Greetings (1968)
US, 88 minutes

Scenario: Charles Hirsch
and Brian DePalma

Starring: Robert DeNiro, Johnathan Warden,
Gerrit Graham, Allen Garfield, Ruth Alda

Hi, Mom! (1969)
US, 87 minutes

Scenario: Brian DePalma, based on a story by Brian DePalma and Charles Hirsch

Starring: Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Salt, Lara Parker, Gerrit Graham, Charles Durning, Allen Garfield.

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By Jim Emerson

"Yeah, you know, tragedy is -- it's a funny thing."
-- John Rubin (Robert De Niro) in Hi, Mom!

Looking back at Brian DePalma's career, it seems perfectly natural that he should move from quirky, underground black comedies like Greetings and Hi, Mom! to highly sophisticated, operatic horror films like Carrie, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. The difference between the early films and the later ones is only a matter of scale and genre emphasis. DePalma began making comedies which are horrifying, and has progressed to making horror films which are hysterically funny. Like all the best American directors, DePalma recognizes that horror and humor spring from the same source-our inability to confront what frightens us. We have two choices: we can draw back in horror, or we can retreat into laughter. DePalma knows that humor and horror are so inextricably intertwined in the American imagination (recall Ronald Reagan quipping to his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck") that it is fruitless to try to sort out which is which, to go for "pure" horror or "pure" humor. There's really no such thing. DePalma's films are bursting with moments which are funny because they are so horrible-and all the more horrible because they are funny. Conundrums like this are the stuff of which his films are made. Tonight you'll see what I mean.

"I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts
He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art."

-- Hi, Mom! title song

The first thing you notice about DePalma's movies is that he is absolutely obsessed, and in love, with the medium. Rarely has the cinema seen such a fluid visual imagination. Always acutely aware that films are made to be watched by audiences in theatres, he pulls us into his film-stories using hand-held camera, character point-of-view shots, and other audience identification techniques-then turns the film around on us, tossing us back into our seats and reminding us that we're watching a movie by slipping in Godardian inter-titles, jump cuts, split-screen, slow-motion, fast-motion, fancy wipes and dissolves, and anything else you can think of that can be done with a movie camera, an optical printer and a moviola. The artist is clearly in his element, and that's what makes DePalma's films such a joy to watch.

The first thing we see in DePalma's movie is a television set carrying a speech by President Johnson. In front of the set sits a book: Six Seconds in Dallas. Greetings, made five years after the assassination, is a picture of a nation obsessed with six seconds of Kodak movie film. Right away, DePalma begins detailing the dissolution of the barrier between the personal and the political in American society; just as, in this and subsequent films, he will dissolve the barrier between the film and the audience, between horror and humor, between public and private.

All of these elements are operating splendidly in the first shot of Greetings. President Johnson, giving a televised speech, is speaking both to the audience there in the auditorium with him and the audience watching him on TV. In front of the television set on which we are watching him is a coffee pot, partially obscuring a portion of the screen. We're not just watching Johnson on TV, we're watching him on a particular TV set in a particular room in someone's home somewhere-which puts us at three steps remove from that hall where we see Johnson speaking. When Johnson turns to the camera to address a question directly to his audience, we experience a strange, chinese-box sensation. Johnson, speaking directly to the TV camera, is speaking directly to the audience watching television. We, watching this television set in this movie, suddenly find him addressing us, too. The documentary reality of Johnson's speech becomes a part of the fictional film, Greetings; all these layers are at once telescoped and compressed into a single frame-within-a-frame. Appropriately, DePalma both begins and ends his film with this shot.

Even more tension is added to the above moment when you consider how DePalma is playing with the dimension of time: Johnson delivered the speech at a particular moment in time; the videotape of that speech was broadcast at another time-say on the evening news; DePalma, after making a videotape of his own from the broadcast, filmed the speech off the television set at some other time in 1968; and we are watching that film now on April 14, 1981. Johnson, in the moment he looks through the camera lens at us, slices through all those levels of distanciation and the moment becomes an immediate one again, Time is trapped on film and renewed. If this is beginning to make you feel dizzy, it should. It's this kind of mind-boggling tension that DePalma's films thrive on. Each film is like a pair of mirrors facing each other with the audience trapped in the void between.

