, to have the slightest thing out of his control. Perhaps his oeuvre should be seen as part exorcism, part conquest of unruly effects like lights, props or camera angles, or women. Especially sexually eager women. Carrie is trying to "find herself" in spite of a repressed religious nut of a mother, and the women in "Dressed" and "Double" aren't getting enough.

So it's fear rather than hate behind this update on the wages of sin, on bad-girl-gets-it-in-the-end. There are people out there upon whom such subtleties are lost. To the folks in the antiporn movement, De Palma's images are up there on the screen inciting people to sin (the new right), or teaching violence against women (feminist antiporners). That's damaging — and damning — enough.

The antiporn crusade didn't start with De Palma. Oh, he gets its attention when he unleashes a film redolent with the bouquet of sex and violence — which nevertheless gets an 'R' and the serious discussion of critics to boot. But the various churches have been warning us against the dangers of carnality since Augustine, and the born-again refurbishing of Christianity that got rolling 15 years ago is just make the cries of brimstone and hellfire louder, slicker, and brought from their sponsor. The feminist protest took off in the mid-Seventies when women, fresh from the abortion victory, turned their energies to rape and battery — the catastrophes possible to us all, the "single issue" capable of rousing the female masses.

Along with rape crisis centers and reckoning with cops and judges who considered rap the deserts of women who asked for it and the understandable restlessness of (white) men, came an analysis of violence against women. Susan Brownmiller's "Against Our Will" was one of the earliest and best known explorations of the subject, but in consciousness-raising groups and Take Back the Night rallies in town and country an ideology was gaining consensus, often distilled into the slogan "Porn is the theory, rape is the practice." With that, feminism launched upon its antiporn journey: WAP and WAVPM began their organizing efforts; other books hit the stands (Andrea Dworkin's "Pornography: Men Possessing Women", Susan Griffin's "Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature", and the Laura Lederer edited anthology, "Take Back the Night", among others).

The antiporn argument — greatly simplified, pace Dworkin — runs something like this: Men may or may not be born with murderous instincts, but at the very least they have developed a culture of misogynist mayhem bequeathed father to son. One of the prime conduits of transit is pornography. From porn, men learn to hate women (or hate them more), to rape them, and that such violence is erotic. So much for the catharsis theory. Freud, eat your heart out.

As though it had been planned, the film industry of the mid-Seventies provided the antiporn movement with fuel for its fire: snuff films and the slasher films like "Halloween", "The Texan Chainsaw Massacre", and "Friday the Thirteenth" that followed. To be sure, there had been precursors: the relatively small, underground porn industry of the Hays Office years; the art films such as "I", "A Woman, Straw Dogs", "The Devils", "A Clockwork Orange", and "Last Tango in Paris" which conflated sex with violence; and the porno flicks like "Deep Throat", "The Devil and Miss Jones", and "Behind the Green Door" that were so sensationalized they nearly qualified for date-night outings. But "Snuff" was in another league. Here we saw porn itself raping and murdering; it is the perfect (if horrifying) reduction, the worst (if self-validating) fears of the anti-porn movement. "Green Door" by the way, is about S/M, a sport feminist antiporners began to tackle a few years ago. Consensual violence is no better than out-and-out force, they said: it recreates and reinforces the pernicious power imbalances that make women and minorities suffer in real life. No more "O"; no more of that letch of a marquis.

Except for the ERA debacle and Geraldine Ferraro, the antiporn protest has been the most visible — and seemingly uniting — of women's issues. After all, dueling with Hefner, Guccione, or Calvin Klein is a lot sexier than organizing the pink collar professions — or, for that matter, the women in the sex industry. (COYOTE, acronym for Cast Off Your Old, Tired Ethics, a group run by former and working prostitutes to help women-in-the-life, is perhaps the only operation of its kind.) But in the spirit of the democratic process, opposition has spoken up. Obviously, the producers of porn rebutted immediately. Civil libertarians cried censorship and set the movement a step or two back, smarting. (Having been burned, however, most antiporners steer clear of the First Amendment by calling, at least in their public appearances, not for the end of porn but for the enlightening of the citizenry.)

