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 rian
De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" is quite
simply the best movie to have been released so far
this year. Ignore all of the cinematic philistines
who have brought the collective ax down on the
film with the unique rage they save for the work
of this most underrated and misunderstood
filmmaker. According to this faction, the party
line is that De Palma is a complete hack who
builds his films from the bones of dead directors
and has lost his way in the disreputable abyss of
camp. The main point seems to be how inferior
"Dahlia" is to the previous Ellroy
adaptation "L.A. Confidential".
For these paragons of
mainstream culture, these frustrated writers
of film criticism, a motion picture is to be judged by its worth as
literature. Their analysis of cinema focuses on
the mechanics they understand best, the mechanics
of writing:
plot, character, structure, and theme. The plastic
elements of film: lighting, composition, editing,
color, sound, and mise en scene are simply checked
off as garnish to be used only to express the
film's literary concepts. Under this analysis,
"Dahlia" is worthless. Using these
criteria, "Dahlia" is inferior to
"L.A. Confidential". Within this
template, a film is only as good as its text.
This is the basic
misunderstanding of cinema that has plagued the
form from its inception when the cinema shackled
itself to the mast of 19th century playmaking,
photographing plays in some desperate plea for
cultural respectability. But there has always been
something wonderfully disreputable about the
cinema and that is something Brian De Palma has
always known. Sex, violence, and our voyeuristic
relationship with those elements are the building
blocks of basic cinema. We watch characters do the
things we secretly desire, that we privately fear.
De Palma simply takes us a step further and
reminds us over and over again that we are
watching a movie, a visual construction of our
fantasies so we can catch ourselves being swept up
by the fantasy. He is like a magician who dazzles
us with a trick only to show us, alas, it really
was only a trick, and in the meantime he's stolen
our watch.
Just in time for the release
of "Dahlia", Something Weird Video has
released a rare early work by De Palma onto DVD.
As to be expected, the 1968 film "Murder a'la
Mod" arrives with no fanfare. The neglect and
disdain demonstrated by the critical establishment
in the
United States
toward De Palma is truly embarrassing. It's simply
impossible to imagine an early work by Martin
Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola being dumped
unceremoniously onto the DVD shelves without
comment.
Some of this neglect can be
explained by the very roots of De Palma's art, his
beginnings as an independent filmmaker in
New York
. The mid to late 1960's independent filmmaking
scene was very much centered on what was known as
the New York Underground cinema movement, dubbed
the "New American Cinema" to create the
illusion of a Nouvelle Vague crashing onto our
shores. The movement was spearheaded through the
critical writing and films of Jonas Mekas, and the
work of such diverse filmmakers as Robert Downey,
Shirley Clarke, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and
George Kuchar. Moving among these filmmakers, but
never quite part of the "scene", was
Brian De Palma.
Fresh out of
Columbia
University
and
Sarah
Lawrence
College
, De Palma had a unique angle on filmmaking which
was quite beyond anyone's conception of form over
content. De Palma saw filmmaking as a purely
plastic form, and viewed the narrative film
through the context of media manipulation. Not
merely interested in the plot or characters
themselves, but rather how they are presented by
visual media, De Palma's films challenge the
viewer to question the presentation itself and how
they relate to "reality". The last word
appears in quotes courtesy of Vladimir Nabokov,
who stated that the word was meaningless without
them. This cinematic conception was at first
influenced by Godard, but soon Hitchcock joined
the mix and the confusion over De Palma was begun.
Audiences and critics seem to see De Palma's films
as classical cinema, but in reality they are all
works of experimental film that play with the
forms of classical cinema to create new works that
challenge the nature and purpose of narrative film
in the modern world.
"Murder a 'La Mod"
is technically De Palma's second independent
feature film, his first being "The Wedding
Party", which was a much more collaborative
work, credited to no less than three directors.
