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or many years, Brian De Palma’s work has been dismissed as misogynistic , on the one hand, and opportunistically derivative, on the other hand. About this latter point, De Palma’s astonishingly productive and ongoing intertextual engagement with Hitchcock—commencing with the Rear Window homage Sisters (1973) and vividly on display in his Femme Fatale (2002)—has been viewed by the general run of critics as a plagiaristic and crass appropriation of the “Master of Suspense” by a talented but shallow hack. While critics like Pauline Kael, De Palma’s staunchest and most famous champion , Robin Wood, Kenneth MacKinnon, Terence Rafferty, and, most recently, Eyal Peretz, have written thoughtfully and perceptively about De Palma, the majority of treatments of his work have treated it with hostility. In his review of Femme Fatale , a deeply surprised Jonathan Rosenbaum admits to “capitulating to” the film’s “inspired formalist madness—something I’ve resisted in [De Palma’s] films for the past 30-odd years.” Rosenbaum goes on to explain the sources of this resistance: I’d always been annoyed by De Palma’s intricate borrowings from Alfred Hitchcock , which I’ve tended to see more as mangled tributes than as perceptive appreciations . My misgivings were only reinforced when his biggest fans, especially Pauline Kael and her most literal followers, implied that Hitchcock was a bit of a hack next to the genius De Palma—suggesting that Hitchcock churned out C H A P T E R F O U R M I S F O R T U N E A N D M E N ’ S E Y E S Three Early De Palma Comedies P S Y C H O S E X U A L 110 dross, which his disciple somehow turned into the pure gold of sublime trash. De Palma’s borrowings were all the more irritating when it became clear that much of his supposed fealty to the master came less from his soul than from his big production budgets, which enabled him to hire Bernard Herrmann for Sisters and Obsession—though all he wanted Herrmann to do was imitate his scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Say what you will about Hitchcock’s calculation, his work displays an almost limitless curiosity about human behavior, whereas De Palma’s shows an interest in people (as opposed to types and figures) that approaches zero.1 Rosenbaum not only lays out his own experience of De Palma here but indexes recurring themes in the reception of De Palma’s work, particularly the films made after his biggest commercial and critical success of the 1970s, Carrie (1976). Rosenbaum also provides telling insights into the ongoing views of Hitchcock’s work, the way that, on the one hand, he almost always emerges as De Palma’s aesthetic and even moral superior, Hitchcock’s status as Original Genius intact, and, on the other hand, in the Kael view, the less daring, radical artist. Neither of these critical tendencies tells us much about either filmmaker, each of whose works are important in political as well as aesthetic terms. In the last chapter, I offer a close reading of Dressed to Kill (1980); in this chapter, I consider three early, Vietnam War–era De Palma comedies. I challenge the establishment critical position , maintained by critics such as Rosenbaum until his “conversion”(however long it has lasted) through Femme Fatale, that De Palma’s Hitchcockian thrillers plagiarize the Master without adding anything significant of their own, aesthetically or thematically. (Certainly, Bernard Herrmann was inspired enough by them to compose two of his finest scores.) In my view, De Palma’s Hitchcockian thrillers add a great deal to Hitchcock; they extend his aesthetic experiments while expanding and revising his psychosexual politics. Between them, Hitchcock and De Palma submit the masculine subject of Hollywood cinema to a challenging analysis, decentering the male subject while also exposing the perniciousness and hollowness of the structural foundations that support this subjectivity. Along with Hitchcock’s aesthetics, De Palma has inherited many of the Master ’s ideological problems. Charges of misogyny have dogged Hitchcock, particularly in terms of his films from Psycho forward, such as The Birds (1963) and Frenzy (1972). Critics have also faulted Hitchcock for the implausibility of his plots and for his formal “coldness.” In the view of a critic like David Thompson, Hitchcock is a great technician but not a “human” filmmaker, his enclosed, precisely storyboarded worlds devoid of spontaneity and real feeling. De Palma’s work has...

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