The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  So let's start again. Brian De Palma sits slumped on his director's chair, down at Burbank, in boiling Los Angeles. It is 'wrap' day on Body Double, his pornographic new thriller: only two climactic scenes remain to be shot. 'Put the chest back on,' De Palma tells the villain, played by Gregg Henry. 'Okay. New chest! New belly!' This means another forty-minute delay. De Palma gets to his feet and wanders heavily round the set. He is indeed rather tubby now, the back resting burdensomely on the buttocks, and he walks with an effortful, cross-footed gait. 'Hitchcock was sixty when he made Psycho,' De Palma would later tell me. '1 don't know if I'll be able to walk when I'm sixty.' A curious remark - but then Brian is not a good walker, even now, at forty-four; he is not a talented walker.

  He walks as if he is concentrating very hard on what he has in his pockets.

  I approached the sinister Gregg Henry and asked him about the scene they were shooting. It sounded like standard De Palma: 'I throttle Craig Wasson to the ground or whatever. I jump out of the grave. I rip off my false belly.' The false belly is part of Gregg's disguise, along with the rug, the redskin facial pancake, and the Meccano dentures. As in Dressed to Kill, a goody turns out to be a baddy, in disguise. It takes a headlining make-up veteran three-and-a-half hours to get Gregg looking as sinister as this. Presumably it takes the baddy in the film even longer — but this is a De Palma picture, where gross insults to plausibility are routine. The second shot involves an elaborate false-perspective prop (to dramatise the hero's claustrophobia as he is buried alive), like the staircase scene in Vertigo. The camera will wobble. 'With luck, you'll feel sick,' says the amiable first assistant. Body Double has gone pretty smoothly, within schedule and under budget. The only real hitch was a 'hair problem' with Melanie Griffith. She spent two weeks under the drier and over the sink. 'We tried brown, red, platinum — until we got what Brian wanted.’

  Suddenly — that is to say, after a fifteen-minute yelling relay — the shot is ready to go again. De Palma talks to no one but the camera operator. 'Why don't you pull back a bit? Why don't you try to hold him from head to foot?' All his instructions are in this dogged rhetorical style. Action. Gregg Henry and Craig Wasson perform creditably ('Oh man,' says Gregg, peeling off his false belly, 'you ruined my whole surprise ending'), but De Palma is unhap ?y about the camera's swooning back-track. He should have been unhappy about his surprise ending, which doesn't work. 'New belly,' says Brian, and the delay resumes. A series of delays interrupted by repetitions: that's motion pictures.

  De Palma went trudge-about. 'I think this would be a good time for you to be introduced to Brian,' said Rob, the unit publicist — also likeable. 'He's in a receptive mood.’

  'Are you sure?’

  'Yes. Very receptive.’

  We walked over. I was introduced. De Palma wearily offered his hand. Rob explained who I was. 'Uh,' said De Palma, and turned away.

  'Is that as good as it gets?' I asked as we walked off.

  See him in New York, said Rob. He 11 be better, when he s wrapped.’

  And so an hour or two later I left him in the lot, which was still doing its imitation of Hell. Gaunt ladies lurk near the catering caravan. Fat minders or shifters or teamsters called Buck and Flip and Heck move stoically about. The place is big and dark and hot, swathed in black drapes, vulcanic, loud with vile engines, horrid buzzers, expert noise-makers. Nearly all the time absolutely nothing is happening. Eight hours later, at midnight, De Palma wrapped.

  As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. Unlike his peers and pals, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese (they all teamed up at Warner Brothers in the early Seventies), De Palma doesn't shoot miles of footage and then redesign the movie in the editing room. His rough cuts are usually shorter than the finished film. Every scene is meticulously story-boarded, every pan and zoom, every camera angle. Here's a sample on-set interview:

  So, Brian, before you make a movie, do you see the whole thing in your head?

  Yes.

  Do you have problems re-creating the movie you see?

  No.

  How does the actual movie measure up to what you originally imagined?

  It measures up.

