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 along 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.