Godard called cinema "the truth 24 times a second." But DePalma, echoing David Hemmings in Blow-Up, also realizes that the closer you examine a frame (one twenty-fourth second) of film, the less tangible the "truth" of the visual evidence becomes. One person may clearly see an assassin; another may see only a grainy blob. Part of DePalma's fascination with split-screen lies in its ability to bombard the audience with a great deal of visual information, allowing viewers to choose what they want to watch at any particular moment -- like Jon Rubin, picking out the most interesting windows in the apartment building in Hi, Mom!, or Allen Garfield watching three porno movies at once in the same film.

Film is a medium in flux; time will never stand completely still for scrutiny, even when "captured" with a movie camera. So DePalma plays with that flux. In Obsession, we move from 1975 to 1959 in one apparently seamless shot. In The Fury, the past and the present occupy the same frame simultaneously as Amy Irving has a telekinetic vision on a stairway. And in Greetings -- well, there's that opening/closing shot.

This complex relationship between DePalma (the intelligence behind the screen), the actors/characters on the screen, and the audience watching the screen, receives its fullest expression (as do most of the themes we encounter in Greetings), in Hi, Mom!, one of my favorite films of the seventies. Greetings is a funky, funny little experimental home movie which captures the atmosphere of the time in which it was made as few films ever do. But it looks almost like a quaint little time capsule next to Hi, Mom!, one of the most radical, revolutionary, and provocative (in the truest sense of the word-it provokes the audience) films of the decade. I've tried to avoid discussing Hi, Mom! For the most part until now because I wanted to give it a treatment all its own and because I don't want to ruin the experience for viewers who are seeing the film for the first time. If you've never seen Hi Mom!, don't even think of reading any further until you have. When watching intricate epistemological puzzles like DePalma's films, it's always a danger to know too much beforehand.

The kind of certainty the white woman displays about "who's who in the theatre" is completely undermined by Hi, Mom! DePalma seems to have set out to make a film which would prove that, even as you are watching a movie, the movie can watch you back. In 1969, between Greetings and Hi, Mom!, DePalma made a film of a play in which the actors disregarded the barrier of the proscenium and interacted with the audience. DePalma was fascinated by this and wanted to capture on film, not just the play but what was happening between the play and the audience. Without the audience, the play was incomplete. So, he filmed the entire thing in split-screen-half the screen devoted to the actors on stage, and half devoted to the audience and its reactions. As the actors moved out into the audience, they crossed this split-screen barrier, moving from one side of the screen to the other and blurring the separation between audience and play.

DePalma, as I said before, is always aware that he is making films to be watched by an audience in a theatre. He glories, like Hitchock, in drawing "mass emotions" out of an audience. (Think of the ending of Carrie). At the same time, we in the audience are always aware, because of his obtrusive technique, of DePalma's presence as master manipulator behind the screen-or if you prefer, behind the camera. He may distance us from the story he's telling with overt cinematic artifice at times, but it's usually for a purpose: to allow us to examine our relationship to the film we're watching and the characters in it at any particular moment. DePalma has been criticized for hi flashy displays of technical devices such as slow-motion or split-screen, but the split he's really concerned with is the one with the audience on one side and the film on the other. DePalma never lets us "wonderful people out there in the dark," in Norma Desmond's phrase, feel safe just because we are cloaked in darkness. He doesn't let us feel smug about our voyeuristic advantage over the characters onscreen. He forces us to acknowledge that we are engaged in an act of voyeurism and that, at any moment, we could conceivably be caught in the act.

Movies, DePalma notes, are a vital part of our lives-both conscious and unconscious, our "real" lives and our fantasy lives. We incorporate our fantasy lives into our real lives when we, consciously or not, act our scenes or bits of dialogue from movies in our daily interactions with people. We all do it. To paraphrase from Win Wenders' Kings of the Road: the movies have colonized our subconscious. We are often acting out patterns we have picked up from movies we have seen without even being aware of it. Filmmakers, too, absorb these influences and incorporate them not only into their lives, but into their own films, as well. Jean-Luc Godard was perhaps the first person to make films which were explicitly about other films. (One thinks of Jean-Paul Belmondo and his "Bogie" impression throughout Godard's first feature, Breathless). DePalma, too, makes films which build on earlier films: Phantom of the Paradise owes the bones of its plot to Phantom of the Opera; Obsession is a variation on Vertigo; Dressed to Kill is a meditation on Psycho; and The Fury is clearly designed to play on the expectations of people who have seen DePalma's own Carrie. Hi, Mom! takes its basic thematic material from two films: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (In turn, Hi, Mom! is itself a major influence, in terms of basic plot elements and De Niro's performance, on his friend Martin Scorsese's 1976 film, Taxi Driver). In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart watches neighbors in the apartment opposite his through binoculars. DePalma adds another dimension by making his protagonist a filmmaker who is interested in "peep art," not only watching his neighbors but filming them. In Sherlock Jr., Keaton plays a projectionist who falls asleep on the job and dreams of actually entering the fantasy world of the screen. He walks down the aisle of the theatre and jumps right into the action onscreen. Robert De Niro, playing Jon Rubin, (the same character he played in Greetings), becomes a character in his own film in order to act out his fantasy of seducing the woman in the window (allusion to the 1945 Fritz Lang film of that title intentional) across from him.

