The Black Dahlia
Written by Josh Friedman
Directed by Brian De Palma
Universal
2006
Rating:


"The Black Dahlia" is Brian De Palma's "A History of Violence". While Canadian director David Cronenberg broke from his traditional subject matter of body horror to explore America's troubling tendency to glorify brutality, De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" works as a summation of his oeuvre and narrows the broadness of Cronenberg's film to focus on cruelty towards women.

Perpetually misunderstood as a misogynist, De Palma's films frequently feature beautiful women being murdered. These acts of butchery don't reflect De Palma's hatred toward women — they reveal a cultural virus of female oppression.

They're also not so different from the acclaimed murders of women in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, films De Palma has infamously spent much of his career emulating in movies like "Sisters," "Obsession," "Blow Out," "Body Double," "Dressed to Kill" and "Raising Cain." "The Black Dahlia," like his "Sisters" and "Dressed to Kill," again offers De Palma an opportunity to roughly parallel the structure of "Psycho": "The Black Dahlia's" inciting incident is the acquisition of unearned money, the film's first act concludes with the murder of the film's "heroine," the second act features a well-orchestrated murder that sends a hero down a stairwell and the movie concludes with a psychological explanation for the murderer. The film also picks up De Palma's notable improvements on the "Psycho" structure, including a more direct link between the victim and the investigator and the use of a film clip to give insight into the killer's identity and motive.

In James Ellroy's novel about the real life Black Dahlia case and Josh Friedman's surprisingly De Palma-worthy script (written eight years ago, David Fincher was originally attached to bring the screenplay to the screen), the director has found the perfect vehicle to combine his feminist politics with his voyeuristic mise en scθne that explores the ramifications of the male gaze, even implicating himself.

Naοve warrants officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) subjectively narrates the story of how he became entangled in the investigation of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), later nicknamed "The Black Dahlia" after the Raymond Chandler-written movie "The Blue Dahlia." Bucky develops a friendship with Sgt. Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) when they fight together subduing the white soldiers and sailors who start the 1942 Zoot Suit Riots against Mexican club patrons (already placing the film in a political context for its violence). Later they fight against each other in a farcical boxing match to raise money for the Los Angeles Police Department. Bucky is forced to throw the fight and has his front teeth knocked out by Lee. In Bucky's brutal loss of his namesake, De Palma shows how violence can irrevocably change identity. Bucky ingratiates himself into Lee's life and the pair soon form a "Jules and Jim"-evoking trio with Lee's moll-ish girlfriend Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), whose name creates another connection to "The Blue Dahlia" in the movie's femme fatale Veronica Lake.

Lee and Bucky become involved in the so-called Black Dahlia case by accident. The officers are caught up in a shootout involving stolen money from a bank heist and the crime scene happens to overlook the discovery of Short's body. In an astonishing crane shot, De Palma connects the two crime scenes. Unlike in his previous works where the bodies of dead girls are leered over, De Palma shows restraint in his refusal to fully show Short's mutilated corpse, which has been cut in half, her mouth slit to give her a grotesque smile. De Palma instead focuses on the way a crowd of detectives lasciviously and coldly examines Short's dead body. Here De Palma continues his tradition of conspicuously positioning his violence so that rather than reveling in a woman's comeuppance, the atrocity of it resounds.

As in Otto Preminger's "Laura," Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and De Palma's "Rear Window"/"Vertigo" gene splice "Body Double," the detectives come to develop a romantic obsession with Short as they attempt to solve her case. Lee, whose mother was abused (just like "L.A. Confidential's" Bud White), becomes the most obsessive about finding the murderer, although his interest fades as he discovers she isn't a pure damsel he can retroactively save.

Short's life as a struggling starlet is conveyed through a series of audition reels. Over the span of mere minutes, Kirshner brings humanity and dignity to Short's preordained tragic trajectory. Short begins her auditions before a faceless director (reflexively voiced by De Palma) as a flirty, vivacious young woman. By the third reel, the director has verbally eviscerated her, leaving her to tearfully "play sadness" in ripped nylons on the floor. On a fourth reel, Short is further humiliated as she's semi-raped with a fanged sex prop in a pornographic film.

Lee betrays Short, eventually disappearing from the investigation entirely, but Bucky is unrelenting. His investigation soon brings him to a lesbian bar in search of someone who may have known Short, and there he meets Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), one of many women in Los Angeles who have taken to dressing like the infamous Dahlia. Madeleine is loadedly named, first because she shares the name of the doubled heroine in "Vertigo" and second because madeleines are the cookies that send Marcel Proust into a "Remembrance of Things Past." This second point is important because "The Black Dahlia" unfolds like an extended, subjective flashback from Bucky's point of view. This especially comes into play when Bucky, through a virtuoso first-person point-of-view shot, meets the Linscott family, who Bucky sees as a collection of moneyed monsters.

In line with the doomed heroes of De Palma's "Blow Out" and "Body Double," Bucky's romantic mania is presented as hopeless. His increasing obsession with the Dahlia case makes De Palma's use of noir's traditional low angles and shadows evoke a descent into hell. "The Black Dahlia" is in many ways a history of the film noir. The stylization of the genre was influenced by German Expressionism, and De Palma connects those dots with his breathtaking use of German director Paul Leni's 1928 adaptation of Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs": Short's mouth is cut to resemble the face of the tragic main character Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt); Bucky, Kay and Lee watch a screening of the film in happier times; the Linscotts have a painting of Gwynplaine hanging in their home; and the sets from "The Man Who Laughs" turn out to be a pivotal clue with "Chinatown" implications. The film also shares "The Man Who Laughs'" theme of how the objectification of a person can ultimately lead to the dissolution of her humanity. "The Black Dahlia's" deconstruction of noir tropes further analyzes the genre's hardboiled detective, displaying how the heroes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett stories are blatantly misogynistic and that the insistence on male dominance in these stories generally leads to futile, if not disastrous ends, especially for the women.

Even Bucky succumbs to this fate, giving into the castration anxiety that afflicts De Palma's male characters. When he confronts a killer in the film's climax, the killer chides Bucky, "You'd rather fuck me than kill me." By adding neutering insult to Bucky's figurative emasculation injury — the transgressive killer's challenging of gender roles and empowered sexuality are at the core of his castration fears — Bucky can only turn to his phallic gun to prove his masculinity. The violence is as much a monstrously selfish act as it is a revenge killing on Short's behalf.

The real Black Dahlia murder was never solved. While in "The Black Dahlia" Bucky manages to find her killers, it brings him no closure. The ghost of Short haunts Bucky, even corrupting his angelic vision of Kay. For Bucky there is now no hope of the world righting itself. The film's fade to black mirrors Bucky's own fall into the void.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

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