Femme Fatale
1.
Life is but a dream.
Hollywood has been called the dream factory. Movies exist at the intersection of private dreams and public, shared fantasies.
In Calderon’s 1636 Spanish baroque play, La Vida es Sueno (“Life is a Dream”), a King, Basilio, is told by an oracle that his infant son, Segismundo, will grow up to kill him and seize the throne. Basilio imprisons Segismundo, chaining him in a tower. From time to time, Segismundo’s warden administers powerful sedatives to him, causing the young man to sleep. He is told that his present state of misery is merely a dream. He can’t oppose the evils that have befallen him because they are not real, merely the content of his nightmare. Later, Segismundo is freed from his confinement. All sorts of mayhem ensues including war, rape, and murder. At the height of the violence, Segismundo is told that nothing that has happened to him after his escape from the tower is real – it is all just a vivid dream from which he will awake one day to find himself still fettered in the tower. At the end of the play, there is a battle in which Segismundo captures his father, and, after threatening to kill the King, spares his life. The playwright, Calderon, tells us that God is constant and rules both waking life and dreams. Therefore, one should strive to do good whether in our dreams or our actual life – in fact, we are incapable of distinguishing dream from reality; there is no reliable way of determining whether we are awake or dreaming.
The themes explored in Calderon’s Baroque play are: predestination, the labyrinth, the monster in the labyrinth, and our inability to know whether we are awake or dreaming: Are these my authentic memories or have I merely dreamed that these things occurred?
2.
Brian De Palma is the most baroque of the filmmakers who came of age in the nineteen-seventies. He is part of the generation of directors that include Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. Of these filmmakers, De Palma alone has continued to explore the post-modern themes that originally inspired him – late films like Femme Fatale (2002) and Passion (2012) recycle questions of appearance and reality, preordained doom, betrayal and nightmare that animated the director’s early movies, all in the context of a delirious, hallucinatory style derived from the most overheated sequences in Hitchcock’s films. (De Palma’s late style is heavily intertextual, although the allusions in his most recent films are most commonly references to earlier movies made by the director himself – Femme Fatale invokes Body Double, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. The erotic thriller, a film genre, in which reality is dissolved by corrosive, overwhelming lust, has been De Palma’s metier in his best and most personal films from the separated-at-birth Siamese twin siblings in 1972's slasher thriller Sisters through Carrie (1974) with the voyeuristic camera prowling through a steamy locker room full of naked teenage girls and pictures like the cult-classic Body Double (1984 - full of actual porn stars) and Raising Cain (1992) in which John Lithgow plays a cross-dressing sex murderer.
At the outset, Brian De Palma aspired, by his own admission, to be “the American Godard,” that is the auteur of films that endorsed their own artificiality, that acknowledged their genre conventions, and that were intertextual, comprised of networks of allusions and citations. Yet, at the same time, De Palma’s master is Alfred Hitchcock. It is impossible to reconcile the notion of making movies both like Godard and Hitchcock – this unstable compound: Godcock or Hitchard, is an impossible contradiction, an obscure object of desire, the epitome of cognitive dissonance. De Palma’s schizophrenic moviemaking has led to equally schizophrenic and polarized responses among his critics.
A brief review of Wikipedia entries as to De Palma’s more scandalous films reveal that critical opinion about these movies is deeply divided. Generally, only about a third of the critics reviewing his pictures recommend them. The “Rotten Tomatoes” ratings for his films hover around 25 to 40% favorable. And, yet, each of these controversial films has its champions. The most common adjectives applied to his pictures in unfavorable reviews are that they are “nonsensical,” “silly”, and garishly imitative of Hitchcock’s better, more restrained and stylish thrillers. But several major critics have praised his pictures – most notably, De Palma was heavily promoted by the formidable Pauline Kael during the first half of his career; thereafter, his films were the subject of admiring reviews by Roger Ebert. Indeed, De Palma’s continued viability as a filmmaker derives in large part from the support of Kael and, later, Ebert – both highly influential critics. I know of no other American filmmaker who has inspired such a radical split in the critical establishment – writers like Kael and Ebert have enthusiastically praised pictures like Body Double, Femme Fatale, and The Fury, that were also widely denounced as raw, misogynist exploitation by more conservative and mainstream critics. Femme Fatale like Dressed to Kill were films savagely derided by most reviewers, but, now, considered cult-classics.
