"Now that's a scream."I've seen this one countless times and though De Palma has a number of masterpieces this is the one that's always felt like it summarizes and symbolizes his entire filmography. His love of/playful use of pulp and B-moviemaking (voyeur-horror, slashers, Giallo black-gloved misogynist murderers, etc), his basically plagiarized Hitchcockian visual grammar/obsession (especially in the suspense-sequencing and doomed murder-mystery/self-critical or confessional romance), the meta-angle of the love of analog craftsmanship + the filmmaker's responsibility to this powerful illusion they serve (not dissimilar from the way a cover-up functions), and of course the radical, angry political paranoia that cropped up in some of his early student and eventual war films. Taking his obvious inspirations (namely Blow Up and The Conversation) and so thoroughly merging them with his own unique obsessions that he spits it all back out as the darkest, most personal and masterfully-crafted “magic of the movies” thriller of all time imo. Where the brutality and constructed artifice of cinema meets the brutality and constructed artifice of a corrupt nation's history, Travolta's tragically handsome insomniac filmmaker-as-detective literally witnessing the seams around him and reconstructing the awful truths of his ugly reality through images and sound. Understanding both the instinct towards curiosity and watching but also the utter horror of actually following them to their logical conclusions; getting the horrifying answers, leading the people you love to their deaths, seeing how their screams are swallowed and reverberated right back into the artifice. A soulful, guilt-ridden, despairing vision of the life of an illusionist in a cruel, violent, corrupt country that’s much better at his trade than he ever could be, and easily one of the greatest movies ever made. Full discussion on ep 230 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
