My Dear Melancholy

Gaspar Noe/Cannes Film Festival
The My Dear Melancholy era notable for being a time when The Weeknd was in proximity to a lot of serious directors. While he’s had a foot in Hollywood for awhile, 2017 through 2019 he was actively engaging with filmmakers like the Safdies Brothers, Gaspar Noe, and Claire Denis, amongst others. While he had been actively courting the Safdies since Good Time was released, he attended the 2018 Cannes Film Festival where he crossed paths Noe, whose film Climax took home a number awards at Cannes. Noe’s Enter the Void had previously served as an inspiration for Kiss Land, and for MDM (and later After Hours) seem to call back to Noe’s other films, like Irreversible and Love, which are both twisted depictions of heartbreak. On the other hand, Climax is about a French dance troupe who accidentally take LSD, and according to Noe is not a “message” movie. It is an audacious psychedelic technical exercise, with numerous long takes and highly choreographed set pieces. The idea for Noe, who had previously captured the feeling of drugs in previous films, was to do the opposite, and present the objectively reality of drugs, watching people high from a sober perspective.
Noe is a rather strong advocate of film, and the opening scene of Climax features VHS boxes of a number of films that have influenced his filmmaking. Two of note are Schizophrenia, otherwise known as Angst, one of Noe’s favorite films which The Weeknd name checked to the Safdies, and Possession, which would go on to be an influence on After Hours (more on this later). He is also said to have sat next to Benicio Del Toro at Cannes, which means he likely caught some of the Un Certain Regard section, where Del Toro served as a jury member. Outside of that section, there were a few other films of interest such as The House That Jack Built from Lars Von Trier (The Weeknd has previously expressed affection for Von Trier’s Antichrist), Mandy from Pastos Costamos, and music video director Romain Gavras’s The World Is Yours, as well as a restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Noe has referred to as the film that got him into filmmaking.
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Asian Cinema
Later in 2018, The Weeknd continued his globetrotting with a tour of Asia. He once claimed in an interview that whenever visiting a foreign country he only watches films from there. I’ve previously written about the influence of Asian cinema on Kiss Land, and there’s not enough work from the MDM era to glean anything cinematically adjacent to this, but now would be a good time to mention that the "Call Out My Name" video was heavily inspired by the work of famed Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Asian tour poster seems to be a reference to Ichi the Killer, which leads us to Takashi Miike. Though he is notoriously prolific across a number of genres, his most popular works internationally are genre melding blends of horror, comedy and crime, most notably Audition, Ichi the Killer and Gozu. Another film worth mentioning is Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon’s masterwork about a pop star’s mysterious stalker that The Weeknd posted about on Instagram before. Bloody and haunting, the film was a major influence on Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. In Interviews he has also mentioned a number of Korean films, such as The Wailing, I Saw the Devil and Oldboy. While Wong Kar Wai was previously mentioned as an influence on Beauty Behind the Madness, also worth mentioning is the work of John Woo, specifically A Better Tomorrow, well known for the shot of smoking a cigar off money, and Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau’s crime classic which served has the basis for Scorsese’s The Departed.
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After Hours

Martin Scorsese
While After Hours more so than any other Weeknd album is bursting at the seams with cinematic references, the influence of Martin Scorsese stands above all. Similar to The Weeknd’s body of work, many Scorsese’s are explorations of violence and masculinity, investigating them from a perspective that depending on who you ask (and how they’re feeling) glamorizes, condemns or just simply presents the reality of characters on the fringes of society.
While there are direct references to a number of prominent Scorsese films, what’s interesting is that his influence also reverberates in other films/filmmakers that influence After Hours. Todd Phillips’s Joker is in effect an homage to Scorsese’s loner-centric New York films, and the Safdie Brothers have been putting their own millennial spin on the type of 70s gritty thriller that Scorsese trafficked in (Scorsese was also a producer on Uncut Gems). Specific Scorsese works will be discussed more in depth in the requisite sections, but it is worth mentioning upfront what a prominent role that Scorsese plays in the nucleus of After Hours.