De Palma began his career making anarchic comedies in a free style influenced by Godard and Richard Lester’s Beatles films – examples are Hi, Mom! (1969) and Get to know your Rabbit (1972). His first thriller expressing De Palma’s characteristic themes – sex murder and doppelgaengers, insanity and naked lust – was Sisters (1972) with Margot Kidder playing a dual Jekyll and Hyde role. This movie was followed by a musical of sorts The Phantom of the Paradise, a remake of The Phantom of the Opera set in the rock-and-roll world of the Fillmore West and, perversely, starring the diminutive pop star Paul Williams. (The Phantom of the Paradise is very hard to see due to some kind of litigation in which the rights to the picture are entangled – but it’s great, De Palma first full-blown baroque masterpiece.) De Palma made a trio of movies heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho – these are Obsession (1976), Carrie (1977), a big box-office hit with Sissy Spacek half drowned in swine blood, and The Fury (1978), an over-the-top movie about telekinesis that was much derided in its time, but now seems prescient of many of the X-Men (and other) superhero pictures – The Fury starred Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes establishing De Palma’s ability to attract important Hollywood stars to his films. (Pauline Kael’s fan reviews of these pictures also helped to establish his bona fides in the Industry.) In 1980, De Palma made Dressed to Kill, another sex murderer film starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson. This was followed by De Palma’s most highly regarded psychological thriller, Blow Out, a remake, in some ways of Antonioni’s seminal Blow Up; this 1981 movie stars John Travolta and was a great success with audiences.
By the early eighties, De Palma was sufficiently bankable for the big studios to hire him as director on expensive prestige projects. (These projects ultimately proved to be De Palma’s downfall because he was not, by disposition, well-suited to the conservative requirements of pictures of this sort.) Scarface (1983) with Al Pacino is an example of a big-budget crime film, intended to compete with epic pictures like Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. After Scarface, De Palma cleansed his palate, as it were, with the deeply personal, obsessive, and delirious Body Double (1984), probably De Palma’s most divisive movie – many feminist-inclined critics denounced the picture as sadistically misogynist. Notwithstanding those criticisms, De Palma was retained to direct The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and a script by playwright David Mamet. This 1987 film was a box office success that led to De Palma’s being given free rein to produce the nightmarish Viet Nam picture Casualites of War (1989 with Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn). Casualties of War, involving the rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian, was too grim to succeed with the public. Nonetheless, De Palma was greenlit to make his screen adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities, based on the Tom Wolfe bestselling novel. This film was an unmitigated catastrophe on all levels, the sort of failure that might end a director’s career. But De Palma returned to his psycho-sexual slasher film roots with Raising Cain (1992), a movie sufficiently successful to return the director to prestige projects, first Carlito’s Way (1993) with Al Pacino, and, then, the inaugural film in the Mission Impossible franchise, a big budget spectacle with Tom Cruise released in 1994. Mission Impossible represented the apogee of De Palma’s success with large-scale star-driven projects. His next films were made on limited budgets and were all failures at the box office, these include Snake Eyes (1996 with Nicholas Cage), Femme Fatale, Redacted, another hellish war film about a massacre of civilians in Iraq (2007), Passion (2012) yet another erotic thriller, and, finally Domino (2017), a failed film shot in Denmark that went straight to video. De Palma is presently 85 and it seems unlikely that he will be able to make another film.
A glance at De Palma’s career reveals the director’s versatility and competence in different modes of movie-making. De Palma has proven capable of making audience-satisfying big budget pictures like Scarface and Mission Impossible. He has made a number of smaller budget psychological thrillers with intense erotic sequences – these pictures like Femme Fatale are surrealistically excessive variants on film noir and his most personal and impressive pictures. But he has also made comedies, a musical (The Phantom of Paradise) and indignant, cruel war films.
3.
