Lost in the Movies: Greetings


When it comes to a wide-ranging body of work, it's hard to top Brian De Palma's oeuvre. Would any 1968 viewer of a proudly scrappy underground comedy like Greetings, anticipate that within a decade the same auteur - so clearly recreating Godard on the gritty streets of New York - would be directing baroque, elaborately formal horror films? Or that, within another twenty years Mr. De Palma would be lending his talents to a big-budget, straightforward adaptation of a 60s TV spy show? By now, we're used to directors introducing themselves with a rugged autobiographical indie, only to move on to more mainstream (and usually rather unfortunate) fare. But, putting aside the fact that De Palma was not selling out in his more expensive movies (at least the early ones), we also have to deal with the fact that his early work was not your run-of-the mill low-budget calling card. Greetings presents us with a fully-formed vision, however different from the vision De Palma later cultivated. It has its own forceful ethos, which is why that proverbial '68 audience could be forgiven for expecting De Palma to follow along the path he was cultivating in this early work, instead of virtually abandoning it for fresh ground in another field altogether.

That said, there are signs that the filmmaker behind Scarface and Carrie is also the mind behind Greetings, a social satire cum screwball comedy documenting three youthful New Yorkers and their quests to avoid the draft, get laid, and solve the Kennedy assassination. For one thing, despite some intentionally sloppy stagings (De Palma sees Godard's jump cuts and raises him a jump cut in which the background and positions of the characters also changes) there's an obviously gifted eye behind the camera. One sequence is particularly striking: as the tired trio parade in Central Park, trying to keep one potential draftee awake so that he'll flunk his examination the next morning, one of the scruffy group breaks away to chat with a street personality, a photographer displaying his increasingly fuzzy blow-ups of a single photograph, interpreting their aesthetic while simultaneously acknowledging the debt to Antonioni's Blow-Up (a constant reference for De Palma here; particularly in relation to the examination of the Zapruder film). Meanwhile, as the zoom lens moves in closer and closer the two remaining buddies, punch-drunk from a night of staying awake, continue to cavort in the background, De Palma holding them in the increasingly tight shot as the heady dialogue continues in the foreground. Here and elsewhere, he's able to balance multiple elements for a dizzying kinesthetic effect.

This already distinguishes De Palma's underground work from many low-budget cousins and direct descendants. Consider mumblecore. While that nascent "genre" has its stylistic flourishes it does not seem to have the same grasp of cinematic history and cinematic language that De Palma effortlessly conveys in Greetings. True, the setups are often static, the shots held for long lengths of time, the distance wide between figure and lens. But in moments like that park scene, De Palma breaks out, and even within many of his long takes, he moves the camera around, indicating an instinctive understanding of where his focus should be during an extended take. Despite its reliance on cheap and easy setups (it varies the static shots with a roving handheld camera), Greetings ends up spinning out a kaleidoscope of cinematic effects, and complements these with extensive references to the larger world of cinema. In addition to the stylistic quotes of the French New Wave and the Keystone Cops (or perhaps the French New Wave quoting the Keystone cops), we have a girlfriend leafing through Hitchcock/Truffaut before fornication, the aforementioned application of Antonioni to Dealey Plaza, and mock news coverage from Vietnam which mirrors both television footage of the time and cinema verite (while questioning the supposed objectivity of both forms by having Robert De Niro's character restage a striptease that he earlier coaxed from an actress for a supposed art piece - here De Palma ties art, exploitation, and "objective" documentary together in one cynical gesture).

Yes, that's De Niro in the movie, whose ugly mustache makes him look a bit older than his actual age (twenty-five) and hence less a kid than he'd appear in some of his later roles. But then he always had a flexibility which leant itself to camouflage. He also had a subtle ability to draw the viewer in his direction, when he chose to flex this charismatic muscle. Note how, for two-thirds of the movie, his character hovers in the background, nondescript comic relief, a third banana much as he was (albeit in pudgier form) in De Palma's earlier The Wedding Party. Then, in the last half-hour, he suddenly appears stumbling through a sex paperback, holding it close to his face as Jean-Pierre Leaud did with Mao's Little Red Book. Without knowing quite why, he fascinates: there's the sense that beneath his clumsy monologue and plain expression some mesmeric serpent is uncoiling. Call it intensity, or star-power or what have you, but whatever "it" is, he's got it. And so after flunking his doomed attempt to appear too right-wing for the Army (he shows up before the draft board in cowboy boots, condemning Chinese and Jews), he ends up in Vietnam and the film's penultimate scene focuses on him, by now the acknowledged star of the picture (his other friends having been long ago forgotten and ignored by De Palma's curious camera).

