Hollywood's New Yorker by Raymond Marc

Author:Raymond, Marc [Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438445731
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

De Palma was taken seriously as a great filmmaker, a new breed of director who, like Scorsese, was fascinated with the formal devices of the cinema and eager to revise past narrative structures.

But what De Palma gradually lost over his years of working in Hollywood was his authenticity, the ability to convince critics that he had maintained his unique individuality as an artist. The major problem he encountered was the fact that he frequently returned to the same genre of his first success, Sisters. The suspense thriller genre that so often attracted De Palma meant that he would always be in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma consistently had to deal with these comparisons with Hitchcock and the allegations that he was simply an imitator. This was especially the case with his remake of Vertigo, Obsession (1976), and his reworking of Psycho, Dressed to Kill (1980). Moreover, Hitchcock's critical reputation started to rise throughout the 1970s and peaked in 1982, when Vertigo was first included in the Sight and Sound Top Ten poll. Before this, De Palma was able to compete with Hitchcock, with many younger critics like Kael actually arguing that De Palma was superior to Hitchcock as an artist. As Kapsis argues, during the 1970s De Palma's art was often characterized positively in postmodern terms. Had postmodernism become the dominant artistic style within canonized circles, De Palma's reputation may have flourished (he remains a favorite of the postmodern auteur, Quentin Tarantino). But despite the arguments of critics like Kael, eventually auteurism became the dominant theory of film history. With this critical shift came a greater respect and admiration for the Classical Hollywood cinema, which was no longer seen as simply mass culture “trash.” The cinema that came to be respected was either the classical cinema of Ford, Hawks, and other auteurs, or the modernist cinema of which Scorsese was often held up as the exemplar.

In contrast to De Palma, Scorsese came to be seen as respectful of the classical cinema, not simply a parodist or an imitator. But during the early to mid-1980s, various journal articles commented on Scorsese's and De Palma's similarities in their artistic approaches. No fewer than three pieces grouped together Scorsese and De Palma. John Mariani in Attenzione wrote a piece on Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino, and Coppola; Leo Braudy in Film Quarterly compared Scorsese, De Palma, and Coppola; and Stephen Mamber in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video discussed Scorsese, De Palma, and Kubrick.66 Mamber's essay is particularly intriguing because of his claims for the postmodern characteristics of three films the respective directors made in the early 1980s: The King of Comedy (1983), Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984), and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Mamber argues that all three films are “nearly identical in their attention to the following parody-related activities.”67 He then lists and outlines the postmodern aesthetics of the films: “intertextual overkill,” “failed artists,” “daring to be bad,” “parodic cultural juxtaposition,” “conflicted obsession,” and “self-parody as signature.” In

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