Brian De Palma's early films tend to deal with a very clear set of themes: homosocialised male power, voyeurism, sex and various gender conflicts, whereby all gender is a performance and white male heterosexuality needs to be rigorously, determinedly, infinitely reenacted to be maintained with any coherence, often by repeatedly destroying that which it defines itself against (homosexuality, femininity, the Other etc). Meanwhile, personal and social voyeurism (pornography, fantasies, government surveillance, an obsession with gazes, dreams, desires and watching) overlap, and his characters can often be found making their own movies, appearing on screens, doing their own prying, or displaying themselves as spectacle.
As an example of De Palma's early obsessions with gender construction, consider one of his later sex thrillers, "Dressed to Kill", where Michael Caine plays Robert Elliot, a trans-gender who epitomises a post 60s trend amongst transsexuals - and certain strains of feminism - to subscribe to pseudo-Freudian essentialization and a medicalization of gender and sexuality (medical understandings of the gay/transsexual rely on a collapsing of sex and gender). Here, Elliot's male body is literally possessed by Bobbi, a feminine personality which desires a sex reassignment operation so that Elliot may become a "woman" with "the right body". In other words, transsexuals are victims of a society which equates the genitalia with gender behaviour and confuses the organ with the signifier; ridding themselves of the organ they can thus supposedly be rid of the signifier which divides them. The film then enters "Scarface" territory. The transsexual, like the "normal" subject, searches for illusory wholeness which he/she believes will be attained by altering the body in order to possess "it", the "it" which in American society is invested with the meaning of the subject's whole being. Unsurprisingly, in real life, transsexuals more frequently wish to be "girls" rather than "women"; an attempt to ward of confusion and establish a pre-social self. The incapability of achieving discursive mastery is itself a common De Palma theme, the subject continually floundering in the dark to sustain his identity. For De Palma, traditional male subjectivity is predicated on the notion of male wholeness and feminine lack, whilst "Woman" serves as the Other for the male subject, a place where he projects and disavows his castration. As inadequacy continually feminizes the male subject, the cycle must be continually repeated.
De Palma's little-seen early films, "Greetings" and "The Wedding Party", deal with similar material. "Greetings" revolves around a group of men who seek to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam war, and "Wedding" revolves around a group of men who seek to avoid being sucked into marriage. Both deal with men struggling to define and uphold masculinity, both star Robert De Niro ("Wedding" was his debut, "Greetings" was the first film to be given an X rating), both are shapeless, dialogue heavy, satirical, Godard inspired, experimental and revolve around various US counterculture movements
"Wedding" centres on Charles, a young man who is days away from getting married. He discusses his anxieties with his buddies and spends much time weighing the benefits of a bachelor's life against that of married men. In the end – like most of these post-feminism marriage movies from the 60s – Charlie opts for marriage and stability. But the film itself jostles between viewing both marriage and bachelorhood as a means of affirming traditional hegemonic masculinity; marry a woman and you're not gay, bed many women outside of marriage and you're a "real man". Women (see "Casualties of War") function purely as the site of exchange between men, and exist solely to be conquered and bolster manhood.
"Greetings" opens with a moment of typical De Palma reflexivity, the American President doubly framed (on TV) as he addresses the nation. His country is portrayed as a giant male fraternity, a band of brothers who, because they've "never had it better", should go abroad, define themselves as men and fight in Vietnam. The film's heroes, a bunch of lowly figures who've "never had it good", then set out trying to avoid being drafted. One even attempts to turn himself gay so that he won't be conscripted. In both films we see an obsession with male performance and its attendant anxieties, and a heterosexuality that defines itself by employing homosexuality to define itself against. Masculinity is itself portrayed as a masquerade and normative heterosexual manhood as an impossible, and impossibly maintained, ideal. As the "homo-social" is inherently incoherent and points toward untenable aims, it has a preponderance toward dissolution and a tendency to assimilate everything.
Furthermore, as the homosexual identity haunts the presumably heterosexual male identity, so too is the Government haunted or shown to be under siege. As a result the Presidency deems all those who oppose the Vietnam War to be "effeminate" and "sexualy deviant" (the Vietnamese are also feminized, emasculated heathens). The Government's obsessions with surveillance, spying and enforcement then becomes a form of gender anxiety, the State pressured to sustain and achieve national manhood (which in turns inspires racism and death wishes). In any male-dominated society, there is therefore a link between male homosocial desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.
"Greetings" ends with our draft dodgers in Vietnam. In a sublimated version of filmed murder, our heroes "film with a camera" a Viet Cong woman in the jungle. They order her to undress and pose, a scene which is juxtaposed with shots of an American woman manipulated into being photographed, both women's sexual exploitation linked to war, carnage and camera, and all other forms of masculinist cruelty and male obsession. Such scenes anticipate De Palma's "Redacted" and "Casulaties of War"; "war" as the mauling of the Feminine by hyper masculinity. In "Full Metal Jacket" one goes philosophically further, all modern, future warfare redefined as a benign, "feminine", merciful, conciliatory gesture, simultaneously disavowed and sanctioned.
5/10 - "The Wedding Party" is anonymous De Palma.
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