  He seldom advises or encourages his actors. Michael Caine has said that the highest praise you'll hear from De Palma is 'Print'. As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. The only question is: why does he want it?

  Always an ungainly cultural phenomenon, De Palma's reputation has never been more oddly poised. He likes to think of himself as over the top and beyond the pale, an iconoclast and controversialist, someone that people love to hate or hate to love — someone, above all, who cannot be ignored. In moments of excitement he will grandly refer to 'whole schools of De Palma criticism' which say this, that and the other about his work. Well, too many people have failed to ignore De Palma for us to start ignoring him now. But it may be that the only serious school of De Palma criticism is the one where all the classrooms are empty. Everyone is off playing hookey. They're all busy ignoring him.

  De Palma's history forms a promising confection, full of quir-kiness and mild exoticism. His parents were both Italian Catholics yet little Brian was reared as a Presbyterian, The Catholic imagery was naturally the more tenacious for the young artist ('that is one spooky religion') and its themes and forms linger in his work: the diabolism, the ritualised but arbitrary moral schemes, the guilt. De Palma Senior was a surgeon - orthopaedics, the correction of deformity. Brian used to sit in on operations, often catching a skin graft or a bone transplant, and would later do vacation jobs in medical laboratories. 'I have a high tolerance for blood,' he says. The cast of The Fury (1978) nicknamed him Brian De Plasma. On the set his most frequent remarks are 'Action', 'Print' and 'More blood!' De Palma was tempted by medicine but rejected the discipline as 'not precise enough'.

  He used to be keen on precision, and still sees his work in terms of 'precise visual story-telling', streamlined and dynamic, all pincer grips and rapier thrusts. In fact, 'precision' in De Palma is entirely a matter of sharp surfaces and smooth assembly; within, all is smudge and fudge, woolliness, approximation. The young Brian was also something of a physics prodigy and computer whiz. At a National Science Fair competition he took second prize for his critical study of hydrogen quantum mechanics through cybernetics. (This is impressive all right. You try it.) One imagines the teenage De Palma as owlish, bespectacled and solitary, like the kid in Dressed to Kill. That solitude is still with him, I would say. Then at university the brainy loner changed tack, selling his home-made computers for a ßolex film camera, 'trading one obsession for another'.

  Born in Newark, raised in Philadelphia, a student of physics at Columbia and of drama at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, De Palma is solidly East Coast in his origins, urban, radical, anti-establishment, anti-Hollywood. He admired Godard, Polanski and of course Hitchcock, but he entered the industry from left field: via the TV-dominated world of documentary and vérité, low-budget satire and chaotic improvisation, war protest and sexual daring — a product of the Sixties, that golden age of high energy and low art. It must be said that of all De Palma's early work, from Greetings in 1968 to Phantom of the Paradise in 1974, nothing survives. These films are now no more than memories of art-house late nights, student screenings, left-wing laughter and radical applause. De Palma's first visit to Hollywood, for Get to Know Your Rabbit, was a disaster movie in itself. His authority attacked, his star out of control, De Palma 'quit' the picture two weeks before its completion — as he would later quit Prince of the City and Flashdance. The film was shelved for two years. On his own admission De Palma was suddenly 'dead' in Los Angeles, where the locals are superstitious about failure; they quarantine you, in case failure is catching. No one returned his calls. They crossed the street to avoid him. 'People think — what has he got in that can?' In any event, Rabbit was a dog. Furtively released in 1974 as a B-feature, it interred itself within a week.

  Then two years later alon
g came Carrie, far and away De Palma's most successful film, in all senses. By now Brian's contemporaries, his Warner brothers, were all drowning in riches and esteem, and he was 'more than ready' for a smash of his own. 'I pleaded, pleaded to do Carrie.' And so began De Palma's assimilation into the Hollywood machine, his extended stay in 'the land of the devil'. The Sixties radical package was merely the set of values that got to him first, and he had wearied of a 'revolution' he found ever more commercialised. De Palma now wanted the other kind of independence, the 'dignity' that comes from power and success within the establishment. He is honest — or at any rate brazen — about the reversal. 'I too became a capitalist,' he has said. 'By even dealing with the devil you become devilish. There's no clean money. There I was, worrying about Carrie not doing forty million. That's how deranged your perspectives get." Nowadays his politics are cautious and pragmatic: 'capitalism tempered by compassion, do unto others — stuff like that'. The liberal minimum. His later films do sometimes deal in political questions of the Watergate-buff variety, but the slant is personal, prankish, paranoid — De Palmaesque. All that remains of the Sixties guerrilla is an unquenchable taste for anarchy: moral anarchy, artistic anarchy.

