Brian De
Palmas controversial thriller might be a bit too mainstream to be included here
on the Ninja Dixon blog. The reason why it's here now it's because it's one of
my favourite films by De Palma, and that's a hard choice because I love most of
what he's done (I tried watch Scarface again recently but had to turn it off
because of Al Pacino's shitty acting, but that's a different story and it's
better for my safety that I keep quiet about my opinion). Dressed to Kill feels
a lot like a Giallo and it's filled with sex and violence. De Palma himself
calls it a "dark sexual fantasy", and that's probably the best
description of it.
For once I
will skip to tell the story, because it's more or less a version of Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho, with some of the same twists - but a lot bloodier and with
more sex. De Palma has always been more European in a sense, but mixed with the
American way of doing everything a bit too much. This is a marvellous
combination and makes Dressed to Kill maybe the ultimate "erotic
thriller" ever made, I mean - you have everything from Dario Argento's
stylish murders, Hitchcock's shocks and twists and the tackiness of every
American musical ever made. What's even more fascinating is how this is a skin
flick, an exploitation movie with big stars and big budget. Full frontal
nudity, dirty talk and ultra-violence - something you could only see on 42nd street before
this hit the big screens. It's not a rip-off, it's a homage to everything De
Palma loves.
Originally
he wanted to do Cruising and the rumour says he even wrote a script based on
that story, but when he couldn't get the rights to Gerald Walker's novel he
just took some of the ideas and transferred them to this new script. The result
became the second most controversial thriller of 1980, of course after William
Friedkin's own version of Cruising. But when Friedkin took a more serious
route, De Palma made a full-out gory, sex and over-the-top murder mystery
instead - and maybe that was for the best. Because in a "dark sexual
fantasy" you have a lot more freedom than in a production that is based on
extensive research and real locations and people. One similarity between
Cruising and Dressed to Kill is that both directors choose to let different
actors play the killer, than the "real" killer. These actors also
played other roles in both movies. I like this idea, it's clever and maybe some
would say it's a cheat. But hey, everything for suspense and tension yeah? The
Italians did this every damn day during the seventies. Another fine detail is
that its De Palma-veteran William Finley doing the voice of "Bobbi",
in just another way to confuse us - and those who's trying to catch the killer.
Dressed to
Kill deals with transsexual issues, in a quite negative twist also - but I
personally think the cause for the murders lays in something else than the
gender of the killer, like in Psycho - schizophrenia, multiple personalities
etc. The movie actually features a clip from The Phil Donahue Show, where
journalist and transgender person Nancy Hunt talks about being transsexual.
It's the only connection to realism in the whole movie. This interview was also
the thing the triggered De Palma to write Dressed to Kill. He did a lot of
research on transsexualism and became more and more fascinated by the thing
called "gender discomfort", which also caused some discomfort among his
friends: "I was at a dinner party, and I asked, quite innocently,
'Wouldn't it be terrific to dress up in women's clothes and go out and see how
people related to you? And everyone looked at me like I was a lunatic!" Happy
for us De Palma did make his movie on the subject, just not very correct and
proper.
I'm
probably not the only person who thought about this, but have you noticed the
interesting connection between Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double?
Except being very European and Hitchcockian thrillers of course. Blow Out
starts with a homage to b-slashers, with POV camera and an unknown assassin
going into a house and killing a woman in the shower. The end of Dressed to
Kill features a similar sequence, but this time a dream and not a
movie-in-a-movie, were the killer through POV breaks into a house and kills a
woman in the shower. Dressed to Kill
didn't only upset the trans-community and the women's right organizations, it
also gained negative attention because Angie Dickinson used a body double in
the infamous shower scene that starts the movie. Something that's actually very
visible and I'm sure De Palma somehow wanted to poke fun at this phenomena -
and then he makes a movie called Body Double which ends with a humours scene
where they need a body double during the making of a corny horror movie.
The circle
is closed and the joke's on Brian De Palma, as usual.
