Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film by Douglas Keesey (review)

Director Brian De Palma has been accused of many things throughout a career that has spanned more than five decades. Chiefly among them, critics have labeled him a misogynist placating a largely male audience that derives voyeuristic sexual pleasure from the on-screen objectification and vicious mutilation of women at the hands of men in films like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), to name just two. In addition, critics have bemoaned De Palma’s penchant for borrowing themes and sometimes whole scenarios from Alfred Hitchcock, labelling his work as little more than crass pastiche from a second-rate director. But, as Douglas Keesey’s Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film reveals, De Palma’s filmography is built less on the direct imitation of other master directors who preceded him, and instead is heavily predicated on him reconciling multiple traumatic events that occurred in his own early life through the visual medium of film.

In the book’s introduction, Keesey suggests that while De Palma has sometimes imitated other directors—Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock—his filmography has generally been one of response to key waves of cultural influence in the United States. Of particular focus are the director’s critical responses to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq (Casualties of War [1989] and Redacted [2007]); space travel (Mission to Mars [2000]); feminism (Carrie [1976], Dressed to Kill [1980], Femme Fatale [2002], among many others); and even, with Greetings (1968), the Kennedy assassination (12). While viewers might perceive De Palma’s films as manifesting a sort of cynicism regarding the fallibility and dark side of human nature, much of his work serves as a cathartic self-critique of the events that have shaped his own life and, on many levels, function as a way for De Palma to resolve traumas that have haunted him since childhood. Keesey claims that there are “certain key incidents from De Palma’s life to which he keeps returning in film after film,” namely observing his surgeon father conduct bloody operations, and contemplating the significance behind “his father’s adultery, his mother’s near-suicide, his sense of inferiority to one brother, and his failure to save the other one from suffering” (13).

By organizing the book into twenty-nine chapters—one for each of De Palma’s films—Keesey not only examines the ways these traumas influenced the narratives from each of De Palma’s films, but also appropriates the director’s signature camera technique—the split-screen—as a lens for considering the complicated nature of a filmmaker whose films often encompass four separate themes. The first theme Keesey discusses is “Independence/Hollywood,” which explores De Palma’s attempts to reconcile his ability to remain true to his own artistic vision, while operating within a bureaucratic and tyrannical Hollywood system devoid of creativity and, much like the theme of De Palma’s own Phantom of the Paradise (1974), is one where artists sell their souls to succeed. In “Originality/Imitation,” Keesey underscores De Palma’s struggles with critics who have chastised his films—particularly Obsession (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Body Double (1984)—for being little more than schlocky imitations of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960). “Feminism/Misogyny” addresses one of the other major criticisms that has plagued many of De Palma’s more erotic thrillers: his objectification and violent treatment of women on-screen. In a number of De Palma’s films women are portrayed as fallen characters whose perceived sexual deviancy, in some way, contributes to their demise: in Dressed to Kill (1980), Angie Dickinson plays a cheating wife who is slashed to death with a razor after inciting the lust of her therapist; Nancy Allen portrays a prostitute in Blow Out (1981) and is strangled to death after involving herself in a sexual frame-up of...