Less obviously, women who don't buy the antiporn line have begun to challenge its hegemony in feminist thought. The matter of consent should be brought to discussions of S/M, they argue, and the matter of context — of the difference between fantasy and reality — to discussions f porn. They worry about the defensive premise of the antiporn argument: men are lusty brutes, women their nice but helpless victims. Kept busy warding off attack, women will hardly have the time for their own pursuits, for finding out what they like or want. And some women don't want to wait until after the revolution. They are wary of prior restraints and the boundaries of government: if the state can interfere with the running of an adult-bookstore, is that not a precedent for its closing gay bookstores or bars, abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood? The social climate need shift only a little...And they wonder about our ability to define porn: is Brooke Shields in jeans porn, is a nude Reubens art? Or better yet, if an oil canvas of a nude hanging in a gallery is stolen and the thief jerks off to it, is that painting art or pornography? Implicit in the problem of definition is the question of who gets to decide.

So much for the pulpits of the Christian right, for intrafeminist or intraleft quarrels; the porn debate has gone mainstream. ACLUers and WAPers have at each other on "Nightline", Indianapolis passes antiporn legislation under the aegis of civil rights law, a woman immolates herself as a protest in a Minneapolis porn shop. And this past winter, the Justice Department awarded Dr. Judith Reisman $800,000 to research the connections among testosterone, pornography, and violence. In all this brouhaha, Brian De Palma's films don't stand a chance of simply being packaged as genre horror flicks and left at that.

In August, De Palma and I talked in his very white, very clean, very spare, very air-conditioned office, about what's going on in the antiporners' minds and what's going on in his. And about Vanessa Williams, voyeurism, the women's movement, Son of Sam, Hitchcock (again), the Sixties left, capitalism, government repression, the media, and (briefly) his taste in porn. — M.P.

Do you think hardcore fucking will get you an 'X'?
There is no hardcore fucking. There's making love but nothing verging on hardcore.

What about the masturbation scenes?
We'll see if they make an issue of it. I've had good luck with the ratings board before and I'll have good luck again.

Where'd you get the image of drilling a woman to the floor?
I do a lot of murder mysteries; after a while you get tired of the instruments. Agatha Christie must've dealt with this day in and day out. You can use a knife, a rope, but now we have electrical instruments-which are truly terrifying.

But why the drill?
Because he's using it to crack a safe.

Did you start with the theft or with the idea of murder-by-drill?
The theft.

Where'd you get the razor for "Dressed to Kill"?
I read somewhere that the most terrifying thing for a woman is disfigurement, that disfigurement is worse than death-that a woman would rather be stabbed than have her face cut up. It seemed to me a particularly terrifying image.

Do you consider your work pornographic?
No. But now you're getting into what is and isn't pornography. The stuff that is shot and sold as porn is meant to get you aroused and to climax. I don't think my movies have people coming in their seats . . .
When you're dealing with an art form, you shouldn't be drawn into all kinds of social and political issues. People can comment on your work and write about it. But I think those making the form should not be bound by these things, If we had people saying you can't use certain words, or have violence, or shoot women in this way, what kind of world is that?

Some women feel it's a safe world where women aren't made into playthings.
Does that mean that nude portraits should be eliminated, should we tear down all those paintings?

That's the question of what is art or erotica and what's porn.
Who's going to decide that?

People in the antiporn movement insist that they can distinguish, that people can tell what is respectful and what's "dehumanizing."
I'd hate to live in a world where art is left in the hands of the political people. I'd leave the country if it came to that-sounds like Russia.

In previous interviews you've said that the crucifixion is a fairly gruesome sight, and no one goes around pulling crucifixes off museum or church walls or off the walls of bedrooms-God only knows what's gong on there. Do you think there's a difference between a still life of an action and an enactment of the action?
No. Moving pictures is a Twentieth Century art form. If they had film when Reubens was painting, he probably would've used it.

The antiporn argument makes an analogy between misogyny and racism: we would never allow pictures with sexual violence done to blacks or Jews, and the body politic does impose restraints on its citizens for the good of society.
But that's film as advertising . . . and I don't remember any great Nazi art forms or socialist art forms.

