Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” was dismissed upon release despite striking visuals and assured direction; is it ripe for a reappraisal?

This week’s Cage Match (as chosen by the random number generator from Cage’s entire filmography) was the chilling, still haunting 1999 thriller 8MM. For the People’s Pick, we put two other films where Cage plays a detective up for a vote: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Brian De Palma’s 1998 thriller Snake Eyes (1988). Snake Eyes won that match.

This divisive film received mixed reviews upon release and continues to inspire differing opinions, which you’re about to witness in this Cage Match!

Meanwhile, the new episode of the horror podcast How I Met Your Monster discusses A Tragic Antihero in Brian De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

Filmmaker and historian Laurent Bouzereau has been thinking and writing about Brian De Palma for most of his life, ever since he wandered into a movie theater to see “Obsession” and acquired an obsession of his own.

Since then, Bouzereau has probably devoted more hours to exploring and explaining De Palma’s oeuvre than any other critic; he was the author of the first English language book-length critical study on the director, “The De Palma Cut,” and has produced endless hours of supplementary features for Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of De Palma classics like “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” and “Body Double.”

Now, Bouzereau has synthesized all he’s learned about his master’s origins in “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.” It’s a book devoted to the period in which De Palma created and perfected the visual language for which he would become famous in movies including “Sisters,” “The Fury,” and his masterpiece, “Blow Out.” Bouzereau moves not in chronological but thematic order through De Palma’s 1970s and early 1980s output, grouping films together according to their visual and philosophical preoccupations and looking under the hood to see how and why De Palma achieved his effects.

Bouzereau does so via a combination of interviews and his own observations after over 40 years of study; as a result, “The De Palma Decade” becomes not only a critical biography of De Palma but a sort of autobiography for Bouzereau himself as he traces his own evolution as a moviegoer (and a gay man responding to De Palma’s complicated treatment of sexual orientation) via his responses to De Palma’s work. Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s section on “Carrie,” in which De Palma and members of his cast and crew recall the casting of one of his most iconic films.

Thursday… today is Thursday… and this is a momentous occasion in Muppet history: their first collaboration with legendary songwriter, singer, and actor Paul Williams! Then, we and our returning guest host Dallin discuss his role in the initially-misunderstood tragedy-slash-funhouse mirror history of popular music, Phantom of the Paradise.

Topics of discussion include songs about love songs, Bunsen’s odd position among the Muppets, how terrifying it would be to work at Rainforest Cafe while high, who the ultimate Muppets antagonist should be, Rick Baker’s post-Planet of the Apes filmography, and the unfortunate ongoing relevance of movies about exploitation in the music industry.

Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double was seen by many at the time as a deliberate provocation — a vigorously thumbed nose at the commentators who’d called his work misogynistic and sadistic as well as at the MPAA, which had given his 1983 film Scarface an X. De Palma himself reportedly said that Body Double was meant to go over the top in all of his alleged cinematic sins. The 84-year-old director now admits that was mostly publicity-friendly bluster. But the movie, which is coming out in a special 4K edition to honor its 40th anniversary, is extreme in all sorts of ways: It’s gory, violent, sexy, stylized, ridiculous, an extremely suspenseful picture that is somehow impossible to take too seriously. It also happens to be a masterpiece, which would come as a surprise to the critics and audiences that rejected it back during its release: The film flopped at the box office, De Palma was nominated for a Worst Director Razzie, and even Pauline Kael, a longtime defender of his, called it “an awful disappointment.” Looking back on it now, De Palma says, “You’re always judged by the style of the day, but sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative.”

In truth, Body Double is the kind of movie that could only work with the unique mix of formal charge and playful self-awareness that De Palma brought to it. It’s a thoroughly transfixing thriller, filled with elaborately choreographed set pieces in service of an absurd story. A characteristic riff on Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and Rear Window, it follows a claustrophobic out-of-work actor (Craig Wasson) who breaks up with his adulterous girlfriend and winds up house-sitting a fancy, space-age pad in the Hollywood Hills. There, he becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman across the street who loves to dance erotically at an appointed hour. The insanely gruesome series of events that follows pulls our hero deep into the 1980s porn industry (or at least a cartoonish version of it), where he then becomes infatuated with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, in what might be her greatest role), a performer who may or may not have a connection to that woman in the window. He also, at one point, winds up in the middle of a real-life music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” a wonderfully bizarre sequence that is left mostly unexplained but feels very much of a piece with De Palma’s earlier, more experimental films. “Somebody at Columbia said, ‘We should have a music video for this movie,’ De Palma recalls. “And I said, ‘Why don’t we put the music video in the movie?’”

