Girding myself, I asked De Palma why his films made no sense. He bounced back with some eagerness, explaining that Hitchcock was illogical too and that, besides, life didn’t make any sense either. ‘Hitchcock did it all the time! Didn’t anyone look at the corpse in Vertigo? In Blowout the illogic was immense — but it was in Watergate too! I’m not interested in being Agatha Christie! Life is not like a crossword puzzle! I trust my instinct and emotion! I go with that!’‘
Brian De Palma once described, with typical recklessness, his notion of an ideal viewership: ‘I like a real street audience — people who talk during and at a movie, a very unsophisticated Forty-Second Street crowd.’ He is right to think that he has an affinity with these cineasts, who have trouble distinguishing filmic life from the real thing. De Palma movies depend, not on a suspension of disbelief, but on a suspension of intelligence such as the Forty-Second Street crowd have already made before they come jabbering into the stalls. Quite simply, you cannot watch his films twice. Reinspect them on video (on the small screen with, the lights up, with the sharply reduced affect) and they disintegrate into strident chaos. Niggling doubts become farcical certainties. Where? When? How? Why? There’s hardly a sequitur in sight.
The illogicality, the reality-blurring, the media-borne cretini-sation of modern life is indeed a great theme, and all De Palma’s major contemporaries are on to it. De Paíma is on to it too, but in a different way. He abets and exemplifies it, passively. In the conception of his films De Palma has half-a-dozen big scenes that he knows how to shoot. How he gets from one to the other is a matter of indifference. On some level he realises that the ignorant will not care or notice, and that the over-informed will mistake his wantonness for something else.
De Palma is regarded as an intellectual. Now it clearly isn’t hard to come by such a reputation in the film world, particularly among the present generation of movie-makers. Spielberg, the most popular, is bright and articulate; but his idea of intellection is to skip an hour’s TV. And Scorsese, the most brilliant (and the most prescient), is a giggling mute. De Palma isn’t an intellectual, though his films, like his conversation, have a patina of smartness. He isn’t a cynic either, nor is he the cheerful charlatan I had geared myself to expect. Is he a ‘master’ (as critics on both sides of the Atlantic claim), or is he a moron? He has no middlebrow following: his fans are to be found either in the street or in the screening-room. Occupying an area rich in double-think, De Palma is simply the innocent beneficiary of a cultural joke. It is an achievement of a kind, to fashion an art that appeals to the purist, the hooligan, and nobody else.
Vanity Fair 1984
Here’s Ronnie: On the Road with Reagan
Ronald Reagan’s personal jet, which goes by the name of Free Enterprise II, flew in late for a Reagan Rally at the Transient Terminal of El Paso Airport, Texas. Practically everyone in the waiting crowd was either a journalist, a secret-serviceman, or a delegate, one of Reagan’s local ‘people’. We were all wearing prominent name-tags, something that Americans especially like doing. I strolled among the Skips and Dexters, the Lavernes and Francines, admiring all the bulging Wranglers and stretched stretch-slacks. This felt like Reagan Country all right, where everything is big and fat and fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don’t weigh twenty-five stone.
The blue-jodhpurred Tijuana band fell silent as Reagan climbed up on to the podium. ‘Doesn’t move like an old man,’ I thought to myself; and his hair can’t be a day over forty-five. Pretty Nancy Reagan sat down beside her husband. As I was soon to learn, her adoring, damp-eyed expression never changes when she is in public. Bathed in Ronnie’s aura, she always looks like Bambi being reunited with her parents. Reagan sat in modest silence as a local Republican bigwig presented him with a pair of El Paso cowboy spurs to go with his 1976 El Paso cowboy boots. Then it happened: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! The next President of the United States!’ And with a bashful shrug ex-Governor Ronald Reagan stepped up to the lectern.