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Urban HorroIsolation
With After Hours, The Weeknd departs from the slicker sounds and influences that permeated Starboy and returns to the cinematic grittiness of Beauty Behind the Madness. While urban horror is a theme that permeates throughout The Weeknd as a project overall, there is a thorough line to be drawn here that follows a number of 70s and 80s cinematic and aesthetic references. For one thing, while the initial bandaged nose was a reference to Chinatown (previously, The Weeknd has a Kiss Land demo titled "Roman Polanski"), the full bandaged face that is so prominently featured throughout the After Hours era is a classic cinematic visual trope that was especially prominent throughout 60s and 80s, though it saw a slight re-emergence in the 2010s. The fully bandaged face is often used to remake someone in the image of another, usually against their will (The Skin I Live In, Eyes Without Face), or as a case of mistaken identity and doppelgängers (Good Night Mommy, Scalpel), themes present throughout much of After Hours. The "Too Late" video acknowledges these references, but instead presents the bandages on two Los Angeles models recovering from plastic surgery, in a nod to a famous Steven Meisel’s photoshoot for Vogue Italia.
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The “masks” people wear is another horror trope that is featured prominently on After Hours, and this is best seen in the red suit character. One important reference in the film is to Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill, where a serial killer is targeting the patients of a psychiatrist (any more on this film will veer towards spoiler territory). The Weeknd is on the record as saying Jim Carrey’s The Mask as being a large influence on the Red Suit character, it being one of the first film’s he watched in theaters. One of the more complex references would be to Joker. While it sort of an in-joke that the character of the Joker is commonly overanalyzed and misinterpreted, referencing Todd Phillips’s Joker is more nuanced because it is in essence a full on homage to Martin Scorsese’s New York films, most notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, which focus on eccentric loners, and can both be seen as cautionary tale of urban isolation, a theme explored perhaps in songs like "Faith." The King of Comedy revolves around a would be obsessive stand up Rupert Pupkin haggling his way to perform on late night TV, with The Weeknd’s talk show appearances being a prominent part of the early After Hours marketing, most notably in the “short film”. This idea of isolated and compressed urbanites recurs throughout After Hours and it’s films.
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The idea of urban repression is in the subway scene of the After Hours short film. The entire film itself is something of a reference to the subway scene to Possession (another Gaspar Noe favorite), mimicking the (also subway set) scene in which Isabelle Adjani’s Anna convulses on the subway due to a miscarriage, as well as Jacob’s Ladder, a 90s cult classic horror film starring Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet (like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle) who is experiencing demonic hallucinations, encountering them in the subway and later at a party he attends, splitting the scene into two.
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Las Vegas
As always, The Weeknd once again grounds After Hours with a strong sense of place, this time setting the album against a nocturnal odyssey through Las Vegas. One of the most prominent films is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s book. This is directly referenced in the "Heartless" video, which sees The Weeknd and Metro Boomin in the Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro roles as they tumble through a Las Vegas casino. The Weeknd has gone on the record to state that the famous red suit character was influenced by Sammy Davis Jr.’s character in the film Poor Devil. However, similar red suit has also been sported by a number of Vegas characters, most notably Richard Pryor and Robert De Niro’s Sam Rothstein in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. With the red suit, The Weeknd seems to be playing with the idea of a devil-ish other, another side of his personality that emerges in Las Vegas.
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While the city lights are the oft discussed part of part of Las Vegas, it should be noted that similar to Beauty Behind the Madness, the desert that surrounds Las Vegas is just as important to the juxtaposition of its beauty. The "Until I Bleed Out" video ends/"Snowchild" video in the desert, similar to the confrontation between Robert De Niro’s and Joe Pesci’s showdown in the desert in Casino, as well as Joe Pesci's death in Goodfellas. The idea of a hedonistic desert playground also bears semblance to Westworld, both the film and the TV show. The desert seems to represent some sort of freedom to The Weeknd, as the "Snowchild" video portrays the desert as a pensive location for reflection, as well as the "In Your Eyes" video showing the girl prominently dancing with the dismembered head out in the open, in reference to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another prominent desert film.
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New York/The Safdies
Despite it’s Las Vegas setting, After Hours also takes a good amount from films set in New York, most notably Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film After Hours. Besides the title, After Hours is similarly about a twisting and turning nighttime odyssey. The film stars Griffin Dunne as Paul, a working class stiff who heads downtown to rendezvous with a woman he met at a diner earlier that night. Of course, things don’t turn out the way they should, chaos ensues, and Paul is set on a dangerous trek back uptown. Like the film, the album After Hours is set off by a woman (though the album takes more stock in romantic endeavors), seems to be set over a single night (or at least a condensed period of time), and involves similar chaos and misadventures (sirens at night at the end of Faith). Tonally, After Hours the film is more comedic perhaps than After Hours the album, however The Weeknd is on the record as having said that "Heartless" and "Blinding Lights" placement on the album is intended to be somewhat comedic, reflecting exaggerated machismo and ecstasy, respectively (to comedic effect).
