DRESSED TO KILL ***1/2
Brian De Palma1980
IDEA: When a woman is killed by a mysterious cross-dressing assailant, the prostitute who witnessed the murder becomes the killer's next target.
BLURB: Dressed to Kill must be among the most deliriously gaze-y films ever made. The characters are pervasively looking or being looked at, fatalistically tending toward or wishing to be seen by an(other); they’re hopelessly trapped subject-objects in untold crosscurrents of desire. The locus, trajectory, and terminus of those desires is the scintillating, terrifying riddle at the heart of De Palma’s psychosexual fantasia. From the sinisterly sensuous opening scene, in which at least three points-of-view (including our own) seem possible, the director masterfully exploits the scopic and identificatory dimensions of our spectatorship through his manipulation of cinematic form. We’re cast into his hall of mirrors, where the pleasures and dangers of looking extend from his characters to us, enmeshed in a shared (although hardly reciprocal) zone of fantasy that can only be sustained so long as it doesn’t ever become real. The problem for the characters of Dressed to Kill is that it does. At the whims of rogue desires - in one case a desire to suppress desire - they collide with each other in orgiastic eruptions of destruction. What De Palma gets at here is the perversity of the unconscious self, and how its desires are fueled by a confluence of drives that can scarcely be understood by another - or even by oneself. Like its progenitor Psycho, which it in many ways remakes, the film is practically engineered for psychoanalytic interpretation, and De Palma lets few moments pass without adding further teasing kinks to his Freudian phantasmagoria. Sure, the stuff about transsexuality is nonsensical pseudoscience, but Dressed to Kill hardly takes it seriously itself. The film’s brilliance lies in its high-wire balancing of burlesque pulpiness and bracing artistry, sordidness and diamond-cut narrative and formal precision. Our gazes are its captive playthings.