Body Double has a pointedly colorful and artificial look that seems to highlight its “movieness,” which also happens to be what the film is about. The protagonist falls in love with a woman whom he only sees through a telescope as she dances, her face hidden, behind a window. His claustrophobia and general awkwardness often prevent him from being able to get close to this person, which effectively turns him into a stalker. He is, in effect, a perfect audience surrogate — a voyeur who increasingly has trouble telling the difference between the movies and reality, a tantalizing boundary that De Palma’s film zigzags across many times.

Body Double is beloved today. But it’s also the kind of movie that nobody could make today. Speaking from his New York City home, De Palma, whose most recent picture was 2019’s little-seen Domino, has some thoughts on that as well as the current state of cinema. He also says that he is working on a new film.

Kenny Ornberg: OK, so I was a farm kid. I moved up here to go to go to St. Thomas, the college of knowledge, and I became friends with a girl named Laurie MacArthur who worked for Jam. There was a Minneapolis office for Jam Company Seven here, and I think to this day, Jam has produced every single Bruce Springsteen concert that's been in Minneapolis. Anyway, I was friendly with her, and she knew that I had a really bad, terrible Bruce Springsteen problem. I mean, it's embarrassing if I think about all the money that I spent on bootlegs and import records. And this was obviously before the internet. But she was kind enough to give me second-row seats for that show, and that was more than enough for me.

But then she called me the day before the show, in the morning, and said, "Don't say anything to anyone. I need you down at the Civic Center" — it was Civic Center then obviously, not Xcel [Energy Center] — she said, "I need you at the backstage door at the Civic Center at one o'clock. Don't tell anyone." And this was a day before the show, and I thought it has to have something to do with Bruce Springsteen. So I followed her rules, and I was down there probably at 12:30, and there was about 30 of us, maybe 40 of us there.

Jill Riley: Like, "Why are we here? Do we get to meet him?"

Kenny Ornberg: Exactly. Yeah. Or maybe watch a rehearsal or something, soundcheck. And we got let in. And Brian De Palma, the director of, at that time, Carrie and Dressed to Kill and Scarface, those were his big movies at the time — and this could have been the first real big director, because MTV was brand-new then too. Was there, and he greeted us, and he said, "We're going to film a video for 'Dancing in the Dark.'" So that — I'm going to say there's 40 of us there. Ninety percent of that video was shot that afternoon, the day before, and then we were all told to wear the same clothes, and then we meet side stage and go to the exact same spots that we were in, and he did the song before an intermission, then took a break, and then came out after intermission and did the song again. And so you see the panoramic shots of the of the full stadium?

Jill Riley: Yeah.

Kenny Ornberg: That's less than 10 percent of that video. That video was shot almost entirely the day before with smoke machines and, you know, different camera angles, and we were there for between six and eight hours.

Jill Riley: That's incredible. And you know, another part of that story, I mean the memorable part of that story for anyone who watched that video on MTV because it was in heavy rotation, there was a, well, an actress that wasn't as well-known at the time, unless you watched soap operas in the afternoon or wherever, but this was before the days of Friends. But there was a, well, a famous Courteney Cox that was the star of that video — I mean, outside of Bruce Springsteen, starring in it — but she was the one that was pulled on stage to dance with The Boss. Can you talk about, you know, Courteney Cox, and what you remember of her in that video?

Kenny Ornberg: Yes, she — well, as I mentioned, we were there all day — and there weren't that many of us, so we got to know each other. She had said to me, "I don't know much about Bruce. Does he write his own songs?"

Jill Riley: What was your reaction?

Kenny Ornberg: Well, I was gobsmacked. I thought, oh my god. And then I found out that she and the two girls on each side of her, those three girls were models, and they were flown in for this. All the rest of us were all fans, and they got picked probably because of the way they looked. And I think she had done maybe a Mentos commercial or something prior to that. And so take after take, she was not as enthusiastic as Brian De Palma wanted her to be. So I would say maybe after a handful of takes, he yelled "Cut!" and kind of borderline chastised her for not being exuberant enough or excited enough to be up there dancing with The Boss. And then she picked it up a little bit.

"I will say," Ornberg continues, "and this is, if you are Bruce Springsteen fan, this, this will be good for you to hear — because it was tedious. You know, you hear stories about, 'Oh, it's not that glamorous on a movie set,' or, you know, 'It's hurry up and wait, and there's a lot of sitting around.' But it was certainly not boring, but it was a long day, and at the end of the day, after doing take after take after take, road crew wheeled out carts full of ice and beer and pop, and Bruce played the Detroit Medley, gave us like a little 20-minute concert to say thanks. And then he walked around and took pictures, like the one that you saw of me, and he was just the coolest. It was was pretty great."

