catapult magazine

I finally saw it! And just like all of Brian DePalma’s films, I had average expectations that were far exceeded. His movies are like a feast, visually and in the thoughts that follows. It’s great to see an expert craftsman at work. I can’t think of many directors who explore eroticism and our voyeuristic culture as well as DePalma. This time he focuses on the Princess Di—paparazzi relationship. Very thought-provoking. If you haven’t seen it, you must. Who has seen it? We have plenty to talk about!

I’d like to hear more about how you think chance is intoduced and how that may differ from other noir like The Postman Always Rings Twice or something like that.

I guess we basically agree on what he’s doing, just whether or not screaming at the audience that they’re watching a movie is a good thing or not. This situation may be different but part of the reason I find self-awareness taxing is because quite often its treated as an end-all; just because a film is acknowledging itself as film does not make it smart. People often mistake that wink, wink as wit.
Plus, I have not run into many examples of meta film that hold up as engaging films in their own right. I didn’t even find Femme Fatale to be that entertaining to watch. Like I was talking about before, characters tend to end up being ideas or flat representations rather than human in anyway. I don’t want to adandon that element of film. But this is an old arugment.

But that’s what I’m saying: it’s not just a wink wink. DePalma is starting with the lighting, the scenery, the camera movement; and the story flows from that. It’s not an end-all, but a different starting point, one that I think is closer to the nature of film. If you sit down to write a screenplay about a real complex human being who becomes engaged in some drama, you’re beginning from the starting point of psychological literature or “realism”.

And I think there’s a certain bias in wanting characters to be “human”. Of course one-dimensional characters are boring, but there’s nothing wrong with them playing eye-candy roles in the film—is The Matrix too unrealistic because its characters aren’t “human”? The human beings play a different kind of role. I don’t go to the theatre solely to see human beings. I see enough of them in “real” life.

Right. I’m not going continue that line of discussion. I’ll save it for some time when we can speak instead of type.

I still would like to know what you mean about chance, though.

I don’t know how the role of chance in Femme Fatale differs from that of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but in Femme Fatale, the shiny necklace is an unexpected element in the story because every other element was manipulated or planned for by the femme fatale, Rebecca R. Stamos’ character. I think this is an important, and comical moment, in the film, which DePalma uses to break through the tight fatalism of the femme fatale’s life, of film noir in general. It’s a sort of touch of the divine, evident by the ritualism of the church-goers in the background of the scene and the sun peaking through the clouds, that shows its ultimate rule in the artistic process…according to DePalma.

This deified Chance is DePalma’s own touch, but I would say there’s a link even in Christianity between the idea of God and the idea of chance (think about the way we talk about the Providence of God and God’s infinite plan beyond our own control—we can reconjure the argument about “Signs” here if we want). This is some of what interests me about this film. I think the movie is about the joy and transcendental role chance plays in our life, especially artistic life. Rather than being just another film noir moment in the history of film, it uses the background of film noir to point to the human experience, the human fantasy that film allows: the dream that we can do it all over again and that we will be blessed by Chance or God or whatever DePalma wants to call it for doing things the right way this time.

Now, if the movie was just about doing things right after reflecting on the consequences of doing a wrong thing (or several wrong things), you could say, “Oh, he’s just taking ’It’s a Wonderful Life’, adding a few strip teases, and calling it ‘Femme Fatale’”, but I think what’s different is that DePalma is not trying to make a moral lesson for life, but is using a common moral lesson to enable him to play with camera angles and lighting and his characters in a doubly charged sense. It’s like he’s using the common story to explore something new with film. So film itself is its own lesson of human experience. We don’t need to tag on extra lessons about human experience to make it meaningful.

I was with you til the last paragraph.

“… a common moral lesson to enable him to play with camera angles and lighting and his characters in a doubly charged sense. It’s like he’s using the common story to explore something new with film. So film itself is its own lesson of human experience. We don’t need to tag on extra lessons about human experience to make it meaningful.”

You’re going to have to explain that further.
If you’re saying what I think you are, then he’s using film noir to make it NOT noir. I suppose that’s part of the point. Ladies and Gentleman, we have deconstruction.

Wow guys, thanks for the insights. I gonna have to watch it again.

No, not deconstruction. Just anti-rationalism. The very invention of film has disrupted our modern ideas about story having to be tied to language: spoken or written. The images tell a story unto themselves. When I think of deconstruction, I think of the method of displaying the moments when writers display their bias toward writing within the text itself. What DePalma is doing is responding to a genre by using the language of that genre, the visual language and structural language. That doesn’t have to necessarily be deconstruction.