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Another of the most prominent filmmakers of After Hours are the Safdies, who featured The Weeknd in Uncut Gems. They also served as a link to Oneohtrix Point Never, who scored their last two films and later worked After Hours. I believe there are three major film tropes (not genres) that inspired After Hours, all of which the Safdies’s have engaged with. There is the one-long-night films, in which a character spends one-long-night on the run from whatever chaos and forces may be that they left in their path. This can be seen in the Good Time, as well as After Hours (the movie). Then, there is the descent-into-madness type, where a character slowly loses grip with reality and ends up in over their head (something like Scarface or Breaking Bad, but for our purposes Jacob’s Ladder can be categorized here as well), which the Safdies did with Uncut Gems. Lastly, but maybe most importantly, the Safdies also explored toxic romance (more on this later) in their less seen film Heaven Knows What, about two heroin addicts and the destructiveness their love brings out in each other, an idea that recurs throughout After Hours on songs like "Until I Bleed Out" and "Nothing Compares." A recurring song throughout Heaven Knows What is Isao Tomita’s synth version of Debussy’s "Claire De Lune", which is featured in some episodes of Memento Mori and bears some resemblance to the start of "Alone Again".
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Obsession/Toxic Romance
While love and lust and the ups and downs with it have been a formative part of The Weeknd’s ideology and themes, I don’t think it would be remiss to say that After Hours is perhaps his most outwardly romantic album. Despite this, one of the major arcs of the album is toxicity that comes with it, which a number of already mentioned films deal with. While "In Your Eyes" is one of the more romantic and accessible songs on the album, a re-assessment of it Ala Sting’s “Every Breathe You Take” could frame it as lonely obsessing, such as Travis Bickle’s infatuation with Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute Iris, Joker's fixation on Murray Franklin, Rupert Pupkin’s obsession with Jerry Langford. Casino also deals with toxic romance, another prominent theme in After Hours, best seen in the love triangle that forms between Sam, his partner Nicky and his wife Ginger, played by Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone respectively.
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In almost all of the After Hours’s video content, The Weeknd seems to constantly meet his demise at the hands of women. Another interesting reference that may be something of a reach is to Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about Reynolds Woodcock, a couture dressmaker loosely based on Cristobal Balenciaga and his muse Alma, played by Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps, respectively. The film delves into their dysfunctional relationship, with Woodcock berating her and Alma poisoning his tea to keep him dependent on her. One of the highpoint of the film is a New Years Eve Party that bears strong resemblance to the "Until I Bleed Out" video. While the balloons may just be a callback to his earlier work, there is something about the color grading/temperature and the production design of the "Until I Bleed Out" video (as well as parts of the "Blinding Lights" video) that made me immediately think of Phantom Thread. A similar relationship is seen in the German horror film Der Fan, which The Weeknd has mentioned in a recent interview. In Der Fan, a young girl Simone spends her days obsessing over popstar R, until she finally encounters him outside his studio. The film is similar to the aforementioned Takashi Miike’s Audition in its exploration of obsession and idealization. In the film, an older man puts up a fake casting call to search for the perfect girlfriend. While Audition explores these themes from an Eastern perspective of societal pressure, Der Fan explores it through a Western lens of pop idolization and idealization. Both films deal with the idea that despite outward appearances, the perfect partner does not exist, and anyone that claims to be (or has the expectations put on them) is not who they seem.
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One film he has spoken at length about is Trouble Everyday, Claire Denis’s arthouse vampire movie. The film stars Vincent Gallo as Shane, a scientist who travels to Paris under the guise of his honeymoon to track down core, a woman who he was once obsessed with who has now become a vampire. Core is locked up in a basement but sometimes sneaks out to seduce and consume unwilling victims. This seems to be where some of the bloody face stuff comes from, but I believe it’s influence is a little more conceptual. To me, a good companion film to Trouble Everyday is American Psycho, which seems to also have been a thematic influence on After Hours. Both films concern idealized version of masculinity and femininity, both very sexual and physical, but hostile as well. American Psycho ends with Patrick Bateman confessing to the killing of a prostitute, but no one believe him. Trouble Everyday ends with Shane killing Core, but Shane is unable to arouse himself after that except through violence. Koji Wakamatsu, a former Yakuza turned prominent extreme Japanese filmmaker (and a major influence on Gaspar Noe) is quoted as saying “For me, violence, the body and sex are an integral part of life.” Despite being hollow, idealized impressions of the self, a vampire and as a banker (cold, seductive bloodsuckers = monsters), Patrick Bateman and Core represent the Frankenstein-ian relationship between sexuality and violence, which I believe is the main theme of After Hours. Truly, we hurt the ones we love.