  What use has he made of his freedom? What exactly are we looking at here? 'Mature' De Palma consists of Dressed to Kill, Blowout and now Body Double. These are the medium-budget films which De Palma conceived, wrote, directed and cut. (The Fury and Scarface we can set aside as fancy-priced hackwork, while Home’

  Movies, a shoe-string project put together at Sarah Lawrence and released'in 1980, is already a vanished curiosity.) De Palma's three main credits, or debits, reveal his cinematic vision, unfettered by any constraints other than those imposed by the censors. They also show how blinkered, intransigent and marginal that vision really is. Such unedifying fixity has no equivalent in mainstream cinema, and none in literature, except perhaps Celine, or William Burroughs — or Kathy Acker.

  Each instalment in the De Palma trilogy concerns itself with a man who goes about the place cutting up women: straight razor, chisel, power drill. The women are either prostitutes, sexual adventuresses or adult-movie queens. There is no conventional sex whatever in De Palma's movies: it is always a function of money, violence or defilement, glimpsed at a voyeuristic remove or through a pornographic sheen (and this interest in flash and peep goes right back to Greetings). The heroes are childish or ineffectual figures, helpless in the face of the villain's superior human energies. There are no plots: the narratives themselves submit to a psychopathic rationale, and are Jittered with coincidence, blind spots, black holes. Like its predecessors, Body Double could be exploded by a telephone call, by a pertinent question, by five minutes' thought. Most candidly of all, De Palma dispenses with the humanistic ensemble of character, motive, development and resolution. He tries his best, but people bore him, and that's that.

  Brian has something, though. Without it, he would be indistinguishable from the gory hucksters of the exploitation circuit, the slashers and manglers, the Movie Morons who gave us The Evil Dead, Prom Night and I Spit On Your Grave. Brian has style — a rare and volatile commodity. Style will always convince cinematic purists that the surfaces they admire contain depth, and that clear shortcomings are really subtle virtues in disguise. De Palma isn't logical, so he must be impressionistic. He isn't realistic, so he must be surrealistic. He isn't scrupulous, so he must be audacious. He isn't earnest, so he must be ironical. He isn't funny, so he must be serious.

  And so I hung around in damp New York, waiting on the man. Every now and then De Palma's 'people' at Columbia would apologetically pass on the odd message: 'Brian's probably going to decide tomorrow whether he'll let you have this interview...' I had urgent reasons for returning to London. A week passed. Now, there is no reason why celebrities should submit to journalistic inspection, and in fact they are increasingly reluctant to do so — except in the trash press, where publicity is always tilted towards celebration. But having agreed to an interview, they should play by the rules, which are rules of ordinary etiquette: do unto others — stuff like that. A week passed. And then Brian came down from the mountain.

  'Mr De Palma? He's right over there,' said the porter down in lower Fifth Avenue. Brian sat ponderously on a bench by the lift with a newspaper under his arm. Always keen to stay in touch with 'street reality', De Palma had just staggered out for a New York Times. 'Hi,' I said, and reintroduced myself. De Palma nodded at the floor. 'It's kind of you to give me your time.' De Palma shrugged helplessly — yes, what a bountiful old softie he was. In eerie silence we rode the swaying lift.

  'Coffee?' he sighed. With studied gracelessness he shuffled around his four-room office — televisions, hi-fis, a pinball machine, De Palma film posters, curved white tables, orderly work-surfaces. This was where Brian did all his writing and conceiving. Wordlessly he gave me my coffee mug and sloped off to take a few telephone calls. At last he levered himself in behind the desk, his nostrils flaring with a suppressed yawn, and waved a limp hand at me. The interview began. Great, I thought, after ten minutes. He really is bananas. This is going like a dream.