You mean high quality anti-Semitism in cinema is okay but low quality isn't?
No. I'm saying in politically restricted societies where politicians control artists, you don't get interesting works of art.

I think the antiporn people would agree that Nazi films were advertisement and the intention behind your work may not be, but the effect on the viewer might be the same. Do you think people learn values or perspectives or even how to act from watching film?
You're being put in contact with the sensibility of one person and you're either attracted to that sensibility and you feel connections with your own experience or you don't.

But art is said to affect its audience; art that contains racism or misogyny could be just one more thing in our culture that adds weight to them.
If you have a misogynist outlook a sexist film could strike a chord in you, but I don't think it engenders sexism. I don't think women are beaten or raped because the rapist has been affected by the entertainment industry. If there were statistics to prove that, they'd be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

One of the projects of the antiporn movement is to get those statistics, to prove that men learn to rape or assault from porn. The line of thinking goes something like: boys learn to be contemptuous of women, and every time they go to a porn film or a Brian De Palma film that attitude is stroked. It snowballs till it leads to violence.
Makes no sense to me. I've seen a lot of movies and a lot of porn, and it's not made me violent to women in any way. Anybody who's had contact with true violence knows there's absolutely no connection with artistic violence . . .
I was just reading a book about Son of Sam. The first time he tried to stab someone, he hit her and nothing happened. He expected her to fall over and be dead like in the movies, but it was nothing like the movies. The difference is so profound. It's the antithesis of the antiporn argument.

What about statements by rapist in prison counseling groups who say they learned how to do it, or that it was in some way okay to do it, from porn?
I hate to give you this tired answer — I must've said this a thousand times . . .

I've probably read it as many times as you've said it.
. . . but motion pictures are a kinetic art form; you're dealing with motion and sometimes that can be violent motion. There are very few art forms that let you deal with things in motion and that's why Westerns and chases and shoot-outs and killings crop up in film. They require one of the elements intrinsic to film: motion.

Rapid motion, percussive motion, emphatic motion may enliven the screen, but then there's the content. You can have an arching motion by itself and you can have that motion be used to slash someone's throat. You can use deep red and silver as a color combination or you can have a razor cut someone's face. Why do you choose the violent content?
It interests me. I don't know why. I'd have to be on the couch a long time to figure it out. I seem to be attracted to it.

You said in an interview in MacLeans a few years ago that you didn't go into medicine like your father because it wasn't precise enough for you. When you direct, you control a whole world, particularly events which, if they happened in life, would be terrifying because you would have no control-like meeting a razor-slashing crazy in an elevator.
I don't like to be out of control. I don't see scary films. That's like getting on a a roller coaster, you're out of control. I never get on roller coasters; I'm amazed at people who do. Who wants to be scared? Why would you put yourself in a situation where you were out of control.

Are you amazed that people go to your films?
I certainly wouldn't go see them. But there's a difference between being the marionette and being the puppet master. One is a director because one wants to be the master.

Do you think men feel women are dangerous?
They're used to mothers taking care of them and to a woman being that nurturing partner she had been for so many centuries. Now when she has her own concerns, career, men have trouble with that. And women are more sexually demanding now: "Where's my orgasm, buddy. You call that an erection?"
It was never a problem for me but I think men find women's intelligence and aggression, their ambition, threatening. Women aren't going to make the terrible bargains they made in the past; they're too well educated. Why should they?

That's the modern problem. I wonder if there's an older issue. First mothers-women-control little boys' lives. And then, as if getting out from under the mother's control weren't enough, when boys grow up they have sex with women so the fears one has about sex-about that moment of being overwhelmed or out of control-becomes associated with women yet again.
Sex is out of control . . . and love is out of control. Having your emotions in the hands of someone else is more terrifying than strange, wild sex, It's the nature of love to be out of control. But I like women. I get along with them; I went to school with a lot of them. I have long-ten relationships. I use women in my films, and they tend to be strong women. I like directing women. I'm not Sam Peckinpah, you know, down in Mexico screwing the whores. So I'm a strange kind of guy to be making the films I make.