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Postscript

To cap things off, I would just like to illuminate some key takeaways. As a filmmaker myself, this has been an extremely helpful exercise in understanding other artists process and ideas.
Steeped in the history of the medium…
It’s clear that The Weeknd is not your typical “I’m influenced by cinema” artist but an extremely legit film buff with serious credentials. The Weeknd’s film taste leans towards 70s-00s genre works, mostly horror, drama and thriller, and is well versed in the classics but also has the nose to sniff out deeper cuts and obscurities. The mantra of “good artists borrow, great artists steal” works even better if not many people know where you’re stealing from! What is impressive to me is that he is not just versed in “mainstream” obscurities, but also serious deep cuts. Films like Possession and Phantom of the Paradise may not stick out to the average person on the street but are well known in most film circles. Films like Inland Empire and New Rose Hotel (Der Fan was especially impressive to me, it is one of my favorite films) however are not as well known and it is very impressive to me that he can come across films like that, and really get enough out of it to bring into his own work.
…is able to interpolate contemporary/mainstream films…
This perhaps is one of the most impressive aspects of his integration of film into The Weeknd’s work. It is very easy for film buffs to get lost within their own obscure taste, living in a world where everyone is an idiot for not knowing who Shinya Tsukamoto. Trilogy and Kiss Land had a lot of contemporary obscurities, like Stalker, David Lynch etc., well known but they still existed as artifacts, not of the time we live in. However, perhaps picking something from his work on Fifty Shades of Grey, of late he has kept his finger on the zeitgeist and anticipated/integrated what the filmmakers of today are doing, such as his work on Black Panther and Game of Thrones, general appreciation of Tarantino, the works of Nicolas Winding Refn in Starboy, and his use of the Joker and Uncut Gems on After Hours, both of which came out just a few months before the album. It feels Jackson-esque, and I believe this is one thing that will help him further in his quest for pop stardom.
…while also being fully in tune to the works of modern transgressive auteurs…
In addition to keeping up with the mainstream is in touch with, The Weeknd also makes it a point to seek out and learn from the cutting edge filmmakers of today. While the Safdies were always going to blow up, I don’t doubt that a Weeknd co-sign accelerated their rise. Gaspar Noe is one thing, Enter the Void and Irreversible exist as masterpieces of the mainstream obscurities I’ve been mentioning, but he really truly tries to understand the heart of Noe’s work, even going so far back as to understand Noe’s influences (I sincerely hope he is tuned in to the work of Koji Wakamatsu). But most of all, to be a fan of Claire Denis is one thing, but to seek her out and make her an offer that she ACCEPTED is absolutely astounding to me. Just spitballing but it would be like if Michael Jackson shot a music video with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who I’d bet good money that The Weeknd was put on to by Noe). We can only PRAY that one day we will be blessed with a David Lynch Weeknd video.
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…and that just about does it. Hope you enjoyed this and thanks for being patient with me. I got quite busy after the first two and had my own projects/work going that kept me occupied. As we’re still technically in the After Hours era, I also wanted to wait until a few more videos and interviews came out to aid me in my research.
I also wanted to find enough time to make the Letterboxd for this. I personally don’t love Letterboxd culture, I find the popular culture surrounding the site a bit snobbish and exclusive, but I’ve gotten a number of requests for one and you gotta give the people what they want. Throughout the list are a few films that he hasn’t mentioned but are some of my personal favorites and I believe Weeknd fans will like, I encourage you to accidentally stumble upon things on it. Don't overthink, just pick something and watch!
If you’d like to follow me further, you can find me on Instagram here, where I post about film reviews Letterboxd style. I prefer Instagram so that more average people see it instead of an echo chamber of film snobs. I am also a filmmaker myself, I just recently wrapped this short film and am currently in the process of putting together my next project.
