The violent murder scene Brian De Palma calls his favourite
When Quentin Tarantino met his hero Brian De Palma, he was quick to ask him why they have both seen themselves tarred as violent perverts. In the reams that have been written about their work, the pull quotes nearly always pertain to courting controversy in one bloody way or another. While that isn’t all that surprising given the blood-soaked celluloid they have both offered up, we’re dealing with the realm of visual fantasy so some of the condemnation seems fancifully misguided.
De Palma believes that the hype that it receives is simply engineered. “When we talk about violence, everybody suddenly tunes in,” he says. It is simple publicity. Despite what Family Guy asserts in its theme tune, TV is usually a realm where blood and gore are sequestered to certain times and spaces. Thus, when you get a director in an interview, the come hither to the public is to get them talking about something naughty. De Palma puts it down to selling “more products”.
“When you’re doing a sequence, you want to make it as effective and moving as possible,” De Palma told Tarantino. “You and I are interested in a kind of visual language and storytelling that nobody understands basically. Because they’re blown away by it and they don’t exactly understand why. And they say, ‘Well my God, it’s because somebody was being knifed or someone was being shot, this is horrible and reprehensible, and I feel badly about enjoy it.’ But as we’ve said a thousand times, cinema is a visual medium and we’re interested in terrific visual sequences and many of them happen to be violent.”
In essence, the art of violence in cinema is simply to be effective—these scenes do what films are supposed to do, they pull us away from the drudgery of reality for a short stay in visceral fantasy. Nothing eviscerates the humdrum everyday quite like a bit of explosive claret. However, director Wim Wenders offers up a more cautious approach. In a debate with Nick Cave, Wenders passionately makes the point that violence is so often wrongly represented as sexy in movies, TV and music when the truth is “that it’s really very ugly.”
Cave, however, has a different approach. He expresses a belief that it is important to display duality and that often his use of violence is comic, and as such, the audience can interpret the intent behind it. This is something that Wenders concurs with. He states that provided the reasons for the violence are depicted clearly then it has a place. “As long as the urge is shown with it, then I like to see it in films. Taxi Driver is still one of the most violent films ever even seen today, but it shows all the reasons and where it is coming from.”
That is essential, and it is the element that makes Brian De Palma’s favourite scene soar. “It can be quite beautiful,” De Palma reflected in an interview with The Talks. “Needless to say, Sam Peckinpah made it quite beautiful. It’s an essential building block to the drama of movies and it can be extremely effective and extremely emotional and extremely dramatic.”
His favourite scene stacks dominos before the glut of gore comes tumbling down perturbingly. “I guess I would have to say Dressed to Kill, the murder in the elevator,” he said when asked about his most effective use of violence. “I had a very good idea in terms of Bobbi killing Angie and Nancy witnessing it and the use of the mirrors and the slow motion. I think that’s sort of the bloodiest murder I’ve ever done.”
The 1980 film sees “a mysterious blonde woman kills one of a psychiatrist’s patients, and then goes after the high-class call girl who witnessed the murder.” As such, De Palma uses suspense and secrecy to help make the violence on display even more shocking and it’s certainly a gritty, grisly force to behold.