Jon Rubin, like all of us when we "plan our day," fantasizes a scenario for himself, enters into it, and acts it out. He first meets Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt) when he knocks at her apartment door, claiming that she is his computer date (another element picked up from Greetings). They go to see a film which Judy feels she can really understand because, in her words, "I had a personal experience." Personal and movie (public) experiences get all mixed together. The movie Jon and Judy have experienced together becomes the pretext for Judy to narrate an episode from the story of her own life, in much the same way that she would describe the plot of a movie. When she has finished, Jon takes this as a cue to tell Judy his story of a similar personal experience. This is one way people become the scenarists of their own lives, re-interpreting the past in light of current events and exposing certain carefully related "scenes" to certain people. Jon tells his narrative so that it overlaps with Judy's -- they've both been victimized by some brute named Roger. Suddenly, they have something in common, and Judy is primed for seduction.

Movies are like mirrors held up to an audience: what people see in films depends on the experiences (experiences from other movies as well as personal experiences) that they bring with them to the theatre. Audiences project their view of reality on to the screen, which affects the way they perceive what it seems to be reflecting back. Jon Rubin projects his fantasies onto the little screen of Judy's window, moves out from behind his camera and acts out his fantasy in front of it (thus preserving his fantasy on celluloid for future enjoyment). In the same way, we project something of ourselves into the movies we see, vicariously acting out the experiences of the movie actors/characters we identify with, even as their experiences seem to be mirroring our own.

Hi, Mom! is an elaborate exercise in point of view. DePalma puts us inside a number of movies within the movie-home movies, television shows-even a porno movie, where we look back at the audience from the screen's point of view as Allen Garfield turns to De Niro and says, "This is your public." (Here's a real "mirror" held up to the audience). The first shot of Hi, Mom! is a subjective shot from Jon Rubin's point of view. But we don't know we're actually seeing through the eyes of a character in the film (as opposed to seeing through the lens of an omniscient camera) until the building manager (Charles Durning) turns around and scolds us for sneaking up behind him like that. Even then, we don't know whose point of view we are inhabiting until, in a startling reverse shot, Rubin/De Niro, exposing himself to us for the first time, yanks away a curtain between himself and the camera, looks directly at us and smiles, "I'll take it." It's an exhilarating moment, an exchange between actor, director and audience that says, in effect, "We're all in this together. I know that you're watching me in this movie, and you know that I know that you're watching." Hi, Mom! is a movie in which everyone is busily watching everyone else watching. In the camera store, we see a woman with a movie camera. In the next shot, we are inside that camera, seeing what it is filming. The woman zooms across the store and we see Jon Rubin, a character in Hi, Mom! who is now appearing in another character's super-8 movie. Jon points a camera at us, filming the woman filming him, filming her, filming him, ad infinitum. Two mirrors facing each other with us in between.

Point of view is a funny thing. Sometimes the camera takes us directly inside the head of a character in the film we're watching. Sometimes it watches the characters from a detached, omniscient point of view. Sometimes the camera itself becomes a presence within the action; characters acknowledge that there is a person with a camera on the scene. When we watch a movie, we know it is "only a movie," a recorded moment played out before the camera. But we have been conditioned, especially by television, to perceive some film styles, some points of view, as more "real" than others. A grainy black and white film shot with a hand-held camera is more likely to seem like a recording of an actual event than a well-framed and lighted Technicolor film in which the camera is steady and stationary. The latter looks like a movie; the former looks like news or documentary footage. This is the trap DePalma pulls us into in Hi, Mom!

"Be Black, Baby," the play which is supposedly filmed by the National Intellectual Television documentary crew, contains some of the most chilling mise-en-scene of the decade. This mini-documentary is an act of terrorism against the play's audience, the documentary's audience, and Hi, Mom!'s audience. The play "Be Black, Baby" purports to show upper-middle class white Americans what it's like to be black in America. It means to give them a personal, aesthetic experience which will enable them to get inside the point of view of a black American. Yet once the play's audience realizes that their experience has been "just part of the play" ("only a movie," in another popular phrase) they are able to distance themselves from it and, thus, dismiss it. ("Dynamite theatre!" exclaims one abused patron. "Clive Barnes was right.") They can never inhabit someone else's point of view, can never really know what it's like to be black. But we, watching the film of the play, feel that we are there with the documentary crew, witnessing the events as they take place.