The main reason I did this however, besides a general appreciation of The Weeknd’s work, was to put more people on to the beautiful art form that is cinema. One thing I learned from Scorsese is that one must be an advocate and truly champion your medium. I hope that this encourages to check out more interesting movies than they wouldn’t normally come across, and I hope this will inspire more people to create more as well, whether it be to write, make films, music, anything. If even one person picks up a pencil, a camera or a keyboard because of these posts, I will be satisfied.
Thanks all!

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De Palma
How does one describe Brian De Palma? Many have accused him of being a misogynist for his films’ violent behavior towards women in thrillers such as Blow Out or Dressed to Kill. Others have commented that De Palma is just a knock-off of Hollywood legend Alfred Hitchcock, as De Palma uses similar formal techniques and even story ideas from classics like Rear Window or Psycho. Though many of De Palma’s movies have become significant within pop culture, most have nevertheless generated controversy for their recurrent use of graphic violence, themes of obsession, and voyeurism. Even if these criticisms of De Palma were entirely true, there’s no denying that his talent as a director or his widespread influence on other filmmakers. Indeed, Brian De Palma has proven again and again over his decades-long career to be one of cinema’s finest provocateurs, fascinated with how people can manipulate images and how those images can, in turn, affect others.
From the beginning of his filmography, De Palma has shown a fierce fascination with cinema and the art of creating images. His first feature in 1968, Murder a la Mod, features a young amateur filmmaker who shoots a cheap pornographic movie to make quick money. De Palma’s formal style itself shows the director’s love for the image; most of his films feature carefully choreographed long shots, split-screens of two separate places, and split-diopter shots that close in on an object or person in the foreground while also maintaining focus on something else in the background. Even De Palma’s recently released thriller Domino, despite a severely cut-down narrative, contains a shocking split-screen sequence that examines how recorded images of violence can easily spread online and thus turn into propaganda
De Palma’s earliest films were low-budget features shot in or around New York City. Three of these starred a young Robert De Niro, who was also beginning to make a name for himself in the film industry. The last and most famous of these early collaborations, Hi, Mom! (1970), was a dark comedy that introduced the themes of voyeurism and images that would become staples of De Palma’s later filmography. De Niro stars as Jon Rubin, a young man returning from Vietnam who has an idea to put a camera outside his window and film people in apartments across the street. Rubin at first gets financial help from an adult film producer and shoots footage of a middle-class family, a rich young playboy, and a college student involved with a black radical group. Rubin even decides to “create” films himself; he seduces a young woman in one of the apartments he spies on and has sex with her in her apartment after setting his camera to start recording after a certain time. Through Rubin, we see not only De Palma’s fascination with vouyerism (there are long sequences of each apartment and its inhabitants, some shots sped up for humor) but also with cinema itself. The girl Rubin dates and seduces on-camera is unaware she’s an actress in a film, showing how much deception inherently goes into making cinema.
The most famous scene of Hi, Mom! occurs after Rubin is fired. Desperately looking for easy money, he gets hired by the black radical group to play a part in a experimental theatrical performance, Be Black, Baby. Shot entirely on 16mm film, the sequence involves several wealthy white audience members going to the production set in an empty apartment building. The black actors running the show make the white people eat soul food and paint their faces black while they don whiteface. From there, the white audience members are terrorized and chased from room to room by the actors as an attempt for the white patrons to understand the “black experience.” Rubin plays a policeman who comes in at the end of the performance to further scare the audience before chasing them out of the building. At the end, the stunned white audience praises the show; the black actors are disappointed and one sourly remarks, “I don’t think they learned a thing.” Though the extended scene is also a hilarious satire of the New York underground theater movement, it also serves as another example of cinema as manipulation. Because of the intense performances by the black actors and Rubin, the white patrons are deceived into thinking they are in serious danger and forget that they are part of a performance until they are let free and given time to calm down.