An interesting persepctive from 1996, considering how the Tom Cruise franchise, and the "popcorn movie" in general, has evolved over the decades since. Here's more from Arroyo's article:

Mission: Impossible is glamorous, exciting, sexy and sometimes witty. I love the way it looks, and the gadgets and the clothes. The film also contains indelible moments: Emilio Estevez impaled: Kristin Scott-Thomas’ bright red lipstick against the noirish blue background by the Charles Bridge in Prague; a hand in a black leather glove preventing a bead of sweat from hitting a pristine white floor in slow motion; the geometric design that the framing of rushing water forms as it chases after Cruise. But the film is gleefully superficial. It doesn’t fit easily into any traditional discourse of aesthetics. It seems to lack coherence, balance, internal consistency, and more importantly, depth.

Mission: Impossible belongs in a long history of the Cinema of Attractions. As with the early trick films of Georges Méliès, that made their audiences gaze with wonder at things and people seemingly disappearing before their eyes, Mission: Impossible assaults the senses, by expressively conjuring a verisimilitude from the logically impossible. Like much current High Concept cinema, the film strives to offer a Theme Park of attractions: music, colour, story, performance, design and the sense of improbably fast motion. The aim is to seduce the audience into surrendering to the Ride. In an article run in The Guardian (2 March), Susan Sontag describes this as one of the strongest feelings movies can offer. Yet Mission: Impossible is a High Concept film, the dominant mode of contemporary Hollywood cinema: in other words, the Popcorn Movie which Sontag and others see as the death of cinema.

As Justin Wyatt so well describes in his recent High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, this type of filmmaking is partly defined by the reducibility of a story into a single sentence, to facilitate marketing (along with a graphic or logo that can be associated with the film across various media). For example, when one reads “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito in Twins”, billing and title in themselves give away the film’s plot, basic structure and most of the jokes. “Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible” operates much the same way. It’s the merging of two cultural corporations: Mr White-Middle-America-with-heart-and-guts meets the 60s pop spy series. The result is familiar. We know what to expect of a Tom Cruise film; we’re familiar with the basic format of the television series, especially its unforgettable signature tune. But it’s different too, in the ways it combines and updates. And just because the plot is simple doesn’t mean the movie is – or that it doesn’t offer complex pleasures.

Applying the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture to this type of filmmaking would not be hard: Mission: Impossible is not very original; the structure of the whole doesn’t depend on details; it respects conventional norms of what constitutes intelligibility in contemporary filmmaking. It could be seen as an example of pseudo-individuation, that which seems different but is in fact the same, whose object is to affirm capitalist culture – Popcorn laced with discourses that propagate and sustain existing relations of power, lulling its audience into believing that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This type of criticism has often been levelled against Hollywood cinema. But though productive as part of a critique, it’s a dead end when it results in mere dismissal.

Enemies of the West

The film also offers a pretty dystopic view of contemporary Western culture. There is no longer any difference between the East and the West. What happens in Kiev and Prague or Washington and London is similar. All are corrupt places with citizens under continuous surveillance. Government, which is supposed to protect, throws out morality, ethics, justice and law to get what it wants, going as far as attempting to kill an honest Cruise, who is simply and desperately trying to do the right thing. Family is far away, ineffectual, vulnerable. Friends are unreliable: they may have killed your other friends, and may yet kill you. Love, as personified by Emmanuelle Béart, is a source of longing, an object of desire (seemingly always deferred) and an instrument of betrayal (the femmes are pretty fatal here – and structurally subordinate in the narrative, as is Hunt’s Black sidekick, played by Ving Rhames; plus ça change…). The worst enemies of Western culture are the ‘Third World’ and terrorists. The worst thing that can happen to an individual is to be ‘disavowed’, to be cut off from one’s corporate community; to survive the hero must remain monadic. It’s a bleak view. The film’s utopia is a masculinist fantasy: that if one is Tom Cruise, all such problems will eventually be resolved.

