8/9/2019 Review, Film Quarterly, Un-American Psycho

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DAMON R. YOUNG

Un-American Psycho: Brian de Palma and the Political 

Invisible by Chris Dumas

Why is it so hard to take Brian De Palma seriously? And

what, in De Palma’s films, should we read as serious?

These two questions propel this provocative and fre-

quently brilliant book by Chris Dumas which, weaving

readings of De Palma’s films into a narrative of U.S. film

and political history, portrays the director as a widely mis-

understood artist whose oeuvre is indelibly marked by ‘‘the

failure of the   1960s.’’ The book’s object of analysis is not

only De Palma but also the convergence of discourses that

has produced him as a ‘‘bad object’’—indeed a ‘‘scapegoat’’

(108)—for feminist and other critics, while rendering him

all but invisible to the academic discipline of Film Studies.

Both popular and academic criticism have failed to appre-

hend the central function not only of ‘‘ humor  and   hyper-

 bole’’ (191) in De Palma’s work, but also of what Dumas

calls reflexivity. While Film Studies has no trouble locating

reflexivity in the work of Jean-Luc Godard, and under-

stands him as such to be a political filmmaker, it is blind to

the same operation in De Palma.

The question of seriousness has been key in the recep-

tion of De Palma’s films. Dismissed by the late Andrew

Sarris as an ‘‘adulatory imitator’’ (34) of Hitchcock, and

by Stephen Prince as a ‘‘thief’’ (46) and a plagiarist, DePalma’s acts of cinematic homage (notably in films like

 Dressed to Kill,   Blow Out, and   Body Double) have been

largely received as perfidious, or at best vacuous, formal

gestures. But what appears to writers like Sarris and

Prince as a form of cynical appropriation that disqualifies

De Palma from being taken seriously, Dumas approaches

rather as a form of highly sophisticated critical reflexivity.

De Palma emerges from his analysis not as an imitator but

as a theorist  of Hitchcock, and a very good one; he ‘‘theo-

rizes about Hitchcock as a system—and in more depth and

with more acuity  . . .

 than the bulk of what we call Hitch-cock Studies’’ (14). Failing to apprehend this reflexive the-

orization of the Hitchcock system that takes place in De

Palma, Film Studies, according to Dumas, mistakenly at-

tributes it to Hitchcock himself, in whose masterpieces its

practitioners gratify themselves to discover the reflection of 

their own critical gaze. (Oddly, the avatar of Film Studies

in this argument appears to be Slavoj Z ˇ iz ˇ ek, of whom

however it might be said that the discipline takes just as

dim and suspicious a view as it does of De Palma, concur-

ring with Dumas’s verdict that the Slovenian philosopher

‘‘does not know anything about movies’’ [81].)

Dumas thus challenges Films Studies’ propensity to

read Hitchcock’s films as allegories of their own ‘‘process

of enunciation’’ (80). The entire discipline, in fact, is

founded on a ‘‘mistake,’’ namely the ‘‘nearly fifty-year old

assumption that  Rear Window   is ‘about the cinema’’’ (75).

(We must be careful not to miss here in Dumas’s own

rhetorical style the importance of the humor and hyper-

bole that critics have missed in De Palma’s.) It is in this

imaginary self-reflexivity that Film Studies locates in

Hitchcock’s films a kernel of ‘‘ideologico-critical potential’’

(78). Dumas’s point, I take it, is not so much that Hitch-

cock’s films should  not  be read as politically subversive as

that De Palma’s films could be but are not, and that this

subversive potential arises because De Palma ‘‘takes on the

 operation of the Hitchcock machine as un Godardiste’’ (143).

Indeed, Dumas wants to situate Godard as the crucial

reference for understanding De Palma’s methodology as

well as his political orientation; he insists that ‘‘ all  of De

Palma’s cinema is fundamentally Godardian: that is to say,

it is irreducibly of the moment, politically Brechtian, for-

mally rigorous, and committed—whether by design or

habit—to the use of allegory to explore social and ethical

issues’’ (108). While almost all American filmmakers of De

Palma’s generation list Godard as a seminal influence,

De Palma is alone among his cohort, Dumas suggests, innot merely aestheticizing the French iconoclast but in ap-

prehending his labor on film form as a properly political

labor. Reflexivity for Dumas is at once inherently God-

ardian and, largely for that reason, the mark of a political

cinema. (It is thus not the case that De Palma has, by the

time of   Body Double, simply ‘‘disappeared up his own

asshole,’’ to cite an opinion J. Hoberman, in his review

of that film, attributed to a ‘‘friend’’ [61].) If it is from

Hitchcock that De Palma learns his technique and his

mastery of genre, and inherits his interest in voyeurism

and surveillance, it is via his encounter with Godard thatthis interest comes to turn back on itself, producing an

allegorical cinema that reflexively stages the spectator’s

relation to the screen—to what end, however, remains

a question Dumas does not fully resolve.