Then why do you make them?
Because of an aesthetic interest that I don't have much control over.

An aesthetic interest?
I'm a visual stylist. I like interesting visual spaces, architecture. I like photographing women because they're aesthetically interesting. I'm interested in motion, sometimes violent motions because they work aesthetically in film. I like mysteries and plots with reversals. I have a dark image of society in which people are manipulating each other. Maybe that has to do with the world I work in.

But that's formal stuff again. You haven't said why you use violence.
I said I'm a visual stylist, a VISUAL STYLIST [bangs on the table]. I'm dealing with a white canvas up there and I may be one of the few practitioners doing that today. Sometimes I feel like Eisenstein; he was a great montage stylist.

But you don't make abstract films.
The content of my films is a secondary issue. I don't start with as idea about content; I start with a VISUAL IMAGE (more banging).

[De Palma starts to smile — oddly, I think. Is he feeling out of control? Is he going to want to do something about it? Am I crazy to be wondering where the drill is? No, razors would be better for the office.]

In the Jan.'84 "Esquire", one of the women you dated before you married Nancy Allen said you keep a book of Nazi atrocities by your pillow. Is that true?
No. I read nonfiction about murders and if I'm doing a film about the cocaine industry I read about that. I keep most of my books here-you can go look.

What are you smiling at? Why are you looking at me that way?
[Chuckling] Uh, it's just that a person's face changes when you get to know them. I'm starting to see how you think.

In your camera-work, you use the protagonist's or voyeur's point-of-view almost all the time — you've got to stop looking at me like that.

[He laughs. I'm getting pissed off; he's just getting off.] Film is one of the only art forms where you can give the audience the same visual information the character has. I learned it from Hitchcock. It's unique to cinema and it connects the audience directly to the experience-unlike the fourth wall approach, which belongs to the Xerox school of filmmaking.

By connecting the viewer to the experience, the sex becomes hotter, the violence more frightening. [He's peering at me again.] I'm going to ignore that. The viewer flirts with losing control . . .
You couldn't be a good director if you didn't also feel the arousal, the fear . . .

. . . but inevitably regains it. When you direct from the protagonist's POV, isn't that what happens to you, standing behind the camera, behind the eyes of the character? Don't you get aroused or frightened and then rein in your feelings, get on top of them?
That's the nature of directing. Taking control.

Did you see the "Times" story on the woman who set fire to herself in a porn shop in Minneapolis? She lit herself up as a protest against pornography, and then was hailed as a martyr by the antiporn feminists there-that was the group that tried to get the city of Minneapolis to pass the Kathy McKinnon–Andrea Dworkin antiporn bill. It takes pornography out of the obscenity area into the civil liberties bailiwick and makes porn illegal by claiming it violates the civil rights of women. The mayor of Minneapolis vetoed the bill but in Indianapolis, the city passed a version of it.
That woman is someone who made an extreme personal sacrifice to dramatize her political views, but I don't think we should encourage this — whether it's for no-nukes or to stop the war in Nicaragua.

I was struck by the difference between attacking porn stores-going after whoever you think the enemy is-and attacking yourself.
It's almost a kind of terrorism, and unless it has a strong base behind it, it doesn't have any effect. It just looks like some single crazy event, like assassinations.

Assassins try to get somebody else; this woman went after herself.
That depends on one' psychology: Do you direct your anger out or in. It's safer to kill yourself than to kill somebody else, there's no question about that. But it doesn't accomplish anything.

Except the media blitz.
That's a problem — that people do things for the sake of media attention. And the media tends to be attracted to violent, explosive, pornographic acts.
I'm getting very interested in doing a movie about this media circus. I'm working on a script now. When I'm on a talk show, there's a montage of every violent scene from movies and life before we even begin to talk. People interpret that as news. Then everybody asks me how I can make violent movies, and the television program is doing the same thing-except they're pretending it's news. They put sensational things on the air in order to sell advertising space. People don't understand that both presentations are entertainment. And news shouldn't be entertainment.