Femme Fatale was released in 2002. It is unabashedly an “erotic thriller.” But, by the time of its release, public enthusiasm for the genre had lapsed. After the year 2000, the market for erotic thrillers was saturated and movies of that type were no longer popular. The film’s belated appearance as an example of a genre that had waned may explain why it was generally disregarded or derided when first released. (De Palma followed the film with another erotic thriller in 2012, Passion. That film was even more of an anachronism and didn’t have an American theatrical release – it went straight to video.)
The erotic thriller genre is a subcategory of film noir in which illicit love and sexual fantasy are accompanied by danger. In essence, the genre is moralistic: the penalty for engaging in forbidden sexual fantasies is, often, blackmail, humiliating disclosure, and death. The films invoke a “pleasure/danger” principle –indulging in pleasure leads to danger.
Prototypical pictures in the genre are Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (also 1944) Both of these archetypes involve a femme fatale who ensnares and destroys a hapless, gullible man. The genre was revived forty years after these prototypes with Body Heat (1980) and the big budget productions Basic Instinct (1987) and Fatal Attraction (1992). There was “gold in them thar hills” and literally hundreds of pictures were made recapitulating themes asserting that illicit sex = danger. (It’s no accident that these movies arose in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.) Between 1992 and 2000, it’s estimated that more than 700 erotic thrillers were produced, almost all of them direct-to-video. In 1996, the Wachowsky sisters (then, brothers before their sex-change operations) released Bound, probably the most influential of erotic thrillers featuring lesbian lovers in a BDSM context. But around 2000, several high profile films invoking tropes of the erotic thriller, Showgirls and Jade failed conspicuously at the box office. These disappointments were instrumental in bringing the genre to an end.
4.
Femme Fatale exposes a fundamental disconnect, an incongruity, between means and ends. De Palma’s film employs sophisticated high-art imagery – cinephiles will note dream imagery involving overflowing water derived from films by Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman; the use of the same actress to play multiple parts hints at how personality may be interchangeable, how characters, under pressure, can fuse together – this is the theme of pictures like Bergman’s Persona. The elaborate, high-gloss camerawork mirrors work by Alain Resnais and the deployment of split screen imagery channels De Palma’s early work in Blow-Out and Dressed to Kill. The interface between dream and reality is obsessively detailed, built from a mosaic of small, almost invisible, details: for instance, casual encounters with minor figures in the context of the diamond heist trigger the appearance of those same people in roles in the dream and a poster showing Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of Orphelia drowning (marked Deja Vu) appears repeatedly in the dream scenes as well. (The dream effects are similar to sequences in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Wild Strawberries). Locations and set design subtly signify that something is “off”, unreal and stylized in the lengthy dream that comprises most of the picture – these aspects of the film signal an exploration of the difference between appearance and reality that has a labyrinthine intricacy; it’s like Borges’ metaphor of the man who dreams of a butterfly who just might be a butterfly dreaming that it is a man. Movies are dream-works; this movie has a movie within a movie and the location for the heist, the Cannes Film Festival, establishes a self-referential aspect to Femme Fatale – the movie, like Wenders’ The State of Things or Truffaut’s Day for Night, is about the process of making movies. All of this exquisite detail, symbolism, and elaborate film technique, however, is in service of amplifying the effects of what is fundamentally a fifties’ style film noir, that is, a B-picture made cheaply to be shown as a the lower-half of double feature. This is made manifest in the opening sequence in the which the titular femme fatale watches Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck appearing together in one of the signature works of film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). The disconnect apparent in Femme Fatale is the use of lavishly extravagant and sophisticated film technique to limn what is essentially trashy, pulp-grade material.
Standard film noir is disposable, little cheap pictures made to be seen once and, then, forgotten. But Femme Fatale is so complex that it demands to be seen twice or more – the details can’t be fully grasped until the movie’s plot is revealed and, since the plot is occult (that is, hidden), the viewer is forced to reconsider radically what he or she has seen earlier once the film’s “trick” has been revealed. The film’s French trailer exploits this aspect of Femme Fatale: the coming attractions trailer ends with the words printed on the screen: “Maybe, you didn’t get it” and, then, “Try again!” thereby suggesting that the movie has to be seen, at least, twice to be understood. This is highly unusual in the context of expendable, low-budget film noir.