The movie opens and closes with a television set, clearly situated in some unseen person's kitchen, on which LBJ gives a crowing, preening speech about the war. Greetings' compulsive references extend outside of the cinema (which is already more than most contemporary movies can manage) to the outside world and its frantic, apocalyptic, painfully immediate zeitgeist, something which contemporary Hollywood had more or less walled off (though fissures were beginning to appear in that particular wall). Indeed, Greetings seems to be broadcast from an alternative history: one in which American cinema was as engaged with political and cultural reality as European cinema or American music. The movie hits all the 60s touchstones, which works only because it takes them all for granted: there's the jingle-jangle folk rock of the title track, the cinematic array of Jules et Jim-esque tricks which De Palma employs, frank sexuality and nudity which earned the film an "X" rating (coupled with a sexism often crossing over into misogyny which, joined by constant reference to "fags" and a cavalier attitude towards racial epithets, reminds us that the 60s rebellion was not as PC as preachy leftists, not to mention preachy conservatives, would have us believe).

The 60s - and Greetings - are close enough to the 50s for some macho, un-PC social attitudes to remain (even as the movie's characters mock social conventions and Establishment politics). The film is so close to the clean-cut Camelot of '63 that the Kennedy references seem au courant, yet it is also close enough to the 70s to employ the stylistic range and adult content which that decade would make de rigeur. This, to me, captures the fascination of the 60s in a nutshell: not so much that the era represented the "new" as that it represented the crosshairs of "new" and "old" where World War II was something people in their thirties remembered while schoolchildren would grow up to found dot-com companies, where the traces of classical black-and-white cinema still lingered but the wide-ranging possibilities of the movies' future was just barely over the horizon. The changes happened so fast that for a brief moment, "new" and "old" co-existed - it was modern America's adolescence and Greetings captures that moment beautifully.

At least for me it did. I discovered, on You Tube, a rather smug countdown of "50 Worst Movies" which presented Greetings at #37. How glibly - and effectively - it makes its case. Yes, that color does look cheap and grainy. How funny and silly those people look marching down the street in fast motion - were they trying to be hip and edgy in that oh-so-dated sixties way? And that theme song! Really, who makes a movie with a theme song, anymore?! The narrator informs us that it was a "turkey" despite the soon-to-be-famous De Palma and De Niro (their fame grants them a bit of immunity with the folks who assembled this piece, as if the film was simply a youthful faux pas). But, really, the harshly contrasted, cheap-looking clips do all the convincing. Cue De Niro's line, in response to the reporter's query, "What are you doing here?": "I don't know." Cue slickly computer-animated audience tossing vegetables at the screen. Move on, cue #36.

Seen from this perspective, I realized what fragile ground a film like Greetings stands on. Sure, it's something of a mess but the messiness is what allows its frequent creativity and occasional brilliance. By breaking all the rules, shattering good taste and conventional expectations both where they should and should not be shattered, Greetings allows something fresh and forceful to bloom. And yet it's so easy to put that down if you're skittishly looking over your shoulder, wondering if you should be laughing and grinning, or sneering and smirking. And so I'm reminded of a Pauline Kael essay I read recently, one which expresses a disgust with the vulgar decadence of Hollywood "society," yet confesses an honest inability to feel secure in this disgust when confronted with the vapid confidence exhibited by L.A.'s ostentatious elite. She concludes: "It's easy to reject all this when I'm back in San Fransisco. But not here. You can't really laugh at the Beverly Hills Hotel and people who pay $63 a day for a suite that's like a schoolboy's notions of luxury. It's too impressive. Laughter would stick in the throat - like sour grapes."

The film industry's arrogant sense of superiority - spurred by its financial largesse and command of the media - easily overwhelms any challengers to its aesthetic and narrative. If they become too threatening, it simply consumes them, then spits out their early aberrations like jagged bones, while the scurvy scavengers gather in a circle to point and laugh at the absurdity of such an object. One often wonders why so few people make films like Greetings, films which are, however flawed, also adventurous, inventive and exciting. Perhaps it's because they're too afraid.

(P.S.: For a great background of that photographer I mentioned, check out De Palma a la Mod's response to this post. Turns out that, far from being a "street personality" (or perhaps in addition to being one) he's the man who designed the White Album!)


Unknown said...

GREETINGS is good. HI MOM, also starring De Niro, is even better - near great in some ways.

You wrote: "putting aside the fact that De Palma was not selling out in his more expensive movies (at least the early ones)..."

Sure he's made some big-budget commercial films, but his last two films, FEMME FATALE and REDACTED, are not sell-outs in any sense. Quite the contrary.

Joel Bocko said...

For your own purposes consider the sentence to read "at least the early ones and the latest ones". I have not seen either of those films, have heard mixed reactions, and will withhold judgement on sights unseen.

At any rate, I don't really have a problem with "selling out" per se, as long as the work's good. I hope that the indie music mentality of ascetic purity (not to mention the indie music aesthetic of twee suckiness, but that's another matter) will not descend on the movie world, whereby hipsters shrug off a filmmaker who receives mainstream acceptance - "Eh, I preferred his early work. Now too many emo kids watch his stuff." (For what it's worth, Scarface is and will probably remain my favorite De Palma, though I have not seen any, that's right ANY of the horror classics yet - no, as I hang my head in shame, not even Carrie.)