After a string of successes in the 1970s including Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie, De Palma made several studio films in the 1980s, some highly commercial (Scarface, The Untouchables) and some were more personal psychological thrillers. Body Double, made immediately after Scarface was negatively received by critics and gained controversy for its graphic violence, was released as a bitter response to Hollywood animosity and was a twisted homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo. After he catches his girlfriend cheating on him, unemployed actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) decides to house-sit for Sam (Gregg Henry) for several days. At the house before leaving, Sam shows Scully a telescope where he watches a neighbor (Deborah Shelton) do a seductive dance alone every night. Scully quickly becomes fascinated with the neighbor and begins stalking her around Los Angeles during the day. One night, Scully watches the neighbor become brutally murdered by a mysterious, disfigured man; he later discovers that the woman he saw each night dancing was a porn actress, Holly Body (Melanie Griffith), hired by Sam to make sure Scully would watch every night. Sam — wearing a mask to look like the disfigured man — killed the real neighbor, his wife Gloria, and used Scully as the perfect alibi.
Body Double is one of De Palma’s most unnerving works, examining our relationship to cinema and how audiences expectations can subjectively affect the images they see. Sam chooses Scully to become an unknowing witness because he knows Scully has recently lost his girlfriend and is lonely. Indeed, Scully projects his sexual desires on to the dancing woman, even following Gloria around as she shops in a mall or walks to the beach. Scully’s voyeuristic act of watching through a telescope implicates us the viewers as well, as we too become an audience to Holly’s erotic dance. After Gloria’s murder, a distraught Scully watches a porn channel and sees Holly doing the same dance she did for him in the window. From here on, Scully transforms from a passive audience member into an active participant; he auditions for a music video with Holly and introduces himself to her as a porn producer as a way to get the truth out of her. The music video itself — set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s single “Relax” — is a film within a film — as Scully plays a man wandering through a strip club and eventually seduced by Holly. Both within and without Body Double, we clearly see how cinema and its imagery can manipulate us, yet there is still a part of us that allows us to get tricked and deceived every time.
One of De Palma’s last Hollywood-funded movies, Snake Eyes was given negative reviews from critics and audiences alike, but it remains an essential De Palma film. Detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) goes to an Atlantic City boxing match to help guard the Secretary of Defense alongside an old friend Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), now a U.S. Navy Commander. When the Secretary gets fatally shot, the arena closes down and Santoro searches for suspects who might have been involved in a larger conspiracy. Most of the film is shown through Rashomon-style flashbacks; Santoro hears stories from different people about where they were and what they were doing when the shooting took place. Yet, Santoro soon realizes some of the statements he’s been given contradicts others — the recollections of witness Julia (Carla Gugino) reveal that Dunne’s story was fabricated and that he was part of the plan to kill the Secretary.
Much of Snake Eyes revolves around the objectivity of the surveillance camera as opposed to the memories of individuals. The film opens on newsreel footage of a storm outside the match and moves from one television to another. Santoro is first seen standing next to a pay-per-view reporter shown on a television and then moves off of the television screen and on to our own. Santoro only believes Julia’s story when he sees footage of Dunne meeting with the shooter minutes before the Secretary’s death. De Palma seems to recognize that a camera recording by itself is unbiased, but those images can easily be changed or constructed to show or hide the truth. When Dunne erases the surveillance video, the camera moves to a different news screen where corrupt casino owner Gilbert Powell (John Heard) lies to reporters about how the Secretary of Defense was killed. The Secretary of Defense was killed because Julia, a military manufacturer analyst, told him that the results of a new missile guard system supported by Dunne and Powell were faked so he would approve its use. Here, one can see a significant change in De Palma’s examination of imagery. In Hi, Mom!, Rubin comically seduces a woman to create an adult film; Sam creates the image of Holly’s dance to get away with murder in Body Double. On the other hand, images are erased or manipulated by military officials and corporation executives for large profits in Snake Eyes. The institutional corruption discovered by Santoro is so vast and widespread that De Palma’s original ending to the film (the casino washing away entirely in the midst of the hurricane) makes much more sense.
De Palma’s filmography of the last 20 years has been mostly independently financed and hasn’t received the same distribution or success as his previous work. Domino is the best example; De Palma had trouble with producers during filming, and a 140-minute rough cut of the film got shortened to the 89-minute version being released this week. Yet, despite all these troubles, there are still sequences within Domino that demonstrate De Palma’s artistry just as much in Body Double or Snake Eyes. No other filmmaker has so thoroughly examined our relationship with cinema and how its artificiality can deceive us. Even in his late 70s, De Palma is still thinking about how images can be manipulated, and in turn, manipulate an idea more relevant than ever in a world filled with billions of cellphones and a limitless global network.
Brian De Palma: Obsessed with the Image By Ethan Cartwright