  'My films are so filmically astute that people think I'm not good with actors. Actors trust me and my judgment because I'm so up front about what I feel ... I don't make "aggressive" use of the camera. I make the right use. I go with my instinct — I use Hitchcock's grammar but I have a romantic vision that's more sweeping and Wagnerian__I have a tremendous amount of experience. I'm not afraid to try new things ... Financially in Hollywood I'm a sound economic given. Three-quarters of my films have made money. Anybody who can make one film that makes money is a genius!’

  'Casting all modesty aside,' I said, fondling my biro, 'where would you place yourself among your contemporaries — Coppola, Scorsese?’

  'Oh, I don't know. I'm up there, I guess. Time ...' he said, and paused. De Palma is generally tentative about time — aware, perhaps, of what time has already done to much of his oeuvre. 'Let's face up to it! I'm never going to get a lifetime-achievement award. I never bought those values anyway. In ten years hence they ... I don't know. Time will find a place for me.’

  On this note of caution, Brian unwound. His mood of frenzied self-advertisement receded, alas, and I have to report that he then talked pretty soberly and fluently for well over an hour — bearish, grinning, gesturing, his laughter frayed by hidden wildness. Of course, the time to catch De Palma in full manic babble is when he is writhing under the tethers of a collaborative project, as on Scarf ace, or tangling with the censors, as he did on Dressed to Kill, which barely escaped an X. But he was relatively calm during our meeting, with Body Double in the can and another project nicely brewing: Carpool, in which he intends to indulge his fascination with rearview mirrors. 'Steven will produce,' says Brian snugly. In January he had told Esquire: 'As soon as I get this dignity from Scarface I am going to go out and make an X-rated suspense porn picture.' Later he added, 'If Body Double doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. I'm going to give them everything they hate, and more of it than they've ever seen.' What major company, you wonder, would finance and distribute an X? I asked Brian about this. He grew sheepish. 'No major company would finance or distribute it,' he said. So it's an R. 'Most frustrating,' De Palma muses. 'I mean, look at cable TV. Kids can watch anything these days.’

  Despite such checks and balances De Palma is quick to claim full responsibility for his projects. 'It is an auteur situation out there. You guys, you writers, you got to stop thinking of directors as still living in the Fifties. It's not an entrenched power system. There's a lot of free will. No one wants to confront you. No one wants to take responsibility. That's why directors are emergent figures. If the executives lean on you, you just have to say, "Okay, guys, you do it." Either they let you alone, or its "Goodbye, Bri! Well, De Palma fucked up!'“

  After a little coaxing, however, Brian confessed to moments of self-doubt. 'It's an intolerable kind of regime. You wake up at four in the morning
, thinking — Who wants it! Who needs it! It's all so complex. It's like Waiting for Godot [this last word stressed oddly too, like Gdansk]. Then the rushes, the final mix — that's pleasure. I like to write. My own pace. I basically like to work by myself.’

  At this point I recalled the morose and taciturn figure at Burbank Studios, in LA. Among all the clamour and clatter, the compulsive wisecracking and bovine bonhomie, there was De Palma, doing as good an impersonation of a man alone as the circumstances could well permit. Occasionally, too, I thought I glimpsed the obsessive and abstracted kid in him, the bristle of a more rarefied talent. Human relations are always difficult'for this kind of artist — messy, confusing, 'not precise enough'. De Palma has been married once, and briefly, to Nancy Allen, whom he had cast as a monosyllabic hooker in three movies running. Informed Hollywood gossip maintains that Nancy wanted a family, and Brian didn't. Well, he's batching it now. Asked why he always equates sex with terror, De Palma says equably, 'Casual sex is terrifying. It's one of the few areas of terror still left to us.' And this is why pornography interests him. It is casual, but safe. And it is solitary: nobody else need come in on the act.