The Bloggomist: My Celluloid Fix
Sisters (1973)

I woke up with a start, my heart racing and my pupils dilated from a nightmare still fresh. I stared into the facing window and freaked myself out, for an unfamiliar face had crystallized from brooding dark shadows gathered on the panes. Before I had a chance to scream, it dissipated into nothing.  My rational senses came to the rescue. Neil Gaiman, in his comic book The Sandman, once said that nightmares are so terrifying because in them, a dark part of our souls resurfaces that we’d soon like to forget. As if we were betraying ourselves by revealing secret fantasies and forbidden desires.

Fear is an explosive emotion within us. Immediate and penetrating. It is the agent of the paranoiac and paranormal. An uneasy extension of ourselves that fades in and out of existence like an elusive magic trick. Dig deeper, and I suppose you can call it a knee-jerk reaction instilled by centuries of evolution: fight or flight. But how do we fight what’s within us? How do we run from ourselves?

To rationalize this fear, nightmares spring from the profoundly deep and murky subconscious. Whether it is bogey monsters, viral contagion, or terrorists; people are constantly searching for some way of externalizing their fear. Rendering the unknown into something rational, mythologized to such looming heights as to overwhelm our senses and make us acutely aware of the simple function of breathing: thus horror movies are borne from out of necessity.

Brian de Palma
Now it’s difficult to excuse Redacted (2007), De Palma’s recent exercise in mediocrity. Or his previous box office schlock, Black Dahlia (2006), which marked a noticeable regression into the predictable world of Hollywood. After spending $10 at the theatre, I would’ve opted for a root canal over the botched interpretation of James Ellroy’s classic pulp fiction. Prior to that mess, de Palma had a string of mildly interesting, unsuccessful films: Femme Fatale (2002), Mission to Mars (2000) and Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage. I suppose he unwittingly (or deliberately) played into the cultural decline of Hollywood’s brief renaissance, a decline signified by the films of movie moguls, Spielberg and Lucas, who juggernauted the chimeras of celluloid past with their blockbuster paradigm. With it came high-stakes film that employed gratuitous special effects, merchandise tie-ins, media spin-offs and carbon-copied sequels. Fodder for the unseeing and the unthinking mass consumers.

Film still of Sisters (Margot Kidder)

However, let’s step back into the hazy, sepia-tinted past of the 70’s and recall Brian de Palma, as we ought , in the prime of his cinematic career. Hollywood began experiencing its own film renaissance – and he spearheaded the new movement with such luminary peers as Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Aside from Kubrick’s The Shining or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, few directors around that time have paralleled de Palma as an engineer of psycho-horror. I choose to focus on Sisters for My Celluloid Fix because it was the first film to mark his obsession with the voyeurism that grew into some of the best-loved horror films, like Carrie (1976) and The Fury in (1978).

Dopplegangers and Femme Fatales
Although Sisters is his first putative exploration into Hitchcockian style, De Palma therein goes beyond the average copy and gives it a distinctively 70’s flair, drawing upon the pop psychology that permeated the decade (the era when all those self-help paperbacks proliferated like mosquitoes in an undrained kiddie pool.)

Dominique and Danielle (both played by Margot Kidder) are Siamese twin sisters separated at birth. As Danielle tries to live a “normal” life, she is apparently wracked by uncontrollable rage, invoked by paranormal schizophrenic sibling rivalry. The plot then takes an interesting turn into de Palma’s voyeuristic tendency, sublimating the film into the stratus of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. A brutal murder occurs. Grace (played by Jennifer Salt) is the only person who sees this horrendous act from afar and snoops around (channeling Jimmy Stewart) for more evidence of this heinous crime.

Unlike most hackneyed thrillers with a denouement invariably anticlimactic, de Palma’s unravels the mystery through Grace’s POV in a spellbinding LSD-induced paranoia complete with trippy 70’s special effects and a musical score by Bernard Herrmann (who happens to be the composer of Hitchcock’s most memorable films). Terrifying and ultimately satisfying for those who need to get the fear juices flowing – this is de Palma as we’d like to remember, the de Palma whose fierce artistic vision we’d love to see him return to someday.

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To see more from Sylvia Adams, visit: http://evilmonito.com/author/sylvia/

Published on 1 December 2009 | |