Perhaps it is this question—‘‘to what end?’’—that

separates De Palma’s techniques of ‘‘distanciation’’ (67)

from, say, Brecht’s. While the latter imagined he was pro-

ducing a revolutionary theater, De Palma’s reflexivity is

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not, it seems, the mark of a politics that sees capitalism as

anything other than the terminal point of history, an inev-

itability that can be allegorized and reflected but not strug-

gled against. ‘‘Objectification,’’ writes Dumas, ‘‘merely  is’’

(200); and ‘‘that is the   truth   regardless of what one tells

oneself about one’s politics and one’s commitment. One

sells and one is sold’’ (201, my italics). But if De Palma’s

reflexive, Godardian–Brechtian politics finally arrives only

at the notion that capitalist objectification is an eternal

‘‘truth’’—an objective fact of sociality—then it is not

entirely clear what has been achieved by rejecting a famil-

iar reading of postmodern reflexivity as the reactionary

aesthetic modality of late capitalism.

No doubt, it is precisely this hopelessness—this sense of 

failure—that Dumas means to characterize in De Palma’s

politics, one he sees as the legacy of the Left after the

failure of the   1960s. Indeed, failure ultimately displaces

reflexivity as the book’s central term. In De Palma’s films,

everything fails; protagonists fail in their attempts (to save

the girl, to expose the conspiracy); the spectator fails (he or

she is left hanging, ‘‘impotently,’’ like the private detective

at the end of  Sisters   [58]); the films anticipate their own

failed reception. This failure is overdetermined, Dumas

suggests, by a series of conjoining failures, personal and

historical: De Palma’s films replay his failed experience at

Warner Bros. with Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), at the

same time that they index the failure of the American New

Left, the failure of the revolution. Personal biography

neatly reflects or remaps political history, and both turn

inexorably around the concept of failure.It is under the sign of failure, finally, that Dumas also

places the discipline of Film Studies, which he charac-

terizes as a discipline created by baby boomers who per-

haps cannot recognize De Palma because they are too

much like him. (In his failures, they see the too-painful

reflection of their own.) Ironically enough, Dumas’s ongo-

ing litany of the discipline’s failings—it lacks a theory of 

tone (104), cannot understand humor (139), cannot concep-

tualize a ‘‘purely   negative  politics’’ (197), sees reflexivity

where it is not and misses it where it is, and so on—

resembles, in its affective tenor, nothing so much as the

film-critical litany of De Palma’s crimes against women,

authorial integrity, and good taste. Indeed I would submit

that ‘‘Film Studies’’ functions here for Dumas much as ‘‘De

Palma’’ functions for his critics: as a structurally necessary,

though perhaps imaginary, bad object.

Arguably, the existence of his own book disproves

Dumas’s thesis that failure is not only the foundation but

also the legacy of the discipline to which the book, for all

its agonistic struggling, nevertheless belongs. The book’s

bravery, energy, and ambition, so refreshingly remote

from the rhetorical and conceptual stolidness that seem

to have accompanied the discipline’s anxious rise to

academic respectability, suggest another path. Indeed, it

would not be a stretch to say that I felt more alive reading

this book than I have felt reading a scholarly work on

cinema in years, and I mean ‘‘alive’’ in the same way one

feels alive watching, say,   Dressed to Kill. (Dumas has

clearly learned from De Palma what we might finally call

the political value of provocation.) In my view, the con-

siderable significance of this book for Film Studies lies

not in the critique of that beleaguered discipline it so

energetically advances, but rather in what it shows by

example—namely that scholarly work on cinema can

still dare, as it did in the  1970s, to read philosophy, pol-

itics, and history together, to make systematic claims, to

overreach, to hyperbolize, to use irony, to venture beyond

empiricism, to unapologetically engage psychoanalysis, to

not merely apply a method but to radically question the

foundations of several. I’m tempted to say that if FilmStudies has a future—and it only should if it can take

up the gauntlet thus thrown down—it will be because

writers like Dumas find a way to speak not against it but

in its name.

Damon R. Young is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media at the University

of California, Berkeley, and a member of the UC President’s Society of

Fellows in the Humanities.

BOOK DATA Chris Dumas, Un-American Psycho: Brian de Palma and the

Political Invisible. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2012. $40.00 paper. 240 pages.

FIL M Q U ARTERL Y