national intellectual television
Last night I had the TV on, and the TV kindly spoke, “from the director of Scarface!” I was like, “Huh? I thought Howard Hawks was dead.” (He died in 1977.) The TV continued, “…and the writer of L.A. Confidential,” and I thought, “Oh, James Ellroy, this must be that new Brian De Palma flick.” Indeed, it was a commercial for The Black Dahlia, which looks like a pretty cool movie. It seems strange they would use a remake of the Paul Muni vehicle to tease a new De Palma movie, since he’s done much better work than Scarface. (I watched it again not too long ago and found it boring and overly long.) As a heterosexual white man living in Texas, I’m sure my taste in movies is more representative of the real America than any of those clowns in Hollywood. So why not use one of De Palma’s good movies like Carrie, Sisters, or my personal favorite, Hi Mom!? If either of my readers have yet to see this film, run out to your local video store and rent it anon! Oh TV, why couldn’t you have said, “From the director of Hi Mom!“?
The sad thing is that I rented Femme Fatale this weekend after the online magazine Slant had a little feature about De Palma in anticipation of The Black Dahlia. The argument these articles make is that De Palma has an underappreciated style, and my experience with Femme Fatale. It’s definitely a B-movie, but it has little stylistic quirks like a slow-motion shot of the protagonist falling off an interior balcony, through a glass ceiling, and into a pile of rolled textiles and identity play similar to Sisters. Like Hi Mom!, it might have been a better movie to cite than Scarface.
Of course, Scarface is the ultimate cult film, probably in some part because of Pacino’s performance of masculinity in that film. It’s probably one of the most quotable films for frat guys, at least in my experience. In fact, at one of F’ville’s mall multiplexes, the overpriced poster shop always displays dozens of “Scarface” posters next to the theater.
Oh, and by some strange coincidence, that comercial came on Comedy Central as I was typing this comment.
After I posted that, I wondered how much of my irony actually came through. I really did think of Hawks when I heard that commercial in the background, but I am also aware audiences are probably more familiar with the remake. I also think it’s kind of boring, compared to De Palma’s other work.
To jump on the cult film issue, I think I don’t understand what a cult film is. I wanted to work in a line about how Hi Mom! is De Palma’s Repo Man. When you said that the Al Pacino remake is the ultimate cult film, it hit a nerve, since I think of Repo Man as the archetypal cult film, a sort of homebrew movie that found an underground following. I think there’s sort of a gap between a popular sense of cult film – the Film Threat sort of underground classic – and the academic sense of a film used in media rituals. Clearly these categories can overlap, like the in the case of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but if I had any influence, I’d call movies like Scarface, Casablanca, Star Wars, and other mainstream films “ritual films” rather than “cult films.”
Guess I was thinking about it in the Umberto Eco sense in that it’s immesnely quotable and in that it opens itself up readily to multiple interpretations in terms of the identification with Tony. He, of course, opens the definition of “cult film” up pretty widely by identifying “Casablanca” as a cult film, so perhpas your invocation of the term “ritual film” is more appropriate (I wrote the last comment when I was half asleep, so it may not be terribly coherent).
No, we were on the same page. I was beefing with Eco’s sense of cult film (filtered through Janet Staiger), which is why I specifically cited Casablanca. Just now, I was thinking I need to read that piece, and I realized I had read it as an undergrad and totally missed the point. Still, I think “ritual film” better captures what academics mean by “cult film.”