Femme Fatale and most of De Palma’s smaller scale pictures are elaborate puzzles that pose the question as to whether the solution to the riddle is worth the effort required to discover it. These films embody Pauline Kael’s fundamental thesis that movies are, at heart, vulgar, middle-brow entertainment and pretensions to the contrary, that is pretensions of “art” or “artistic quality” are inimical to popular films. The art is slathered onto some pretty raw and fundamental stuff about lust, desire, and greed.
5.
De Palma returned to surrealist film noir in 2012 with his picture Passion. The movie is a French-German co-production produced by a French-speaking Tunisian Said Ben Said. The budget was low, although the film had sufficient resources to cast Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as the picture’s dueling bitch goddesses. In Passion, De Palma amplifies the content of Femme Fatale to its essential reductio ad absurdum: there are no men of any significance in the film which features extended lesbian kissing sequences between the beautiful leading ladies, schematically reduced to a glacial ice-blonde in the Hitchcock mode and a dark-haired temptress. The tone of the film is wildly uneven oscillating between elaborately choreographed aria-like sequences and low comedy involving bumpkin Berlin cops trying to entrap the murderess. The film is not a success in many respects but, nonetheless, is an engrossing spectacle to those who know and admire De Palma. I cite this picture because of an excellent review posted by Peter Sobczinski on Roger Ebert’s website (RogerEbert.com). Sobczinski follows his mentor’s practice of praising De Palma. He observes that the movie is best interpreted as a musical composition – images are used musically to create mood and establish an aura of fatality and doom. Sobczinski notes that you can’t decode musical themes or motifs in non-musical terms. Therefore, its is futile to attempt to interpret Passion (or any of De Palma’s fully realized erotic thrillers) is literary terms. We might think of “themes” as being complexes of meaning such as the role of women in society, misogyny, sexual repression versus sexual expression and so on. But this would be misguided. De Palma’s work in his personal films isn’t thematic in this sense: the themes in his movies can be specified not in terms of content but as formal devices: the analytical overhead shot, the Steadi-cam tracking up or down steps, a crane shot that suddenly pulls away from a salient detail or that descends into a close-up, close shots that provide details or show eyes glaring into the camera, the swooning camera spinning a circle around protagonists, super-saturated colors, time suddenly slowing as a result of slow motion, and so on – none of these technical devices have literary or subject matter content; rather, they are technical motifs like musical phrases from which De Palma constructs his movies.
Passion wasn’t theatrically released in the United States. It went straight to video.
6.
“Row, Row, Row your Boat” is a children’s song, frequently performed as a round or canon. The lyrics are: “Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily / Life is but a dream.” I have always wondered about the origins of this haunting song.
Most writers aver that the lyrics are a nursery rhyme, a little poem whose origins can’t be traced. I’m not so sure about that. The song was first printed in 1852 in a book of children’s songs. (Curiously, this book is never exactly identified and the identify of its author not specified.) The lyrics were printed in the form in which they appear above but the accompanying music is said to be “very different.” The version of the melody that is current today was written by a pedagogue named Eliphalet Oman Lyte (1842 - 1913). Lyte was born to Quaker stock in the old village of Bird-in-the-Hand near Lancaster, Pennsylvania – he was a grammar and composition teacher. The song appears in his book The Franklin Square Song Collection published in New York in 1881. The tune can be performed as a four-part canon beginning with a soprano voice, followed by alto, tenor, and, at last bass. When performed in this way, the song encompasses the entire range of human voices and, accordingly, seems to suggest a universal message – all life is a dream. Some commentators find inspirational and, even, spiritual meaning in the tune – these writers focus on the adverbs “gently” and “merrily.” Of course, the folk culture of children have developed innumerable profane, violent, or simply silly variants on the lyrics: “Row, row, row, your boat / Gently down the stream / Throw the teacher in the creek / And listen to her scream.”
You can see Ella Fitzgerald with Bing Crosby singing several nursery rhymes as a duet. They perform “London Bridge is falling down,” “Row, row, row your boat”, “Three Blind Mice,” and “Frere Jacques”. The YouTube duet dates from 1950 and is worth watching.
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