Let me back up a little. A Godardian title card introduces the final segment of Greetings as: "Two Views from Vietnam" (an allusion, perhaps, to Godard's contribution to the 1967 omnibus documentary, Loin du Viet-nam/Far from Vietnam). In the first "view", a cameraman discusses the war in terms of photographic problems it presented. He describes how the presence of his camera altered the "reality" of what he was filming. (He asks some soldiers, for instance, to bring their prisoners out of the shade and into the sunlight for better exposure.) The war, for most Americans, never really existed except in films. In fact, it never existed until it was filmed and broadcast into our living rooms every night. In the second segment, we are with draftee peep artist Jon Rubin on patrol in Vietnam. Here, the documentary form itself turns Vietnam into a peep show for voyeuristic Americans who watch form a safe distance. But the documentary form is a lie; it is just another form of manipulation.

Which brings us back to "Be Black Baby." How do we get inside this pseudo-documentary, anyway? Jon goes into an electronic hardware store and in the window we see a television set flashing the message: "N.I.T. Next." DePalma cuts to a close-up of the TV set. Another cut and a television screen-shaped frame fills the center of the screen we're watching. The documentary begins. In three shots, DePalma takes us out of one narrative and plunges us into another, seemingly unconnected one. And we, quite willing to jump into any point of view, follow without question. This is the same principle Hitchock uses to trick us into identifying with the criminals in many of his films.

In "Be Black, Baby," however, we tend to forget that we are watching actors at work (unless we remember Ruth Alda from the peep art window scene in Greetings). Except for Alda, the play actors and Gerrit Graham, who Jon's neighbor's home movies has already introduced as a "Be Black, Baby" actor named Gerrit, the faces on the screen are unfamiliar. The play's audience seems to be made up of "real people." This makes part of "Be Black, Baby" almost too awful to watch. I've seen audiences sweat, cry and run for the exits during this part of the film. Then, just when the performance reaches its most horrifying point, the rape of Ruth Alda with a broom handle, Jon Rubin/Robert De Niro reappears in the guise of a policeman, and we remember that we've been watching an act-within-an-act-within-an-act-that Jon has auditioned for this part in the play within the movie. After this, the audience watching Hi, Mom! usually begins feeling that it's okay to laugh again.

In the final third of Hi, Mom!, Jon Rubin adopts the persona of a mild-mannered insurance salesman so that he can "bring home" the reality of oppressed America to the middle class, blowing away the separation between the personal and the political in their lives as "Be Black, Baby" has politicized him. His home life becomes a grotesque parody of middle-class situation comedy domesticity on a flimsy, slapped-together set. And then he destroys it all-the housing project, the kitchen appliances, the laundry room, the doggie, even his pregnant wife, the unfortunate Judy Bishop. Jon discards the accouterment of his phony life and, stripped down to shirt and pants, lights the bomb with his pipe and runs away. The screen goes white, wiping away the world we've been watching for 80 minutes or so.

The next time we see him, Jon is dressed in a military uniform, wandering into a news report on the former site of the apartment building he's destroyed. This is the Jon Rubin who we saw sent to Vietnam in Greetings. He, like the other people the interviewer has talked to, has objectified the world so much that he can only see how events affect him directly-he's totally locked into his own point of view with no empathy for other people. He's the ultimate voyeur. Avery Gunnz (played by DePalma's brilliant editor, Paul Hirsch) complains that he left his wallet in the building and is really bummed out at having to get a new driver's license. Jon is upset that he has come back from Vietnam, where he's been "cleaning up the country," to a mess like this one at home. The interviewer says that they're running out of time (and film?) and asks him if there's anything else he might like to say. He looks into the camera and waves.

Is this Jon Rubin, the man who has just blown up his own child along with its mother, looking at us and waving to the society which has given birth to people like him? Or is this Robert De Niro waving to his mom, who for all we know could be seated in the audience right next to us, and simultaneously reminding us that it's all been only a movie, that building didn't really get blown up, that nobody was raped, and that the house lights can come up now and we'll find ourselves in our theatre seats? You decide.

Originally published in April, 1981.

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