What bothers me more is the implicit fear and anxiety over what happens if you don't sell out in any spiritual sense, cowering before Hollywood's near-arbitrary (if not downright backwards) sense of good taste - hence the last few sentences of the review. One should be free to take the money or not take the money, to make a work for hire or stick to an inexpensive, idiosyncratic vision without fearing some kind of conformist (or even ostensibly nonconformist) crackdown. Not that it's ever possible but it is a nice idea.

Fox at Tractor Facts had an interesting article on Hi, Mom recently & it sounds extremely intriguing. It's next in my random Netflix queue, but I'm not expecting to review it (then again, I wasn't expecting to review Greetings either...)

Unknown said...

For the record, I liked FEMME FATALE and did not like REDACTED (De Palma told the same story better in CASUALTIES OF WAR), but I consider both of them to be works of aesthetic integrity - for whatever that's worth.

SCARFACE is a big, commercial, ultra-violent work for hire - and I love it. What can I say? If I didn't enjoy a lot of commercial mainstream cinema, I wouldn't be writing about it.

Hope you enjoy HI MOM. The less you know about it in advance, the better.

Joel Bocko said...

Scarface embodies its trashiness so perfectly - and with such flamboyant skill - that it becomes, in my opinion, one of the great movies. Who ever thought of teaming up De Palma and Stone, two of the most over-the-top sensationalists in the business (not to mention Pacino on the cusp of his barking-over-brooding persona change) deserves a fucking gold medal.

Unfortunately thanks to Fox (thanks, Fox) I pretty much know the whole plot of Hi, Mom. But it sounded real interesting...

Fox said...

Wow. Great thoughts here on a film that doesn't get near enough attention.

MovieMan, as you point out, I think too many people (understandanly so) only know DePalma only from Carrie on. If you chart his work from the beginnings of Murder a la Mod on, you can really track a fascinating progression of De Palma's technique.

I remember seeing that DVD of 50 Worst Movies and seeing a small pic of Greetings on the cover. I was perplexed, but not enough to ever rent it. I will check it out on YouTube now that you've said that it's there. How bizarre.

Oh, and sorry about spilling some beans on Hi,Mom!, but I don't think it was enough to take anything away from the experience of watching it. It's great. I'll be anxious to see what you think.

Joel Bocko said...

Fox, just saw Hi, Mom and liked it a lot. In fact, I don't think you can even make the same arguments as with Greetings - that it's a totally different De Palma, for the most part, from the one who later made slick horror films. While Greetings has very subtle uses of technique mixed in with the slapdash approach, Hi Mom! is often quite sophisticated - the Rear Window pastiche, the mulitiplicity of forms and approaches (long takes with dialogue, montages, black-and-white handheld TV docs) and especially the virtuoso "documentary" Be Black, Baby! segment - the most amazing set piece in the movie. Actually, I think I read it a little differently than you did - from your write-up I got the sense that the exhibition was pretty much a total pastiche of chic 60s radicalism, whereas in the movie it seemed a little more ambiguous - as if De Palma was somewhat repelled, but even more fascinated, by the exercise and a little bit in sympathy with the aggressive tactics of the black radicals. Perhaps a little bit because of politics, but even more so because of the aggressiveness of their "technique."

I was also somewhat elated to see that modern apartment complex in the Village with the Picasso statue in the middle - I shot a short film there once! It's one of the most cinematic (and underused) locations in New York, I think. Those pillars were just made to run between and hide behind.

James Hansen said...

I'm with Fox. Great post on a film that anyone rarely hears anything about. Its not the one people think of when they hear De Palma, but essential in its own way. I'm a huge De Palma buff (although I thought REDACTED was a little...umm...weak) especially the 70s/80s horror/thrillers. And I've actually never seen SCARFACE. Maybe one day...

Sorry for not being on here for a while! I've been out of town and quite pre-occupied. Doing my best to get back in the swing of things!

Joel Bocko said...

James, what did you think of Hi, Mom! (if you saw it)? My above comments will probably be the extent of my ruminations on the subject, but it's a very compelling movie - often more formally satisfying than Greetings, and with one especially bravura sequence - Be Black, Baby!, which is among the best pseudo-documentaries I've ever seen.

As for lax blogging, I feel ya. I remember a college professor once telling my class that students tended to have a weird drop-off over Christmas vacation, and that when they returned for the spring semester things moved sluggishly for a while. He was right, and I've certainly been feeling that effect around here lately. Actually, some change-ups are due, which I will be putting forward at the end of the month. Suffice it to say I will be focusing on quality over quantity in the future and will be streamlining my approach to this blog. More on that later.

James Hansen said...

Haven't seen Hi Mom! but I definitely will. Sounds pretty fascinating.

Quality over quantity is the best way to go, although its a constant battle since you have to have SOME quantity. Alas, we'll all be fine. :)

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