This is a reading of the film that appears to give it a degree of depth. But to look at Mission: Impossible only in this way is perhaps to miss what is most interesting about it. It’s built around set-pieces (the interrogation scene in Kiev; the Embassy scene; the aquarium scene and the Hotel Europa scene in Prague; the burglary at Langley, Virginia; and finally the train scene, which begins in London) each involving some element of action and ingenuity (from characters or filmmakers). These scenes are woven through the film like songs and dances are in an old-fashioned musical: it isn’t so much that they don’t tell us anything about the characters, but that their function as spectacle exceeds their function as narrative. For exampIe, though we may need to know that Cruise’s colleagues are killed at the start, we don’t need to see it in such detail or to such effect to follow the story. Mission: Impossible is a star vehicle structured around a protagonist: but it is not important to know much about Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise plays. What’s important is how Cruise the star looks, smiles, jumps, leaps, outwits. In such movies, the star functions less as character than as an integral production value. Tom Cruise as ‘Tom Cruise’ in Mission: Impossible is its own kind of spectacle (as when he takes off his mask and is revealed to be ‘Tom Cruise’ during his star entrance at the film’s beginning); what’s more, it’s an integral part of the spectacle presented during the more elaborate action scenes (as when the wind buffets his body on top of the train in the final scene).

Like the musical using the order of musical numbers to create changes of pace and variation, Mission: Impossible tries to vary its own set-pieces in terms of length, tone and desired effect: the scene at the Hotel is medium-length and meant to be exciting; the scene in Langley where Cruise steals the diskette is long and meant to be funny and suspenseful; the scene where Cruise makes the diskette disappear in order to con Krieger (Jean Reno) is meant to be ingenious. The last action scene, the lollapalooza, is to function as the showstopper. It begins with a blast from Lalo Schifrin’s energetic television theme-tune, and reprises all previous effects (it has excitement, speed, suspense, humour and ingenuity), but faster, with more intensity and at a higher pitch.

And like the musical, much of the beauty of and meaning in Mission: Impossible comes from the expressive use of non-representational signs: colour, music, movement.

The scene at Langley where Cruise and company download the names of undercover agents into a diskette is a good example of the pleasures on offer. While Rhames hacks away at the security with his computer, Beart, Cruise and Reno disguise themselves as firemen to get into the building. Beart injects the coffee of the computer worker with a serum to force him to go to the bathroom, and plants a bug on his jacket so that his movements can be traced. In the meantime, Cruise and Reno have managed to get to the room via an airvent. So far, so familiar: this is reminiscent of the pleasures of James Bond, with gadgets, wit and a few punches thrown. As the scene proceeds, maintaining the humorous tone, a shift registers. Will the computer operator return too soon, intercepting Cruise stealing the diskette? Cruise is hung from the ceiling with wires, handled by Reno. We see a rat waddling next to Reno. Will this cause him to lose control? Will the sneeze he’s been controlling simply erupt, setting off the alarm? De Palma is a brilliant student of Hitchcock: these bits are funny and suspenseful.

And Reno does lose control. Cruise, previously floating downwards, now drops abruptly to only inches from the floor. He’s hung from wires, waving his arms as balance, to avoid touching the floor: thus the film offers us the pleasure of Cruise’s physique, his physical prowess. But his body is also reduced to a graphic element of the composition, albeit a gorgeous one: for example, in the high-angle shot which shows us Cruise (dressed in black) against a white floor crossed with thin black lines. His body seems two-dimensional; it seems to disappear into the pattern as if matter had dissolved into geometry.

Two separate moments make this scene thrilling: a drop of sweat about to hit the floor and Reno’s knife falling to the floor. Both are exciting only because of their context (if either lands, this could ruin the mission). They involve quick cuts, to enhance the sense of danger and to give an impression of movement. But they also involve the use of slow motion, to arrest and break down movement.

Thrilling fascination

The combined effect is that of the sublime. The slow motion fixes our gaze with awe; the quick cuts rush us headlong into terror. It’s thrilling to watch, but it’s also fascinating because such a technique, so typical of the contemporary action/spectacle film, reduces difference into equivalence while divorcing an object from its properties. Here a drop of sweat and a knife are equally dangerous, one a natural process which does the body good, the other produced by human ingenuity and human labour to cut and harm: moreover, the knife is dangerous not because it can pierce but because it can fall.

We could interpret this by arguing that in the post-modern world, culture is more the source of terrorized amazement than nature; except its awesomeness derives not from God but from humans. But if we think of this at all, we think of it afterwards. Mission: Impossible is so thrilling that even hermeneutics are left behind, for a while. On the ride, the viewer is too busy rushing through its aesthetics to think of anything but its erotics. Mission: Impossible is a delight because in pleasing the eye and kicking the viscera, it continually asks the audience to wonder, How did they do that? And that the film does this, and how it does it, is at least as important as why, or what it all may mean.