Earlier you said audiences didn't learn to be violent from your films and yet now you say viewers are affected by the news, which you say is entertainment just like your films.
The media affects people because they can become stars. They do things in order to get on TV. You don't become a star by watching my movies....Take the street riots at the Democratic convention: if you turn on cameras and lights, people perform. The media is creating its own "news" events-and it's a monster because it needs stuff all the time.
I think there are a lot of psychopaths out there watching television-I don't think they're watching my movies, particularly-and when they see someone like Gary Gilmore giving press conferences, they say "Hey, what am I doing sitting in this motel room when I could be out there killing people, writing books, and being a celebrity." It's the "Taxi Driver" idea, the "King of Comedy" idea. And television has a much larger audience than movies.

You don't think people get the message from your films that if they take a razor to some woman in an elevator they'll become a star?
No. If you're worried about violence against women, stop buying Penthouse magazine. Hat's the simplest way to deal with that problem-and the media is selling it all over the place.

What did you think of the Vanessa Williams business?
She's very young, and I thought she handled those reporters like a seasoned anchorperson. I believed everything she said-until I saw the pictures. They were obviously very carefully posed-this was no poor young girl wandering into a studio-specifically pornographic, created for a hardcore male market.

But they were rather standard, tame shots.
Uh, that's pretty hardcore stuff, I think.

The lesbian shots?
And the split-crotch shots.

Do you think she should've had to return her crown?
Well, after all, she's a spokesperson for a lot of products and obviously it embarrasses the manufacturers. Come on, any public company would bail out of it in ten seconds.

Do you think the pageant is being a little hypocritical?
Because the pageant exploits women in bathing suits and what's the difference between that and "Penthouse"? I think it's a matter of degree. We don't like to think of Miss America as a sex object, it's more the image of a pretty girl. There's a big difference between girls parading around in bathing suits and posing for "Penthouse," just like there's a difference between love scenes in movies and hardcore porn.

What's the difference between a nude scene in one of your films and the shots of Vanessa in "Penthouse"?
One is constructed to arouse and the other is constructed to enhance, or beautify, or whatever. I don't think pictures of women with their legs spread is aesthetically pleasing. I guess it's in the eyes of the beholder, totally subjective.

Who gets to decide what's art and what's porn?
You do, each individual

So you're not for closing down "Penthouse"?
Absolutely not. I don't want to be in a bureaucratic situation where some people can decide what the rest of us should read and what we shouldn't.
I was on a program once with those guys who did a study where they showed a group of college kids a bunch of violent movies and then did a mock rape trial. The researchers concluded that people in the test group were de-sensitized to violence, did not empathize with the girl who was raped, and in fact thought if they could rape somebody and get away with it, they would. It makes no sense at all to me-that I am such a brainless fool that if I see a few violent movies I'll feel it's perfectly fine to go out and rape somebody. Are we that impressionable? That's the whole process of growing up. You're supposed to be able to discriminate.
When you're dealing with someone like Son of Sam who thought if he hit someone like they do in the movies she would fall down dead, you're talking about someone who obviously can't distinguish between a movie and really trying to get a knife into someone-which is a very difficult process, especially if she'd be wearing a heavy coat. That guy is crazy.
I think the antiporn movement is dealing with duplicitous arguments. They're worried about walking into one of my films when in they neighborhoods there are stores selling pornographic cassettes hand over fist, and their six-year-old can turn on cable TV and see a hell of a lot more than is ever in my movies.

The antiporn people are worried about that, too.
I should think they would be. That's a huge business. The history of radical movements in this country has been that the media addresses itself to the minor issues because there's no way they can deal with the major ones. If people are worried about aggression, then we shouldn't live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is based on aggression, and violence against women has to do with aggression. That aggression is fanned constantly.

The antiporn people think pornographic cassettes and cable and magazines and your movies are all dangerous.
Then we get into where you draw the line and the effects of drawing that line. Cigarettes are death and we still sell them. If you can't prevent me from smoking cigarettes then you can't prevent me from buying porn. People have a choice: nobody has to walk into my movies . . . Why not have an economic boycott of films they don't like?

