After our last class when we discussed the Linda Williams essay on “film bodies,” I went back to the section on “Structures of Fantasy.” Williams includes a chart of which categories certain films fall into depending on pornographic/horror/melodramatic content and the perceived intended/expected audience, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) falls into the horror category with the assumed audience of teenage boys. The interesting thing about Dressed to Kill, besides the fact that it was nominated for three Razzies (including Worst Director) in the very first year that the awards were given out, is that it steals so gleefully from Alfred Hitchcock films, possibly more so than in any other De Palma film. (I’ve seen quite a few of those sex-and-violence-driven De Palma thrillers – Sisters, Body Double, Passion, etc. – so I feel able to make that statement.) Dressed to Kill is primarily influenced by Psycho, but there is a famous scene set in a museum that swipes so many elements from Vertigo that De Palma ought to have been arrested for theft. Everything from the setting to Pino Donaggio’s score to Angie Dickinson’s Kim Novak-esque outfit is meant to evoke Hitchcock’s film and the cat-and-mouse game played by Dickinson and Ken Baker is supposed to excite the viewer as much as it does Dickinson. The blend of desire and unease is part of the thrill of the chase both for her (the participant) and for us (the spectator). The quality of fantasy exists here because De Palma places the two characters in a soft-focus bubble of Hitchcockian homage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUyibRxVr1g
Talk about a “quest for an object of desire” (as Laplanche and Pontalis might say)!
Unsurprisingly for a De Palma film, a female character suffers as a result of expressing her sexuality (although the question of whether Dickinson had any choice in either consenting to or refusing the sexual encounter is up for debate). This not-so-clandestine taxicab interlude between strangers brings greater sexual satisfaction to Dickinson’s character than anything she has experienced with her husband – De Palma depicts this with a “bad sex” scene at the beginning of the film – but as we know from Linda Williams’ list, Dressed to Kill is a horror film. Draw your own conclusions.
