De Palma: Sisters (1973)

Sisters was the first of Brian de Palma’s great reinventions of Hitchcock, meaning that it’s something of a mission statement, a new, plastic reading of the master for what promised to be the least euphemistic decade in sexual and cinematic history. Taking its cues from Rear Window, it revolves around a murder that appears to have been committed by Danielle (Margot Kidder), a recently separated Siamese twin, and witnessed by reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt). For the most part, the drama’s driven by Danielle’s shadowy twin Dominique, also played by Kidder. However, unlike the doubles that abound across Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Danielle and Dominique are offered as biological freaks as much as psychological abstractions – there’s a literalism at play here that devolves classical Hitchcockian suspense into emergent body horror in a quite original way. Among other things, that means that Hitchcock’s privileged narrative objects are refurbished as kitsch, divested of their cathartic potential; where, say, the glass of milk in Suspicion or the earrings in Vertigo act as repositories of dramatic tension, de Palma’s objects stubbornly and comically refuse to act as placeholders for suspense, even or especially when they’re integrated into suspenseful matrices. That makes for a kind of off-suspense, suspense that isn’t suspended consistently or concertedly; if Hitchcock excelled at suspending his mise-en-scenes across thought-networks and observation-networks, geometrical arrangements of sightlines and thoughtlines, then here those networks face significant interference from the bodies and objects that actually support them. And that’s not just a revisionist twist but the actual nature of Dominique and Danielle’s plight: having spent their whole lives occupying the same sightline, plugged into the same sensory-nervous system, their separation is too recent for them to suspend disbelief in their individual thoughts and perceptions. That makes suspense feel like a phantom limb that’s always about to corporealise, whether through sex, surgery, split screens or the Staten Island backdrop, which de Palma shoots as if it’s just been severed from Manhattan. In other words, where Hitchcockian suspense works by bringing things into visibility, here it’s suspense itself that’s brought into visibility – de Palma isn’t interested in the horror of what can’t be seen so much as the horror of a world in which there may soon be nothing left unseen, nothing left to even unsee, as all horror becomes somehow simultaneous, exhausting in its availability and banality.