Do you think they'd be successful?
If they got enough support they could probably...if that's the way society is going to go then I'll have to stop making movies. But to me that's like the revolution of the Sixties-trying to create a revolution in a society that doesn't really want a revolution. I don't think too many people want to burn down the banks; they have car payments and mortgages.
Profit has become the moral justification for selling cigarettes. If you say that capitalism is the best system and free-choice is necessary, you're going to have to accept that cigarettes and porn are going to exist. They make a profit, and people have the choice to buy them.

You seem to be pro-free-choice and critical of capitalism.
Capitalism has to be tempered by you own sense of morality. There are certain things you just shouldn't do in order to get ahead and those things need o be engendered by your family, by whoever brings you up.

Not by society?
I don't think it would work. Going to a communist country isn't going to do it either. You have to balance the freedoms of a capitalist world with a sense of what's good and bad.

That means people will develop different moral codes. You smoke but other people think smoking is polluting the air and killing them. You don't think men learn to cut women up from your films and other people do. What's your 'sense of morality'?
I hate to get Biblical, but the Ten Commandments work perfectly well. 'Do Unto Others' seems to make a lot of sense. To me, the aggressive aspects of man come from profit being the most important thing in life.

Are women affected by the profit motive?
Of course. I think it's behind a lot of the women's movement. Women want a piece of the pie too — and why should they be deprived of what we've had?

Do you think women are aggressive?
Sure. They're being affected by the same system that men have been . If you want to change all of society you have to protest porn and General Motors simultaneously. I want to see WAP take that position.

I think a lot of them would.
Then they have to start trying to get legislation against both industries-and they will get nowhere. So they focus on porn. They get a lot of attention because the media loves to put antiporn stuff on the air . . .
You get the jollies of porn and you get to feel righteous at the same time . . .
And you get to sell General Motors too. You can go live in places in this country where the profit motive is not so important. I'm sure I can go out and live in Maine and get a job in a mill and earn $200 a week — or maybe a month — and I'd be totally unaffected by the profit motive of this country. But if you're going to live in one of the power capitals . . .

Unless they closed the mill.
Then you'd have to go someplace else. But don't come into Manhattan and talk about pornography — it's ludicrous.
I think this antiporn business is a tempest in a teapot. When I was making "Dressed to Kill," suddenly there were three books out on transsexuals, and transsexuals were on all the talk shows. One was on "Phil Donahue," one on "Good Morning America." You'd think they were all over the place. Same thing with the gay movement; people think they're going to take over. Then the craze passes, and we move on to the next thing.
There's also something else. We are human beings; we have certain kinds of drives and things we're attracted to that don't get educated out of us. And I don't think I'd want them to get educated out.

One last question. You've often been accused of lifting from Hitchcock . . .
Richard Corliss is a big one on that . . .

Given all those accusations, why do you still put bathroom scenes-lifting from "Psycho," they call it — in every one of your films, including the new one?
I throw it right in the face. I refuse to be censored by a bunch of people who have the wrong perceptions of my movies. I should listen to these nitwit critics? I don't cater to the public, why should I cater to the critics?

Do you put those scenes in as a jab?
No. If I'm attracted to something I shouldn't refuse to use it just because Hitchcock was attracted to it too.

What's the attraction of the shower scene?
Hitchcock discovered that people feel safe in the bathroom with the door shut.

Not any more . . .
It's a place that when someone comes in, you really feel violated. To me it's almost a genre convention at this point — like using violins when people look at each other or using women in situations where they are killed or sexually attacked. You know, the woman in the haunted house — I didn't invent that. Women, over the history of Western culture, seem to be more vulnerable than men. It has a lot to do with their being physically less strong. They made a movie with Roy Schneider being stalked in a basement. Roy Schneider is the guy who killed in "Jaws." Now who is going to jump out at Roy Schneider? Obviously children in peril is also something you'd connect with, but there's something too awful about that. I don't particularly want to chop up women but it seems to work.

marciapally.com

Site updated Jan. 24, 2010

‘Double’ Trouble

An Interview with Brian De Palma

by Marcia Pally