Essential Erotic Thrillers: Angela Walsh on DRESSED TO KILL and THE LAST SEDUCTION
DRESSED TO KILL (Brian De Palma, 1980)
Met with outrage and protests when it was initially released in 1980, Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL is, in many ways, the defining erotic thriller. The story of a call girl who helps to solve the brutal murder of a housewife is explicit in its depiction of sex and violence and, like many erotic thrillers, shows how sex and violence are intertwined by exploring the psychosexual impulses of its characters.
The film would probably be met with a similar sense of offense and revulsion from audiences if released in to the cultural landscape of 2018. This is a film that does, after all, present us with a troublesome psychologizing of a transgender character, textbook examples of the male gaze, and gratuitous violence against its female characters. The film’s overt stylization adds a layer of self-conscious reflexivity to the film, a feature that some writers have interpreted as a De Palma’s satirizing of the conservative moral logic of traditional slasher films which sees female sexual impropriety violently punished.
But in attempting to view and appreciate the film beyond some of its more distasteful narrative elements, DRESSED TO KILL can be interpreted as a vital meta text for the erotic thriller, offering a particularly effective representation of how looking is a generator of desire and showing how quickly viewer becomes voyeur. The viewer-as-voyeur concept is one most readily found in the films of Hitchcock, whom many of De Palma’s films are fashioned after (DRESSED TO KILL, as many have noted, is an overt homage to PSYCHO.) As Keith Phipps noted in his review of the film for The Daily Beast, the film both works by both “indulging viewers’ voyeuristic desires and critiquing them, drawing audiences along and then making them question if they really want to see what they’re being shown.” If the erotic thriller is a genre that capitalizes on the viewer’s desire to witness salacious activity, then DRESSED TO KILL, with its suggestion that spectatorship is an implicitly voyeuristic activity, is a film that both exemplifies and comments on the features central to the genre.
Shot with a soft focus that evokes Vaseline lens melodramas of Classical Hollywood, the aesthetic style of DRESSED TO KILL gives it a surreal, almost absurdist, quality. The film opens with a shower scene that, like the shower scene in another De Palma film CARRIE, provides a defining example of the male gaze — a cinematographic positioning that appeals to the desires of a viewer implicitly suggested to be male. The camera slowly moves in from the hallway to the bathroom where Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is taking a shower — this slow creeping movement implicates the viewer in a visual invasion of intimate spaces. A scene that is steeped in dreamlike sensuality suddenly turns becomes violent as a man appears behind Kate in the shower, putting her in a chokehold, the dream abruptly turning into a nightmare. It sets the tone for a film filled with duality– that between dream and nightmare, sex and violence, benign spectator and voyeur.
By inviting the audience to gaze on scenes of sex and violence, De Palma exemplifies and comments on the central sources of the erotic thriller’s appeal — the viewer’s strange and perverse desire to see sexually charged nightmares play out before our eyes. In this, DRESSED TO KILL is an essential text for understanding how and why erotic thrillers operate.
DRESSED TO KILL is available from iTunes and other streaming services.
THE LAST SEDUCTION (John Dahl, 1994)
The third in a series of film noir homages directed by John Dahl, THE LAST SEDUCTION(1994) is a film that explicitly quotes many of the noir classic of the 40s and 50s. At the heart of this referencing is Linda Fiorentino’s performance as Bridget, a star-making portrayal of the femme fatale archetype that has led much of the discussion around the film in the years since its release.
Everything about Bridget — from her meticulously coiffed hair and white button-ups to her seductive prowess to her persistent chain smoking — references the kind of wicked self-possession of femme fatale characters of the past. However, Fiorentino plays Bridget as an accelerated version of the femme fatale archetype that takes the character’s evil impulses to extreme ends. There has never been much moral redemption for cinema’s femme fatales, but what makes THE LAST SEDUCTION so interesting is that it views the femme fatale’s irredeemable nature as a central part of her appeal. Whereas the male-driven noirs of the past framed the femme fatale within the tragic emasculation of the fall man, but THE LAST SEDUCTION seems to delight in her malevolence. Bridget may be rotten to her core, but being bad has never been quite this fun.
After stealing a million dollars in drug money from her abusive husband (Bill Pullman), Bridget flees Manhattan and, almost by happenstance, ends up in Beston, the kind of quaint small town where locals say good morning to passersby on the street and where there appears to be but one local watering hole. It is at this watering hole where she meets Mike Swale (Peter Berg), a sweet insurance salesman who is bewitched by Bridget’s hard persona and the mystery surrounding her background. After a tousle in the sheets they begin what is primarily a sexual relationship. Their relationship soon becomes more involved as Bridget, who has changed her name to Wendy Kroy and taken a job at the same insurance company as Mike, uses him as a pawn in her violent scheme to get back to New York and get rid of her husband.
Bridget wears her bitchiness like a badge of honour, and exerts her dominance at every turn. While she casts a kind of seductive spell over Mike, her sexuality is not merely a means to an end. She also seeks to serve her own pleasure and the film’s erotic sequences highlight this. She consistently rebuffs Mike’s attempts to date her and refers to him as her “designated fuck.” In one particularly memorable scene, Bridget rides Mike in the reverse cowgirl position while gleefully exclaiming that she is a “total fucking bitch.”
This power extended to the film’s production, where Fiorentino played an instrumental role in choreographing the sex scenes. Speaking in an interview with Vulture about filming THE LAST SEDUCTION’s sex scenes, Peter Berg said that the scene where Bridget and Mike have sex against a chain-link fence outside a bar was almost entirely conceived and orchestrated by Fiorentino.
As a celebration of the femme fatale and all of her evil excesses, THE LAST SEDUCTION shows why she has been a persistent cinematic figure and a source continual fascination and debate.
