Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible

by Chris Dumas

Brian De Palma is perhaps best known as the director behind the gangster classic Scarface . Yet as ingrained as Scarface is in American popular culture, it is but one of a sizeable number of controversial films—many of which are consistently misread or ignored—directed by De Palma over his more than four-decade career.
            In Un-American Psycho, Chris Dumas places De Palma’s body of work in dialogue with the works of other provocative filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francis Ford Coppola with the aim of providing a broader understanding of the narrative, stylistic, and political gestures that characterize De Palma’s filmmaking. De Palma’s films engage with a wide range of issues surrounding American political and social culture, and this volume offers a rethinking of the received wisdom on his work.

Genres: Film, American

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of tremendous insight, incendiary reasoning, and truly dazzling literacy, it blasts open a pathway to considering De Palma central to the fraught discipline of Film Studies while at the same time challenging the politics of post-1960s humanities scholarship, the New Left, and Grant Theory. Whatever conclusions one takes away from it, Dumas’s brilliantly engaging writing is an absolute delight from start to finish, his recursive layers of clearly framed self-reflexivity perfectly complementing the labyrinthine organization of De Palma’s films — which I now can’t wait to revisit in full.

[Joseph Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding! I’ve now read this book twice and it is one of the few truly indispensable works of film scholarship I’ve come across. In addition to articulating never-before-published insights about Brian De Palma’s singular filmography, Chris Dumas uses the movies (primarily Sisters, Dressed To Kill, Scarface, Body Double and Casualties of War) and the discourse surrounding them as a mirror to inspire meaningful reflection on the personal baggage and biases we bring to reading (or misreading) complicated works of art. By working through and seeing beyond the many misleading and counterproductive pathways of film criticism, Un-American Psycho establishes an analytical methodology and clarity of thought that is uncommonly provocative and applicable to reading any film — not just the films of De Palma.

[Nicholas Mennuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally someone who understands De Palma wrote a book. Although it can be academic at times (with a long preamble about varied schisms inside film studies) when the author gets down to the films and De Palma's methodologies and filmic philosophies it's riveting. It really made me go back and re-watch his films (particularly Blow-Out) with a new appreciation.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just a brilliant, witty, and fresh analysis of De Palma's frequently misunderstood filmography, but also an insightful examination of the significant trends and critical blind spots within the field of film studies. A fascinating, must-read work for anyone with an interest in the cinema.

[Mateo Ellacott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the best and most thoughtful film criticism I can recall reading. Maybe not necessarily the biggest page-turner I’ve come across as it can be somewhat dense at parts and I candidly don’t care quite as much for the very Inside Baseball asides into the history of film studies but I still remained engaged throughout.

BDP is my favorite director and though much of his filmography has gradually started to be reclaimed/re-examined over the last 10-20 years since this was published I still feel he isn’t nearly talked about or examined enough in a critical context beyond his handful of more popular canonized works and his reputation as le horny split-diopter man who really likes Hitchcock. This book provides a very worthy analysis into his cynical leftist politics and underrated talents as a sharp-witted satirist and does good work to characterize him as a student of Godard/Bunuel just as much as he is of Hitchcock. Would strongly recommend to anybody who considers themselves an acolyte of De Palma or just an appreciator of good film criticism in general

[Mynt Marsellus · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the second chapter leaves a little to be desired - focusing so on De Palma's early career stretches beyond the limits of its relevancy - the rest of this book is without question the best auteurist study of the last twenty years.

[Keith Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating look into the world of Film Studies, which I very quickly discovered I know absolutely nothing about. Book definitely piqued my interest in Brian De Palma films.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating when it deals with De Palma's (or Hitchcock's, or Godard's) films; a little less so when it discourses on film studies as a field of academic study.