"Murder a 'la Mod" is De Palma's first
completely solo effort, and in many ways, the
movie is a time capsule trapped forever within the
culture of the era. It is quite audacious with a
playful cinematic structure and most
interestingly, includes scenes which parallel
"The Black Dahlia" 38 years later. In
the 1968 film, a series of young women are screen
tested for what appears to be a porn film, and are
shown looking right into the lens of the camera as
the offscreen voice of Brian De Palma directs them
to take off their clothes.
In "Dahlia" we get
our only glimpse of Elizabeth Short, "the
Black Dahlia" herself, through a series of
haunting scenes depicting her screen test in which
she is berated to act by the voice of the
offscreen director, once again voiced by Brian De
Palma. In both films, we watch this movie within
the movie seeing the women as they are represented
by the camera's gaze. In both films, we sense that
this gaze is completely lecherous and
exploitative. We see and can also feel our own
complicity in seeing. Someone saw Elizabeth Short
die. Someone cut her up, cleaned up her remains
and placed them like a modern art exhibit in a
vacant lot on the 3800 block of
South Norton Avenue
in the
Leimert
Park
neighborhood of
Los Angeles
.
De Palma gives us our first
glimpse of this presentation like some kind of
framed theater. We glide over a building, past
screeching crows to see something across the
street, something pale and disconnected like a
broken mannequin. The image is completely flat and
horizontal. A woman with a baby carriage is seen
screaming and running from what she has found. De
Palma then ignores her to follow a black car as it
winds back to the front street and back to our
story of two cops known as Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice,
former boxers now Warrant Division detectives
played by Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett.
"The Black Dahlia"
is not a movie about the "dahlia", but
rather how her murder haunts the lives of these
two Detectives and the women, presented as one
kind of victim or another, around them. The women
are struggling against the lecherous and
controlling gaze of men and their desire to
destroy or protect them. Or perhaps even own them.
One young woman has her flesh branded with the
initials "BD". Within the context of the
film's narrative, the initials were carved by a
pimp named "Bobby Dewitt", but playfully
it can also be seen as referring to the
"Black Dahlia", and even more playfully,
"Brian De Palma". Or perhaps more
meaningfully, since De Palma completely owns
this film in a way few directors can.
There is an almost three
dimensional quality to De Palma's vision of the
time and place that renders narrative concerns
moot. You simply feel as though you are walking
through a virtual reality recreation of not any
real
L.A.
of the late 40's, but rather the
L.A.
as depicted in the classic noirs of the past. You
feel as though you might run into Bogart from
"In
A Lonely Place
" or Gene Tierney from "Laura". The
score by Mark Isham is exactly what you would
imagine hearing as you walk down these dark
streets.
Some have compared "The
Black Dahlia" to Welles' "Touch of
Evil" in its sense of perversity and
corruption. There is definitely an undercurrent of
noir-ish sickness within the film. However,
"Dahlia" seems more like "The Lady
From Shanghai" to me, in its playfulness with
cinematic surfaces, its slyly parodic style,
extreme performances that reach towards black
comic opera, and its interest in a kind of
Brechtian alienation. It also seems as though both
films present their narratives as complex not
because they really are, but because the
complexity is part of the atmosphere.
The argument that the film's
narrative makes no sense is nonsense. It's all
there onscreen, you just have to pay attention. In
both "Dahlia" and "
Shanghai
", the resolution is actually quite simple
and almost disappointing. The whole point of the
film was to drown the audience in so many plots as
to leave them as disoriented and lost as the
doomed and haunted characters.
At the end of
"Dahlia", De Palma pulls a last minute
scare that was once his signature in the days of
"Carrie" and "Dressed to
Kill". In those films, the effect was one of
sudden and intense fear, like a bucket of cold
water waking us up out of the dream. But here, the
effect is quite different. The photographic image
of the dead "Dahlia" remains one of the
most horrific and haunting ever published. Looking
like a broken doll, it is perhaps the reason why
the case still resounds after all these years. At
the end of "The Black Dahlia", De Palma
jolts us with the fact that none of these
characters will ever forget that image, and the
director leaves us to be haunted by it as well.
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