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| Obsession (1976) / Brian De Palma |
One is not prone to discussing the class-consciousness prevalent
in De Palma’s work; the excitement of his films seems to derive as much from
the perverseness of his directorial design (particularly; in terms of the
central plot, the mood of the piece and the various rhythms/double-rhythms),
but also, from (what seems like an) inevitable, and yet, unforeseen engagement
of societal classes. In Obsession,
for instance, De Palma revises Hitchcock’s Vertigo
by entirely severing the original story’s connection with dreams, magic or
enigma at-large, and re-depositing it instead in a world of open manipulation,
schemers and hustlers – where the reincarnation is no longer the result of one
man’s obsessive fantasy, but of his business partner’s (unbelievably) elaborate
plan to annex the protagonist’s mind, and through it, his money. In short, De
Palma airlifts Vertigo from Hitchcock’s
private architecture and places it, as such, in America. Two great achievements
of Obsession: the first is De Palma’s
recognition of the plausibility of the central plot itself; a man obsessed with
a dead lover/wife spots another woman who looks just like her and aims, through
his own set of eccentric and aloof habits, to reincarnate the deceased in the
alive. While Hitchcock’s film’s working class detective can hardly, in a ‘real’
world afford to devote most of his life to the peculiar pursuit of this young
girl who bears an uncanny resemblance with his lost love, De Palma corrects
this technicality by rendering the same plot as a holiday film. The rich businessman
goes to Italy for a business meeting and spots this replica (what’s more, she
works as a restoration artist, how cute!) – tells his partner to trudge on
along to America while he will stay on for a few more days. These ‘few more
days’ being the point of De Palma’s larger awareness (which he posits in Blow Out as a complete theory); that
only a multimillionaire on a holiday can savour the luxury (as opposed to the hope-agony of Scottie in Vertigo) of rediscovering, perhaps, a
lost love. In finishing therefore, this triumvirate (with Laura, and of course, Vertigo),
De Palma’s point is made, i.e., only three types of people can spend their
lives obsessed with the dead: detectives, rich men on a holiday and of course,
at a larger level, cinephiles.
Obsession’s larger achievement is in the final
shot of the film, when De Palma paints the final stroke over his Vertigo restoration – he dispenses with
the wonder inherent in the circular tracking shot that captures the
resurrection/reunion in Vertigo and replaces
it instead with the bottom-line reality of such a complex affair: when the man and
the woman enter the world-ending embrace in Obsession,
she overdramatically and in a high-pitched voice, squeals: ‘Daddy! Oh daddy!’
And this is really how De Palma summarises for us the whole Hitchcock film; as
some sort of a modern variation of the old Frankenstein-legend,
wherein the reproduced girl is no longer a myth, and she does not see the
fanatic whose obsessiveness makes her existence possible as her lover, but as
her father, her progenitor and her creator ( of course, this is a terribly
sentimental moment; imagine the Monster calling Frankenstein his father, but
also a bit of a joke on ol’ Jimmy’s age in Vertigo)
. Two other significant facts about this scene; it is set in the symbol of concrete,
real and practical contemporary
existence, the airport, and is thereby relocated from the dreamy, neon-lit
hotel room of the Hitchcock film, and lastly, this scene ends the film (unlike Vertigo,
where Scottie must suffer till he can exterminate this agent of recurrence
herself). This is because the larger irony of the project – the story of a man restoring
an object from the past being filmed by
a man restoring an object from the past – is not lost on De Palma, and therefore,
just like Scottie, he must end eternal recurrence with his own piece. How? By
ensuring that the reunion scene is the final scene of his story, so that by the
time the end credits begin to roll, the ghosts of an unhappy past are entirely
exorcised.
